I remember being in a game with a Gruumsh worshipping Half Orc and a Corellon worshipping elf, and while they hated each other at first, as they grew to know each other as people their hatred turned into a fun little rivalry where they tried to one up each other in a very Gimli and Legolas type relationship. It was fun to watch, and the elf ended up dying to save the half orc in the end.
@@casimirlawnicki8990 He made a vow to take the elf's spear back to his home and tell everyone of his deeds. We played out a small little post session and that was part of it.
@@leonelegender Its also not in the Monster Manual that the standard orc presented in there is a Grey Orc which is the most civilized of the types of orcs in the Forgotten Realms and that Orcs are not native to Toril, they came through a Gate opened by a wizard who just let it be open for years and then suddenly a great horde of Orcs invaded Faerun :P
@@leonelegender there are passages in the books that suggest the orcs looked to the possibility of a "better" life. Most notably is the discussion between the two orcs in the citadel where Frodo is being held captive. They talk about sneaking away and leaving the war behind and setting up a better life for them and some of their kin, where they are their own masters.
@@leonelegender It was not stated so plainly but the concept of Orcs being disloyal to Sauron is directly stated, and good Orcs are implied to exist by one very broad statement about all races having good and evil members (except elves who are always good).
I’ll admit I was defensive about this kind of thing for a long time. One of my best RP experiences was in an Underdark campaign. A friend of mine was playing a dwarf called Khor, and I was a duergar called Horkoal. (For those not in the know, dwarf is to duergar as elf is to drow.) The premise of our characters is that Horkoal was unpleasant to be around even by the low standards of his clan. As such, he was often sent out into the Underdark to gather rare mushrooms for use in brewing alcohols (but really his family was just hoping he’d get killed out there). Eventually Horkoal came upon Khor and tried to kill him, because All Duergar Hate Dwarves (this was a truism at the time). Long story short, Khor spared Horkoal’s life and Horkoal swore a life debt to him, much to his own chagrin. Over the course of the campaign, Horkoal and Khor had a lot of fireside conversations. They learned to work with each other and fight to protect each other, and at some point Horkoal realized he wasn’t doing it out of obligation anymore. When finally presented with the chance to be free of Khor by turning him over to an illithid, Horkoal refused. He had come to care about Khor more than anything because Khor was the only person who ever treated Horkoal with any kind of decency. He treated him like a person. It was a beautiful thing. I remember telling this story one day and a friend challenged me on it. She asked me if that story could have possibly functioned without the need for All Duergar Are Evil. And I realized it could have. There could have been some other reason for their peoples to not get along besides racial hatred due to inherent evil. And it probably would have made for an even better story. So yeah, I get the resistance. But there are better ways.
It makes sense to move away from humanoid species being inherently good or evil, at least if we leave out embodiments of certain alignments like devils or celestials. The dominant cultures of the likes of Duergar, Drow or Orcs are still evil and thus most of the individuals are as well, though. And that’s why other species like humans would usually not want anything to do with members of these species. They would either attack them or flee. They would not let them in their cities or accept them into their societies, not even as second class citizens. And that’s exactly how it was handled in older editions. But now? Here is an example: In Baldur’s Gate 3 you encounter lots of Drow in the very city of Baldur’s Gate and it seems like that’s perfectly normal there. In Baldur’s Gate 2, which takes place around 130 years earlier, people in Athkatla wanted to burn a Drow at the stake, simply because she was a Drow. WotC just shadow rectonned all major societies in their settings to be extremely inclusive and ignore their own security interests in thar regard. The problem with that retcon is that it just doesn’t make much sense that all major human societies are now much more tolerant than even the most progressive real-life societies. That doesn’t fit late typical medieval/early renaissance D&D settings at all. It also takes aways a huge part of what made playing a characters of these species interesting in the first place. Your character doesn’t have to sneak into cities anymore. They don’t have to hide their identity. Their origin will not automatically trigger conflicts that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. They will, at worst, get a snarky remark from an npc here and there. Most DMs won’t even do that, though. If you care about societies and sociologies of fantasy setting even making the faintest bit of sense, this is simply immersion breaking.
You didn’t mention the early alignment charts in Chainmail and OD&D. In Chainmail, orcs were Chaotic and in OD&D they were Neutral or Chaotic. This information was elsewhere so it didn’t need to be in their statblocks. Orcs didn’t need gods because like other non-humans, they didn’t have souls. Greyhawk changed that by adding in elf and dwarf clerics who could heal and raise elves and dwarfs from the dead. I also appreciate that the book explicitly tells the referee to create multiple orc nations in the rules so that they are non-monolithic unlike in modern iterations of the game.
@@braedenmclean5304 But the rules don’t say they aren’t. In OD&D, you rolled a die when you encountered orcs to determine which nation they were from for the infighting rule so you needed at least 6 nations (the first printing of the rules gave several examples from the Ring Cycle: orcs of the Red Eye, White Hand, Misty Mountains, Moria, Isengarders, and Mordor).
I have the impression that the Lawful - Neutral - Chaotic alignment from OD&D is better suited to creating interesting characters and cultures than the Good and Evil alignment approach. But perhaps the color system from MTG is even better than all of this... or maybe it's better to remove the alignment altogether
@@Vopyr Law and chaos in original DnD literally just meant good and evil though. Every good creature was lawful, and every evil creature was chaotic. "Evil high priest" was one of the main examples of a chaotic human. Pretty funny, because I could not possibly imagine a more lawful concept than organized, hierarchical religion
Really cool to see some of the history of Gruumush and the orcs. I think the biggest problem with orcs in general is that everything in the books is presented as the one truth. I'd really like to see more mythology in the books as supplemental sidebars. I can only imagine having a sidebar with the story of Gruumsh being upset that Corellon took the place Gruumsh wanted for the orc people and so fought him for the right, even though Corellon had drawn his lot fair and square. During the fight, Corellon accidentally cuts Gruumsh's eye out, which he immediately loses amidst the chaos of the scuffle. Gruumsh then swore petty vengeance that day for the supposed indignities Corellon made him suffer and set his people out on a blood oath to find his eye and exterminate the other mortal races for daring to cross him. But then on the very next page, we get a side bar that tells of the great betrayal of the gods to Gruumsh. Where he was never told about the drawing of lots but his one magnificent eye sees all and so when he found out he was enraged at this trickery. As the gods laughed in their victory, they mockingly asked Gruumsh where his people would live. Gruumsh simply pointed his spear to the world and claimed it would be there. That his people would earn their right to live, unlike the other races, and prove themselves worthy. That the road would be long and hard for his people, but that they had the strength to endure such hardships and inherit the world long after all the other races would fall to time.
My enthusiasm aside, this feeds off an issue about how so many D&D players think about the gods - their argument is often, “If the gods were real, then how could there be disagreement about whether they exist/how powerful they are,” and something like this hits the same pitfall. And that’s gonna have to be a subject for another day, because I have a lot of thoughts about the gods in D&D 😁
Heck it would also be a neat bit of lore if it turned out Lloth had it this whole time and was hiding it from Grumsh and was disloyal to Corellon even back then, and the whole being cheated out of his chance to draw lots was her playing the two against each other.... Would be fun to see the resulting war that happens should this ever come to light.... Orc delving into the Underdark after learning the truth as now there is a genocidal war between the Orcs and the Drow over control over the underdark.... That could be neat....
@@AzraelThanatos Perhaps, though I wonder what Corellon would do with this information.... War between Orcs and Drow still seems likely, even if old one eye still hates Corellon....
Thank you for building this case out. The loss of nuance in later books is really such a shame, since it makes the world feel so hollow. I always mention the owlin race - five sentences of flavor text, and four of them just describe owls. Imagine coming to a game where you and the DM have wildly different ideas about what your race is generally like, because the books do so little to explain them.
The Owlin are one of the biggest travesties in modern DnD. What an amazing concept for a race... but there is nothing about what their society looks like, how they interact with other races, what their place in the Feywild is, or even their most basic of stereotypes, like dwarves with being stubborn, or elves being free-spirited.
I just wonder why the Owlin aren't linked to the Aarakocra at all. They're both predatory bird humanoids and that would at least give the Owlin more background than WoC's "idk they came from giant Feywild owls".
@@affsteak3530 They really can't go there nowadays. With the possible either a storytelling or a storywriting game that's collaborative. exception of specific worlds like Krynn, they are avoiding anything that could in any construe Lore or Cultures. One of the new unspoken rules at WoTC is obviously " Make nothing that gives any indication of anything that can be perceived as telling a player what their character might be like, beyond it's physical attributes, and make those as malleable as possible." They can't create Lore that says that Aarakocra and Owlin are related... because a player might not want that to be the case for their character.
Owlin are a weird example because they came from Magic: The Gathering (they were introduced to D&D in the Strixhaven book), and since they've only appeared in one Magic set where they were background characters *at best,* we don't really have any information on them beyond "there's bird-people in this set's world! and this time they look like owls, rather than eagles/falcons like the Aven from other sets." It's honestly really, *really* weird that they even threw in that line about Feywild giant owls, because... the Feywild isn't a concept that exists in Magic: The Gathering.
I just now thought of another way you can still use the Gruumsh lore given without pigeon holing the whole ancestry. Factions, just like in any religion in the real world, you'll have different groups based on interpretations of their beliefs. Having a faction of more 'typical' orcs vs a faction that believe that Gruumsh was talking about more traditional war and not going out commiting heinous acts. Ones that believe he had his eye shot out and ones that don't. Something like that would be a great way of deepening how orcs can work in a game and just generally make them more interesting overall to interact with.
Hell, maybe you can have groups that worship both Corellon AND Gruumsh, seeing Corellon as Gruumsh's equal for being able to shoot out his eye, or orcs that think that Gruumsh and, say, Kord, are the exact same deity (in a similar way as Romans who often claimed that the deities that other populations worshippe were actually the Roman gods under a different name). Maybe some orcs actually worship other deities and don't even know who Gruumsh even is
In my homebrew pantheon, there's a god only referred to as "The Sleeping God". He's currently a mountain range in a humanoid shape that was literally put to sleep to stop him from destroying the world in a great storm. He's the God of Storms, and all weather comes from his dreams, but the strongest Malstrom now is nothing compared to what he did when awake. When the gods put him to sleep, they erased his name from existence, so that no one could call him to awaken. He's not so much "evil" as "chaotic", but he would absolutely wipe life off the Earth if he ever woke up.
This is the nature vs nurture argument. Even in Tolkien, they were mistreated elves, twisted and shaped into evil by Morgoth and later Sauron. I think Gruumsh was likely an attempt to sever the orcs from the Tolkien orcs & elves more permanently. The existence of Gruumsh means that orcs aren’t just twisted and evil elves, as in the Silmarillion. I played a half-orc priest of Baghtru back when Monster Mythology came out. He had a more nuanced philosophy and his being a part of the party brought to light the more bullying aspects of the paladin in the group’s religious zeal. “You break legs for your god, yes?” was the question that broke the paladin’s player. It was the “are we the bad guys?” moment in the campaign.
Great video. You gave good attention to the badassery that does come from the lore while still making clear that nuance is what you're advocating. I liked the bits with the voices and the wardrobe change lol
I actually really like the interpretation of Gruumsh getting cheated out of his part of the world. So much so that I used it in my setting! Only I had him fight Corellon for dominion of part of the world and lost. So the "gift" he gave his people was the "struggle to exist" belonging nowhere Orcs have become a darwinistic, tribal meritocracy. Their religion and philosophy is actually based on The Hive from Destiny believing that they must "take" everything they were denied and when they ascend to their "last true shape" they will be an oricsh race cabaple of taking what they were denied. To that end their biology is similar to Krogen from Mass Effect where living in hostile environments for millennia has fostered them to be hardier and have "back-up" organs and systems. This also serves as an in-game explanation for a PC's Relentless Endurance. But I digress, all of the above are the reasons they seem so brutal to other civilizations, but not evil or at least not all of them are evil and there are upsides to the meritocracy most tribes are organized by which I am always delighted my players get to see, add to, and interact with! This has nothing to do with the above point but orcs see the taking of a life as the most sacred. So I stole a phrase from one of my favorite shows and "Repitza" is a common orcish phrase, greeting, praise, exacerbation, prayer etc. Edit: I cannot believe I never saw the parallels to Vikings. I super wanna weave themes, style, or design of vikings into my game now!!
I honestly never saw the parallel to Vikings. I have always believed that Gygax was inspired as much by original Star Trek as any other source. Consider the main races... Humans. Unfeeling Elvish creatures (Vulcans) who had a civil war, creating an offshoot species that was evil (Romulans). Evil Lizard men. A humanoid evil protagonist species that was as powerful as the others, and were Evil. (Klingons) The Episode Journey to Babel showed what could be Dwarves or halflings, as well as angry Pig headed creatures. As the evolution of the Klingons evolved in the 1980s, I always felt they seemed to follow the evolution of the Klingons in many ways.
Man I can’t tell you how much Destiny has inspired so much of my writing and creation in other games. Specifically the sword logic has been center to so many things. Personally I’ve always seen orcs as more reminiscent of mongols. Nomadic, poly-spiritual, and a focus on strength and conquest that goes beyond the norm. The norse and danes where largely agricultural, and had complex political structures and society that doesn’t translate to how orcs are often described societally. Of course that is not to say you have to follow that reading. The joy of dnd is making stuff your own. But it is an observation.
