D&D General Handling the Orc Horde as a key setting element

[Tonguez]

make sure that the first Orcs that the PCs meet are peaceful and interesting. Maybe a druid or a some traders visiting a merchant rather than raiding. Have some positive interaction happen so the PCs get to see orcs as people first.

 

[overgeeked]

And I admittedly have no real idea where to even start with that.

Do the same with the orcs as with the tribes you mentioned. Include other factions of orcs who aren’t football hooligans. It’s not including savage, warlike orcs that’s the problem. It’s only including savage, warlike orcs that’s the problem. Include a diverse array of orc cultures and you’re set. Intelligent and erudite orcs in high society. Orc wizards, sages, and librarians. Orc paladins, sheriffs, judges, and jailers. Treat them as any other sentient and free-willed people. Some of them are a bit embarrassing, but the majority are fine.

 

[Laurefindel]

Do the same with the orcs as with the tribes you mentioned. Include other factions of orcs who aren’t football hooligans. It’s not including savage, warlike orcs that’s the problem. It’s only including savage, warlike orcs that’s the problem. Include a diverse array of orc cultures and you’re set. Intelligent and erudite orcs in high society. Orc wizards, sages, and librarians. Orc paladins, sheriffs, judges, and jailers. Treat them as any other sentient and free-willed people. Some of them are a bit embarrassing, but the majority are fine.

This is how I've been addressing orcs in my recent campaigns. That and acknowledging that levels of technology =/= levels of civilisation and cultural development.

Alliances and enmity remain key concepts in my campaigns however. Many humans (in the north of Faerun) see orcs as evil because they are a enemy nation and vice versa, regarless of alignment (or whether aliment exists at all). A game and setting that tries to eliminate cultural bias and demonization doesn't mean its inhabitants cannot be biased.

 

[J-H]

Do the same with the orcs as with the tribes you mentioned. Include other factions of orcs who aren’t football hooligans. It’s not including savage, warlike orcs that’s the problem. It’s only including savage, warlike orcs that’s the problem. Include a diverse array of orc cultures and you’re set. Intelligent and erudite orcs in high society. Orc wizards, sages, and librarians. Orc paladins, sheriffs, judges, and jailers. Treat them as any other sentient and free-willed people. Some of them are a bit embarrassing, but the majority are fine.

Not all societies will have librarians, judges, and jails.

Consider drawing from the war-making strategies of the Cherokee and other native Americans. My source material for this is my memory of a 50 minute lecture on warfighting and goals that I watched more than 6 months ago. If I could find the link, I'd add it. I am pretty sure he was discussing Cherokee.
In short, the historian's point was this:
-Hunting was a key source of food security for them.
-Hunting sustainably required a large area of space.
-If you drew a map of their lands, it would look like a pair of concentric circles. The inner circle would be the area that they lived in (possibly nomadic with several camps based on time of year), and the outer circle would encompass all of the hunting grounds that they would draw on to support the inner area. If someone else moved into these areas, it would impact their food security...so they considered it "theirs".
-These outer areas would not show any indication of property ownership (walls, houses, boundary markers, etc.). Spot where the conflict will come from when colonists move into the area!
-To preserve the hunting grounds needed to support their people, or to expand their hunting grounds, they would not go to war in the sense we think of, with forming up an army, having big battles, and going for a decisive political/military defeat. Instead, their method of warfare was deterrent warfare: Lots of small raids. Steal a horse, kill two people, burn a house, spoil food stores, kill some livestock.... whatever it takes to make life unpleasant for any intruders into THEIR hunting grounds. Eventually, the pressure of raids makes it so unpleasant that the intruders leave, and their hunting ground is secure.

This happens without central leadership, command and control, judges, jails, or sheriffs.

To the uninformed, this looks like savage raiders randomly attacking and/or stealing from people moving into ignored, unused, unclaimed land.

And that's why the orcs keep raiding the civilized areas. They are trying to make them GO AWAY. Want peace? Leave.

Good luck resolving that conflict without bloodshed.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In my setting, long ago orcs were more or less united as a slave race under an evil overlord, but after his defeat they differentiated and live in many places, sometimes with other heritages, and sometimes in orc communities. A few still live near the ruins of the dark lord's fortress and remain loyal to his memory, but most have moved south and made new lives for themselves. They raid when conditions allow for it, and farm or even trade when they don't.

 

[Yora]

Do the same with the orcs as with the tribes you mentioned. Include other factions of orcs who aren’t football hooligans. It’s not including savage, warlike orcs that’s the problem. It’s only including savage, warlike orcs that’s the problem. Include a diverse array of orc cultures and you’re set. Intelligent and erudite orcs in high society. Orc wizards, sages, and librarians. Orc paladins, sheriffs, judges, and jailers. Treat them as any other sentient and free-willed people. Some of them are a bit embarrassing, but the majority are fine.

Generally I do agree with that approach. In my homebrew setting, the various humanoid peoples are really just different looking humans.

