I'm just going to reply to this for now, as I'm short on time.
Firstly the lore of FR and the lore of Mystara is quite different, even with the humanoids, and the stories I've told there are human-centric.
I never said they were the same lore? But orcs have been an incredibly common enemy in the game. The lore I found for Mystara states they are incredibly common in Mystara, and you ran FR for a decade. Even if the lore is different, it is really weird you keep saying that you NEVER looked into orcs before this thread.
Though I guess it does help prove you don't need orcs to be enemies, since it seems you never did.
The Soderfjord campaign was all about the Reformation and their independence from Ostland. The Kamameikan campaign had them deal with the friction between the Thyatians and the Traladarans, an inserted TToEE, as well as take down a network of Lycanthropes. In Darokin it was about the politics and intrigue of the merchant Houses and having to deal with competing adventuring guilds. Orcs would have featured in these campaigns but only as minor obstacles.
Oh, so it isn't that you never used orcs before, or people didn't encounter orcs before, you just never bothered to read anything about them before using them. They were simply in the game as disposable enemies and you left it at that.
But let us put that aside, and move to characters - the proposals I made upthread are example of PC goals that I imagined would be realised during play. That is how I imagined it, and it would make sense to have an orc or half-orc PC who would pursue this. Why would my halfling sorcerer or human cleric of Kelemovor care two cents about the lore of Gruumsh?
It would be high level play because in order to deal with ancient lore that deals with deities its not something a 5th level character would be able to pull off.
In the just under 10 years we've playing FR the PCs have come across orcs but mostly as minor antagonists.
OKay, but this gets very confusing to me. We have brought up the half-orc is problematic. You responded "aha! The Mark of Gruumsh makes this not problematic" So, immediately, you are assuming that a level 1 character would need to know about The Mark of Gruumsh on some level, because it is a fundamental part to this racial write-up and a reason that "civilized" folk, let's say "are cautious" around half-orcs.
But then, I responded to how the Mark of Gruumsh doesn't really solve the problem. Because if you see "Gruumsh is evil and hates everything" as propoganda, as the story told against Gruumsh, and look at his motivations.... it is trivially easy to see him as a heroic figure. To which you then proposed this entire campaign of redemption for Gruumsh and the downfall of the elves, and presented it as though that was the entire point of Gruumsh's forty year old lore, was to allow you to make that story, and that campaign.
And now, you are claiming that the only reason to make that campaign is to have high level play, because the creation myth of the orcs is "ancient lore" (weird, the creation myth of every single other race isn't ancient lore. Do you think the orcs don't know their own religion?) and would require an orcish character... because only orcs can possibly care about the plight of orcs and how they have been mistreated? Why can't a follower of Kelemvor, who believes in balance and judgement, look upon the situation and go "that's messed up"?
Meanwhile, none of this actually gets back to the initial point, which is that the "Mark of Gruumsh" is a thinly-veiled attempt at reducing the obvious racial overtones in how they are talking about a mixed race person in the half-orc entry.