Okay, let me see if I can put this into words properly...
This isn't actually about orcs for me - the word "orcs" is a placeholder in this instance. Fundamentally, I couldn't care less whether they add orcs into Dragonlance or not, because at the end of the day, I've never particularly cared about Dragonlance.
It may simply be a case of wrong place, wrong time, but I only got into D&D with 3e and thus missed Dragonlance's heyday, and while I have delved into the proverbial mines when it comes to older settings that managed to catch my interest (Planescape, Dark Sun), I have heard very little about Dragonlance that makes me want to look into it beyond a surface level. Maybe Dragonlance fans are just bad at selling it to me, but everything I hear about Krynn makes the setting feel shallow, narrow, pared down to only what it needs to tell the story it is trying to tell, with no extraneous fat - like the writing philosophy behind Chekhov's Gun applied to worldbuilding. It doesn't sound like a fully realized world, just a narrative framework.
Want to be an arcane spellcaster? Congrats, you have exactly two choices: you either join the Wizards/Mages of High Sorcery or your character is hunted down like a mass murderer by the magical pre-crime thought police. Are there any other arcane orders? Nope, your options are join or die. Want to try making your wizard a well-intentioned extremist committed to doing terrible things for the greater good? Can't be done, because if they're Good they wear white and can't have Evil methods, if they're Evil they wear black and can't have Good motivations (plus no one trusts them), and if they're Neutral they wear red and can't have either, because either their Good ends or Evil means would disrupt the all-important Balance. And if anyone suggests maybe loosening the Alignment requirements to allow for more nuanced plots involving the Mages of High Sorcery, like WotC did in the first Krynn UA, they're shouted down for daring to alter the setting's canon. I love D&D Alignment - I'm a Planescape fan who swears by the Great Wheel - but the way Dragonlance seems to handle it leaves zero room for ambiguity and nuance, and I am someone who loves to play around with ambiguity and nuance.
Just about everything I've heard about the setting is like that to one degree or another. There are little nuggets that sound like they could be interesting - quite a few of them, actually - but they're invariably wound up tight in narrative devices that seem to only allow for a handful of predefined uses or outcomes. I would prefer something more flexible. Instead, I'm repeatedly told that the only thing that makes Dragonlance unique is its rigid adherence to its limitations. I don't want "orcs" because I want to play a big, muscly bruiser-type or want the orc's specific bundle of racial traits, I want a world that has consistently come off as one-note to me to feel more multi-dimensional.
Maybe I just don't know enough about Dragonlance, and there is stuff I would find compelling that I just haven't been exposed to - I am admittedly far from well read on the subject. Or maybe Dragonlance just isn't for me. But when I talk about figuring out a way to work orcs into the setting, what I mean is nothing has convinced me thus far that the setting, as is, will be useful to me for anything more than spare parts and I would like it to be more than that. I would like a setting that can tell the kind of stories classic Dragonlance fans enjoy while also having room for people like me who might want different stories, and if that requires revising the setting in some aspects, I don't feel that should necessarily be off the table.
dragonlancenexus.com
