D&D General Drow & Orcs Removed from the Monster Manual

[TiQuinn]

All this talk of Volo’s made me go back and read the section on orcs and all I can say is it was definitely written by someone saying “yyyyyyeah, how do I say they’re evil in so many ways while giving the slightest possibility that a few may be non-evil to allow for PC characters?”

 

[Scribe]

Only if being beaten up by bullies when I was in school counts.

So no. No Football? Boxing? Martial Arts (Hard)? No activity that even as a casual participant leads to the you or your fellow participants being battered, bruised, or bloodied?

PCs in my games don't typically kill their weak children, go on devastating raids that slaughter entire towns, sacrifice the victims to their gods, and take the survivors as slaves. The adventuring parties in my campaigns are generally morally gray mercenaries that go on adventures and help people largely because it benefits themselves. I cannot think of a time when this involved them massacring a village, monstrous or otherwise. Even in games where the characters were outright evil and did minor war crimes, they didn't act like this.

Sure, but did this happen in our own history? Obviously so. Were those people 'Evil' or just not fitting in with the morals (lol) of the present age?

Again, brutal, violent? Absolutely. Evil?

Volo says Orcs are more violent than humans are. Whatever bloodlust humans have, Volo's says Orcs have more of it.

How many versions of Orcs have there been since Volos? Is Volo's even in print?

But Gnomes are monsters! They even have lairs!

Monsters they may be, but if it comes down to needing someone at my side in a battle, a physical endeavor? I'm taking the Orc.

 

[Dire Bare]

Seems like we've already forgotten why people appeared to like the 4e monster stat blocks....I'm pretty sure it wasn't because of the narrative.

Forgot? Nah. Disagree with your point of view? Yeah.

 

[Reynard]

As others have already pointed out in various places, when you look at D&D that had species specific statblocks for humanoids, they didn't vary much anyway. They were already vanilla.

This isn't a reason not to do it. It is a reason to do it better.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Actually, none of it supports your point that orcs are innately evil. Violent, perhaps, most of them certainly are and that is a valid claim according to the text in Volo's.

But NO WHERE, I repeat NO WHERE, is there any evidence to support your claim, especially when you go on to claim "that it’s okay to slaughter them on sight."


Homebrew lore??? Seriously? Anything you write is skewed by your own views... which include the assumptions you come to based on the text in Volo's.


Only if they feel homocide is justified because a race is violent...


Then show me this "follow up" and where it mentions diverse ways they are "evil"... becomes I'm not seeing it anywhere:

Nope, nothing about being evil. The closest you get is the "demon-orc crossbreed" which is "depraved". Of course, that is not an "orc", but a demon-orc, not quite the same thing really.

Did you even read this section completely or do you enjoy cherrypicking?? I mean, you certainly can treat orcs how you want to, and in many games they might be met with suspicion or hatred, but even then you cannot slaughter them on sight. It would be murder.

The text tells DMs (along with their groups) to consider the roles of monstrous characters, how are their species considered in the game world? It includes establishing a monstrous creature as just another culture in the campaign as an option.

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So, it does spend time dicussing it, apparently.


So, shifting goalposts by bringing drow in? Ok... well, no where in the Volo's text does it talk about orcs having a genetic predispotition to evil.


Not evil. Violent, yes, but not evil--especially not inherently evil.


Hardly an afterthought! It is the SECOND sentence under Roleplaying an Orc!!!


Look, we're discussing orcs, not drow. I'm not going to take the time to hunt down all the stuff on drow like I did for orcs. Maybe when I have more time these weekend I'll review it for you, but certainly not tonight or tomorrow. Offhand, however, I would say that since Drow were in the PHB as a race, while Orcs were not, having more text/info on "good drow" is not surprising.

Now, the text in Volo's certainly could be offensive to some people, but despite the language they use orcs are not inherently evil and creatures you should feel justified in slaughtering on sight--unless you are playing an evil PC?

I'm not going to respond to this in point by point breakdowns. Once discussions turn into that, that's where they stay and it bogs up the whole thread.

