Some moral dillema and gray can be good, but we've been flooded with an era of terrible writing and characters that can't do anything well.

You may notice the character in my avatar pic, she's a Zeon soldier from a previous Mobile Suit Gundam campaign.
She's not a bad person and fights for a better life for her family.
She's also just a soldier and isn't privy to the big picture, or who might do what war crimes.

It has been a gradual downward slide that has taken decades, but fundamentally the poisoned pill was swallowed by the general RPG and fantasy fandom early on.

Orcs lost their mojo the instant that the half-orc was allowed to be a playable race.

Orcs are fearsome man-flesh eating, raping, looting, killing machines. They are that enemy in the dark that has wholly given themselves over to evil and wickedness. In most early depictions, orcs are so horrible that the general populace is fully justified in killing them and their evil touched half-breed offspring on sight.

For a half-orc to be a playable race, they need to not be killed on sight by the regular populace in a fantasy setting. To make that possible, the traditional depiction of Orcs as fearsome man-flesh eating, raping, looting, killing machines has to be softened and toned down.

People may not do this consciously, but it is something that has been, and still is being done.

Especially once the half-orc went from a race that could pass for human in AD&D, to a race with clear physical orc traits in current D&D. Just as they have gone from a evil aligned enemy to just another playable humanoid race. These two things are connected.

This is directly due to the push to have half-orcs playable in all *insert generic D&D setting here*, and the self-referential feedback from other fantasy media like WoW, to play orcs.

Orcs in D&D should be feared by PC's like the Reavers are feared in the firefly tv series. That they no longer are is a failure on the part of the commercial stewards of the hobby.

Small correction: this was almost certainly the first image I saw of an orc (from Drakar & Demoner). I noticed the resemblance to some of John Howe's work when I saw a Tolkien calendar shortly after.

Sleeping Beauty. 1959, possible inspiration for pig-faced orcs. Would you let these things in your house for tea?



Hildebrandt The Lord of the Rings calendar orcs.

I like the illustrations below of Tolkien orcs specifically. I don't like the horned helmet look for Tolkien orcs, as it doesn't fit for me with how Tolkien described them. Tolkien's orcs made things that were ugly and functional. Horned helmets are decorative and impractical.

I liked the Uruk Hai armor in the LotR movies, pictured as mass-produced and blocky. Still, the LotR movies also made a lot of changes from the descriptions in the books. (For example, they should have a white hand emblem on their shields - not white hand facepaint.)



Some other orc illustrations more like this style:







Tolkien's goblins are monsters, but they are soldierly monsters.

Quote from: Socratic-DM on May 02, 2025, 05:53:01 PMMy only concession would be that from a narrative standpoint Orcs being twisted elves would bolster Morgoth's character, however it still creates more inconsistencies than it solves for, given Elves have souls with specific qualities we don't see in orcs, we don't hear of Orcs in the halls of Mandos, but we do for dwarves... we don't see Elves lament Orcs as fallen brothers. "There goes me but for the grace of Arue" type shit. we never see any of that.

As for whether P-Zombies are an easy idea to convey in fiction is certainly another rabbit hole unto itself, but frankly I think modern audiences aren't as retarded you might suggest, and are aware that just because something can talk doesn't make it self-aware (more-so now) but even excluding ChatGPT or other LLMs from the modern zeitgeist . Bladerunner, The Thing, I. Robot, Terminator, anything by Philip K. Dick, Anything from Issac Asimov, Blindsight by Peter Watts, I could keep going but isn't a novel concept by any stretch really.

The question of self-awareness and language in relation to having a soul is a problem as old as Gottfried Leibniz if not older, and it's had more then plenty of time to enter the culture via osmosis.

And this is rather all besides the point because Lord Of The Rings and the Legendarium as a whole are conveying ideas which are already a tad esoteric to begin with, the entire conceit of the stories is through a translation and murky retelling. Tolkien even makes editorially changes to The Hobbit then retcons why that change happened in-fiction as unreliable narrator on Bilbo's part...
He's already playing and writing in territories an editor might consider over the top for a "general audience"

I think you're misunderstanding the problem, at least as I see it as a fiction editor.

