D&D 5E How Are Orcs Different In Your World? (+)

[DarkCrisis]

My current campaign is set in Krynn (Dragonlance) where Orcs simply don’t exist.

 

[Bupp]

Orcs once had a large and stable empire on one continent of my World of Eska. Peaceful and benevolent and overflowing with resources. That is, until the elves came and wiped them from the face of the planet.

 

[Dioltach]

Is it me, or are more and more DM's casting elves as pretty nasty? (In one of my homebrews elves were decadent isolationist demon summoners that had created halflings as a slave race.)

 

[Thunder Brother]

For my orcs I liberally borrowed ideas from the trolls (Uz) of Glorantha.

 

[Mad_Jack]

Orcs for me tend to be sort of the utility player of the humanoid races - every game I've run, they've played a different role, from straight-up mindless hordes to noble savages living in harmony with nature to oppressed people fighting for their freedom...
(In that game, which was a party-as-military unit game, the party were heroes of their "Golden Empire, the height of Civilization" which was at war with the "Evil Orc Hordes", but after getting captured and talking to the Orcs' leader (who turned out to be highly intelligent, eloquent, and one of the Great Generals of History), the party realizes that they're on the wrong side and actually working for the "Evil Empire"... The rest of the game involves them helping the Orc freedom fighters.)

If anyone hasn't read it, I recommend Stan Nicholls' Orcs trilogy - it's a great take on the orcs as a second-class warrior race bred for battle but having developed a much deeper, richer culture than other think them capable of.

 

[DeviousQuail]

Is it me, or are more and more DM's casting elves as pretty nasty? (In one of my homebrews elves were decadent isolationist demon summoners that had created halflings as a slave race.)

I've done a couple Elf civilizations that were xenophobic, racist, or both. Their internal variety, extremely long lives, and connections to magic make them much more alien to me than something like an Orc or Tiefling.

As for Orcs in my worlds they've been a lot of different things. The theme that is common for them is that they are always a tragedy of some kind. Weapons for war, exiled peoples, abandoned by their creators, etc.

 

[Bill Zebub]

My orcs are tall, fair-skinned, blonde and they have socialized medicine and are really good at cross-country skiing. They also make boxy-looking carts and wagons that are sought-after by families for being very safe.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Is it me, or are more and more DM's casting elves as pretty nasty? (In one of my homebrews elves were decadent isolationist demon summoners that had created halflings as a slave race.)

I've long had elves as villains or difficult to deal with. I think it is built into the concept (at least as they appear in fantasy because they do often come with a sense of superiority over other groups). But elves are fun because their long life span allows for interesting thought experiments around their culture (i.e. how does a very long lived creature deal with the possibility of a violent death cutting that short)

 

[David Howery]

I haven't been gaming in a long time, but when I was a DM, I treated them more or less as Vikings... raiders who could show up at unexpected times and generally pillage. I even had one batch of them who decided to copy the northmen longboats and took to sea raiding...

 

[Blue]

I love worldbuilding, so every campaign I run is in a new homebrew setting, usually one with significant changes from the default setting to present a fresh take on things.

Let's see, my current campaign my orcs are different by not seeming to exist. They have never come up in play, no one has played a half-orc, and there hasn't been a single reference to orc. Of course my mainland is a old civilization failing Imperium and only the civilized races remain (and not all of them - Dwaves were genocided, and both Halflings and Drow are created races, with vHuman being that same tinkering to the noble line.) And there's a new world but I explicitly was doing uncommon races and such there, like Wemics. There was fiendish gnolls and frost giants, the closest to "normal" races there.

My last campaign the orcs were united and actually broke out into war against the alliance of their hereditary enemies the dwarves and the human kingdom, secretly being orchestrated by the Queen of the Elves. (With the actual end goal of obliterating a magical floating city of the humans that had been built by the old Wizard King who is now the Lich King and was thought by the Queen of the Elves to be his phylactery. Oh, and and like half a dozen lesser goals, the plans of elves last centuries.)

The campaigns before that (two campaigns in the same setting, 80 years apart) the world had a cosmology that this particular material plane was easier to get to, and a bunch of different deities over the millennia has brought "their people" here to escape genocide, catastrophes and the like. There were two very different sets of orcs, from different pantheons and different home material planes, at different times. The Northern Steppes had seven orken tribes, horse nomads loosely modelled after the Mongols, each tribe with it's own core tenant. On the other hand the Archipelago Orks were a more advanced civilization that controlled the seas in an rea. They were slavers, working with a fledgling metropolitan LN kingdom that accepted any race, had legal slaves and undead-as-workers. There was also some nameless evil (literally, it was a blank spot in my notes and it didn't come up in either campaign) that lived in a volcano on one of their islands that they may have worshiped.