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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Malmuria" data-source="post: 8531268" data-attributes="member: 7030755">This description doesn't help me very much as a DM for a few overlapping reasons• I think  culture- and society-forming humanoid groups ought to be presented as complex and with free will.  These orcs hunt, forage, make arts and crafts (and possibly trade), have a way of relating socially (even through violence), and raise young.  They should have all the detail in a setting that groups of humans have.  This is especially true if this is a playable race; players will want their characters to have free will in order to shape their characters backgrounds (beyond just being another Drizzt).  They will probably want their orc character to be able to accompany the party into town without constantly roleplaying hostile interactions.• There is a strong implied setting in the above description, namely a Keep on the Borderlands-style frontier.  First, the<a href="https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/2021/07/classic-play-v-aesthetic.html" target="_blank"> frontier setting</a> is strongly reminiscent of the American frontier (vast stretches of <a href="https://blogofholding.com/?p=7182" target="_blank">"free" land</a>, militarized border towns and "homesteads," cash economy, and of course the Others who threaten "civilization").  But it's also very handwavy: there's civilization and then a generic expanse "out there" where orcs, goblins, bugbears, hobgoblins, etc all live.  There's no sense of who controls what territory, whose allied with whom, etc.  They are simultaneously described as only forming "loose knit" groups and being powerful enough to threaten entire kingdoms.  In other words, the king has an orc problem, and somehow 4-6 adventurers are the best way to deal with that problem, and everything else is shunted offscreen.  • re: inherent evil: if creatures are formed by demon ichor on the 83rd layer of the abyss and are entering the material plane through a portal opened by a wizard, then sure.  I suppose that's covered by the "long forgotten" evil in the description, but again feels handwavy, an excuse to create an inherently evil group without providing any texture to the lore.  The effect is to constrain the way PCs might interact with this group of creatures.The above might not be problems when in the context of a specific setting.  For example, a points of light setting in which there are not vague "realms" but just this one realm, and not orcs inhabiting a featureless wild, but this one specific group of orcs that occupies the forest to the NE.  To be clear, it is likely that this setting would still be at least implicitly colonialist, but it would work from a world building perspective.  But when you generalize culture-forming humanoid groups in this way, you sort of get the worst of both worlds: both generic, texture-less world building and creatures that grotesquely resemble colonial fantasies of the "other."</blockquote>

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