When you are consuming a work of fiction, most people default to projecting themselves onto characters in the story. This means that if you have a fantasy race, the audience will default to projecting that they are self-aware onto it. Modern science fiction readers likely can understand the distinction when told, but it's worth noting that this audience understanding didn't exist when Tolkien was writing. And I think it's kind of doubtful that a fantasy audience would appreciate this distinction, anyways (although Tolkien was largely writing before the science fiction/ fantasy genre divisions were clear.)

But the real problem is showing, not telling. Showing a character isn't self-aware is impossible because of the hard problem of consciousness, and if you tell people that a character isn't self-aware, a sizeable fraction of the audience will immediately disbelieve you. You list Blade Runner as a work where the replicants presumably aren't self-aware, but it's literally the point of the tears in the rain monologue to imply that they are (turning into the skid that viewers will default to viewing a human-shaped character as human.)

Your only real path is to find a character tick which can imply that these characters aren't self-aware. Not only are these kinds of ticks very hard to write, but the logic is also difficult to communicate to readers, so simply explaining the premise is not good enough. This is shockingly difficult writing, and is why I would expect most writers to resort to a cheap trick rather than directly confronting the matter.

For the record, I do think it's possible by showing that the entire group in question has a defective grieving process. Self-aware characters know that a dead character can't be replaced with characters just like them; the original is still dead. However, a character who is not self-aware absolutely would make that mistake. Alas, this is a case where very self-aware human authors are quite likely to make this mistake at the same time. The ending of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and certain segments of Knights of Sidonia come to mind, because both have an imitation trying to slot in where an original human went, and humans should instinctively realize that's wrong.

Quote from: ZeeHero on May 02, 2025, 06:36:18 PMSome moral dillema and gray can be good, but we've been flooded with an era of terrible writing and characters that can't do anything well.

You may notice the character in my avatar pic, she's a Zeon soldier from a previous Mobile Suit Gundam campaign.
She's not a bad person and fights for a better life for her family.
She's also just a soldier and isn't privy to the big picture, or who might do what war crimes.

I agree that there's been plenty of bad writing - but I don't think any particular variety of orcs is a cure for that. There's plenty of potential for good writing with different kinds of orcs. For example, the Klingon-like "warrior race" orcs of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls still allow lots of different themes - including conservative ones. They're different but they're not inherently political or woke.

Quote from: Jaeger on May 02, 2025, 06:57:39 PMIt has been a gradual downward slide that has taken decades, but fundamentally the poisoned pill was swallowed by the general RPG and fantasy fandom early on.

Orcs lost their mojo the instant that the half-orc was allowed to be a playable race.

Orcs are fearsome man-flesh eating, raping, looting, killing machines. They are that enemy in the dark that has wholly given themselves over to evil and wickedness. In most early depictions, orcs are so horrible that the general populace is fully justified in killing them and their evil touched half-breed offspring on sight.

The original orcs are evil, but both Tolkien and Gygax pictured humans and orcs allying at times. So orc evil was the sort of evil that humans could be tempted into, not an inherently anti-human evil.

Tolkien had orc armies fight alongside human ones (Dunlendings on one side; and Easterlings, Southrons, and corsairs on another). Gygax had half-orcs as a PC race in the 1e Player's Handbook (1978). While demi-humans generally hate half-orcs, humans are "neutral" to them according to the "Racial Preferences Table"

Are you saying these aren't the real orcs, or does this still fit with your image of orcs?

Quote from: jhkim on May 02, 2025, 03:13:45 PM

Quote from: Omega on May 02, 2025, 10:05:53 AM

Quote from: Trond on April 30, 2025, 12:05:09 AMThe weird thing about orcs is that they did not only lose their mojo after Tolkien, they got dumbed down too. Tolkien had several kinds of orcs. The "standard" ones (often called goblins) e.g. in the Misty Mountains, the larger and stronger Uruks, and even some kind of sniffer scout orcs.

Initially D&D orcs were apparently fairly organized and not the dumb brutes they mostly are now.

I blame Forgotten Realms for part of this problem as the orcs of Faerun are mostly dumb brutes.

As far as I can see in Greyhawk and Mystara, orcs are roughly the same. There is nothing like the open and powerful Mordor. Instead, there are a handful of backwater places where a mix of humanoids can manage to avoid being crushed by the superior human and demi-human nations. In Greyhawk, there is the Pomarj. In Mystara, there is the wasteland of Thar.

