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.

 

[Echohawk]

It was irrelevant to my point (having stats for various humanoid and or PC race enemies is useful), so, yeah, I saw it in bad faith. (Unless WoTC can't write an entry for humans without it being racist?)

I apologise! I certainly did not mean it to come across that way. It seemed relevant to the larger topic of WotC no longer wanting put statblocks for playable races in the Monster Manual for (it seems) cultural sensitivity reasons, but in retrospect I can see how it came across as a dig.

Looking a little more closely at WotC's approach to humans, it is curious that they dropped humans from the 3e Monster Manual, put them back for 4e, and then removed them again (along with elves, dwarves, etc.) in the 2014 MM. As others have pointed out, the removal of drow, duergar and orcs in 2025 MM is actually a less dramatic change than we saw in 2014 (since fewer species were removed from the MM), but it feels more substantial partly because the table for customizing NPCs by species has also been dropped.

More and more, I'm wondering if that was a deliberate decision or something that simply got lost in the reorganisation process. There is, after all, a huge space for "Stat Block Alterations" on the NPC Tracker sheet, but the supporting text for doing that just points at the Creating a Creature customization rules. I recall it being mentioned in interviews that including all the tracking sheets was a decision made quite late in the process, and I can easily image a conversation along the lines of "what can we cut from this bit?", "how about this table for customizing NPCs by species", "yeah, we can just point them at the rules for customizing monsters, those are close enough".

 

[I'm A Banana]

Not really.

At this point, bakers, librarians and shop-keepers are becoming an hyperbole to say that an orc commoner shouldn’t be that different from a commoner of any other PC species and therefore we don’t need a separate orc commoner stat block - and by extension - that an orc warrior shouldn’t be that different from a warrior of any other PC species and therefore we don’t need a separate orc warrior stat block (which some see as a logical fallacy, including me).

Given how light the '24 species traits are, this isn't so much a logical fallacy as it is a tautology. It's just true of how the chosen design works out. Take an axe-wielding berserker and give 'em Orc traits, and it isn't going to impact the fight much.

One could desire more impactful species traits, but this wouldn't be a direct concern for the MM. We have orcs that aren't much different than humans or halflings, so an orc berserkers and a human berserker and a halfling berserker aren't actually much different from each other.

I think it'd also be OK to have stat blocks for more culturally specific kinds of folks (the Eye of Gruumsh isn't JUST a berserker!), but it's true that these would be mostly species-agnostic as well. You might see more orcs becoming Eyes of Gruumsh, but you could see it in human camps, in tieflings with a chip on their shoulder, in the heart of an elf who has come to hate her people.

It sounds like the MM is going pretty hard with an NPC list, which is a good sign. I'm OK if they want to cover more specific kinds of NPCs in future supplements. If we get an adventure vs. Drow, maybe we'll see the Priestess of Lolth there, kind of thing.

 

[John R Davis]

Shame duergar lose their uniqueness. There must have been at least 12 funky statblocks for them in various books over the years
Book is out soon so let's see what happens

 

[Phaezen]

Need to see the books to see how well it is implemented, but having a bunch of generic humanoid statblocks you can adjust for species adds a nice level of customization for DMs to play with.

The goblins who moved into the old mine and are terrorizing merchants on the nearby road - humanoids.

But rumours persist that if an unwed mother leaves her baby at the dolmens on a cloudy night it is taken by the King of the Goblins and turned into one the fey goblins who live with him in a vast, ever shifting, maze in the middle of the feywild.

Similar could be done for gnolls, gith or any other creature that was move from humanoid.

 

[Zarithar]

The simple way to avoid any of this controversy would have been just to have a template or a brief list of species specific abilities to paste onto the bandit, gladiator, or whatever statblock - for orcs, halflings, dragonborn... whatever. It's a shame about orcs though honestly in my opinion. I really loved the various expanded orc statblocks from the original Volo's Guide. I'm glad we have books like Flee Mortals on D&D Beyond now as well - as I can pull some really cool statblocks for orcs and others from there as well.

My biggest gripe with the new MM though is the organization. I hated it in Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse and I hate it here. Red Dragon under "R", Blue Dragon under "B" etc. They say it's for new players and dms but that makes 0 sense. New players and DMs have been figuring it out for 40+ years now. Having demons, devils, giants, etc as a category just makes way more sense.

