Do orcs in gaming display parallels to colonialist propaganda?

[Dannyalcatraz]

Australia went to war against the Nazis while fiercely maintaing the White Australia Policy. Churchill went to war against the Nazis while resolutely desiring to maintain the British Empire.

Opposed/fought the Nazis doesn't show that someone, or some political outlook, isn't racist.

Greece, too, was on the side of the allies, even though the predominant political hierarchy had a great deal in common with the Nazis.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

What do you think is the best approach? Get rid of "Always Chaotic Evil" races?

Are Always-CE Undead ok? How about demons?

I'm not joking; I am increasingly inclined to think RPGs can do without orcs and suchlike.

My personal take: if it’s a mortal, corporeal, sapient race, “always evil” is probably not a good option. Too cartoonish. Lazy. That closer they are to humans, the worse such a design becomes.

If it’s a sapient species of extraplanar or otherwise “unnatural” origins- demons, godlings, elementals, spirits, most undead, etc., having a more monolithic ethos makes sense...at least, moreso than for normal beings.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

And increasingly, we have to consider our potential audiences as multicultural, multiethnic, gender diverse, multi-aged, etc. So we have to be more cognizant of when we toss around faux insults in our fiction lest we actually insult real people. We don’t have to agree with complainants, but we also can’t handwave away complaints without at least a modicum of questing for the truth.

My words here just triggered a thought in me. Between me, [MENTION=16984]Smon[/MENTION] and [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], I think the sun essentially does not set on this thread. I mean, I KNOW it’s the internet, and it’s open 24/7, but between the three of us, we cover 3 pretty widely spaced locations within what used to be the British Empire.

 

[dragoner]

What do you think is the best approach? Get rid of "Always Chaotic Evil" races?

Are Always-CE Undead ok? How about demons?

I'm not joking; I am increasingly inclined to think RPGs can do without orcs and suchlike.

Accept the truth and move on, I'm no fan of sanitizing the past. D&D gets by due to the tropes being traditional and ingrained in fantasy. Orcs or evil races don't delight me in games, though they aren't an automatic deal breaker either. It is what it is. Supernatural evil is something different, it doesn't have the Gygaxian ecology that Orcs have. I'm more interested in playing games like Mythras, I converted "Caverns of Thracia" to Mythras and we played that out until a TPK, and the idea of some good vs evil, never actually came up. The players were a band of adventurers out of Constantinople, exploring Cyrene.

 

[Doug McCrae]

What do you think is the best approach?

My approach isn't going to be popular - never run D&D again! I just feel it's so grounded in the idea of race determining personality, ethical stance and capabilities and that that idea isn't a useful one, either in art or reality.

 

[generic]

My approach isn't going to be popular - never run D&D again! I just feel it's so grounded in the idea of a being's race determining its personality and capabilities and that that idea isn't a useful one, either in art or reality.

What would you prefer, a game with no mechanics to simulate the biological differences between species, as Orcs are not really a "Race"? Eventually, this becomes ridiculous.

 

[S'mon]

My approach isn't going to be popular - never run D&D again! I just feel it's so grounded in the idea of a being's race determining its personality and capabilities and that that idea isn't a useful one, either in art or reality.

It's funny, running a D&D campaign now in Howard-esque Primeval Thule, that seems much much less the case than in traditional Tolkienesque D&D. The Beastmen may be thought of as 'orcs' by the local homo sapiens sapiens, but it's clear to the reader that they're really Neanderthals, just as Thule is really Greenland (and north is really west, so Hyperborea is really northern Canada!). Even the Serpentmen dwell peacefully alongside humans in the city of Ikath, and a relatively benevolent serpentman sage or artificer is easily imaginable.

Swords & Sorcery really does not have the Tolkienesque Good Race vs Evil Race thing going on - if only because everyone is pretty bad - and does not seem grounded in racial conflict the way Tolkienesque fantasy is.

 

[Doug McCrae]

What would you prefer, a game with no mechanics to simulate the biological differences between species, as Orcs are not really a "Race"? Eventually, this becomes ridiculous.

Orcs as an artistic concept went wrong from the beginning. They ought to have represented all evil, including the evil in us. But instead the evil got placed in Those People.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I was pretty shocked reading Stoddard that (as best I recall) there was pretty much nothing about superiority/inferiority, and that he saw the end of "White World Supremacy" as inevitable, and not particularly a bad thing.

I don’t agree with either of these assessments. He has a whole complex crazy system. There’s a hierarchy of intellectual ability with “Nordics” at the top and black people at the bottom. He believes black people are physically superior. Worst of all are certain “mongrels” because they combine all the negative attributes and none of the positives.

“As explained in the Introduction [written by Madison Grant], the white race divides into three main sub-species—the Nordics, the Alpines, and the Mediterraneans. All three are good stocks, ranking in genetic worth well above the various colored races. However, there seems to be no question that the Nordic is far and away the most valuable type; standing, indeed, at the head of the whole human genus. As Madison Grant well expresses it, the Nordic is ‘The Great Race.’”​

“Although the white race displays sustained constructive power to an unrivalled degree, particularly in its Nordic branches, the brown and yellow peoples have contributed greatly to the civilization of the world and have profoundly influenced human progress. The negro, on the contrary, has contributed virtually nothing. Left to himself, he remained a savage… The originating powers of the European and the Asiatic are not in him.”​

“There can be no doubt that the Indian is superior to the negro. The negro, even when quickened by foreign influences, never built up anything approaching a real civilization; whereas the Indian… evolved genuine polities and cultures like the Aztec of Mexico, the Inca of Peru, and the Maya of Yucatan.”​

“The black man is, indeed, sharply differentiated from the other branches of mankind. His outstanding quality is superabundant animal vitality. In this he easily surpasses all other races. To it... is due his extreme fecundity, the negro being the quickest of breeders.”*​

“Professor Agassiz wrote: ‘Let any one who doubts the evil of this mixture of races… come to Brazil. He cannot deny the deterioration consequent upon the amalgamation of races… which is rapidly effacing the best qualities of the white man, the negro, and the Indian, leaving a mongrel, nondescript type, deficient in physical and mental energy.’”​

He thinks that if white people cease to exist then it will be an utter catastrophe for the world.

“If white civilization goes down, the white race is irretrievably ruined. It will be swamped by the triumphant colored races, who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption... If the present drift be not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed.”​

“And that would mean that the race obviously endowed with the greatest creative ability, the race which had achieved most in the past and which gave the richer promise for the future, had passed away, carrying with it to the grave those potencies upon which the realization of man’s highest hopes depends. A million years of human evolution might go uncrowned, and earth’s supreme life-product, man, might never fulfil his potential destiny. This is why we to-day face ‘The Crisis of the Ages.’”​

The above quotes are all from Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy (1920).

*Very interesting similarity to orcs here, one that hasn’t been raised in the thread up until now afaik.

 

[S'mon]

Guess I remembered wrong then! I recalled the Maddison Grant intro having a very different tone from the rest of the book by Stoddard.