D&D General What have you done with Orcs in your games?

[Voadam]

Japan really seems to love their pig orcs. Also their dog Kobolds (I like mine to be more rat-like, personally).

Classic

 

[Voadam]

I ran a 3.5 game where I house ruled orcs to be subtype goblin and orcish to be a dialect of goblin so that type based stuff like ranger favored enemy and bane weapons would work on them all, plus to give it a little Tolkeinish flavor.

However in that same game I eliminated half stuff and replaced half-orcs with mechanically similar full orc gray orc subrace. So that moved a little away from LotR flavor and more to a B/X flavor.

 

[auburn2]

So there are a lot of options for portraying Orcs in D&D games, from Gruumsh touched 5e default ones, to Eberron druid history ones, to the alignment splits of 3e and on Chaotic Evil, AD&D Lawful Evil ones, and Basic Chaotic Orcs. Outside of D&D there are 40K fungi biologic weapons, Warcraft Orcs, Lord of the Rings Orcs, Shadowrun style metahuman Orks, and others that can be taken as inspiration.

What have you done with them in your games?

It has taken a long, long time for me to get comfortable with chaotic orcs as I played 1E extensively. Now I run mostly to types of Orcs CE orcs that are the "standard" for 5e and other LE soldier type Orcs that can be found in many mercenary groups.

 

[GM Lent]

My big D&D influences are Dragonlance (no orcs), Dark Sun (no orcs) Eberron (orcs saved the world back when) and Al-Qadim (orcs are people like any other).

I'm cool with each and every one of these depictions and I bounce between them on the rare occasion orcs see use in my games.

 

[Omand]

I started playing with a combination of Basic/Expert D&D and 1E AD&D so Orcs were originally LE in my original conception (yes, Chaotic in Basic, but that really just meant Evil).

Tolkien was/is a great influence for me as well, so in my homebrew work I generally group all of the goblinoids and orcs together as one lineage/race/people. Just different sizes and shapes and colours like humans. All are usually called orcs, but in different areas of the world the local name of goblins may be used for the little ones, etc.

I have never used Half-Orcs. Not sure if my young self realized without really realizing the implications of half-orcs right off the bat and that caused the rejection or if it was because there was really no interest amongst my early player groups in anything other than Humans, Dwarves and the very rare Elf or Halfling. I mean, until later 3.5E about 90% of all characters in campaigns I ran were human, dwarf was in second place, halflings were third (distantly) and only slightly ahead of Elf or Half-Elf. It took the 3.5E Environment books to bring in a few other options like Hadozee (monkey people) and then 4E brought Shifters via Eberron.

Back to topic. Traditionally, orcs (and goblins, hobgoblins and bugbears) have all been fodder for the PCs to fight/defeat.

I have never been able to settle on an origin story for them. They serve great evil lords in the setting, forming large armies/hordes. But are they created by the big evil god of the setting? Maybe, maybe not.

One thing they definitely are not is 3E or 5E Gruumsh-centered rampage orcs. Can they rampage, yes, but that is not their entire reason for being.

With all of that said, I am looking at what I want to do going forwards. My gaming has been interrupted for a few years due to work (first) and then COVID. That has given me some time to think about how the world fits together. What are the origins of things?

Certainly all of the recent online chatter has made me examine where I should have things end up for world design.

Cheers

 

[John Quixote]

I'll just quote myself, I guess:

Because there are so many different things that come to mind nowadays when one says "orc," I actually mostly avoid the term in my games. What are orcs, anyway? Are they Tolkien's goblins? Warcraft's cool green people? The "spectre, wight, or hell-devil" that haunted the Anglo-Saxons?

I use all three.

For the original, mythical orcne (demon-corpse) of Dark Ages mythology, I use the thoul stats and call them draugr (although elves will still refer to them as orcneas). These are the creepy-ass shadow-monsters that haunt the misty, boggy places where you'd expect Grendel to stalk off the moors in the dead of night, sneak into your mead-hall, eat all your thanes, and murder all your athelings. Not something a 1st level party wants to run into in the dark, let me tell you.

For Tolkien's yrch, I actually ditched the concept of goblinoids altogether and replaced them with Chaos-spawned beastmen. So my campaigns have ratlike humanoids called skavers instead of kobolds, doglike humanoids called mogrels in place of goblins, piglike humanoids called gruuchs in place of orcs, etc. They're all brutish, violent, disgusting, semi-intelligent (lacking tool-use or language and barely smarter than animals if there isn't a demon-prince or a Dark Lord around to drive them with its evil will and organize them into a Chaos army), and mostly just irredeemable little sacks of bonus XP.

For the Orsimer of videogameland, I make them one of my standard playable demihumans (they get their own character class!), but I term them ogres instead of orcs. (This is etymologically tenable: the Old English word orc almost certainly shares the same root as the Latinate word ogre, namely Latin Orcus.) This does require that I shuffle some monsters around a little bit: the 4+1 HD monster becomes a troll and the 6+3 HD monster becomes a greater troll. These ogres might be savages (noble or otherwise), soldiers, or city-folk, but they're always lean, green, and at least a little bit mean (in an endearing sort of way). They take more inspiration from Elder Scrolls than Warcraft, because… I don't care to play Warcraft, World of or otherwise.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Most of the time, they are old school pig faced orcs as described. However, several times I have them be more neutral. Might still makes right, but that doesn’t mean inherently evil. They do what it takes to survive, and can be negotiated with. It adds a level to the game and has caused players to do more than just hack and slash their way through every encounter, so to speak, if there are potential benefits for working with them as opposed to always killing them.

 

[Shiroiken]

They're horrible, degenerate, rapacious creatures that breed with almost any humanoid creature. They are innately cruel and while normally barbaric, they can be found as part of evil civilizations. Gruumsh is the head of their pantheon, but isn't worshiped any more than any other pantheon leader would be.

 

[cmad1977]

All sorts of things. Depends.

 

[Flamestrike]

Peaceful coexistence with orcs is not possible. While individual orcs can be friendly with other races, their natural instinct is to conquer and pillage, and that is what Orc societies will do unless they're ruled by an outside power.

So exactly like Humans then?