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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4290131" data-attributes="member: 2067">Implied Rape.Hope I'm not violating the Grandma Rule, but there it is. Orcs are the classic "raiding savages" who come out of the wilderness and burn your town to the ground and stack skulls outside of your village like the Huns. A strong population of half-orcs suggests that often, rape is part of that conquest.  Often enough to leave offspring that have a strong population in the implied setting, anyway. Now, take a look at, say, the Yeenoghu entry. A lot of violence, a lot of filth...even some light cannibalism (though gnolls eating humans might not be as "bad" as gnolls eating gnolls or humans eating humans). But it doesn't really combine with sex anywhere. You could chalk that up to the classic American paradox: we're great with blood and guts, but private parts will always make us squeamish. This is especially so with D&D, which is kind of targeted at high-school age folks, and kind of targeted at boys. And you could probably make a case that half-orcs weren't very popular anyway (being a slightly sub-optimal choice in most cases) so cutting them isn't going to alienate a lot of people, while it will avoid a very "icky" issue.Of course, there are counterpoints. That not every half-orc needs to come from rape (or even most of them), that if there are half-elves, then human barbarians can be the creatures invading the forests making it slightly MORE disturbing, that it is kind of satisfying from a storytelling standpoint to be a half-breed bastard-child, that both half-orcs and half-elves existing says something interesting in the implied setting about humans, elves, and orcs....WotC just thought the "icky" factor outweighed all of those. And, really, I can't blame them much for that.Not that people don't have very good reasons to miss their Krusks and Imishes......just to make a counterpoint?Tieflings. Warlocks. Evil paladins. Shadar-Kai."Dark Heroes" are definately in for 4e.</blockquote>

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