Are Orcs in the Monster Manual? No and Yes.

The culture war surrounding orcs in Dungeons & Dragons continues with the release of the 2025 Monster Manual. Review copies of the Monster Manual are out in the wild, with many sites, EN World included, are giving their thoughts about the final core rulebook for the revised Fifth Edition ruleset. But while most commentators are discussing whether or not the monsters in the new Monster Manual hit harder than their 2014 equivalent, a growing number of commentators (mostly on Elon Musk's Twitter, but other places as well) are decrying the abolishment of orcs in the new rulebook.

Several months ago, would-be culture warriors complained about the depiction of orcs in the new Player's Handbook. Instead of depicting orcs as bloodthirsty marauders or creatures of evils, orcs (or more specifically, playable orcs) were depicted as a traveling species given endurance, determination, and the ability by their god Gruumsh to see in the darkness to help them "wander great plains, vast caverns, and churning seas." Keep in mind that one of the core facets of Dungeons & Dragons is that every game is defined by its players rather than an official canon, but some people were upset or annoyed about the shift in how a fictional species of humanoids were portrayed in two paragraphs of text and a piece of art in a 250+ page rulebook.

With the pending release of the Monster Manual, the orc is back in the spotlight once again. This time, it's because orcs no longer have statblocks in the Monster Manual. While the 2014 Monster Manual had a section detailing orc culture and three statblocks for various kinds of orcs, all specific mention of orcs have indeed been removed from the Monster Manual. The orcs are not the only creature to receive this treatment - drow are no longer in the Monster Manual, nor are duergar.

However, much of this is due to a deliberate design choice, meant not to sanitize Dungeons & Dragons from evil sentient species, but rather to add some versatility to a DM's toolbox. Orcs (and drow) are now covered under the expanded set of generic NPC statblocks in the Monster Manual. Instead of players being limited to only three Orc-specific statblocks (the Orc, the Orc War Chief and the Orc Eye of Gruumsh), DMs can use any of the 45 Humanoid statblocks in the book. Campaigns can now feature orc assassins, orc cultists, orc gladiators, or orc warriors instead of leaning on a handful of stats that lean into specific D&D lore.

Personally, I generally like that the D&D design ethos is leaning away from highly specific statblocks to more generalized ones. Why wouldn't an orc be an assassin or a pirate? Why should orcs (or any other species chosen to be adversaries in a D&D campaign) be limited to a handful of low CR statblocks? The design shift allows DMs more versatility, not less.

However, I do think that the D&D design team would do well to eventually provide some modularity to these generic statblocks, allowing DMs to "overlay" certain species-specific abilities over these NPC statblocks. Abilities like darkvision for orcs or the ability to cast darkness for drow or a fiendish rebuke for tieflings would be an easy way to separate the generic human assassin from the orc without impacting a statblock's CR.

As for the wider controversy surrounding orcs in D&D, the game and its lore is evolving over time, just as it has over the past 50 years. There's still a place for evil orcs, but they no longer need to be universally (or multiversally) evil within the context of the game. The idea that D&D's rulebooks must depict anything but the rules themselves a specific way is antithetical to the mutability of Dungeons & Dragons, which is supposed to be one of the game's biggest strengths.

 

[Alzrius]

So NPC dwarves have no resistance to poison and NPC tieflings and dragonborn have no resistance at all? No dragonborn NPC breath weapons?

That seems an odd choice.

I would have hoped for a quick easy to apply modifier chart, not stat changing but a quick mini template that gets across the biggest associated flavor mechanic that does not require recalculations of stats.

'14 orcs generally had aggression which would be easy to apply to a generic NPC statblock even without the stat adjustments of the 14 DMG chart.

I mean, isn't it the design ethos of the current edition that the racial entries in the PHB aren't supposed to be for the entire race, but your "exceptional" PC only? Because I recall that being said where the racial ability score modifiers were concerned, back when those were still a thing, so wouldn't that be the case here?