In spite of those complaints, I still like what I've seen of the book overall. The statblocks are nicely done and the little random tables (in the spirit of the excellent Skerples Monster Overhaul) are fantastic. I also am loving the artwork that I've seen so far for the most part (sphinxes got done dirty though imho... I much prefer the older versions which lean more into mythology than these new magical kitties that we have now).

 

[Zarithar]

Shame duergar lose their uniqueness. There must have been at least 12 funky statblocks for them in various books over the years
Book is out soon so let's see what happens

Yeah this exactly. Same goes for drow and orcs of course. Good thing we still have the old books to use both physically and on D&D Beyond and that they remain compatible.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

My biggest gripe with the new MM though is the organization. I hated it in Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse and I hate it here. Red Dragon under "R", Blue Dragon under "B" etc. They say it's for new players and dms but that makes 0 sense. New players and DMs have been figuring it out for 40+ years now. Having demons, devils, giants, etc as a category just makes way more sense.

Ouch, that is terrible. With the 5e book if you want to design an encounter with a band of demons you turn to the "demon" section and choose some suitable creatures, but now you have to flip all across the book and try to find the demons? Who on earth thought that was a good idea?!

I guess this makes it slightly faster to look up a creature referenced in a published product, at the expense of making it much harder to use the book when making your own adventures.

Making your products worse in order to appeal to the imagined traits of "new customers" is historically a good way to lose money...

 

[SlyFlourish]

I got my review copy of the 2024 Monster Manual yesterday. Like renaming “race” to “species”, removing orcs from the Monster Manual feels like WOTC sidestepped the real issue. The problem wasn’t just orcs — the problem is treating any whole sentient species as all bad when it comes to the motivations and behaviors of that species.

WOTC removes orc and drow from the MM and then pats themselves on the back for changing gnolls to fiends and goblins to fey as if that solves the problem. WOTC’s second most popular campaign world — Eberron — doesn’t handle goblins and gnolls this way, giving them a richer standing in the world than just mischievous little thieves or brutal murderers.

The 2025 MM has a section on minotaurs of Baphomet that describes how the minotaurs it describes aren’t representative of all minotaurs but just these particular minotaurs. There are other humanoid-type creatures described in the MM in a way that makes it clear that they have different drives for different groups. That could have been applied to drow and orcs as well.

The DMG could have taken a page or two to have an adult conversation about the issues of stereotyping an entire species and how GMs can avoid it and still have fun with D&D building richer cultures in our game worlds. In short, race or species doesn’t determine a moral standing, beliefs and behaviors do.

Not all orcs are brutal murderers but those orcs of Grummsh? They can be real a-holes. Same with drow. Many drow worship a variety of gods but the drow worshippers of lolth? They can be jerks.

WOtC had years to figure this out and many creators in the larger RPG community, including the creator of Eberron, gave them a blueprint. WOtC sidestepped the issue by removing orcs and drow from the MM completely which is confusing from a compatibility standpoint and lost them the opportunity to move the topic forward for potentially millions of players.

 

[SlyFlourish]

One of the very few advantages of the 5e adventure format, which references stat blocks in the text by name, rather than reprinting them, is that it makes it really easy to transfer them from one edition to another - when the room contains 6 orcs you just grab the MM for the edition you're using, look up orcs, and you're good to go. This change means that 5e24 now doesn't support that, which is a backwards step.

Otherwise, and going forward, it's fine. Mostly. They should have included the guidelines for turning a "bandit" into an "orcish bandit" or a "dwarven bandit", or whatever, but it's not that hard.

There is a table that shows you which stat block you can use to replace one in the 2014 MM but they’re far from the same.

 

[SlyFlourish]

There are I think 7 Cultists statblocks. Along with various things like Raiders, Toughs, Bandits and various other things. Like there is a fairly powerful Bandit mage.

They have four different CR 8 cultists. I love cultists but even I didn’t need four different CR 8 cultists. I’m also sad the base CR2 cult fanatic isnt super useful with its main action being tied to melee and half of its DPR being tied up in a spell you have to look up. The priest stat block is a better cult fanatic than the cult fanatic.