Are Orcs in the Monster Manual? No and Yes.

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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.
 

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Christian Hoffer

Christian Hoffer


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Orcs in Tolkien serve a fascist empire too. They've just been doing it for a long, long time and their culture has warped to accommodate that.
D&D Orcs are not Tolkien Orcs, and the origin/nature of Orcs is something Tolkien changes his mind on a few times.

Also, I don’t know if I’d call Sauron’s realm “fascist.” That’s a pretty specific term that shouldn’t be reduced to just mean “evil.”
 


Funny enough, that's been the trend in media for the past couple decades. Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc.
Right, but these are "factions". These shows dont demonize every human − Sopranos is careful to never demonize every Italian or every Sicilian.

I feel it is ok to give a faction an alignment, as a kind of "charter" for how the organization operates.

The species itself is never the faction. The Humanoids can be members of any faction, whether Good or Evil.


In other words, it is tolerable to demonize an explicitly self-identifying demonic faction.

But not the species.
 

I am sure this is mentioned at some point elsewhere in this thread, but the new Monster Manual does reference the four orcs found in the 2014 MM. The conversions are listed as:

Orc -> Tough
Orc Eye of Gruumsh -> Cultist Fanatic
Orc War Chief -> Tough Boss
Orog - > Berserker
 
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D&D Orcs are not Tolkien Orcs, and the origin/nature of Orcs is something Tolkien changes his mind on a few times.

Also, I don’t know if I’d call Sauron’s realm “fascist.” That’s a pretty specific term that shouldn’t be reduced to just mean “evil.”
Fair enough, but let me ask you this: is Sauron's Mordor less evil and oppressive to its citizens than a fascist regime?
 


That never seems to be good enough for folks now. Not sure why.
You cant say, "Not every member of the [such-and-such] ethnic group is Evil" ... and then proceed to make all generalizations about that ethnic group Evil. Obviously, that would still be racism.

This goes back to the rule of thumb. A species cant be both humanlike and demonized.
 

It's more interesting than that...Mordor is depicted using the language and structure of the British Army.
Heh. I guess things come full circle, although this was completely a coincidence. The orc book I'm working on now has an ancestry which..well...see for yourself ;)

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