I have an adventure I want to run about goblins (who're also considered evil by most), where different survivors of goblins banded together and learned that if they keep doing what they've been doing, sooner or later, adventurers/soldiers will show up and destroy them. So they first move into an abandoned dwarfstead, use whatever they dind there to mine and sell, help out the surrounding villages instead. When the PCs show up they discover that the goblins have been taken over by hobgoblins/bugbears and the surviving leaders of the goblin is asking for help get ridd of them and save as many goblins they can, even the villages want them to help the goblins as they have been good neighbours. I think this could be very fun.
I very much enjoyed this video, I agree with all of your points and will now be shaping my orcs more like Vikings, but I also love the Urgal thought as well. Also, I'm enjoying seeing your videos get cleaner. That teleprompter is definitely something that helped you out so much.
I think very recently, they also changed goblinoid lore to make them more fey like and forced to do evil by their evil warmongering god. (who killed their original creator gods and brough goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears under one banner as goblinoids). Also how much do you know about Orcs in Tolkien's world? If memory serves, they used to be elves but were corrupted by Morgoth, the literal Satan analogue. Of course, that was written after Lord of the Rings, but still another instance of evil races getting evil gods or god-like beings. Also I feel that Orcs being coded as the old monsterous depiction of Vikings was the intent, especially since the head god of the Norse, Odin, has one eye. On another note, there is also the Famorian King Balor from Celtic mythology who may also have been an inspiration for Gruumsh.
I really enjoyed the breakdown of orcs across editions, and learning more about the old DnD pantheons. I think it adds to the point about the Thermiaen Argument that all of this is made up, and is the way that it is because someone writing those books chose to make it so and to make changes over the years. It demonstrated that the official lore isn't set in stone
For me the major problem has always been that there's always been some kind of person who takes fluff as rules as written e.g. wargamer types in 1e, Rules Lawyers/Party Killers in 2e, and people who came to it as a video game in 3/4/5e, and the same types tend towards and idea of everything RAW being an intricate part of the game that if you take it out or modify it makes the game an unplayable mess like it was a Triple A game (or for the older editions a simple to set up and play RPG) I'd say that's the larger thing that ends up being where a LOT of the problems and a lot of the justifications and excuses are coming from, ignoring that even as far back as 1e I was seeing people modify things like alignment on monsters, different gods, race-class limits (and 2e made that official with an optional rule and a little work), hell even the world and idea of it being more than just "go into the dungeon/wilderness and kill things". Quite frankly the focus on RAW and taking everything in the books as RAW has been a longstanding problem that From 1e-3e it was a perjorative (because it was never arguing RAW all the time, just when it was convenient for them), and the phrase, "not a video game" from 3.5 onwards.
Really liked this vid. Great job digging into the old sources and showing how it developed over time. Honestly I'd watch general lore deep dives from you. The overall presentation had great pacing and the right level of depth. (Also going to borrow some of those Viking ideas; getting a bit tired of my 'early industrializing' orcs.)
While the argument is sometimes made in bad faith, it also sometimes isn't, and I think that's why this video was a good idea, rather than just pointing to the Thermian Argument video. There are absolutely people who, when you explain that the gods justification came *after* the decision to make orc culture evil, will reevaluate their stance, even if its a minority of people. (Also, a history of orcs throughout D&D is just a cool video for the rest of us lol)
You have to remember that, when D&D first came out it in 1970s, it sprung out of wargaming and, with that, you just needed armies to fight - so humans/elves vs. orcs. You didn't care why. They didn't need a massive backstory or justification - just make the other side "evil" like they were in LotR. Then, as the D&D campaign worlds evolved, people made up the lore for their worlds and this sort of mythology grew to fit those worlds. I doubt it was meant as a "justification" - people were just storytelling in the style of the Greek (and other cultures) myths. Take a look at Runequest Glorantha for other example of this - in that case, the mythology was largely there before the rules though.
@@ricardojuanlopeznaranjo6651 This argument falls apart the INSTANT someone points out that people aren’t born as Nazis - that’s an evil ideology. I never said an orc couldn’t be evil because of their ideology. In fact, I specifically said that having an orc be evil for a *reason* is preferable to being evil by default. This is the weakest possible bad faith argument that betrays how badly you missed the point, and you should feel embarrassed that you wrote it.
Yes, the orcs did come from Tolkien, as I talked about in these videos. Making them all evil by default is still deeply lazy and problematic; crediting that to Grandpappy Tolkien doesn’t change that. Same with citing Gygax as the source - having high esteem for the folks responsible doesn’t mean it’s good writing. Lol and of course you you have to wrap it up with a bunch of culture war bullshit. Because the “snowflake” in this situation certainly CAN’T be the person who can’t handle someone saying “orcs don’t have to be bad.” 🙄😂 I’ve somehow gotten under your skin in a major way, but rest assured, I’m never going to think about you again. Peace.
First, let me say I have no issue with WotC getting rid largely of evil peoples like Orcs and Drow to make them represent a spectrum. (Still, this makes me wonder what will become of Mind Flayers and vampires. What about fiends?) But something that I don't like is the presumption that it's an inherently better game where everything is shades of grey. I get way too much of that in real life. Good and evil are human constructs and assholes use their own definitions to fight each other. This is entirely exhausting. D&D is a fantasy game, and part of the fantasy is that Good and Evil are actual things. They are fundamental forces of existence and it's cathartic to be able to destroy evil without any concern of making the wrong decision. Even still, my idea of Good means mercy is shown to Evil when possible (this is in stark contrast to Gygax's ideas). Again, this is part of the fantasy-- I can be so Good that I will wave my right to destroy Evil. In a game where Good and Evil don't exist, I'm just someone who isn't murdering someone else. Whoopie. I don't find the point that Gruumsh didn't appear until a few books down to be very compelling, because of course that didn't happen. The world building happens over time. People imagine the conflicts, then they fill in the reason for the conflicts. Those early books were really thin. And don't you think it's interesting that they developed Gruumsh when they weren't under any pressure to explain why orcs are evil? This happened a ton in D&D. Yeah, it was okay to make generalizations about different monsters, but there could still be exceptions. And it's playing against type that makes Drizzt interesting. An orcish bard dandy is inherently more interesting in a world where you expect orcs to be violent marauders. In the end, it's a game. These are creatures in the Monster Manual. They exist to be defeated in dungeons by the players. Making them evil means you can do that. Yes, Gruumsh was created, in part, to justify having orcs be dungeon fodder-- so what? Why is the timing relevant? I don't understand why you seem to think it's some kind of ah-ha moment. This would only make sense if orcs were already a nuanced people, then you're accusing D&D of doing orcish propaganda to make them seem like they were always evil... but, like, they aren't real. They're fictional. They aren't humans. They're monsters. It would be interesting to see someone actually make some argument about why a god couldn't influence their chosen to be evil, but I don't see people do that. The real issue seems to be that marginalized people see themselves in orcs and drow with they way they are described. And I would very much agree that this is an issue. We should be aware of how language, imagery, and context can aggravate the wounds of the traumatized and work to mitigate that. It just seems like to me "no evil races" is, ironically, an unnuanced stance. And it doesn't seem like this is the real metric people want. I don't see people defending the goblinoids or gnolls. And, like I mentioned earlier-- what about Mind Flyers? People are their food and incubators for their offspring. Changing orcs and drow because they hurt people should be a good enough reason to do so. We don't need to hide behind the idea of a "better, more nuanced game". Nor do we need to address that orcs and drow are corrupted by their gods since it's actually irrelevant to the issue at hand. We can just choose to be decent people and make D&D more hospitable to more players.
Its fun hearing you talk about Orc ressembling vikings because hearing you narrate the history of the orcs and their culture I started imaging them as the Gallic
with the point on how they will do orcs in onednd. Wizards have been taking some strides in clarifying that the standard "idea" of drow are actually mainly based on drow from the city of menzobarrazan (which is a Lolth-cult) and that there are other drow cities that do not fit with this idea. Even having options in stat blocks for things to change depending on whether a drow matriarch is a follower of lolth or not (removing some of the spider/poison abilities). Baby steps, but showing "diversity" in the stat blocks communicates the idea that they are actually trying (and not doing it half-assed)
Agreed, I think they’ve made improvements on the drow since 5e’s player’s handbook, but there are also very few drow NPC/monster stat blocks since then (at least, that I have seen), so I hope they distill some of these changes down to some lore that will be visible in the new publications.
@@SupergeekMike there are some (the ones with the changes) in monster of the multiverse. And i think they recognise that anything presented to a player (like drow or orc) that has historically been poorly portrayed needs to get a new coat of paint in "core" books.
Our group’s current campaign is set in a land based on Ptolemaic Egypt and we established early on that the biggest foreign threat were Orcs, but here they’re styled off the Roman Empire with Latin names and titles. The Orcs consider themselves the “most civilized” of the nations in contrast to their usual role as “savages” (hate that term). Not all Orcs are evil, but Orcish nobles have been villains because they work for an empire which is seeking through politics and war to annex the kingdom in which the PCs reside and have already occupied the homeland of my PC who is the only not native-born party member.
thing with the dark elves is that the original dark elves from Mystara weren't necesarily evil as a culturethey just hated surface elves because surface elves left them to die during an ancient apocalypse and they had to move and live underground to survive. also i really like the Gruumsh origin story but i kind of found it to be unfair to Gruumsh. it gives great nuance to the argument of evil orcs, but also from the perspective of that story all other gods are evil figures to the orcs. the human gods can be seen as corrupt, letting themselves be swayed b y the other gods against Gruumsh, the dwarf god as greedy, taking the mountains and therefore all the bounty under the earth and the elven gods as agressors. quick to attack and harm Gruumsh. a good excuse to commit violence upon them. a version i like is the 4th edition one where both Gruumsh and Corellon are twin brothers representing the destructive and creative facets of chaos. i think this adds a lot to the story of Corellon cutting Gruumsh' eye. i use the 4th edition gods so i made "expanded" the myths a little, for fun. in my setting Torag & Lolth tried to take over their respective pantheons by killing the heads of each one. in this version Torag is the son of Moradin and dwarven god of arcane magic. Lolth convinces corellon that his brother tried to do something terrible, Torag does the same so both Moradin and Corellon leave Gruumsh out of the partition of the world. Lolth then tries to sabotage Corellon's battle with Gruumsh by enchanting an arrow into hitting Corellon in his left shoulder, the arm holding the shield, but at that moment Corellon strikes the eye. when the traitorous intent of both Torag & Lolth gets revealed, Lolth gets turned into a spider for spinning a web of lies and Torag gets beaten into the ground so hard and so throughly he crawls thourgh the underdark forever disfigured incapable of ever finding the surface, but the damage is already done. also corellon loses his right hand to balance out the losses of all gods. in the end, Torag, Lolth and Gruumsh get casted down, Gruumsh swears revenge on all including both Torag and Lolth. Corellon gets a silver hand and a painful shoulder and the dwarven and elven pantheon blame each other for the corruption of their respective traitorous gods. who corrupted Torag and Lolth is never revealed. was it Asmodeus? Tharizdun? Tiamat? Zehyr? a secret surviving Primordial? who knows
I think an interesting thing with this is that there are/were cultures that have/had a lot of cultural norms that we would generally feel are evil (*cough*19th century USA*cough*), but not all the people in those cultures were “evil”. Sure they owned slaves or had rampant abusive child labor or participated in human sacrifice or buried a husband’s wives when the husband died or committed attempted genocide, but most of them didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. Those who perpetrated those practices should be the targets of ire, not the average joe. If you want the drow or orcs or humans to be “evil”, have their leaders believe and perpetrate the evil parts, but have your average person be just that. Your average person. Jim Bob the orc may hate elves, but that’s because he’s been taught that that is the way of things all his life. He’s not particularly mean and likes to joke around with his friends and has a wife and kids. Wilma the drow may be…(I honestly have very little idea what the “normal” drow culture is supposed to be), but that’s just normal. She’s quite pleasant and an loves the physical prowess she’s able to practice in the military. Really truly evil people exist. For sure. But most people who believe things we consider evil are not, they have been taught evil beliefs and never looked past them.
This video gave me a cool character concept. Imagine an Arthurian Knight looking for the grail, but it is an Orc Paladin searching for Gruumshs lost eye, hoping it will end this great conflict. Maybe the Paladin being of good alignment has caused Gruumsh to abandon to paladin, and another god is aiding in the quest, or maybe Gruumsh is assisting. Lots of potential to explore ideas inherent to Orc culture. What does it mean to be strong? Why do we need vengeance? What is true destruction?
Well stated. I really liked this episode & the last one. I've played D&D for along time & I am very far removed from the PC sanctioned monster slaughter that is Keep on the Borderlands. I want the characters I play to be challenged and have to deal with the nuance you discuss. One of the reasons I love Critical Role so much is that Mercer's villains aren't evil 'cause their orcs. It's 'cause their orc pirates trying to drown the heroes and working to be back some ancient evil bent on world destruction. Even then, they aren't bestial 'creatures' with no redeeming or qualifying qualities. I recently played the 5e module Out of the Abyss and the party got to a point where they were working with a Drow wizard to stop the demonic incursion. He wanted the party to plant the device he created to remove the demons within the city of Menzoberranzan. My paladin was the only one to balk at the idea of doing this since the Drow were 'evil anyway.' Luckily, in between the two campaign sessions, the rest of the party changed their minds - and even seemed shocked at my confusion when then they discussed their revised plans. ;-) I just have a problem with an entire race/species/etc... being inherently evil - far too much like real world propaganda for my tastes. Also, people should remember that Tolkien himself wanted to change his Orcs somehow. As a catholic, he had a problem reconciling the concept that the orcs were wholly irredeemable.