But in this specific case I want to take a 30 year old setting and play it straight as it is written. Exploring how much depth can be gained by taking the material at its word without outright contradicting it. I feel that a lot of old worldbuilding only suffers from unfortunate presentation but having actually solid content that can still make for really great campaigns. And by and large I still stand by that opinion for The Savage Frontier. The horde of murderous orcs being the one case where it actually requires some contortions. But I still think it's doable without just retconning the established descriptions away.

 

[Faolyn]

With Uthgardt raiders, you can easily show that raiders are bad people. Not Uthgardt are bad people.

But then there's also the orcs.

Why not combine 'em? Maybe you don't need to have both human and orc raiders. If you prefer orc raiders to human, give them Uthgardt culture and totems and whatnot.

 

[Clint_L]

I get where the OP is coming from, because so often the antagonist races in fantasy are just presented as pure evil in ways that raise serious questions about sustainability.

Like, take lightless, volcanic Mordor. How, exactly, does it sustain these massive orc armies? Where are their cities, farms, merchants? Where are the women? The children?

Those questions always bug me in a setting, so when I am building my own worlds I can't just ignore them. I like having orc raiders; they're fantasy staples, and they're fun. But they gotta have some of backstory, so in my world there are lots of orcs who aren't raiders, just like there are lots of humans who aren't raiders. Then I just gotta figure out why this particular group have become a problem. That makes things a lot easier.

 

[squibbles]

Okay. Let's see what we actually have as exiting information:

The Goblin Races were involved in race-killing wars with dwarves over their mountain peaks, and with men over the lowlands. Usually the Goblin Races have been repulsed or crushed, but there are many dwarven halls in Orcish hands.
The Goblin Races are generally under-organized and under-equipped, and would have been wiped out several times over were it not for a rapid breeding cycle and a high self-preservation instinct. Faced with overwhelming odds, most Goblin Races will waver and retreat, and for this the tag "cowardly" is usually added to their other names.- Forgotten Realms Campaign Set: "The Goblin Races"

For ages the Dwarves have engaged in wars bordering on the genocidal, fighting against other races, such as orcs
and goblins, who sought out the same caverns and mines the dwarves considered their homes. In those ancient days a live orc was competition both for treasure and for living space, and dwarven armies fought and died to protect and expand their realms.- Forgotten Realms Campaign Set: "Dwarves and the Shards of the Dwarven Kingdoms"

Whatever the truth, the wizards no longer dwelt in Netheril and to the north, once-majestic dwarven Delzoun had fallen upon hard days. Then the orcs struck. Orcs had always been foes in the North, surging out of their holes every few tens of generations when their normal haunts could no longer support their burgeoning numbers. This time they charged out of their caverns in the Spine of the World, poured out of abandoned mines in the Graypeaks, screamed out of lost dwarfholds in the Ice Mountains, raged forth from crypt complexes in the Nether Mountains and stormed upward from the bowels of the High Moon Mountains. Never before or since had there been such an outpouring of orcish power.
Before this onslaught Delzoun crumbled and was driven in on itself. Netheril, without its wizards, was wiped from the face of history. The elves of Eaerlann alone withstood the onslaught and, with the aid of the treants of Turlang and other unnamed allies, were able to stave off the final days of their land for yet a few centuries more.- The Savage Frontier: "History of the North"

The orcs in the North wage a constant war of raid and retreat on frontier outposts. Small wandering bands constantly harry farms and villages, stealing livestock and brutally killing people. Just as often, they take slaves. Attempts to negotiate or control them for any length of time end in failure. Bounties placed on orcish heads only seem to encourage the beasts to attack for sport.
[...]
This is a holy war. Its roots date back to the formation of the Uthgardt as a people. The barbarians and the orcs compete directly with one another for the same resources. Savage humans and bloodthirsty orcs fight to the death upon meeting. Adventurers in the North could do worse than to aid the Uthgardt in such a conflict.- The Savage Frontier: "Common Themes & Conflicts"

The third major race in the North is not human at all: orcs dominate the wilds and may be the true, though disunified power in the North.
- The Savage Frontier: "The People of the North"

It really is very simplistic and one-dimensional. This is gonna take some real work.

What I see is that the history of the orcs is directly tied to the history of the dwarves. The dwarves and orcs have been fighting for thousands of years. And the dwarves know they have lost. In this version of the realms, the only two remaining dwarven cities in the North are Adbar and Ironmaster. Other dwarves live in various human cities like Mirabar and Sunabar, and there's hint of small secret dwarf holds scattered through the mountains that are too small and insignificant to get individual descriptions or marked on the maps.

It is stated in several places that many of the major orc strongholds are old dwarven cities that they conquered, and there is even one case of orcs running a mithril mine and selling to an evil wizard. [...]

Thanks for providing the direct quotations. My way to make the Orcs or "Goblin Races" outlined in them a sustainable culture, after some thought, would be this:

They are like a desert bloom.

