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.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

As a follow up, here's a freebie for what WotC could have done in the MM 2025:

Orc page: talk for more than 2 paragraphs about the new orcs. Give us a feel for them. Give us three statblocks: Orc Nomad, Orc Pathfinder of Gruumsh, Orc Tradesman. BAM! We have an entirely new representation on orcs with three unique culturally relevant stat blocks telling us about the new nomadic species that follows the wandering Gruumsh, who is now no longer a demon god thanks to a path through which he sought mythic redemption and escape from his old ways, casting aside his demonic brothers.

Drow Page: Talk about the proud subterranean species which rose up and cast off the yoke of demonic worship from their old days; provide some context for the fact that lingering drow cults to Lolth may exist, but Drow in general seek unification and reform, a way to expand into the world once more and cast off the damage once done by the Queen of the Demonweb Pits. Stat blocks: Drow Envoy, Drow Outcast, Drow Renegade Cultist, Drow Matron of Peace.

BAM! You've got two completely new/updated takes on two races with interesting lore explaining what has changed about them, with distinct culturally specific stat blocks unique to their species.

This would have been pretty cool. I may use it in a future game.

 

[Libertad]

I watched it, and did not really enjoy it. He says:

• In previous editions, orcs were pure evil monsters that exist to be killed. He does a little skit about it.
• Playable orcs can't be monsters, just variant humans with a different coat of paint.
• Playable orcs are part of a corporate ploy to cater to children who don't read Tolkien.
• Playable orcs are a slippery slope (his literal words) that leads to everyone playing monsters, and if everyone is a monster then NOBODY is a monster, and then what will players kill?
• There is a scale of personhood to monsterhood that is up to the each GM, and there is no right way to do orcs because orcs don't exist.
• Killing goblin children (a la Goblin Slayer) "goes hard".
• In his game orcs are pure evil monsters that exist to be killed, but they have pig faces.
• Buy Deathbringer.

I talked about this guy in a post a few months ago.

Professor DM is also an Elon Musk stan who sided with him in going after WotC and also downplayed why people were saying that Gary Gygax was bigoted by selectively quoting Gygax's statements to obfuscate the worst parts. So besides his fallacious claims about "corporate ploys" and whatever, he isn't someone who should be taken seriously when it comes to culture war issues surrounding D&D.

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

Those who are using dark mode may be unable to read the orc stat titles with custom fonts. It could just be me, but wanted to throw that out there.

 

[Mournblade94]

Error

 

[Mournblade94]

Professor DM is also an Elon Musk stan who sided with him in going after WotC and also downplayed why people were saying that Gary Gygax was bigoted by selectively quoting Gygax's statements to obfuscate the worst parts. So besides his fallacious claims about "corporate ploys" and whatever, he isn't someone who should be taken seriously when it comes to culture war issues surrounding D&D.

He gave an utterly neutral point of view on it all. Professor DM gives detached analysis exactly the way it should be done. He's pretty much just analyzing the business ends of things, he really doesn't go into the culture war at all. That Musk video was just discussing the possibilities, and not for Culture War Sake. Professor DM encourages people play alot of indies in the spirit of AD&D like Mork Borg and Troll Lord Games, two of the best publishers in the Indie Field. He gives them quite a bit of exposure and preserves the old style of playing not the Actual Play influence that has been infecting the game in the last few years.

Mostly its older players that care about Gygax, newer players have barely a clue. Older gamers care about Gygax's accomplishments, not how his actions 40 years ago would look today. Its a tired conversation at this point.

 

[Azzy]

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

Raises hand

I bemoaned all that going from 1e to 2e.

 

[Libertad]

He gave an utterly neutral point of view on it all. Professor DM gives detached analysis exactly the way it should be done. He's pretty much just analyzing the business ends of things, he really doesn't go into the culture war at all. That Musk video was just discussing the possibilities, and not for Culture War Sake. Professor DM encourages people play alot of indies in the spirit of AD&D like Mork Borg and Troll Lord Games, two of the best publishers in the Indie Field. He gives them quite a bit of exposure and preserves the old style of playing not the Actual Play influence that has been infecting the game in the last few years.

Mostly its older players that care about Gygax, newer players have barely a clue. Older gamers care about Gygax's accomplishments, not how his actions 40 years ago would look today. Its a tired conversation at this point.

If he was detached and neutral, then he wouldn't gloss over key information. And he and Musk were criticizing a history book for...covering the history of D&D, including its creator's worldviews at the time. If talking about such material in history books isn't the time and place, then when is it the time and place?

 

[QuentinGeorge]

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.

I’m pretty sure you vastly misunderstood both Tolkien and his core beliefs if that’s what you got from his writings. He also was pretty well known for not thinking of his works as allegorical.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

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.

Yep that’s the biggest issue for me, it all amounts to creating a product that when it comes down to it, has less utility than the one produced 10 years ago.

 

[Mistwell]

The easiest path for WOTC to both avoid taking a firm stand while also providing the necessary information on orcs and drows is to have used them as the examples in the DMG on how to alter an existing monster. Just include "Let's say you want to alter the Tough to be an Orc. You would add X, Y, and Z. But because Z is a trait which increases the percentage of damage they do by 25%, you should add 1 to their CR." Or something like that.

I still can't believe they provided zero guidelines on what to do with half-races from the 2014 books. I'm truly astounded that didn't make the cut despite testing it in a UA which acknowledged there was an elephant in the corner. It really feels like there was a round of "not it!" in the WOTC offices on that topic.

 

[Aldarc]

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.

I think that you may be out of touch with the full-time designers if you genuinely believe this. Jeremy Crawford has gone on record in saying that their preference for orcs was closer to how they are represented in Eberron and Wildemount. This was about four years ago too.