An interesting observation here is that every time we ask why they're evil, if you don't stop at "they just are" you make them necessarily deeper and more interesting, and also remove that inherent part of evil. Maybe all orcs are evil in this world, but if they actually have a story explaining it, it is coincidence that all are evil and none removed those villainous shackles, not an in-built frature of their entire being.
I've always liked the idea of solving the whole Gruumsh problem by adding a fairly simple idea to a setting: *Gruumsh isn't actually the creator and patron god of orcs even if though he claims to be.* The general concept being that Gruumsh is just one god among several orcish deities with as wide a range of alignments/personalities as any human pantheon, but has convinced some (though not all) orcish cultures that he's the rightful ruler of all orcs and all orcish gods, and within those cultures their mythology has been warped to idolize him above all. Basically, imagine if Bane claimed to be the patron god of all humankind, and in cultures that revered him had his church push revisionist history depicting Bane as humanity's creator and rightful ruler of the pantheon. The key to making it work well would be to give orcs some nuance and have plenty of orcish cultures that worship other gods and aren't anywhere near as antagonistic towards other cultures as Gruumshite cultures. Could provide some interesting worldbuilding to have non-Gruumshite orcish mythology heavily feature stories about Gruumsh being a rogue tyrant that much of the rest of the orcish pantheon fight to resist.
Thing is even if grumsh is their creator god both in people's campaign and I believe in lore their are good orcs goblins and even mind flayers so while orcs are evil their can still be out liers with drizzt the drow being the best example.
Recently found your channel and I have been really loving it. I've never really liked alignment and have always had some against-type factions in my worlds. Sure there are the scary sppoky goblins, but there are also the mongolian-inspired nomadic goblins that are sometimes allies, I have a noble aloof aristocratic Vampire who just wants to protect his village (for that sweet blood tax), orcs with complex cities. Story telling is too much fun to try to stuff whole species into 9 neat boxes.
Over the last few years I have been attempting to add nuance to my portrayal of Orcs, Goblins, Kobolds and other ancestries commonly denoted as Evil with a capital "E" in D&D. I started my current campaign running "The Sunken Citadel", where I gave Meepo's tribe of Kobolds a clearer motivation. They were living in the citadel before the Druid and his Goblin followers took over the area around the Gulthias Tree. They want the goblins to return their dragon wyrmling and to stop attacking them. To this end I made them willing to negotiate with the party, and Meepo and some other Kobolds accompanied the group to fight the Druid. Later on the group encountered a peaceful Goblin with a pet snake who was quite friendly. I added a Hobgoblin Warrior traveling under peace banner as an encounter, and an Orc Wizard who was evil, but not because of Gruumsh's influence, and who wasn't an opponent of the party. My next adventure will include an Orc member of the Athar, handing out pamphlets denouncing the Orc pantheon.
I mean, orcs being evil because of their god are due to Morgoth creating them. Which is the issue that orcs were made so that Tolkien wouldn't be glamorizing violence against "real" people. The argument is that you've already "humanized" them and made them something different from zombies.
On orcs being vikings, I've toyed with that coding, but also being germanic tribes in a Roman based setting and as Mongolians with cars, being the only race that knows how to make them with other races trying to steal their war machines.
Given the context of this video, I thought it might be interesting to know that in "Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue #6, the UK exclusive magazine, there is a short part on Gruumsh and Orcs in "the North" of the Forgotten Realms. Quote: "Since then, Gruumsh has led his followers across all planes of existence in a mission of ceaseless destruction - though, of course, not all orcs swear allegiance to him. Those that do are largely ravagers and raiders." Later in an encounter provided in the issue for Phandalin it reads "Orcs sometimes roam the North but rarely raid or pillage its settlements" which I thought was remarkable given how previous editions had made it quite clear that the original Phandalin was destroyed by a massive orc horde. In the encounter itself, orcs surround Phandalin after a greedy human mercenary killed two young orcs at a private wedding ceremony on a mountaintop and took the offerings the pair had brought for Luthic. The orcs also don't immediately attack and kill everybody, but hurl a message tied to a javelin into town, proclaiming how their queen demands blood and requests for representatives of the town to meet with her at some standing stone. The magazine likely does not constitute the "most official" of sources, but I still thought it was interesting.
Melkor. Sauron's evil god. He made orcs that way. The trope pre-dates D&D, it's right there in Tolkien. And Sauron's sign was the unblinking eye. So they clearly just transposed that over into D&D.
Mike, good sir, that is a nice suit. Content wise, thanks for making this, I unfortunately never used or saw Orcs as simply evil foot soliders. I'm a big fan of Warcraft Orcs and I kinda make it my goal to make them honorable as all hell.
Check out the "Orcs and Half-Orcs" episode of the Manifest Zone podcast. There are a lot of orcs among the Gatkeeper druids, who maintain the seals which keep aberrant extraplanar threats sealed away. The Gatekeepers are the oldest of the many druid sects of Khorvaire, though they were heavily decimated during the invasions of the daelkyr. Their main task is to defend nature against aberrations, outsiders, undead, and similarly unnatural beings. The first of the Gatekeepers, orcs, were taught their magic by the dragon Vvaraak.
Nice job handling such a complex topic. This and the last video hopefully provide people with the opportunity to be a little introspective on these matters. Yes the context here is D&D but you pointed to some IRL parallels that I hope didn’t go over anyone’s head. Bravo.
In the DND world I'm creating Orcs are Nomads. Taking something from Tolkien Orcs in my universe were once elves. But they betrayed their own people for more power. A conflict known as the Elven Civil War. When they lost the war as punishment for their hubris and treachery the elven god(Not sure if it's gonna be Corellon or a homebrew god yet) transformed the dissenters into monsters and stripped away their magical power. From now on they would be known as the orcs and doomed to wander the world forever without a homeland. Orcs in the present day in my world are nomads found all over. While there are some who wish to move past their legacy of being betrayers and want to live in peace with other races there are just as many who want to reclaim the power they lost. So there you go. More than enough room for a variety of moral spectrums across all Orcs in my universe.
I think a game of D&D often benefits from having an enemy that is just undeniably "evil". I never really cared for alignment, but I make sure that there is one faction in the game where the heroes can just slay on sight.
While I agree that quick and easy enemies can be useful, I think that those enemies should not be defined as a monolithic species of intelligent mortal beings. I would much prefer to have a clearly defined evil faction which is instantly recognizable by their uniform, not their race.
@@kurtschroeder6736 because intelligent mortals should have (some degree of) free will. If you say that beings that can think and feel always choose to be evil, that has some pretty awkward philosophical implications. Note that I'm specifying mortals here. Undead, fiends, and certain kinds of elementals and aberrations can be killed on sight without a lot of the dark implications, because their minds are not implied to be similar to human minds. But anything which experiences life in a way that is relatable to humans is effectively human, philosophically speaking. And if you say that a group of humans are always going to choose evil based solely on the circumstances of their births, that becomes highly problematic.
That’s definitely true. There’s a great Matt Colville video called “Everybody Loves Zombies” but don’t be fooled by the title, he touches on what we have covered in these videos and covers the difference between innately evil creatures and evil factions or organizations of those creatures. It’s a great vid: th-cam.com/video/cTp9SdpcvF8/w-d-xo.html
So, there was a series of posts on the Giant in the Playground message boards that took one of the DnD pantheons (Greyhawk, I think) and tried to flesh them out into believable religions that would still put the gods in the roles players come to expect. So, for example, Olidammarra does encourage his followers to treat the world as though it's all theirs (he is still a god of thieves), but that this attitude also includes taking *responsibility* for all of it. Those helpless people? They're YOUR people! Help them! That temple to another god? It's your temple, too, so defend it! The author never did get around to Gruumsh, but I wish they had. Honestly, I kinda want to see a CR player play a follower of a Betrayer God as a sympathetic character (and not because they're deceived about their deity's nature)@. I get that, say, Tharizdun would be hard to give the Sympathetic Villain Motivation to, but I think it'd add a lot if the Betrayers weren't all quite so mustache-twirly.
Honestly, I think the whole discussion is just overblown and irritating at this point. People are going to have whatever kind of orcs at their table they choose. Not everyone is playing D&D for "Deep and complex worldbuilding", sometimes they just want to go kill some evil things, so that's what they do. It all really just comes down to a bunch of people posturing and having a pissing contest about "My ideal game is better than yours" while also throwing in any real world political jabs they can as well, making the entire thing one giant "bad faith" argument on both sides. I don't even run the same style of game between campaigns, I've done old school "These are all evil" just as often as I've ran games where all the players were goblins just struggling to live in a world that wants them gone just for existing. Are there discussions to be had? Yeah, probably, but videos like this in particular just come off as a long way of saying "I'm right, you're wrong, now let me focus on the weakest arguments against me so I can win in my own video", as you don't even bother having someone who's on the other side of the argument around to explain where they come from, just find the flimsiest strawman you can and say "That's the argument against this, isn't it silly?". And try to understand, I'm saying this as someone who's really enjoyed a lot of your content, but this? I honestly feel like this was just not the hill to go die on and make into such a big thing, and no matter what political side you're on, I will ALWAYS get irritated when people talking about the game where we roll dice and play pretend have to start bringing in real world politics and snide remarks.
These are my thoughts exactly. I've been a fan of this channel, but these last two videos have left a bad taste in my mouth. Especially the complete dismissal of seemingly all arguments/rebuttals against his points and the bad faith in which he's presenting opposing arguments to make them look flimsy. Everything here comes off as less of a nuanced piece or persuasive argument and more of a persecution of people in the audience who think differently than him. I also hate that people feel the need to bring race politics into the hobby, and I'm a POC. This is literally a fucking GAME where fellow nerds improv adventures, make bad puns, and do math for 2 - 4 hours. If you don't enjoy it, change it and if you do keep it. It's that simple.
Dammmn i ran an orc mini campaign with Luthic and Gruumsh as focal background deities and wish id known some of this extra lore to spice up the Correllon beef. Great video
Out of curiosity, have you ever looked into the world and lore of Eberron. It's probably the most "different" DND world, and Orcs there are also very different and very nuanced. In the "main" continent of Khorvaire, many became Druids under a Rogue Dragon, others became clerics and paladins of their version of the Silver Flame farther west in the Demon Wastes, where they fight off demons in their self-imposed exile, and kill anyone who enters the Waste out of fear they've been tainted. In the east, other Orcs wear armor of bones, and south there are the more savage tribal orcs. I'm just touching the surface, though
Everything I hear about Eberron is always very cool! I just haven’t taken the time to sit down with the material. But I was passingly aware that the orcs of Eberron are handled much more gracefully, couldn’t have told you the details.
@@SupergeekMike Whenever you get the chance, I would highly recommend it. Thanks to DM's Guild, Keith Baker published some more works outside WOTC that are excellent. Another group he changes is his world's goblinoids. In Eberron, they are the original occupants of Khorvaire (again, the main setting continent) and had a wide spread empire called the Dhakaan Empire, until it eventually fell after decades of fighting the otherworldly forces (often alongside the Druid Orcs. Pretty ironic considering most settings). The Dhakaan treats their people almost like ants; each individual has their assigned role and no role is without import. The latrine cleaner receives the same respect as the archer, for it is not the archer who will ensure sanitary conditions, etc. In fact, the Dhakaan goblinoids have different terms. The Ghuul'dar (strong ones) for bugbears, the Ghaal'dar (smart ones(?)) for hobgoblins, and the Golin'dar (small ones(?)) for goblins. And while you may say, that it's kinda racist in itself to do just this, the world acknowledges that. Many bugbears in present day believe that they have been tricked into the shock trooper role over for millennia by the hobgoblins, and some tribes in the newly made goblin nation resent their current hob-king. Elsewhere, many first human colonists would believe that the ruins they found were a previous human civilization over goblin, and treat the splintered goblin groups as, well, slaves. Up until Galifar I freed goblins in his conquest/war of unity, although they are still in ways treated as second class (the end of goblin slavery takes place 998 years prior to the start date). In Droaam, the unofficial monster nation, "Goblin" is a term that refers to small creatures - specifically goblins and kobalds. The two creatures often work hand in hand. Even though Dhakaan fell, it still has Kechs (think a mixture of clans and Fallout Vaults) that survived, with one being composed entirely of golin'dar (or just goblins), who use their "lesser status" as a front to spy on others. What they see is the old goblin seamstress instead of James Bond, but a goblin. Sorry to gush about Eberron. It's a really extraordinary world, and I highly recommend it, especially if you cover subjects such as monstrous races. I believe it comes out, but Keith Baker's "Frontier of Eberron" is based on Droaam, an all but officially acknowledged nation composed of monsters. One city is ruled by medusas, one is governed by a mind flayer. The monarchs are three hags. Eberron is a very organic world, and all I've gushed about is just cliff notes, really.