I do not understand how someone would hear the lore "Orcs are inherently, genetically more bloodlustfull and violent than humans, and less empathetic, loving, and compassionate" and somehow not understand that to mean they're innately evil. Love, empathy, and compassion are practically the exact opposite of evil. To inherently lack that means they're inherently evil. My point in bringing up the Drow was to point out that most 5e lore about the historically always evil species was that how 5e lore discussed always evil monsters and races with evil cultures was different. Mordenkainen's Drow, Githyanki, and Duergar lore emphasizes that their evil is cultural, not innate. Volo's Orc lore specifically mentions how much of their behavior it natural to them a lot. They're primitive, because they're naturally dumb. They're naturally chaotic and it requires outside influence to force them to become orderly. They're naturally violent, callous, and heartless, it takes "domestication" to force them to gain some semblance of empathy. I think Volo's was just wrong in the sentence "they're not innately evil." Not because Orcs are naturally evil in my games (they're not), but because I think it contradicts with the rest of the text and the purpose of the Orc lore and monster stats in VGtM. I started playing and DMing D&D in 5e. Volo's was one of the first books I bought and read after the 3 core rulebooks. I base how I write my lore on WotC's style and how they communicate ideas to the readers, which is why I brought up my homebrew lore. When I created an evil culture for my homebrew world, I studied how Mordenkainen's communicates that the drow aren't naturally evil, but their culture, religion, and society is. Then I used the same tools WotC used to communicate the same idea.

I cannot count the amount of times people that argued in favor of always evil Orcs told me not to think about how they're depicted because it's just a game and how the PCs job is to massacre settlements of Orcs and Goblins, even the women and children. My games' PCs do not do that, but from my understanding that was more of the style in older editions. Like, Gary Gygax said it was Lawful Good to kill goblin children because "nits make lice." I do not agree with that stance and dislike that playstyle on many levels. I'm not the one making the argument that it's okay. I'm pointing out that that was the core assumption of the game for a long time and the reason why the monster lore emphasizes how evil they are is to justify the PCs violence against them.

And honestly I'm baffled by your argument or what you're even trying to say. Is your point that Orcs didn't need to change because the 5e books didn't say they're all evil? Because I think even if you are technically correct that the books don't outright say "All orcs are evil, it's okay to kill them on sight," that is both what the assumption used to be in D&D and what WotC wrote most of the early 5e lore for.

If you're so adamant in your position that it doesn't portray them as innately evil, what do you think Volo's was trying to communicate?

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

So no. No Football? Boxing? Martial Arts (Hard)? No activity that even as a casual participant leads to the you or your fellow participants being battered, bruised, or bloodied?

Not really. I did Karate for a few years, but that didn't really involve fighting. I have never been very athletic or gotten into an actual fight.

Sure, but did this happen in our own history? Obviously so. Were those people 'Evil' or just not fitting in with the morals (lol) of the present age?

Again, brutal, violent? Absolutely. Evil?

Yeah, I generally consider people that massacre towns to be evil.

How many versions of Orcs have there been since Volos? Is Volo's even in print?

There were playable Orcs in Eberron and Wildemount, but with different statistics because those settings don't assume all Orcs are dumb, evil brutes. Then I think the next printing was in Monsters of the Multiverse, which was post-Tasha's so they were redesigned. Then they were printed again in the new PHB, with a new design again. So in total I believe there's 4 versions of Orcs in 5e.

I think they stopped printing Volo's after Monsters of the Multiverse came out.

 

[Lazybones]

I wonder how much of this debate is baggage from past editions that some of us are carrying over. Certainly our society has changed a great deal since D&D was first introduced. Many of my players are decades younger than I am and have different cultural references that I do. I wonder if the changes RE orcs, drow, etc., would even register to a new player to the game, someone who's maybe seen the LotR movies but doesn't really have a lot of context for how those races were presented in past versions of D&D. Maybe it's not a bad thing that some of the old expectations are being recast for this new "edition."

I was just thinking the other day how drow are one of the few playable races that I've never allowed in my games, since my homebrew setting doesn't really have an Underdark per se and most of what I know about them comes from the Salvatore novels, the Baldur's Gate games, and the old G-D-Q series. All of that content has conditioned my expectations for how drow should appear in a D&D game, which doesn't really fit into my game world. I just took another look at the 2014 MM entry for drow and it definitely fits that specific, narrow model. After reading this thread and the lore-thin text about drow in the 2024 PH I'm thinking about recasting them in my setting and making an effort to "forget" the old lore that set my expectations for that species.

 

[Scribe]

So @Levistus's_Leviathan consider the pop culture view of the Spartans. What they apparently (I'm not a scholar, I dont know this) did to their sons, was horrible. There are people, who as a hobby, get beat up. I did it for near 10 years, before Covid, and a week did not go by without me being bruised either with a black eye, busted up nose, forearms, upper leg, elbows/knees, or shins.

I mean my fellow idiots, we would roll glass jars over our shins to deaden the nerves, and we were just casuals.

There are people, humans, today, who are violent. Who are aggressive above the average of your typical human. Who enjoy getting punched in the face, and punching other (consenting!) adults in the face.

Is it REALLY beyond the pale to consider that a Fantastical species, with all the variety of behaviors, attributes, neural functions, and so on demonstrated in humanity, is it just a bridge to far for you to consider that maybe, a species could exist that is more aggressive than us?

I'm not saying Evil with a capital E.

