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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 7269560" data-attributes="member: 6683613">Classically, orcs are demons. The word orc probably derives from Latin Orcus, and is explicitly defined in one Old English glossary as "hel-deofol".Sorry, I was unclear. I wasn't making the claim that official campaigns say this. Frankly, I don't play official campaigns enough to comment one way or the other. I was just calling attention to the geography as described in sources like the Monster Manual, where orcs tend to be a threat that is nearby on the Material Plane, and demons are not. And this basic pattern is generally followed in official and homebrew campaigns, in my experience. Then I was saying that, given this pattern, making the nearby threat intrinsically evil might create a campaign with more tension than one where the only intrinsic evil threat is the distant one. Doesn't have to be this way. You're certainly not doing things wrong if you don't do it this way. But it's one reason a DM might have intrinsically evil orcs.I will mention, though, that the 5E PHB comments on orc alignment on p. 122, describing a situation that's something of a middle ground: orcs are created by evil deities, and evil deities being evil they have no use for free will, so orcs feel a strong innate pull towards evil. But it's not completely irresistible, unlike the devils in the next paragraph which are essentially evil. This, again, is a premise that could have fascinating consequences in the hands of a good writer or DM, and, pace  [MENTION=6853887]zeldafan42[/MENTION], is far from simply an excuse to have guilt-free slaughter.Which is also a fair description for Tolkien's orcs, or the fel orcs of the Warcraft universe, or arguably the orcs described in the PHB.</blockquote>

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