Coming back to this now that the new PHb has had its big previews available to read and I think the route they went is sorta similar to the vikings idea by depicting them looking like cowboys. Just thinking about the cowboy/gunslinger fantasy from westerns (especially neo-westerns), they're capable of a lot of good and have lots of complex relationships and interior lives but they're also capable of pretty incredible violence if they feel like their cause is just and I think that that's a good space for orcs to exist in. They're not inherently violent or evil, but they can and will move heaven and earth to accomplish their goals and if an orc or group of orcs is evil then that becomes a very dangerous thing
One of the great arguments against all of this is, "we need bad guys!". Yup, we do, but what people forget is that nuanced beings (humans we call them) have managed to create plenty of bad guys, evil and villains all on their own and don't seem to be getting rid of that "special" ability any time soon. Nuance is just that, nuance. It doesn't mean an end to evil orcs. It doesn't even mean an end to most orcs are evil. It just means an end to all orcs are evil. D&D has, as you pointed out, tried to write more nuance into their world. In fact, some of the species we consider problematic these days were originally some of that nuance. I've said before that drow are one of the original attempts to remove the monoculture of elves, breaking with the shiny, happy, people vibe they tended to have. But even the drow were given greater nuance as time went by. As the Drizzt novels progressed, the one-dimensional portrayal of dark elves just didn't work and we learned there was a lot really bad nurture mixed in with that nature. The drow even had a few good, or at least less evil, deities that had glommed on to the dark elves. You can even grow your nuance out of the "evil bad guys" trope. Fine, the world is full of angry Gruumsh hooligans who murder/death/kill so they can be good boys for orc Odin. However, maybe, just maybe, there are orcs out there who are sick of that bullshit and are smart enough to figure out, "Hey, ya know what, other gods don't ask their followers to do that." or "You know who doesn't starve and go without? Humans. Those guys are badasses at making their own food and building societies. Maybe we should try that." I have been working nuance into the creatures of my world since 1979. If my crusty ol' D&D grognard butt can do it. Anyone else can too. I still like evil drow though. (just not universally and unwaveringly evil).
So what about those of us that have games, not every game mind you, that don't have nuance? Are we bad people for having enemies for our players to fight, kill, and loot from?
@@squidpope9344 #1 Nobody is telling you how to play at your table. #2 Nuance doesn't mean you can't have that. I am going to bet that when it comes down to it, your bad guys have more reason than just "because I'm evil" going for them. Even when they are evil, there is likely motivation behind that evil. I feel this argument gets a lot more energy from people feeling they are being judged or told how to run their games than any serious examination of what they are already doing in their games and how that may or, in so many cases, may not be different than what is being proposed.
@@elfbait3774 I appreciate the response! And yes, those of us that play less nuanced games are concerned about being judged for how we play. In fact, in another comment thread I was very clearly judged for playing as a "Murderhobo" and "Psychopath". And you are correct, most enemies in dungeons are there for specific reasons, not because they twirled their mustache that day and decided to hang out where maybe they could murder some unsuspecting adventurer's!
I think you should highlight the part of the text you are reading, especially when you jump some part of the text (like with the text from chainmail). I was completely lost trying to find the text you were reading, which means I did not fully understanding what you were saying at the same time. Maybe it is only because I'm not a native English speaker, but I would appreciate if you add this kind of think the next time ^^
That was something I wish I’d had the time to do but just ran out of time when the deadline came - but something like that would be the plan for next time 😁
Really loved learning about the history of Orc and Gruumsh throughout the game and im definitely using some of that lore (as well as the idea of Orcs as Vikings) as inspiration for my own game :D
That this video even exists is all the evidence I need to back up my assertion that the biggest thing "wrong" with D&D is that the settings produced by the publisher of the game are too intertwined with the core ruleset, and that the biggest improvement that could be made to the game, and by extension, the entire RPG market and community, is divorcing those rules which really ought to be considered setting-dependent from the core mechanics of the game. This especially includes the cosmology, the races/species/ancestries, and the "monsters" (the single most problematic term/trope in all of RPGdom). Gruumsh? What Gruumsh? We don't need no stinking Gruumsh. There is no Gruumsh or Corellon Larethian in my setting. Not at my table. So, any attempt to justify the idea that someone is "inherently evil" because their god made them that way falls flat on its face, because in my cosmology, not such deity exists. There is a argument that really does need to be addressed, and that is this idea that D&D players need "monsters" to kill, or there's no game there. I think this is a false argument. D&D does not need "monsters" in order for conflicts to exist which lead to combat. After all, "monsters" don't exist in the real world, yet war and combat exist in the real world.
I feel deficient because I'm not understanding the issue here. If youre playing in a way with political and moral nuance then sure, I totally understand the desire to have complex villains and themes. But that's not the only way to play D&D! Should I have to bend over backwards to provide moral justification to my players who are dungeon delving as to why it's totally okay to kill these sentient creatures? Or can I just have them as enemies to fight so we can have fun kicking in the door and earning loot?
Nope, as I commented on last weeks video, its the difference in D&D. Some players see Orc and think "Enemy" Others see an Orc and think " Im gonna talk to him" Both are correct and wrong at the same time, depending on what kind of table they are at. A player who, like me, have been trained to see orcs as the bad guys, will have a hard time to find a reason to talk to an Orc if I am in a group of players who are of the " lets talk to it"-mentality. And the same will be said for the other player who wants to talk to it and the other players are already readying their weapons for a bloody fight :P So clearly something to talk about in a session 0 :P
I agree. The orcs aren't real, the gods the orcs worship aren't real, the characters aren't real, and the game isn't an attempted simulation of real things. However it is that you play at your table, as long as you are playing D&D and having fun, you are doing it right. Even if you harm 10,000,000,000 orcs during play, no real orcs were harmed.
@@Malkuth-Gaming Oh absolutely! I just sometimes feel there's a judgement being made against people who want to play a more simplistic dungeon-delving style of game versus games striving to be some sort of grand saga ready for Streaming/TV
@@squidpope9344 playing murder hobos is fine. It seems like a thin fantasy to explore, to my mind, and I can see how some might enjoy pretending to be a psychopath.
The subject of D&D gods/pantheons is a huge topic as well… what should I discuss the next time I tackle that concept? Thanks so much to WorldAnvil for sponsoring this video! Visit www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike and use the promo code SUPERGEEK to get 40% off any annual membership! www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike
A look back at the past evolution of pantheons for the game would be cool. The first printing of the AD&D Deities & Demigods, for example...had borrowed some stuff from copyrighted works, such as the Melnibonean deities and monsters, which they had to remove from later printings. :) Their various interpretations of real world pantheons have been interesting, I use both the 3rd edition and AD&D pantheons for my various homebrew settings, and have done a pantheon of my own...
In the broad topic of advice for DMs, I think the most salient topic to address regarding gods and pantheons is: how present should they be in your game world?
I would greatly appreciate a Planar view (even it's more of a subpoint of a larger topic) of deities, as Planescape and then later Eberron presented it. I think Planescape and Eberron are two unique settings as regards Planes and deities. Planescape in particular massively influenced main line D&D in further editions. (E.g.: 5E Planes: static.wikia.nocookie.net/forgottenrealms/images/a/a2/Planes-5e.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20180207035855 vs. Planescape planes: static.wikia.nocookie.net/forgottenrealms/images/b/b9/GreatWheel.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120212182059 )
In another comment, you mentioned that it bugs you when players assume that nobody would question the existence or power of D&D gods. Like, people question the reality and power of things in the real world all the time! Whether it's social constructs like ideology, or scientific concepts like immunology and ecology, there is *no end* of dispute over *very real,* worldwide things. Would be cool to see you talk about that.
@CafeNelson , I think it bears noting that it also depends on the setting. For example, in the Forgotten Realms setting, the lore states that the gods are well known for their avatars showing their existence to the people. It's hard to question whether the gods exist when you see direct evidence. But using an example from Planescape, there's an entire faction that believes the gods of the Multiverse are just powerful beings who lied to everyone, to convince the Multiverse that gods are all-powerful. (The Athar.) And that gods are powerful, but not /all/ powerful. That the gods aren't worthy of worship. So, I guess I'm just saying, some nuance covering various settings and perceptions of deities in those settings could be beneficial, to the topic you presented.
half orcs were a huge problem full of half caste tropes still in dnd5 specifically describes half races in way I was taught to never say dealing with indigenous people in 1990 uni and then workplace very cliche ridden and i had multicultural family children bring me the players book to ask me about it and i gagged and explained it was terrible
I honestly always thought Orcs in D&D were supposed to be their version of Vikings, never really looked into it more than that cos it always felt right to me. Strange how you can get an idea so stuck in your head that you start to assume that its either canon or everyone else thinks the same.
I really enjoyed this alignment series! Funny thing, halfway through the video, I commented to my wife how I always found it weird that some of the illustrators depicted Gruumsh as Cyclopean when it's always been part of his lore that he lost an eye in combat. I then made a remark about Odin, so I was well primed for your Orc Vikings idea! That's a great idea to uproot them from their Tolkienesque and Gygaxian tropes.
There's another issue with this sort of thing, specifically in a TTRPG: Equating this metal lore, a race, and villainy denies it to the players. Imagine if Gruumsh were presented simply as "the metal option" for picking your character's religion. The party's front-line fighter type, regardless of species or ethnicity, might be a worshipper of Gruumsh - whether they grew up in that cultural environment or they converted when they took up the axe then provides one more easy step of potential complexity. And, note that "cultural" in there. Religion is one of many forms of culture, and this is improving the game by making cultural matters cultural. Generally, tying culture and biology weakens both. Unrelated, a big part of why cyclopean Gruumsh looks silly is his face is modified from human. Cyclopes whose features are based on elephant skulls are a lot less silly-looking. Weirdly, the oldest depictions basically look three-eyed - with a single eye in the forehead, brows and orbits below as you'd expect for a human, and blank skin covering those sockets.
I've waited for this video to come out so that I could see all of your points before responding. I'll preface by saying that in most cases, I am in favour of the 'typically X' implementation that was talked about in the previous video. I do, however, think you've been a little unfair with rounding your opposites into one somewhat strawman-esque group. An example of this is when talking about when Wizards removed the alignment from statblocks like the jiangshi you said that "exactly the people you expect" opposed the decision, which begs the question of who you were implying those people are. I was personally opposed to the removal of alignment from statblocks for two reasons. Firstly, with creatures based on myths that are not familiar to a wide audience or with entirely invented names, it presents a barrier for DMs trying to use the material that are unfamiliar with the original source, presenting more work for DMs, particularly new ones. Secondly, because some creatures, as per D&D lore, absolutely do have one and only one valid alignment. A jiangshi is actually a fine example of that. There are no good jiangshi. It isn't down to culture or some subjective element. They do not have free will. They act in very specific ways based on specifically evil motives. I think the biggest counterargument you didn't address in your videos is that in the cosmology of D&D good, evil, lawful and chaotic are not just subjective descriptors. They are real and tangible forces in that world and setting, and that isn't something you can just retcon without remaking a huge amount of material. There are planes like Mechanus which are inherently and entirely lawful. There are creatures like demons and devils that are defined entirely based on which alignment they fall into. If they cease to be that alignment, they cease to be a devil or a demon or whatever. Alignment as a tangible thing is woven into a massive amount of D&D lore. You even touched upon this with an aside about a sword knowing you are evil. It's therefore helpful to think of the alignments as akin to something real and tangible. Let's think about the alignments like day and night. Animals in the real world can be strictly nocturnal, strictly diurnal, largely one of the other, or ignore the day night cycle altogether, depending on the species. In the same manner, creatures in a D&D setting can have an inherent affinity for the forces of good, evil, lawful and chaotic, which varies from non-existent to absolute. Should people be absolute about orcs or any other D&D race in particular? That's up to them, I'd say no, but I'd also say that in the same way that having all members of one race be X alignment by default is simplistic and boring, having all sentient races in your setting lack any tendency towards or affinity for any of the alignments is equally boring.
Good comment, his assertion is quite intriguing indeed ("exactly the people you expect"), it can fall on many things. Who are they? Racists? Ignorants? Seems to paint his oppositors in a very negative light even though that may not having been his intention. Though i disagree with your notion that "having members of one race be X alignment by default is simplistic and boring", it can be as boring as you can make it to be, goblins and orcs, for instance, could be seen as phisycal manifestations of chaos and entropy, it's a simple concept, not necessarily bad or boring..... There are two pitfalls that I've come across with people debating this issue: - The first is to assume that in order for some type of narrative aspect to be good, it must be as nuanced, profound and morally grey as it can possibly be and, by default (ironically), simple concepts are inherently bad writing. The idea that something being "complex" makes it necessarily good is nothing more than post-modern cliché regarding narrative, it started as a genuine movement to go against the cliché of simple concepts for heroes and villains that were prevalent in the twenteeth century, but eventually it simply became the new "norm", oftentimes not questioned by writers. Some go as far as to challenge the entire notion of monsters, as to even question that evil exists, leaning hard on moral relativism. - The second is to make real-life correlations with fantastical races, when you say that an orc "can't be evil because it draws a parallel with black people" then the one doing the parallel is you, it's a personnal problem that people are trying to address as if it is not, which, paradoxically, further extends the problem and make these comparisons sound plausible and logical (when they are not). I think one of the problems with current D&D and why it allowed this issue to become as heated as it is, not addressing real-life ideological perspective per se, was not to dissociate the system from the scenario (in the case of 5e Forgotten Realms). If the system had no "standard lore" to be followed that is so ingrained into system as to become blury in trying to separate these things, people could just "feel like playing D&D" while describing their races and moral dillemas in an entirely unique way, because I think that many feel the need to rewrite lore because they believe that if they deviated from it they wouldn't be playing D&D anymore. Edit: few grammar mistakes.
The Orc version of the Valkyries are called Claw's of Luthic, and make great War Domain Clerics. Imagine an Orc with the ferocity of a mamma bear, and spell casting to back it up.
Specifically, I believe it was the Orc from Orlando Furiosa, that allowed Orcs to survive the lawsuit. Because it was tusked, and "mossy" or "fungus" skinned depending on the translation, and probably why the Orcs have tusks and are largely depicted as green in modern media, as adopting these traits probably is what kept the orcs from being able to be targeted by the lawsuit. Honestly, if you ask me... its kind of shifty, and shadey, and Orcs probably shouldnt have ended up in the public domain... but at thesame time, I love orcs conceptually and I would hate them to lose that status. I have really mixed feelings about it.