More violent than humans, aggressive, is this REALLY a problem?

This is the Shadowdark Orc. Is this actually an issue? I mean we obviously have different views on things, and thats OK, so if you think this is a problem thats fine, and we just move on.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

So @Levistus's_Leviathan consider the pop culture view of the Spartans. What they apparently (I'm not a scholar, I dont know this) did to their sons, was horrible. There are people, who as a hobby, get beat up. I did it for near 10 years, before Covid, and a week did not go by without me being bruised either with a black eye, busted up nose, forearms, upper leg, elbows/knees, or shins.

I mean my fellow idiots, we would roll glass jars over our shins to deaden the nerves, and we were just casuals.

There are people, humans, today, who are violent. Who are aggressive above the average of your typical human. Who enjoy getting punched in the face, and punching other (consenting!) adults in the face.

Is it REALLY beyond the pale to consider that a Fantastical species, with all the variety of behaviors, attributes, neural functions, and so on demonstrated in humanity, is it just a bridge to far for you to consider that maybe, a species could exist that is more aggressive than us?

I'm not saying Evil with a capital E.

More violent than humans, aggressive, is this REALLY a problem?

This is the Shadowdark Orc. Is this actually an issue? I mean we obviously have different views on things, and thats OK, so if you think this is a problem thats fine, and we just move on.

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I don't have any objection to the idea of a creature that's more aggressive than humans. I don't have a problem with Orcs being more aggressive or violent than humans. I'm not saying that core idea is racist or whatever you think I'm talking about. My point was that to me Volo's saying Orcs aren't innately evil while also saying they're naturally more violent and inherently lack empathy and compassion is contradictory.

Note: I do think the specific language Volo's uses to talk about how evil and primitive the Orcs are is often based on old racist tropes. But that's not what this tangent was about. The discussion was about if 5e presents Orcs as irredeemable monsters that should be killed on sight. I think most of the lore in Volo's does support that idea.

All this talk of Volo’s made me go back and read the section on orcs and all I can say is it was definitely written by someone saying “yyyyyyeah, how do I say they’re evil in so many ways while giving the slightest possibility that a few may be non-evil to allow for PC characters?”

This was the point I was making. All of Volo's talks about how evil the orcs are, how they're naturally chaotic and callous. All of their stat blocks are chaotic evil. Their lore doesn't mention any of the non-evil depictions in D&D worlds (Eberron, Many Arrows, Ondontis, etc). The lore focuses on the evil and "primitive" aspects. How they can't create wagons so they steal them from Dwarves. How their whole culture and religion is based around raiding. How they kill their weak children (unless they devote themselves to a member of the Orcish pantheon). The book spends almost all of its Orc lore only discussing how terrible they all are, and then has a few small mentions about how they're "usually chaotic evil" and have the potential to become kinda good, if only someone were to raise them outside of Orcish society.

If the lore in Volo's was actually concerned with providing support for the idea that not all Orcs are evil, it would have done so similar to how Tome of Foes does for Drow. It wouldn't have focused so much on how their primitive, savage lifestyles comes from inherent traits. If it wanted to present them as diverse in alignments like most people in D&D are, it would discuss that. The core, original Orc lore in 5e definitely assumes that they're mostly irredeemable monsters that can be slaughtered on sight. Even the small mention in Volo's about how they could be "domesticated" dilutes the idea that Orcs are anything but innately savage monsters that should be killed.

Again, this is not how I use Orcs in my games. I think that the idea of having entire pantheons for a single type of monsters is generally bad worldbuilding. I don't use species-specific gods in my settings, and I don't have humanoid species that are innately or universally evil.

 

[AnotherGuy]

@Levistus's_Leviathan can you not see the appeal and celebration of all that is orc in what you read about orcs in Volo?
I literally am excited when I read how culturally and spiritually different the orc is to the human, the dwarf and the elf. The fact that their life span is so short and thus their value system is about about aggression, immediate satisfaction and appeasing their gods. They don't have, or believe they have, the time to craft like the longer lived races...

I love that they they steal their wagons and the pride they gain from having one and how they elevate their stature by the wealth of its decor. Their superstitious nature is perfect (thinking of ways PCs could use this to their advantage when encountering them).
They commune with and celebrate different aspects of nature (strength and might), different to that of elves (grace and beauty etc). Love that trolls sometimes temporarily accompany the tribe if there is a promise of sufficient food. There is just so much gold in having a species be so different to humans - emotionally, spiritually, physically and even intellectually (higher, lower, sideways).

I will say in a post Warcraft world I would gladly welcome a sidebar which imagined orcs differently.

Anyways I'd just thought to give you a different pair of glasses because I cannot imagine reading D&D lore and constantly comparing it to RL history.