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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8831216" data-attributes="member: 6670763">I've been recently diving deeply into the original 1st edition box and sourcebooks of the Forgotten Realms and discovered a setting that is really quite different from what it became over the following three decades with several timeline advanced, inclusion of classes and creatures from later rulebooks, and a radical shift in visual presentation. It's of course much broader strokes with way less detail, but I think expanding on what is presented in those early sources could really be a very strong setting for a campaign. I want to take what is there on the page and elaborate on it without overwriting anything that's already established in the text.Overall not too difficult, but the very strong presence of wild hordes of evil savages does make for a bit of a challenge.The Uthgardt barbarian tribes are not that bad. While the raiders of the Griffon, Elk, and Blue Bear tribes are straight up murderous bandits, they make up only the dominant group of their tribes of maybe a quarter of the whole tribes at most. You can have plenty of "civilians" so to speak and warriors who follow the big bullies on raids but aren't particularly happy about it. And then there's the Thunder Beast, Tree Ghost, and Great Worm tribes who are straight up good.With Uthgardt raiders, you can easily show that raiders are bad people. Not Uthgardt are bad people.But then there's also the orcs.And to a lesser extend the goblins. Those are a much tougher nut to crack. Orcs are featured quite prominently in the material as a great and regular threat to human towns and barbarian tribes. To do justice to the work of Greenwood and Jaquays and to stay in the spirit of the setting that was created, I don't want to simply shove the orcs into the backgrounds where they won't be seen and lead to any difficult questions. I really do want to salvage them. But a whole species where everyone is a burning and pillaging warrior and an evil bastard just straight up makes no sense. Believable orcs need to look like they could be a sustainable culture that has been going for thousands of years and wouldn't destroy itself within just one generation.The easy way out would be to just make the orcs more multi-faceted as well and establish that there are peaceful orc farmers and some honorable good warriors who oppose the violence and pillaging. Or the orcs could be acting the way they do out of desperation because the mean dwarves have been pushing them into inhospitable mountains for thousands of years and nobody wants to trade with them. But I think that would be directly counter to what orcs are supposed to be. Orcs are supposed to play the role of hostile monsters, and in the specific case of The Savage Frontier, there are already the Uthgardt that fill the role of ambiguous barbarians with a complicated neighbor relationship and internal complexities.Simply having an orc horde that is all "Waaagh! Kill and burn! Hur hur!" just isn't going to cut it. But I do want to make something out of that one-dimensional premise and have them feature prominently in the campaign that isn't pure cringe. And I admittedly have no real idea where to even start with that. So I am coming to all of you, asking for any kind of thoughts and idea you might have on that topic. Even if it's just something very simple and vague that could potentially kick off the start of a line of thought that could lead to something interesting and worthwhile.</blockquote>

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