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Message: <blockquote data-quote="squibbles" data-source="post: 8833283" data-attributes="member: 6937590">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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_bloom" target="_blank">desert bloom</a>.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.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.</blockquote>

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