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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3647563" data-attributes="member: 2067">The Romans, in many ways, had moved past the original mythological kind of thought I'm describing when I say "orcs are based in very early myth."Go earlier than the Romans. Go earlier than trans-continental empires. Go, perhaps, into very early Greece at the latest. Back when everyone who wasn't "one of us" was a "barbarian." Of course the Romans would have laughed. They were far too well-educated. Orcs are from something much, much earlier.I really don't see it. Axe-wieldling, primitive barbarians who rape and pillage the civilized world, who disrupt life for the sake of bringing pain and fire and blood...that doesn't sound like Tolkien's "slowly brooding army of ill-defined darkness" as much as it sounds like some missionary's fever dream, or something out of the Odyssey's lands of lotus eaters and islands of shapeshifting sorceresses. About the only thing they share is the name. Even the D&D origin story of the Orc (in Grummsh's battle with Corellon) deals more with colonialism themes (fighting for land) than with any kind of creation, corruption, or servitude. So, if you see them as direct Tolkien rip-offs, I'm gonna hafta ask how you see them that way, since we obviously came to very different conclusions based on the same information in the 3e MM. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />You seem to have used actual D&D humans for this role, but, as your use of the Roman comparison implies, you seem to grow distant from this crazy world of racist mythology that views everyone outside of your little village as either sub- or super- human. Which, y'know, cool, but I'm big into the mythological feel, usually, and orcs (as I understand 3e to suggest them) hit that very well.</blockquote>

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