In adventures, orcs are always at most a side encounter even for first level characters. B2 "Keep on the Borderlands" is a good example - where areas B&C have two rival bands of orcs, with little of value. The top threats and treasure being in Area K "Shrine of Evil Chaos".

Obviously, an individual DM could create a setting where orcs are organized and have their own powerful nation, but it doesn't appear in early D&D.

Quote from: blackstone on May 02, 2025, 09:43:42 AM

Quote from: jhkim on May 01, 2025, 07:21:37 PMIn the Lord of the Rings, Mordor is probably the strongest kingdom in the world, with massive armies and also a number of major human allies. The orcs also have a few other lesser kingdoms.

What's weird to me is that most D&D players don't seem to notice this complete flip.

The reason for this is because most players that are Millennials or Gen Z aren't well-versed in classic fantasy literature. Their concept of an Orc comes from video games and those RPGs that are influenced by them, which is by in large a post-modernist impression. To them, orcs are just another race of people.

There's some crossed wires here. I was talking about how in the 1970s people didn't notice the complete flip from Tolkien to early D&D.

There are also changes that happened in orcs from early D&D to later D&D, but the big downgrade happened at the start of D&D, where they went from world threat to minor pests.

One note, Thar is not the name of a place. Thar is the leader of the Humanoids of the Broken Lands (thats the places name) the Orcs of Thar is a name for Thars legion which is his army. Also there is sort of a Mordor in the form of the Hagiarchy of Hule, while they arrnt the main threat they are in the employ of the Master of Hule during Red Arrow Black Shield which is basically a fantasy world war. Though it was removed from canon for the most part.

EDIT: Also to add more, the elves of Alfheim basically adopted an Orc clan that lives alongside them and theres also a powerful clan of orcs that live underground in a city that was built by the shadow elves (but iirc theh claim they built it) and are the chosen people of a god that used to claim the shadow elves before they abandoned it. As a mystara fan id also like to mention Mystara runs on Reincarnation and people who were violent or evil tend to reincarnate as orcs and other monster humanoids, but all of them can be neutral rather than Chaotic and reincarnate next time as humans or demi-humans

Quote from: Fheredin on May 03, 2025, 07:06:53 PMI think you're misunderstanding the problem, at least as I see it as a fiction editor.

No, I just don't constitute it as a strong argument. and as a whole I've already alloted you more side tangents and posts than I should have.

QuoteFor the record, I do think it's possible by showing that the entire group in question has a defective grieving process. Self-aware characters know that a dead character can't be replaced with characters just like them; the original is still dead.

grief is just as fakeable to a classical P-zombie as anything else, though funny how we never see Orcs grieve, or care for each other.

Quote from: ZeeHero on May 02, 2025, 06:36:18 PMSome moral dillema and gray can be good, but we've been flooded with an era of terrible writing and characters that can't do anything well.

What some of the village idiot applicants here keep willfully forgetting is that D&D orcs were originally NOT just purely evil. They could be Chaotic AND neutral. Though I do not recall ever finding out why there were neutral orcs.

Quote from: jhkim on May 01, 2025, 12:45:03 PMAs I noted in the OP, I think the biggest change was from Tolkien - where orcs were a world power and the primary antagonists of the stories - to early D&D where they are a minor side threat for beginning adventurers, with almost no nations of their own and not even the primary enemies in introductory modules for 1st level adventurers.

Quote from: jhkim on May 01, 2025, 07:21:37 PMIn the Lord of the Rings, Mordor is probably the strongest kingdom in the world, with massive armies and also a number of major human allies. The orcs also have a few other lesser kingdoms.

I gotta say, you're really overstating the case on this.

While I agree with you that Tolkien probably conceived of Orcs as being on rough parity as soldiers with the average human, they're not primary antagonists. They're lackeys: first to Morgoth, and then to Sauron, Saruman, the Witch King, and so on. The only time we see them go to war on their own initiative is in the Hobbit, and I don't think you could even call them the primary antagonists of that story. The Hobbit is also the only place where we hear of what might be called "orc heroes" (Azog, Bolg and maybe the Great Goblin). Very few orcs are even named in LOTR, and I don't believe a single one is named in the Silmarillion.