From what I know the D&D orc’s appearance may have some relationship with an official Lord of the Rings calendar. To your other point, the term ‘orc’ was in use before LotR, being the name of a William Blake character and a sea monster in the Matter of France, not to mention the whale species orca and a creature type in Beowulf. Unlike Tolkien’s other creations, ‘orc’ was already public domain.
Honestly we can create better orcs than Tolkien just by looking at real world folklore. So let's examine the Neapolitan orc and see what more southern Italian's have to say. "Giambattista Basile, who wrote in the Naples dialect and claimed to be passing on oral folktales from his region. In the tales, Basile used huorco, huerco or uerco, the Neapolitan form of Italian orco, "giant" or "monster", to describe a large, hairy, tusked, mannish beast who could speak, lived in a dark forest or garden and might capture and eat humans."-Myths and Folklore Wiki So let's break that paragraph down. "Basile used huorco, huerco or uerco, the Neapolitan form of Italian orco, "giant" or "monster", to describe a large, hairy, tusked, mannish beast" From this sentence we can introduce the following physical traits: 1. These Orcs are large creatures standing between 6-7 feet tall. 2. They are covered in coarse, protective body hair. Not unlike that of a boar or certain breeds of terrier. 3. They have tusks, further solidifying their pig-man image. 4. They have similar features to humankind. For the sake of being creative and continuing the superficial resemblance to pigs, let's say they have four toes and three fingers with an opposable thumb. Perhaps their ears are slightly pointed. Let's move on to more cultural issues: "mannish beast who could speak" This one is extra interesting as if we take this very literally it implies that these orcs speak human languages. It's possible that there may be no orcish language at all and they simply "pirate" human languages for their own use. Perhaps they speak a universal common or simply the national language or regional dialect. Perhaps even entire clans or even tribes would not be able to communicate with one another, as they speak different human languages. Now of course this can be taken the other way. In doing so the above statement implies that orcs have their own complex language. Perhaps they are even poly-lingual. "lived in a dark forest or garden" This is also interesting and brings up some interesting questions. For starters what is ment by "dark forest", is it dark because of dense tree cover? How do Orcs remain undected or alternatively remain a step ahead of a lord's (or even king's) rangers? Furthermore how do they creep in to gardens unnoticed? To me it seems these orcs are skilled at the arts of camouflage, misdirection and maybe even slight of hand. They must also have some power over illusions (be it magical, technological or otherwise). "and might capture and eat humans." Now why would they do this? Humans are hardly the most efficient food source and there are more effective means of terrifying local peasants. Further why even strike fear in the first place when you are a 7 foot badass? You can just take what you want and do away with anyone who opposes you. The thing that first come to my mind is a form of ritual consumption or blood sacrifice. Plenty of cultures in the real world, perhaps even most, have practiced human sacrifice. The Aztecs, Celts & Norse are among the most famous, but even the comparatively well off and cultured Carthagenians, Phoenicians and Romans have been speculated to have practiced it at one point or another. So why might orcs kidnap, sacrifice and eat sentient beings? Well perhaps the most obvious answers are to bring luck in battle or to placate some god or element. Perhaps thay believe the world will stop spinning if they don't. Therefore their society would be ruled by a cast of Lawful Evil Clerics and Anti-Paladins. Maybe they have a Neutral Evil, or even Chaotic Neutral emperor who doesn't believe the clerics nonsense but actively benefits from playing along. Now does this mean than all the orcs of this particular tribe or nation believe or support this evil? No of course not. Even if it is a minority, some orcs are actively going to oppose and fight this evil. People forget that even in places like Nazi Germany there were domestic resistance movements. At the very least the vast majority of the orc population is going to be Lawful Neutral. Just following the law and going about their business as many Aztecs did. Because ultimately, people just want to get on this their own lives, and orcs would be no different. The sacrifice and consumption of some random human farmer by the clerics and their fanatics would probably not concern the average orc. Whatever the case may be it's evil, but it's an grounded evil. One that might actually prevent some greater evil from entering the world if we feel like it. We are not even covering the Northern Italian/Tyrolean concept of the mount orc, which could be it's own thing. Regardless we have already created more compelling evil orcs than Tolkien did imo. And just from a few sentences too. Very few individuals are evil for the sake of evil, let alone whole cultures.
I’ve always seen the stat blocks and descriptions in the books are in world notes and articles about those creatures. If something is reductive in the books, that’s because that’s how the person in world sees that topic and how it’s portrayed in the in world civilizations. This obviously doesn’t work for homebrewed settings, but that’s probably why someone is doing a homebrewed setting, to get away from the established lore and do something different.
I still don't understand why such a large portion of the community gets hung up on this one way or the other. Being "Evil" doesn't mean bad, it means being aligned with a supernatural force on the evil team. Being "Good" doesn't mean being morally upright (see Lawful Good paladins committing atrocities in the name of their god) either. There's nuance on both sides without resorting to propagating thinly veiled racism, or interpreting these stat blocks as doing such. Isn't it reasonable for created creatures in a world that literally has gods to be bound to their creator's faction by default? Whether or not it's always been that way is irrelevant, regardless of whether you like or dislike default alignment as part of stat blocks. I think it matters more what kind of source material you want to start working from - how much texture do you want? Getting out from under the faction you're created into is a more interesting story than... well, having nothing to work with, or forcing an entire culture to be cannon-fodder for good guys to kill without any exceptions. I guess I'm not a fan of the current trend of turning everything into a coat of paint without any substance, lest it be interpreted poorly. I wish WotC would actually tackle the valid issues in a productive, sensitive, manner without taking the easy way out. In the meantime, I suppose I'll keep trying to help my players play the characters they want to play, without letting some stat blocks (or lack thereof) get in the way of that.
I think part of the problem here is that alignment as more "Red team vs. Blue team" worked better in players' minds when the alignment spectrum was just Law vs. Chaos. Those ideas, I think, are easier to understand as cosmological "teams." Calling a character "Good" or "Evil" feels like a value judgment, even if it's not intended as such. Like, once upon a time I had a character's alignment changed to Evil because she *opposed* slavery. I still bring this up in alignment discussions because while this technically made sense cosmologically based on the setting and whose slavery she was opposing, I think it also makes clear how that sounds absolutely bonkers if you're not using the terms "good" and "evil" in this specific jargon-y way that isn't explicitly stated in most modern D&D materials.
@@honoratagold Yeah, I agree. I guess I wished WotC made more of an effort to onboard people in this specific jargon-y way. Buuut, I get the feeling that the people working on these products also see alignment as prescriptive of behaviour rather than descriptive of... well, cosmic alignment. One thing I really miss from stories of D&D from before I was born is that sort of moral complexity around how people on the good team aren't always good. They can do terrible things and justify it (fun catholic church and police parallels). Whereas I think we'd get a "what's your alignment?" question at a lot of tables these days, enforcing a nebulous rule that Good characters can't do bad things because it goes against their alignment. When I'm DMing, I like to allow PCs and NPCs to be "unaligned" meaning they don't worship or pledge service to any particular god(s) or cosmological force(s). Let them roleplay how they want to play without worrying about character alignment unless it's something they actually want to explore.
This is a very fascinating video for me as orcs are my favorite fantasy creature. I’ve always loved the faceless henchman cause they are usually quite funny and interesting when you take a step back. Shadow of mordor and war really crystalized this as not only was it my funny cockney brutes, they had real personality and some incredible variance and looks into how they are not a monolith, and thats all while they still remain in that “naturally evil” thing that is usually problematic. It probably helps that Tolkeinian orcs really don’t have any cultural parallels while also being technologically adept so claims of primitivism or savagery are kinda silly. But in any case they have always been special to me and when I finally started playing dnd and made my first orc character (who has become my favorite character) I can’t tell you how ecstatic I was with how good the volo’s guide to monsters depiction of orcs was, and how much better it is when compared to some of past iterations. The myths (and they are typified as myths rather than facts) around Gruumsh and Corellan are left perfectly vague to fill in gaps and really let them grow on their own. The descriptions of the other gods, specifically Luthic, instantly gives so much possibility for variance and nuance within orc culture. Before Volo’s orcs were described as largely patriarchal and often had some very nasty connotations (rape) behind some of that inherent sexism. But with the expansion of Luthic and dropping of that terminology orcs are instantly made more meritocratic as well as maybe even giving a space where females are revered and respected do to their place within whats important to orc kind. And this is not to mention what Yurtrus and Shagraas offers orcs that deviate from normative pictures of orckind. Its just so good how much nuance and interesting possibility is breathed into the race with just what little Volo’s did. Increasingly the reason I continue to love orcs is people recognizing the potential with them. They can fit into so many archetypes and be typecasted so widely thats its hard not to find something to use them for. But also they seem to me to be one of the most adaptable creatures in genre fiction. Most races in fantasy have remained tropey, dwarves and elves and halflings are still trying to escape the tolkein mold, but orcs are going all over the place. WoW orcs are different from 40k orcs which are different from dnd orcs. Nuance and different interpretations are everywhere. There are norse coded orcs, mongol coded orcs, golden-age arabic coded orcs, etc etc. They are really exemplifying the potential of fantasy rather than remaining part of its stagnation and problematic past. When I learned Monster of the Multiverse officially retconned Volo’s I was pissed. The official blurb for dnd orcs is now as milquetoast and barebones as every other race. It was a huge step back because while it gives free possibility, it does not give easily recognized potential. No longer can you look to Luthic and Ilneval and wonder how orcs focused on protection or their kind or strategy and honor can be so easily labeled evil. Gruumsh has no interesting depth to him listed, being read as a generic over god or just a generic brute bad guy. Gutting substance from races is not what is going to allow races or species to be variable and nuanced and non-monolithic. It just makes them bland and more likely to be branded with equally bland characterization which sets everything back a decade. Theres a massive difference in removing alignments and removing entire sections of lore. I agree alignment should be removed or modified, and so should lore, but not in this way. Its just really sad to see that this is what is being done, as it comes of as careless and pandering rather than thoughtful and genuine. I want good orcs, I want evil orcs, but mostly I want interesting orcs.
I have tried to start using the default D&D God's instead of making up my own, but then you have boring Gods like Gruumsh and I just throw it all out again.
I would lke to point out you skipped a step. You mentioned Tolkien popularizing Orcs, but didn't look at whether Tolkien blamed an evil god for making Orcs evil. He did, and so baked int people's connotations for orcs is that they work for an evil god. Skipping this seems like a huge oversight, and undercuts your point. That said, I agree that its a cop-out and frustrating, and the thermian argument still stands. But pop culture orcs were always evil because their god made them that way.
My campaign hinges on the fact, that there are "orcy Orcs" who just make war because that's what orcs do, and a faction of landseeking orcs just looking for a place for their clans to stay. The second are not at all subtle in their approach, but at least they have a purpose. Also... political shenenigans.
I may have missed the point in the end, and I accept that possibility. I don't think it's bad to have a race (or species, or whatever you want to use to refer to sentient, self aware life) that is considered evil...because I'm sure we can all think of a culture, society, or group that holds ideas in such opposition to our own that you at least wouldn't choose to interact with them if you knew it. And thats where the players likely start. Of course all orcs are bad and we shouldn't feel bad for killing them, Whisseldorf was literally erased from maps because of them! But as a good storyteller it might not be a bad idea to know WHY your orcs are 'evil'. Did they kill the men of Whisseldorf (and the women and children too) because it was a territory war and there's a permanent orcish camp in the area? Or did the land Whisseldorf occupied once belong to the orcs generations ago and a strong, warlike leader finally rose up to reclaim their lands, even if it was against the wishes of an elder council of shamans and druids? As far as the players know, until they choose to investigate further, it's just orcs doing what they've been told orcs always do. Look to history, how long did it take during WWII for "all americans" to villainaize "all japanese" and send their neighbors off to...well...thats probably a different video. I think my point is that it's ok to have a race or multiple races that your PCs will initially consider to be all evil. Because from a world building standpoint even if the totally evil orcs of pillaging etc. are originally a much more peaceful society of druids and such with fringe extremists, based on my understanding of common practice world building, your characters have likely grown up with hundreds or thousands of years of propaganda informing their initial worldviews. As a DM it's up to you to decide if that worldview is ever challenged.
0:52 Was this really the case? As far as I can tell, the first published Lord of the Rings wargames were 1975, years after Chainmail's fantasy supplement included orcs. And the first LotR-based fantasy miniatures (though unlicensed) seem to be a series called Mythical Earth, from 1972, also after the 1971 fantasy supplement. My impression is that it's Chainmail (followed by the D&D little brown booklets), and the fantasy RPG movement which resulted, that produced a market for LotR-themed miniatures, not the other way around.
Oh interesting! I knew there was a lot of LotR influence on D&D despite Gygax not being a huge fan, I knew his players would’ve wanted that stuff, I must’ve assumed the LotR war games were out at that point. Funny!
Can we also appreciate the fact that the creation of the one-eyed orc god is just a quick shuffle after getting slapped by the Tolkien estate and likely having entire armies of orcs painted up with the eye of Sauron on their shields. "So, how can we sing this? i know, we'll file the serial numbers off Odin, give him a stereotypically orc name that any 10-yr old deciding to make up an orc would come up with and call it good. There, problem solved. No eyes of Sauron here. Just the one-eyed orc all father."
Let this be a lesson to the "DMing is hard" crowd. You can literally steal from the greatest fantasy story ever and a pretty well known mythology and make it part of your campaign world and people will love it.