Under normal circumstances they live a lot like the Uthgardt--hunting, herding, raiding--in the way that nomadic folks often do, with a territory that they seasonally circumnavigate, fastidiously defend, and opportunistically expand when their neighbors are weak. Also like nomadic folks, there aren't very many of them and their society lacks a lot of useful technologies (e.g. metallurgy and construction) because they don't have the spare resources to support the trained specialists that those technologies require. They don't mainly live in caves or old dwarf holds, because they don't practice agriculture and aren't sedentary,* but they like having holdfasts in case they need somewhere to retreat (and really don't want someone else to move in), so they always leave bands of armed raiders holding the pre-existing fortifications in their territory (these are gonna be the guys that most adventurers encounter).

Usually, goblinoids are living pretty close to the edge of survival, fighting among themselves and their neighbors for pretty limited returns.

But--and this is leaning on that text about "breeding cycles" in the campaign set--goblinoids differ from human nomads in that they have a short gestation period, produce multiple births, and reach adulthood very quickly. It falls apart if you overthink it too much (bipedalism and large brains are a hell of a design constraint), but lots of large mammals reach adulthood in only a few years--2-3 in dogs, 4 in horses, 2-3 in cattle, etc. So, unlike humankind, goblinoids can rapidly overpopulate their environment in a short time.

They know this and it informs their society.

A goblinoid clan/tribe/whatev strictly controls births during the lean years. They practice birth control or infanticide (maybe for the tribes you want to label as notably evil).

But every now and then, they have a really good year: lots of hunting, good weather leads to a really productive herd, good fishing, good forage (i.e. of other peoples food supply), some kind of exogenous magical windfall, etc. In that year, they don't practice population control, and one or maybe two cohorts of orcs/goblins/bugbears are born in litters of 5-10. Their population explodes. They know that they need to do something with this excess population, or they'll all just starve, so they make some deals with the neighboring goblinoid clans which also had a good year, form a large-ish military confederation, and make a move on the nearest wealthy urban civilization.

They do this because they think it helps their kind thrive (which is evolutionarily true). They also do this because they have legitimate historical grievances against wealthy urban civilization. The ancient delzoun dwarves, being stubborn problem-solving type people with no patience for raiders, reasoned that goblinoids, unlike most peoples, always bounce back a few years after being terribly defeated, and that the only permanent solution was total genocide (a decision from which they reaped their due comeuppance). And, since humankind, the elves, the halflings, the gnomes, etc. all seem to have taken the dwarves' side on that issue (they all live together in those decadent cosmopolitan cities which kill us on sight don't they?), most goblinoids think that said peoples deserve whatever harms befall them.

Additionally, like some historical nomads, goblinoids have a cultural condescension towards farming; those people are like animals who scartch in the dirt, most of them can't fight, they can't survive in the wild, and they live lives of drudgery that no one would want under subordination to hereditary monarchs who never earned the authority to lead. Goblinoids also dislike the way that farming societies clear their grazing land and game-rich forests to replace it with endless rows of tilled dirt. They consider if fair to steal from people who do this (and maybe kill and eat them, again for the tribes you want to label as notably evil).

Different groups of goblinoids hold these grievances and biases to varying degrees. Some of them reciprocate the kill on sight outlook that folks like the Uthgardt have towards them, while some are (warily) willing to trade information, furs, foodstuffs, etc. in exchange for things they can't make themselves (like longswords). And it's possible for a party of adventurers to cultivate a friendly relationship with a group of goblinoids on the basis of repeat transactions--but that won't stop said goblinoids from joining a desert-bloom-year war host, and might not stop them from cattle raiding the town the adventurers came from (actions which the goblinoids feel are completely justified and will explain their rationale for undertaking).


*a clan of goblinoids might switch to a sedentary life if they became the rulers some other sedentary people, which would be the most likely arrangement for, say, a castle-dwelling orc warlord.

Sounds like a great situation to tell a story not about "barbarian raiders" but about culture clash, encroachment, and colonization. The "barbarian" culture is slowly losing ground to "civilized" peoples. You could, for instance, say raids are not about being "evil" but about trying to get by and adapt to stresses placed on them from the encroaching nations - old trade routes have been lost, and hunting grounds diminished, and so on.

And you don't have to paint this as "civilization" being evil, or the "barbarians" being noble, or something. They can all be people, who come into conflict, with their good and bad qualities, trying to look after their own interests when resources and lands are contested.

Culture clash is sorta what I ended up with, after writing the bit above. I'm hoping it comes across as being reasonable from the orcs' point of view, but still completely unacceptable to non-goblinoids, and not really amenable to PCs working out any real compromise.

But to push back some--the 'barbarians', as described in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set and Savage Frontier, aren't losing ground to colonization by 'civilized' peoples, they beat the civilized peoples (well, the orc 'barbarians' did). The dwarves and elves are still declining in the face of persistent attacks, and humankind hasn't recovered much of what the orcs took (and might lose to them too). The raiding isn't a coping strategy its an equilibrium strategy, and I think that's more fun to explain, since it isn't inherently sympathetic.

 

[Umbran]

But to push back some--the 'barbarians', as described in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set and Savage Frontier, aren't losing ground to colonization by 'civilized' peoples, they beat the civilized peoples

I have zero allegiance to setting canon.