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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fearsomepirate" data-source="post: 7980119" data-attributes="member: 7021420">I had kind of a shower thought on orcs.If you want to run a serious setting where the orcs are more "ugly humans" than "malevolent spawn of the god of destruction," you should probably look more at nomadic raiding societies than violent 20th-century ideologies like Nazism.What does the tribal raider see when he looks at civilization? We tend to assume that he, like city-dweller, sees himself as "primitive" and civilization as "advanced," and longs to live in a stone building in a city, be part of the development of new technologies, and only doesn't because the city-dwellers are keeping him out.But what we often see is that the raider's view of the world isn't "primitive" vs "advanced," but "strong" vs "weak." He sees agrarian civilization in terms of those sleepy villages of weak men, who waste all their time growing tired in the fields, who never learn how to wield spear or bow, who are fit for little more than to die by the sword when the snows melt and the time is ripe for plunder.The history of civilization is hardly one of continual expanse. There are plenty of examples of those raiding nomads getting the upper hand over cities and showing very little interest in preserving or adopting their ways. To us in the 20th century, we've got that 20/20 hindsight that civilization ultimately won, but to a Comanche warrior in 1760, or a Mongolian horse archer in 1240, his territory has been continually expanding, he's slaughtered his enemies, and if the world of cities and farms has anything he can use to become a more deadly raider, he's had little difficulty obtaining it. Why would he ever adopt their ways? They are weak, and he is strong.Note that in our world, civilization's decisive victory over nomadic raiders was in the 19th century, over 400 years after the invention of firearms. In the D&D world, when it comes to war-making, orcs and elves aren't nearly at the disparity that, say, Americans and Comanche were at in 1870. What we have, then, are two radically incompatible and opposed ways of life, in a world where the people at civilization's boundaries are easy picking for the raiders beyond them. To the elf, the orc is a violent, uncultured savage, whose way of life is mindless, destructive brutality. To the orc, the world consists of hunters and prey, and these foolish elves have adopted a way of life that makes them weak...if the elf wants to be prey, then the orc is happy to oblige.</blockquote>

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