 

[GothmogIV]

I think people who are complaining about these new design choices just need to accept that this is a different game than D&D versions 1-4. No one has to play it if they don't want to (I don't). It's really popular, which is good for the hobby overall. The D&D police are not going to come to your house and make you play orcs and drow and duregar this way. There are many other options. We can still love Dungeons&Dragons even if the new version isn't to our liking.
Everything changes.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

Framing this as an inevitable culture war seems to me to be just throwing fuel on a fire, and bad journalism to boot.

Boo.

Great for generating Engagement though, which is what matters to most websites.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Great for generating Engagement though, which is what matters to most websites.

And is the antithesis of measured discussion. Which is one of the reasons our world is so screwed - everything is turned into a full scale war in the name of generating a few more clicks.

 

[KYRON45]

We've got 50 years of orc stats. I think we'll be ok.

 

[Reynard]

Um, I don't think it really helps make your point that having humans in the Monstrous Manual "worked perfectly fine", when the screenshot you used includes terminology that would generally be considered offensive today.

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This post here is a really good example of how bad faith responses and hyperfocusing on singular details out of context can drive discussions in the wrong direction.

Bravo.

 

[Echohawk]

This post here is a really good example of how bad faith responses and hyperfocusing on singular details out of context can drive discussions in the wrong direction.

This is a thread about the "removal" of orcs from the Monster Manual, which as I understand it, has been done because it is now viewed as problematic to position them as a uniformly evil species.

QuentinGeorge drew a parallel between this and the inclusion of humans in the 2nd Edition Monstrous Manual, and noted that this worked perfectly fine.

I pointed out that it did not, in fact, work perfectly fine, because the specific entry for humans in the Monstrous Manual is problematic for reasons that are not at all dissimilar to the reason orcs, drow and duergar are no longer treated as monsters. Changing cultural sensitivities demand changing approaches to the presentation of content.

I don't think you are using the term "bad faith response" correctly above, but in any case, I don't appreciate the unwarranted personal attack.

 

[Parmandur]

So NPC dwarves have no resistance to poison and NPC tieflings and dragonborn have no resistance at all? No dragonborn NPC breath weapons?

That seems an odd choice.

How likely is a Bandi having Poison Resistance going to come up in a 12 second combat encounter...?

 

[Parmandur]

On further reflection, I'm rather more bothered by this reassignment of goblins as fey and thus keeping them in the MM. The D&D assignments of "humanoid" and "fey" are, ultimately, entirely arbitrary, and using them to declare that this group of intelligent creatures are now "people" while this group of intelligent creatures are "not people" and so monsters who can be slaughtered with impunity is really problematic, IMO. Everything that was said about orcs that led to their reappraisal applies just as much to goblins, and gnolls (and, for that matter, to dragons, beholders, mind flayers, et al).

The other thing the did there is to remove "Goblin" or "Hobgoblin" as all-inclusive stat blocks that suggest they represent the entire Species: there are individual Goblin types, but no general "Goblin" statblock.

 

[AlViking]

It seems like this argument as usual calcified around page 2 or 3 but honestly I don't see why it's such a big deal. If I want a warrior that happens to be of a specific species that's in the PHB all l have to do is glance at my PHB. I don't need the 3-4 lines that actually matter copied over into a chart in the monster manual, my PHB isn't going to suddenly evaporate. I'm not going to suddenly forget that basically every non-human species has darkvision, that dwarves are resistant to poison, that dragonborn have a breath weapon.

I would kind of like a book at some point that talks about special abilities given to followers of a specific cult or god. But a follower of Lollth doesn't have to be a drow, even if drow are the most common followers, same as a priest of Grummsh. That to me would be more flexible and useful. Give me some ideas of how to have different types of clerics that follow different tenets of wrath, subterfuge or trickery not dedicated to a specific god or cult and then I can plug them into my own homebrew campaign as I see fit.

I could see specific versions in campaign setting books with certain warriors from a particular faction having specific stat blocks as a starting point. I don't need them in a book that is supposed to be used for any and all campaign worlds in the multiverse. The detail lore and associated cultural influences should be campaign setting specific IMO.