Likewise, we're clearly supposed to understand that Mordor is powerful, but most of that power derives from Sauron's sorcery and personal influence. I don't think there's anything in the LOTR to suggest that a Mordor run only by orcs would be any kind of serious threat to its neighbors.  Mordor appears to have very limited (though not zero) industry or agriculture, so I think we have to understand that it relies on goods levied as tribute from Khand, Rhun and Harad. Those regions appear to be larger geographically than Mordor, and probably also in terms of manpower and natural resources. Umbar is likely smaller, but it has sea power which Mordor does not. Without Sauron and his Nazgul/human agents to dominate its allies, Mordor would probably find itself the junior partner in the alliance, if not jettisoned entirely in the name of better diplomatic relations with the much wealthier Free Peoples.

Also, while I do agree that Tolkien's orcs are supposed to be capable soldiers, it's not hard to read the books and come away with the opposite conclusion. Tolkien doesn't spell things out for his reader, so you have to go beyond the surface level to pick this stuff up. On the surface, orcs suck. They only get one "on-screen" win in all of the Hobbit and LOTR, and that's when it takes a small army of Uruk Hai to kill Boromir and kidnap the wrong hobbits. There are other victories, but they're mostly in the background, and never when our POV characters are present. Orcish battlefield capability comes across better with the full context of the Silmarillion, Appendices, Unfinished Tales, etc., but I don't know how many people were reading those in 1977.

Quote from: Omega on May 03, 2025, 09:49:42 PMWhat some of the village idiot applicants here keep willfully forgetting is that D&D orcs were originally NOT just purely evil. They could be Chaotic AND neutral. Though I do not recall ever finding out why there were neutral orcs.

Wow. Not everyone started out with OD&D. While correct, Holmes, Basic and 1e, which a lot of people are used to, did not have the neutral alignment listed. I can see neutral orcs though, survivors of a warband left without direction, without the drive to destroy they just become neutral and live out their lives not trying to break or kill everything in their path.

Quote from: Slambo on May 03, 2025, 07:45:40 PM

Quote from: jhkim on May 02, 2025, 03:13:45 PMAs far as I can see in Greyhawk and Mystara, orcs are roughly the same. There is nothing like the open and powerful Mordor. Instead, there are a handful of backwater places where a mix of humanoids can manage to avoid being crushed by the superior human and demi-human nations. In Greyhawk, there is the Pomarj. In Mystara, there is the wasteland of Thar.

In adventures, orcs are always at most a side encounter even for first level characters. B2 "Keep on the Borderlands" is a good example - where areas B&C have two rival bands of orcs, with little of value. The top threats and treasure being in Area K "Shrine of Evil Chaos".

One note, Thar is not the name of a place. Thar is the leader of the Humanoids of the Broken Lands (thats the places name) the Orcs of Thar is a name for Thars legion which is his army. Also there is sort of a Mordor in the form of the Hagiarchy of Hule, while they arrnt the main threat they are in the employ of the Master of Hule during Red Arrow Black Shield which is basically a fantasy world war. Though it was removed from canon for the most part.

EDIT: Also to add more, the elves of Alfheim basically adopted an Orc clan that lives alongside them and theres also a powerful clan of orcs that live underground in a city that was built by the shadow elves (but iirc theh claim they built it) and are the chosen people of a god that used to claim the shadow elves before they abandoned it. As a mystara fan id also like to mention Mystara runs on Reincarnation and people who were violent or evil tend to reincarnate as orcs and other monster humanoids, but all of them can be neutral rather than Chaotic and reincarnate next time as humans or demi-humans

Thanks for the correction and additions. (I have _The Orcs of Thar_ but I forgot about the name.) Are you disagreeing about the big picture, though? Thar's secret army under the Broken Lands has the potential to be a problem for surrounding nations, but at present they're just hiding and raiding caravans. They have shown no ability to take and hold territory.

You mention Hule (which I didn't recall), but you also say that was removed from canon, and from what I read  here, Hule is predominantly human with a 30% minority of mixed humanoids (primarily bugbears, gnolls, kobolds, ogres, and orcs).

Quote from: Jaeger on May 02, 2025, 06:57:39 PMOrcs in D&D should be feared by PC's like the Reavers are feared in the firefly tv series. That they no longer are is a failure on the part of the commercial stewards of the hobby.

It certainly doesn't help that D&D orcs have always been 1HD mooks that characters slay by the thousands in order to get xp and loot and level up.

*quoted myself*