Now I have an Orc Gruumsh worshipper wriggling around in my dome, There's so much untapped potential with that idea alone. Also now I know why my first DM was hesitant to let my half or be part elf bc I had no idea that half orcs couldn't be part elf, oopsies lol
Ultimately part of the problem in discussing this subject is that it requires that all parties agree on the desired outcome for their games. Arguing with nuance or grey morality as benefits of excluding evil races falls flat on people who do not want to add greater nuance or situations of grey morality to their games. Having one of the outlaws who the PCs viciously slaughtered in an ambush be carrying a letter from their sick child is a situation that players may hate for a variety of reasons, one of which is that it isn't fun for them. To delve into potentially even more over-discussed waters I'd mentioned the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Finn should be an expectation-shattering character for us and our perception of the world. Storm troopers are not irredeemably evil. Every Death Star explosion should be observed with thoughtful silence at the decision to kill thousands without trial or chance at redemption. Would that be fun? Does Finn grimly set about every battle he's in, aiming for incapacitating shots and managing the logistics of prisoners each time? No. He lets out shouts of joy as he wastes dozens of his former comrades. I'm not saying you should have evil races, I'm saying there is a reason why some of us will continue to do so and I think we are sometimes given plenty of descriptions in bad faith. Honestly I couldn't care less about Gruumsh. My orcs are my own, my world is my own. My players and I all work in a high-stress field and need to be able to turn off and do cool things to evil creatures
That’s totally fair - it’s one of the reasons why I try to put my focus less on what people do at their games (although that’s unavoidable, in part because those are the people who are the source of the comments/arguments that inspired these videos), but instead put more focus on how this information is presented to DMs. As an example, a few people in the comments of Thursday’s video shared stories where their players ignored the DM’s attempts at nuance with these ancestries, and just tried to kill all the drow and orcs they saw, because “They’re always evil.” In a lot of ways, that’s the same issue you pointed out - it’s a misalignment in the players’ expectations. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with some evil orcs, and honestly if everyone at your table is fine with it, that’s cool. But as long as DMs and players are receiving the proper tools they need to understand that nuance is an option, and to help groups get on the same page, then that would be the game moving in the right direction, as far as I’m concerned.
I think anyone drawing connections between D&D races and real-life races is the problem, not the fact that some races in D&D can be evil-by-default or lean evil. It's never crossed my mind to equate a fantasy race to a real-one, since all real-world races would fall into human in the game. That said, the Viking Orc idea is genius and it's a really great way to sidestep the entire argument, I love it.
The problem is that people *do* draw those connections, in non-gaming contexts, all the time. For example, a new meme going on since the invasion of Ukraine is using orc as a slang term to mean "Russian". Why do they call Russians orcs? "Because there's something about Russian people that makes them intrinsically irrational and violent all the time, you know, like orcs."
@@nicholascarter9158 So, people are taking the traits of a fantasy race and projecting them onto a real race. The problem is still with the people doing the action, not with the portrayal of the fantasy race. The orcs are innocent here
@@chaqalaqalaqa I'll grant you that, but I want you to consider this: If you were sitting down to play a game of D&D with a Russian friend of yours, would you explicitly say "Hey, in this game we'll be exploring the question 'What if all the bad stereotypes that people said about Russians were literally true, but about orcs instead of Russians?"" and also expect your friend to not find that kind of insulting when the orcs- who at no point are called russians- start painting z's on their horses?
@@nicholascarter9158 It just seems like a very forced issue when you have to jump through so many hoops to make it one. I just don't see any similarities between orcs and real-life groups. No real-life group is giant and green-skinned, going around as a force of nomadic violence or anything, you know?
@@nicholascarter9158 IDK, I just fundamentally don't really agree much with the whole argument. This video/creator explains it much better than I could near the end of the video: th-cam.com/video/PjmhfsiBFFI/w-d-xo.html
One thing with Orcs is that Gruumsh is also a jealous god, worshipping other gods tends to draw his attention to punish them...such as why Malar became a far weaker diety after attempting to steal some of them from him. The other orc gods are allowed, but stepping outside it, especially for elven gods, is going to draw him in (AJ Pickett has a video from a few weeks ago that covers that pretty well). Part of the thing is that you can still have "good" orcs mixed in, they might be looking for a way out from under their gods so that they can live at peace with most of the others. You also have some of the other Orc gods who seem to be trying to direct Gruumsh in different ways...such as Ilneval. But the issue is one where when you have gods involved, they need to be considered with things. Without something that can save you, you aren't likely to turn apostate when the god is likely to smite your ass...and Gruumsh's existence being defined later on than the introduction of orcs doesn't really work when it's a thing as lore expands and they'd give an answer for who various other species would be worshiping and expand as a general thing how different species and groups handle themselves.
I tend to see "Evil" as being used as the default label for enemies in general.... The assumption of Orcs=Evil comes from them just being the designated enemy of the players.... As the game evolved and players started to want to play Orcs and Goblins and all of that well we needed an explanation for why the non-NPC Orcs were enemies to the players.... (Kind of like how it's generally assumed that Bandits in any fantasy setting default to evil.... )
In my worlds, almost consistently, Orcs are just as nuanced as any other race. Lolth and Gruumsh are just one God for each race; just like not every human is Catholic (and I promise that's not a 1:1 comparison for any Catholics reading this) But the general idea is that Orcs, for the longest time, were "outcasts" all the same...but for the same reason Elves and Humans or Dwarves and Elves clashed; their cultures were SO different. Orcs felt that the best way to fortify their homes was to clash. The losing group would take the others help to defend them. Essentially making sure "The Strongest Survive" but the weak don't die off. There were still EVIL Orcs, sure, but once the Orcs established "Not everyone wants their village ransacked to make sure they've got the most capable fighters" everyone kind of settles in...and Orcs now serve as town guards, military, etc. to still fulfill cultural ideas without harming anyone.
Its really funny that I am just now watching this video because I am currently in a campaign where my Half-Orc Ranger wants to kill off the Orc pantheon because he thinks the only reason Orcs are considered evil is because Gruumsh made them and he is evil. And he wants to free them from Deities that keep them evil.
Aight. So the way I write orcs is as nomadic tribes across the planes. The various clans worship “the great wanderer” (gruumsh) Gruumsh was once peaceful but was torn from that when the Great War of the gods began. His eye was torn from him by the elven god of death when he stole a hunt from the god. Because of this insult to death itself, Gruumsh was banished from each plane and forced to roam endlessly for a home death had not seen yet. The orcs search for their “clan father” hopping from plane to plane, from each corner of the world. Some clans give up and stay put in a single place, hoping that the wanderer comes to rest with them, while others see Gruumsh’s path as a route of conquest, hoping to find him and give him the spoils of war, hunting with the wanderer across the planes.
@@SupergeekMikefeel free to take it! I also run orc variants. Basically feats that allow orcs to have different resistances depending on the plane they were born in. Nomadic warriors with differing variant philosophies definitely make running orcs more fun. And just having players join an orc clan for a planar jump makes finding orcs a lot more fun for players. Like “oh! Maybe they’re headed to the city of brass to sell all the pelts they’ve gotten.” (Also, sorry about the delayed response lol, was rewatching and just saw you responded)
As always, I really enjoyed this video. I got to learn more about the history of a race in DnD. Yay! However, I do disagree, mainly on the overarching statement regarding the Thermian Argument, which is the same issue I have with the Folding Ideas video. And that's the simple fact that criticism of a work based on the Thermian Argument, effectively boils down to "You didn't *have* to write it that way!", which is a criticism I find entirely hollow and empty. I have no issue with the specific example you chose and your approach to it, because you didn't do that. You critiqued the general argument by pointing out where it is factually wrong. But what about works where that isn't the case. Works where, from the onset, a specific race is just inherently evil for some in-universe reason. You can absolutely debate whether or not the method used was well-executed, or express your general displeasure at the idea, but the Thermian Argument is basically just a case of "I don't like that, you should change it" as though it is an objective flaw. And if that became a legitimate point to use again a creator, literally every reason for every choice made in the creation of a world, setting or story would be open to it, and someone would use it.
After your last video i wanted to wait for this one before commenting, so I could get the full picture. I'm relatively new in the world of D&D and so I'm not quite familiar with the history of the game apart from what i've seen on this channel (big fan by the way). But I dont get it. I don't mean this in bad faith as I'm very open to being educated. I just don't understand how having orcs or goblins in my game be evil makes me racist. I get how it is somewhat lazy game design and not having this be your default opens up the moral dilemma's of slaughtering a cave full of goblins for a bag of gold, but I also get that some people just want to roll some dice and get loot and having a default bad guy makes that easier.
It doesn't make you racist, evil guys aren't bad faith, and it isn't lazy game design. Know the sociological connotations of having all uncivilized ancestries be evil and worthy of extermination. See if your players are engaging at that level and if having all goblins be evil will turn some players off to the hobby. If not, beer and pretzel tomb raiding campaigns are amazingly fun. But if someone is trying to play a half orc at your table to work through their discomfort in navigating the workplace as a second generation immigrant, maybe you can let them have a different flavor of orcs because it means more to them than it does to you. Basically, don't be a dick.
This bleeds over into real racism at two different points: The first place is that the original designs of the D&D monsters have been inspired directly by real life racist propaganda: The 5e writeup on orcs invokes the One Drop Rule, the oldest surviving illustration of goblins is a French tapestry that specifically takes pains to point out "We gave the goblins long hooked noses because goblins are a metaphor for Jewish people", basically all racist propaganda has as its ur- theme "They are not human, and their species is metaphysically limited to being violent and stupid no matter what". It would probably help a great deal if Gary Gygax were not on the record as saying that the genocides of the European Invasions were the pure undiluted goodness of the Christian god working upon the earth, and only pure sadism or mental illness could make a person think that anything more moral than the genocide of indigenous North Americans could have ever happened in history. The second point is that in the last ten years or so these depictions have leaked back out into the world as racist propaganda going in the other direction. For example, a recent meme that is growing since the invasion of Ukraine is to use the word orc as a slang term for all Russian people- the logic being that, like orcs, all Russian people are sub-human, know only hate and violence, and it is not just necessary but really funny when they are killed.
@@andrewduitsman3918 I think that a specific dimension of this is that if the species is actively supernatural as individuals, the problems with them all behaving in a single very stereotypical way goes away in most people's minds to a great extent. A big part of why beholders aren't ever considered a metaphor for white supremacists, despite their defining trait being crippling xenophobic terror and a need to murder every other living person while constantly navel gazing about how their own compatriots aren't pure enough to be spared, is because beholders are levitating orbs covered in eyes who reproduce by having nightmares of racial panic so bad that they vomit up egg sacs of children. In my setting I didn't make goblins and orcs not evil, I made them not-mundane: Goblins are literally fae who crawl through portals to the unseelie realm that form out of the shadows of people having nightmares, and are basically fear manifesting physically on the material plane. Orcs are a kind of captain america/incredible hulk thing created by the alchemist labs of the Crimson King, interplanar tyrant. The problem I think is when you've got a creature that is so obviously just human: Living in a non-magical, sexually reproducing body that exists in a complex society of emotional ties and specialized division of labor, and then you throw "The one thing about them that's supernatural is how bad they suck." in there on top. That's a weird thing to add. Also the issue at hand is basically this: If you were sitting down to play at a table where the DM introduced a brand new, never before seen monster as "I imagined what it would look like if every Nazi propaganda piece about Jewish people were literally true, and made that a race." That would be really fucking weird. That's exactly what happened with some fantasy monsters, which are basically old racist propaganda transformed into fairy tales. It just doesn't feel as weird because it's never explicitly presented that way.
On my homebrew I use a bit of ideas from the 5E, but the gods are from some Humanoids were the giants gods, and they made a pact bidding them and the giants (the Ordning, that still aply to the giants more or less) and after that, they made the humanoids to break it. The God of Winter is the patriarch of the orc pantheon, but there are other gods and orc cultures; the more druidics are more akin to the WoW shamanic ones for example, others worship the god of the land and the strength. In fact I use the idea of elves and humans on conflict from Dragon Age, but in a different way. My elvish people lives more on Communes, with every group of elves being a "elvish" territorie, and that canot work on the biggest human empire (besides religious laws). So the conflict is political, and not about being evil or not. The different lineages of elves have different versions of this selfgoverment.
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I remember being in a game with a Gruumsh worshipping Half Orc and a Corellon worshipping elf, and while they hated each other at first, as they grew to know each other as people their hatred turned into a fun little rivalry where they tried to one up each other in a very Gimli and Legolas type relationship. It was fun to watch, and the elf ended up dying to save the half orc in the end.
Real homie energy right there. How did the Half-orc react?
@@casimirlawnicki8990 He made a vow to take the elf's spear back to his home and tell everyone of his deeds. We played out a small little post session and that was part of it.
Tolkien was very troubled by the idea of Orcs being evil by default and had great misgivings about the concept. Source: his letters
Doesn't matter, it's not in the books
@@leonelegender Its also not in the Monster Manual that the standard orc presented in there is a Grey Orc which is the most civilized of the types of orcs in the Forgotten Realms and that Orcs are not native to Toril, they came through a Gate opened by a wizard who just let it be open for years and then suddenly a great horde of Orcs invaded Faerun :P
@@leonelegender there are passages in the books that suggest the orcs looked to the possibility of a "better" life. Most notably is the discussion between the two orcs in the citadel where Frodo is being held captive. They talk about sneaking away and leaving the war behind and setting up a better life for them and some of their kin, where they are their own masters.
