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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bran Blackbyrd" data-source="post: 1283045" data-attributes="member: 1710">Orcs have looked like this (at least) since the inception of 3E. They look like this in much of the conceptual art before 3E was finished. This predates Jackson's LOTR movies, so who is copying who?What is flagrant here is the way you've ignored the timeline.Showing a hero hopelessly surrounded by a horde of enemies is a staple of fantasy art, not to mention of D&D art.I take that back, it's a staple of any kind of art that shows conflict; be it the soldier from Doom surrounded by demons, Ash surrounded by Deadites, a WWII soldier surrounded by Nazis, a comic book hero surrounded by villains... The list goes on and on. A hero just isn't a hero unless he/she is surmounting the insurmountable. Showing the odds stacked against them heightens tension and the sense of heroism.Assuming is all fun and games until someone loses an eye; that's the first lesson of posting on a message board.Do the illustrations in the original LOTR books show orcs similar to those in the movie? Yes? No? Maybe?Even the pictures that artists have done over the years portraying Tolkien's orcs are merely their own interpretation of his description, not Tolkien's own work. Some of the same people that have done art for official LOTR books have probably done art for D&D and vice versa. We all draw from the same well of inspiration. The fact is that the orcs from Peter Jackson's movies are just the inbred children of the artists inspired by Tolkien's work, and the Trilogy's bastard love child, D&D. With that in mind, can anyone really point fingers at who is ripping who off?It is said that there is nothing new under the sun, yet at the same time it can be argued that if you have not yet seen, heard or experienced something, then it is new. So is every new idea a theft? Is it new at all?I once overheard two people arguing in high school over whether CDs had better audio quality than cassettes. When they asked a third party his opinion the guy responded, "Dude. That's a nerd argument."All three were schmucks, but the third party had a valid case. I doubt anyone here would be scared away by the nerdiness or geekiness of an argument, but this particular one is pointless. Tolkien isn't going to throw off the shackles of death and demand credit for the way orcs looked in D&D 3.0, WoTC isn't going to sue Peter Jackson because his orcs looked like theirs, and he's not going to sue WoTC for the pictures of orcs in the Complete Warrior and on the cover of The Thousand Orcs. Until one of those things happens no one is going to give any of you a definitive answer on who gets all the credit.So why waste your time on it?This is probably my number one favorite racial change that 3E brought about. The pudgy little hobbits that were portrayed by artists pre-3E were lame. Even Peter Jackson decided against this long-time portrayal. The old ones looked about as heroic as a Hummel figurine.</blockquote>

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