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.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Fair enough, but let me ask you this: is Sauron's Mordor less evil and oppressive to its citizens than a fascist regime?

I don’t remember the books/movies well enough to answer that. And I don’t think it matters to the discussion of Orcs in D&D. Which very much have been presented as innately evil because of their nature in most of D&D’s past.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don’t remember the books/movies well enough to answer that. And I don’t think it matters to the discussion of Orcs in D&D. Which very much have been presented as innately evil because of their nature in most of D&D’s past.

Meh. Settings are settings, no matter who made them.

 

[Mournblade94]

It's not Satanic Panic. It's coming from WotC. The attitudes towards orcs have been progressively changing for a while now, and the designers have their own opinions about things that they disliked or have made them uncomfortable. It's just that they now feel confident that they can make those changes due to how the fanbase itself has changed.

They unfortunately catered to a bunch of twitter activists that acted like the old christian moms. The case had just as much merit. I don't think any of the full time designers really thought there was anything wrong with the evil aligned orcs. If there was social media in the 80's the Christian Moms would have achieved an equally absurd victory.

 

[Mournblade94]

Not to mention that there’s a huge difference in why Orcs and Storm Troopers are evil. The reason why it was okay for Luke Skywalker to blow up a moon-sized space station full of Storm Troopers wasn’t because they were born evil. It’s because they’re soldiers that serve a fascist empire. They’re called “Storm Troopers” for a reason.

I have “Storm Troopers” in my games. They’re just generally not born innately, genetically evil.

Orcs aren't genetically evil. Is there genetics in D&D? Its Dubious.

Orcs are magically evil due to a creationist origin of species via Gruumsh. In a world where Alignment is a cosmological force it is absolutely appropriate to have pre determined alignment at birth. Its not the real world.

 

[Mournblade94]

May have been different depending on where you were but I remember this getting a lot of complaints. It didn't bother me as I was only a few years into D&D when 2E came out, but the players who were a grade or two ahead used to complain about this and stuff like taking out the assassin

It got lots of complaints because it gave in to the Christian alarmism the same way the modern orcs gave in to the Orc Racism alarmism. James Ward addressed this in a facebook post as he said he didn't want moms feeling bad about buying the games.

I distinctly remember myself and several others complaining about this when the Monstrous Compendium came out. The difference was it was only a name change. The essence of Devils and Demons was still the same. They weren't softened like the Orc Variant Humans we have now.

I'm in 5e for the long haul at this point, but the lore direction of D&D has taken a very strange turn with 2024.

 

[Mournblade94]

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 agree with this if we are talking about the real world. IN a fantasy world though? They're not real it just doesn't matter.

 

[Yaarel]

I agree with this if we are talking about the real world. IN a fantasy world though? They're not real it just doesn't matter.

The problem is, fantasy worlds are speculative fiction. They are almost always commentary about reallife situations. (As Tolkien intended his works to be too, the exploration of how a group forms folkbeliefs. He was a linguist interested in human sciences. He had specific ethnic groups in mind as he wrote.) They always borrow descriptions from reallife experiences and often from reallife ethnic groups.

 

[Alzrius]

I'm in 5e for the long haul at this point, but the lore direction of D&D has taken a very strange turn with 2024.

I disagree; it took a strange turn some time before this (e.g. remember when Lolth's great evil was retconned to be her introducing elves to the idea of fixed genders?).

 

[Yaarel]

I disagree; it took a strange turn some time before this (e.g. remember when Lolth's great evil was retconned to her introducing elves to the idea of fixed genders?).

Heh, and ironically, that lore doesnt age well, when it depicts Corellon (who is the only famous gender fluid D&D character) to be a terrible abusive negligent parent. (Who somehow counts as Good.)

 

[Doctor Futurity]

I have my MM 2025 now and while it has some interesting stuff and improvements, I think I am most bothered by the organizational structure. I am secondarily irritated that phylactery is too esoteric (I cannot imagine who may have been offended at the term's use) for mainstream player audiences, and tertiarily I think the genericization of humanoid stat blocks, with no guidance in the book for customizing them (indeed, from the MM I would assume customizing them is not intended), is possibly the worst move I've seen in the game since 4E did its thing. The reason is: this is the least flavorful version of how they could have handled it, and shines a spotlight on how the bounded accuracy of the system and the design of 5E ultimately makes too many stat blocks too generic and uninteresting, requiring customization but without any guidance given. This book will require the DM to put some work into making warriors, thugs, assassins and other common humanoid encounters more interesting due to the fact that, as presented, there's now no difference between a human assassin, warrior or whatever and a drow, orc, elf, dwarf or...you name it.... This is going to get boring even faster than the old range did. A real shame, because some of the newer designs and stat blocks in this book are definite improvements; they were "that close" to making this a Top Dog Monster Manual, and leaning into the generic humanoid stat blocks totally flubbed it.

EDIT: at this point, if you are an orc fan (be it as DM or player), this borders on insulting IMO as you essentially only have 2 paragraphs on orcs in the Player's Handbook and zero further content to guide you. Drow give you exactly one paragraph in the PHB. As far as I can tell Duergar are scrubbed from existence. Is the plan to release a Humanoid's Handbook in the future with the vast level of missing lore? Are we supposed to purely derive some perspective on these species from a picture or two? Or is the real goal here to expurgate them from the game through essentially neglect? Either way, this is putting a lot more heavy lifting on other species in the MM that will now be the new regular bad guys by default such as the hobgoblins, gith and gnolls, because it does appear that lots of traditional foes are simply gone now, wiped out from explicit lore beyond the barest hint of something in the PHB. Heck, even if you explicitly want these species to be more heroic and available as playable species you will find almost nothing, perhaps even less than nothing to actually go on here. And the MM's absence on all of them is just weird and off putting.