@@leonelegender It was not stated so plainly but the concept of Orcs being disloyal to Sauron is directly stated, and good Orcs are implied to exist by one very broad statement about all races having good and evil members (except elves who are always good).
@@blindbeholder9713 not all elves were good. Feanor and his sons did some evil things.
I’ll admit I was defensive about this kind of thing for a long time.
One of my best RP experiences was in an Underdark campaign. A friend of mine was playing a dwarf called Khor, and I was a duergar called Horkoal. (For those not in the know, dwarf is to duergar as elf is to drow.) The premise of our characters is that Horkoal was unpleasant to be around even by the low standards of his clan. As such, he was often sent out into the Underdark to gather rare mushrooms for use in brewing alcohols (but really his family was just hoping he’d get killed out there). Eventually Horkoal came upon Khor and tried to kill him, because All Duergar Hate Dwarves (this was a truism at the time). Long story short, Khor spared Horkoal’s life and Horkoal swore a life debt to him, much to his own chagrin.
Over the course of the campaign, Horkoal and Khor had a lot of fireside conversations. They learned to work with each other and fight to protect each other, and at some point Horkoal realized he wasn’t doing it out of obligation anymore. When finally presented with the chance to be free of Khor by turning him over to an illithid, Horkoal refused. He had come to care about Khor more than anything because Khor was the only person who ever treated Horkoal with any kind of decency. He treated him like a person. It was a beautiful thing.
I remember telling this story one day and a friend challenged me on it. She asked me if that story could have possibly functioned without the need for All Duergar Are Evil. And I realized it could have. There could have been some other reason for their peoples to not get along besides racial hatred due to inherent evil. And it probably would have made for an even better story.
So yeah, I get the resistance. But there are better ways.
It makes sense to move away from humanoid species being inherently good or evil, at least if we leave out embodiments of certain alignments like devils or celestials. The dominant cultures of the likes of Duergar, Drow or Orcs are still evil and thus most of the individuals are as well, though. And that’s why other species like humans would usually not want anything to do with members of these species. They would either attack them or flee. They would not let them in their cities or accept them into their societies, not even as second class citizens. And that’s exactly how it was handled in older editions. But now? Here is an example: In Baldur’s Gate 3 you encounter lots of Drow in the very city of Baldur’s Gate and it seems like that’s perfectly normal there. In Baldur’s Gate 2, which takes place around 130 years earlier, people in Athkatla wanted to burn a Drow at the stake, simply because she was a Drow. WotC just shadow rectonned all major societies in their settings to be extremely inclusive and ignore their own security interests in thar regard.
The problem with that retcon is that it just doesn’t make much sense that all major human societies are now much more tolerant than even the most progressive real-life societies. That doesn’t fit late typical medieval/early renaissance D&D settings at all. It also takes aways a huge part of what made playing a characters of these species interesting in the first place. Your character doesn’t have to sneak into cities anymore. They don’t have to hide their identity. Their origin will not automatically trigger conflicts that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. They will, at worst, get a snarky remark from an npc here and there. Most DMs won’t even do that, though. If you care about societies and sociologies of fantasy setting even making the faintest bit of sense, this is simply immersion breaking.
You didn’t mention the early alignment charts in Chainmail and OD&D. In Chainmail, orcs were Chaotic and in OD&D they were Neutral or Chaotic. This information was elsewhere so it didn’t need to be in their statblocks. Orcs didn’t need gods because like other non-humans, they didn’t have souls. Greyhawk changed that by adding in elf and dwarf clerics who could heal and raise elves and dwarfs from the dead.
I also appreciate that the book explicitly tells the referee to create multiple orc nations in the rules so that they are non-monolithic unlike in modern iterations of the game.
I didn’t realize that, that’s wild!
@@braedenmclean5304 But the rules don’t say they aren’t. In OD&D, you rolled a die when you encountered orcs to determine which nation they were from for the infighting rule so you needed at least 6 nations (the first printing of the rules gave several examples from the Ring Cycle: orcs of the Red Eye, White Hand, Misty Mountains, Moria, Isengarders, and Mordor).
I have the impression that the Lawful - Neutral - Chaotic alignment from OD&D is better suited to creating interesting characters and cultures than the Good and Evil alignment approach. But perhaps the color system from MTG is even better than all of this... or maybe it's better to remove the alignment altogether
@@Vopyr Law and chaos in original DnD literally just meant good and evil though. Every good creature was lawful, and every evil creature was chaotic. "Evil high priest" was one of the main examples of a chaotic human. Pretty funny, because I could not possibly imagine a more lawful concept than organized, hierarchical religion
@@Sina-dv1eg, Unfortunately yes, this is true. Too bad that they use Lawful and Chaos system like this.
Really cool to see some of the history of Gruumush and the orcs.
I think the biggest problem with orcs in general is that everything in the books is presented as the one truth. I'd really like to see more mythology in the books as supplemental sidebars. I can only imagine having a sidebar with the story of Gruumsh being upset that Corellon took the place Gruumsh wanted for the orc people and so fought him for the right, even though Corellon had drawn his lot fair and square. During the fight, Corellon accidentally cuts Gruumsh's eye out, which he immediately loses amidst the chaos of the scuffle. Gruumsh then swore petty vengeance that day for the supposed indignities Corellon made him suffer and set his people out on a blood oath to find his eye and exterminate the other mortal races for daring to cross him.
But then on the very next page, we get a side bar that tells of the great betrayal of the gods to Gruumsh. Where he was never told about the drawing of lots but his one magnificent eye sees all and so when he found out he was enraged at this trickery. As the gods laughed in their victory, they mockingly asked Gruumsh where his people would live. Gruumsh simply pointed his spear to the world and claimed it would be there. That his people would earn their right to live, unlike the other races, and prove themselves worthy. That the road would be long and hard for his people, but that they had the strength to endure such hardships and inherit the world long after all the other races would fall to time.
Hell yes.
Hell. Yes.
HELL. YES.
My enthusiasm aside, this feeds off an issue about how so many D&D players think about the gods - their argument is often, “If the gods were real, then how could there be disagreement about whether they exist/how powerful they are,” and something like this hits the same pitfall. And that’s gonna have to be a subject for another day, because I have a lot of thoughts about the gods in D&D 😁
Heck it would also be a neat bit of lore if it turned out Lloth had it this whole time and was hiding it from Grumsh and was disloyal to Corellon even back then, and the whole being cheated out of his chance to draw lots was her playing the two against each other.... Would be fun to see the resulting war that happens should this ever come to light.... Orc delving into the Underdark after learning the truth as now there is a genocidal war between the Orcs and the Drow over control over the underdark.... That could be neat....
@@minnion2871 Old one eye would still hate Corellon there, even if it's just due to losing an eye there.
@@AzraelThanatos Perhaps, though I wonder what Corellon would do with this information.... War between Orcs and Drow still seems likely, even if old one eye still hates Corellon....
Thank you for building this case out. The loss of nuance in later books is really such a shame, since it makes the world feel so hollow. I always mention the owlin race - five sentences of flavor text, and four of them just describe owls. Imagine coming to a game where you and the DM have wildly different ideas about what your race is generally like, because the books do so little to explain them.
The Owlin are one of the biggest travesties in modern DnD. What an amazing concept for a race... but there is nothing about what their society looks like, how they interact with other races, what their place in the Feywild is, or even their most basic of stereotypes, like dwarves with being stubborn, or elves being free-spirited.
I just wonder why the Owlin aren't linked to the Aarakocra at all. They're both predatory bird humanoids and that would at least give the Owlin more background than WoC's "idk they came from giant Feywild owls".
@@affsteak3530 They really can't go there nowadays. With the possible either a storytelling or a storywriting game that's collaborative.
exception of specific worlds like Krynn, they are avoiding anything that could in any construe Lore or Cultures. One of the new unspoken rules at WoTC is obviously " Make nothing that gives any indication of anything that can be perceived as telling a player what their character might be like, beyond it's physical attributes, and make those as malleable as possible."
They can't create Lore that says that Aarakocra and Owlin are related... because a player might not want that to be the case for their character.
Owlin are a weird example because they came from Magic: The Gathering (they were introduced to D&D in the Strixhaven book), and since they've only appeared in one Magic set where they were background characters *at best,* we don't really have any information on them beyond "there's bird-people in this set's world! and this time they look like owls, rather than eagles/falcons like the Aven from other sets."
It's honestly really, *really* weird that they even threw in that line about Feywild giant owls, because... the Feywild isn't a concept that exists in Magic: The Gathering.
I just now thought of another way you can still use the Gruumsh lore given without pigeon holing the whole ancestry. Factions, just like in any religion in the real world, you'll have different groups based on interpretations of their beliefs. Having a faction of more 'typical' orcs vs a faction that believe that Gruumsh was talking about more traditional war and not going out commiting heinous acts. Ones that believe he had his eye shot out and ones that don't. Something like that would be a great way of deepening how orcs can work in a game and just generally make them more interesting overall to interact with.
Nobody expects the Orcish Inquisition!
Definitely!
Hell, maybe you can have groups that worship both Corellon AND Gruumsh, seeing Corellon as Gruumsh's equal for being able to shoot out his eye, or orcs that think that Gruumsh and, say, Kord, are the exact same deity (in a similar way as Romans who often claimed that the deities that other populations worshippe were actually the Roman gods under a different name). Maybe some orcs actually worship other deities and don't even know who Gruumsh even is
In my homebrew pantheon, there's a god only referred to as "The Sleeping God". He's currently a mountain range in a humanoid shape that was literally put to sleep to stop him from destroying the world in a great storm. He's the God of Storms, and all weather comes from his dreams, but the strongest Malstrom now is nothing compared to what he did when awake. When the gods put him to sleep, they erased his name from existence, so that no one could call him to awaken. He's not so much "evil" as "chaotic", but he would absolutely wipe life off the Earth if he ever woke up.
This is the nature vs nurture argument. Even in Tolkien, they were mistreated elves, twisted and shaped into evil by Morgoth and later Sauron. I think Gruumsh was likely an attempt to sever the orcs from the Tolkien orcs & elves more permanently. The existence of Gruumsh means that orcs aren’t just twisted and evil elves, as in the Silmarillion.
I played a half-orc priest of Baghtru back when Monster Mythology came out. He had a more nuanced philosophy and his being a part of the party brought to light the more bullying aspects of the paladin in the group’s religious zeal. “You break legs for your god, yes?” was the question that broke the paladin’s player. It was the “are we the bad guys?” moment in the campaign.
Great video. You gave good attention to the badassery that does come from the lore while still making clear that nuance is what you're advocating.
I liked the bits with the voices and the wardrobe change lol
Thank you!
I actually really like the interpretation of Gruumsh getting cheated out of his part of the world. So much so that I used it in my setting! Only I had him fight Corellon for dominion of part of the world and lost. So the "gift" he gave his people was the "struggle to exist" belonging nowhere Orcs have become a darwinistic, tribal meritocracy. Their religion and philosophy is actually based on The Hive from Destiny believing that they must "take" everything they were denied and when they ascend to their "last true shape" they will be an oricsh race cabaple of taking what they were denied. To that end their biology is similar to Krogen from Mass Effect where living in hostile environments for millennia has fostered them to be hardier and have "back-up" organs and systems. This also serves as an in-game explanation for a PC's Relentless Endurance.
But I digress, all of the above are the reasons they seem so brutal to other civilizations, but not evil or at least not all of them are evil and there are upsides to the meritocracy most tribes are organized by which I am always delighted my players get to see, add to, and interact with!
This has nothing to do with the above point but orcs see the taking of a life as the most sacred. So I stole a phrase from one of my favorite shows and "Repitza" is a common orcish phrase, greeting, praise, exacerbation, prayer etc.
Edit: I cannot believe I never saw the parallels to Vikings. I super wanna weave themes, style, or design of vikings into my game now!!
I honestly never saw the parallel to Vikings. I have always believed that Gygax was inspired as much by original Star Trek as any other source. Consider the main races... Humans. Unfeeling Elvish creatures (Vulcans) who had a civil war, creating an offshoot species that was evil (Romulans). Evil Lizard men. A humanoid evil protagonist species that was as powerful as the others, and were Evil. (Klingons) The Episode Journey to Babel showed what could be Dwarves or halflings, as well as angry Pig headed creatures. As the evolution of the Klingons evolved in the 1980s, I always felt they seemed to follow the evolution of the Klingons in many ways.
Ooh that makes a lot of sense
I love it!
Man I can’t tell you how much Destiny has inspired so much of my writing and creation in other games. Specifically the sword logic has been center to so many things.
Personally I’ve always seen orcs as more reminiscent of mongols. Nomadic, poly-spiritual, and a focus on strength and conquest that goes beyond the norm. The norse and danes where largely agricultural, and had complex political structures and society that doesn’t translate to how orcs are often described societally. Of course that is not to say you have to follow that reading. The joy of dnd is making stuff your own. But it is an observation.
I have an adventure I want to run about goblins (who're also considered evil by most), where different survivors of goblins banded together and learned that if they keep doing what they've been doing, sooner or later, adventurers/soldiers will show up and destroy them. So they first move into an abandoned dwarfstead, use whatever they dind there to mine and sell, help out the surrounding villages instead. When the PCs show up they discover that the goblins have been taken over by hobgoblins/bugbears and the surviving leaders of the goblin is asking for help get ridd of them and save as many goblins they can, even the villages want them to help the goblins as they have been good neighbours. I think this could be very fun.
I very much enjoyed this video, I agree with all of your points and will now be shaping my orcs more like Vikings, but I also love the Urgal thought as well.
Also, I'm enjoying seeing your videos get cleaner. That teleprompter is definitely something that helped you out so much.
Thank you so much!
I think very recently, they also changed goblinoid lore to make them more fey like and forced to do evil by their evil warmongering god. (who killed their original creator gods and brough goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears under one banner as goblinoids).
Also how much do you know about Orcs in Tolkien's world? If memory serves, they used to be elves but were corrupted by Morgoth, the literal Satan analogue. Of course, that was written after Lord of the Rings, but still another instance of evil races getting evil gods or god-like beings. Also I feel that Orcs being coded as the old monsterous depiction of Vikings was the intent, especially since the head god of the Norse, Odin, has one eye. On another note, there is also the Famorian King Balor from Celtic mythology who may also have been an inspiration for Gruumsh.
I really enjoyed the breakdown of orcs across editions, and learning more about the old DnD pantheons. I think it adds to the point about the Thermiaen Argument that all of this is made up, and is the way that it is because someone writing those books chose to make it so and to make changes over the years. It demonstrated that the official lore isn't set in stone
Now I want to play an orc cleric or paladin looking for an eye. Thank you Mike.
Really appreciate this series
Thank you!
For me the major problem has always been that there's always been some kind of person who takes fluff as rules as written e.g. wargamer types in 1e, Rules Lawyers/Party Killers in 2e, and people who came to it as a video game in 3/4/5e, and the same types tend towards and idea of everything RAW being an intricate part of the game that if you take it out or modify it makes the game an unplayable mess like it was a Triple A game (or for the older editions a simple to set up and play RPG)
I'd say that's the larger thing that ends up being where a LOT of the problems and a lot of the justifications and excuses are coming from, ignoring that even as far back as 1e I was seeing people modify things like alignment on monsters, different gods, race-class limits (and 2e made that official with an optional rule and a little work), hell even the world and idea of it being more than just "go into the dungeon/wilderness and kill things". Quite frankly the focus on RAW and taking everything in the books as RAW has been a longstanding problem that From 1e-3e it was a perjorative (because it was never arguing RAW all the time, just when it was convenient for them), and the phrase, "not a video game" from 3.5 onwards.
Really liked this vid. Great job digging into the old sources and showing how it developed over time. Honestly I'd watch general lore deep dives from you. The overall presentation had great pacing and the right level of depth.
(Also going to borrow some of those Viking ideas; getting a bit tired of my 'early industrializing' orcs.)
Glad you enjoyed it!
While the argument is sometimes made in bad faith, it also sometimes isn't, and I think that's why this video was a good idea, rather than just pointing to the Thermian Argument video. There are absolutely people who, when you explain that the gods justification came *after* the decision to make orc culture evil, will reevaluate their stance, even if its a minority of people. (Also, a history of orcs throughout D&D is just a cool video for the rest of us lol)
Thank you ☺️☺️☺️
You have to remember that, when D&D first came out it in 1970s, it sprung out of wargaming and, with that, you just needed armies to fight - so humans/elves vs. orcs. You didn't care why. They didn't need a massive backstory or justification - just make the other side "evil" like they were in LotR. Then, as the D&D campaign worlds evolved, people made up the lore for their worlds and this sort of mythology grew to fit those worlds. I doubt it was meant as a "justification" - people were just storytelling in the style of the Greek (and other cultures) myths. Take a look at Runequest Glorantha for other example of this - in that case, the mythology was largely there before the rules though.
@@ricardojuanlopeznaranjo6651 This argument falls apart the INSTANT someone points out that people aren’t born as Nazis - that’s an evil ideology. I never said an orc couldn’t be evil because of their ideology. In fact, I specifically said that having an orc be evil for a *reason* is preferable to being evil by default. This is the weakest possible bad faith argument that betrays how badly you missed the point, and you should feel embarrassed that you wrote it.
Yes, the orcs did come from Tolkien, as I talked about in these videos. Making them all evil by default is still deeply lazy and problematic; crediting that to Grandpappy Tolkien doesn’t change that. Same with citing Gygax as the source - having high esteem for the folks responsible doesn’t mean it’s good writing.
Lol and of course you you have to wrap it up with a bunch of culture war bullshit. Because the “snowflake” in this situation certainly CAN’T be the person who can’t handle someone saying “orcs don’t have to be bad.” 🙄😂
I’ve somehow gotten under your skin in a major way, but rest assured, I’m never going to think about you again. Peace.
First, let me say I have no issue with WotC getting rid largely of evil peoples like Orcs and Drow to make them represent a spectrum. (Still, this makes me wonder what will become of Mind Flayers and vampires. What about fiends?)
But something that I don't like is the presumption that it's an inherently better game where everything is shades of grey. I get way too much of that in real life. Good and evil are human constructs and assholes use their own definitions to fight each other. This is entirely exhausting.
D&D is a fantasy game, and part of the fantasy is that Good and Evil are actual things. They are fundamental forces of existence and it's cathartic to be able to destroy evil without any concern of making the wrong decision. Even still, my idea of Good means mercy is shown to Evil when possible (this is in stark contrast to Gygax's ideas). Again, this is part of the fantasy-- I can be so Good that I will wave my right to destroy Evil. In a game where Good and Evil don't exist, I'm just someone who isn't murdering someone else. Whoopie.
I don't find the point that Gruumsh didn't appear until a few books down to be very compelling, because of course that didn't happen. The world building happens over time. People imagine the conflicts, then they fill in the reason for the conflicts. Those early books were really thin. And don't you think it's interesting that they developed Gruumsh when they weren't under any pressure to explain why orcs are evil?
This happened a ton in D&D. Yeah, it was okay to make generalizations about different monsters, but there could still be exceptions. And it's playing against type that makes Drizzt interesting. An orcish bard dandy is inherently more interesting in a world where you expect orcs to be violent marauders.
In the end, it's a game. These are creatures in the Monster Manual. They exist to be defeated in dungeons by the players. Making them evil means you can do that.
Yes, Gruumsh was created, in part, to justify having orcs be dungeon fodder-- so what? Why is the timing relevant? I don't understand why you seem to think it's some kind of ah-ha moment. This would only make sense if orcs were already a nuanced people, then you're accusing D&D of doing orcish propaganda to make them seem like they were always evil... but, like, they aren't real. They're fictional. They aren't humans. They're monsters.
It would be interesting to see someone actually make some argument about why a god couldn't influence their chosen to be evil, but I don't see people do that.
The real issue seems to be that marginalized people see themselves in orcs and drow with they way they are described. And I would very much agree that this is an issue. We should be aware of how language, imagery, and context can aggravate the wounds of the traumatized and work to mitigate that. It just seems like to me "no evil races" is, ironically, an unnuanced stance. And it doesn't seem like this is the real metric people want. I don't see people defending the goblinoids or gnolls. And, like I mentioned earlier-- what about Mind Flyers? People are their food and incubators for their offspring.
Changing orcs and drow because they hurt people should be a good enough reason to do so. We don't need to hide behind the idea of a "better, more nuanced game". Nor do we need to address that orcs and drow are corrupted by their gods since it's actually irrelevant to the issue at hand. We can just choose to be decent people and make D&D more hospitable to more players.
Yo Mike I love the channel but the cyclops design is just so metal I don't blame Matt for that one bit!
Uggggghhh I hate the cyclops approach so much lolol
@@SupergeekMike I didn't know until this video that paragraph existed, but the middle ground Matt finds is cool, c'monnnn
Its fun hearing you talk about Orc ressembling vikings because hearing you narrate the history of the orcs and their culture I started imaging them as the Gallic
with the point on how they will do orcs in onednd. Wizards have been taking some strides in clarifying that the standard "idea" of drow are actually mainly based on drow from the city of menzobarrazan (which is a Lolth-cult) and that there are other drow cities that do not fit with this idea.
Even having options in stat blocks for things to change depending on whether a drow matriarch is a follower of lolth or not (removing some of the spider/poison abilities). Baby steps, but showing "diversity" in the stat blocks communicates the idea that they are actually trying (and not doing it half-assed)
Agreed, I think they’ve made improvements on the drow since 5e’s player’s handbook, but there are also very few drow NPC/monster stat blocks since then (at least, that I have seen), so I hope they distill some of these changes down to some lore that will be visible in the new publications.
@@SupergeekMike there are some (the ones with the changes) in monster of the multiverse.
And i think they recognise that anything presented to a player (like drow or orc) that has historically been poorly portrayed needs to get a new coat of paint in "core" books.
imagine thinking you found Vecnas eye, and it turns out to be Gruumsh's eye
Oooh
Our group’s current campaign is set in a land based on Ptolemaic Egypt and we established early on that the biggest foreign threat were Orcs, but here they’re styled off the Roman Empire with Latin names and titles. The Orcs consider themselves the “most civilized” of the nations in contrast to their usual role as “savages” (hate that term). Not all Orcs are evil, but Orcish nobles have been villains because they work for an empire which is seeking through politics and war to annex the kingdom in which the PCs reside and have already occupied the homeland of my PC who is the only not native-born party member.
I don’t have much to add today.
But I just wanted to say that I love your videos and I appreciate the effort you put into every one of them
Thank you so much!
This is a really great way to RP an Orc within a campaign.
thing with the dark elves is that the original dark elves from Mystara weren't necesarily evil as a culturethey just hated surface elves because surface elves left them to die during an ancient apocalypse and they had to move and live underground to survive.
also i really like the Gruumsh origin story but i kind of found it to be unfair to Gruumsh. it gives great nuance to the argument of evil orcs, but also from the perspective of that story all other gods are evil figures to the orcs. the human gods can be seen as corrupt, letting themselves be swayed b y the other gods against Gruumsh, the dwarf god as greedy, taking the mountains and therefore all the bounty under the earth and the elven gods as agressors. quick to attack and harm Gruumsh. a good excuse to commit violence upon them.
a version i like is the 4th edition one where both Gruumsh and Corellon are twin brothers representing the destructive and creative facets of chaos. i think this adds a lot to the story of Corellon cutting Gruumsh' eye.
i use the 4th edition gods so i made "expanded" the myths a little, for fun. in my setting Torag & Lolth tried to take over their respective pantheons by killing the heads of each one. in this version Torag is the son of Moradin and dwarven god of arcane magic. Lolth convinces corellon that his brother tried to do something terrible, Torag does the same so both Moradin and Corellon leave Gruumsh out of the partition of the world. Lolth then tries to sabotage Corellon's battle with Gruumsh by enchanting an arrow into hitting Corellon in his left shoulder, the arm holding the shield, but at that moment Corellon strikes the eye. when the traitorous intent of both Torag & Lolth gets revealed, Lolth gets turned into a spider for spinning a web of lies and Torag gets beaten into the ground so hard and so throughly he crawls thourgh the underdark forever disfigured incapable of ever finding the surface, but the damage is already done. also corellon loses his right hand to balance out the losses of all gods. in the end, Torag, Lolth and Gruumsh get casted down, Gruumsh swears revenge on all including both Torag and Lolth. Corellon gets a silver hand and a painful shoulder and the dwarven and elven pantheon blame each other for the corruption of their respective traitorous gods. who corrupted Torag and Lolth is never revealed. was it Asmodeus? Tharizdun? Tiamat? Zehyr? a secret surviving Primordial? who knows
I think an interesting thing with this is that there are/were cultures that have/had a lot of cultural norms that we would generally feel are evil (*cough*19th century USA*cough*), but not all the people in those cultures were “evil”. Sure they owned slaves or had rampant abusive child labor or participated in human sacrifice or buried a husband’s wives when the husband died or committed attempted genocide, but most of them didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. Those who perpetrated those practices should be the targets of ire, not the average joe.
If you want the drow or orcs or humans to be “evil”, have their leaders believe and perpetrate the evil parts, but have your average person be just that. Your average person.
Jim Bob the orc may hate elves, but that’s because he’s been taught that that is the way of things all his life. He’s not particularly mean and likes to joke around with his friends and has a wife and kids.
Wilma the drow may be…(I honestly have very little idea what the “normal” drow culture is supposed to be), but that’s just normal. She’s quite pleasant and an loves the physical prowess she’s able to practice in the military.
Really truly evil people exist. For sure. But most people who believe things we consider evil are not, they have been taught evil beliefs and never looked past them.
This this this this THIS.
Great job! really enjoy your arguments here!
This video gave me a cool character concept. Imagine an Arthurian Knight looking for the grail, but it is an Orc Paladin searching for Gruumshs lost eye, hoping it will end this great conflict. Maybe the Paladin being of good alignment has caused Gruumsh to abandon to paladin, and another god is aiding in the quest, or maybe Gruumsh is assisting.
Lots of potential to explore ideas inherent to Orc culture. What does it mean to be strong? Why do we need vengeance? What is true destruction?
I love it!
Well stated. I really liked this episode & the last one. I've played D&D for along time & I am very far removed from the PC sanctioned monster slaughter that is Keep on the Borderlands. I want the characters I play to be challenged and have to deal with the nuance you discuss.
One of the reasons I love Critical Role so much is that Mercer's villains aren't evil 'cause their orcs. It's 'cause their orc pirates trying to drown the heroes and working to be back some ancient evil bent on world destruction. Even then, they aren't bestial 'creatures' with no redeeming or qualifying qualities.
I recently played the 5e module Out of the Abyss and the party got to a point where they were working with a Drow wizard to stop the demonic incursion. He wanted the party to plant the device he created to remove the demons within the city of Menzoberranzan. My paladin was the only one to balk at the idea of doing this since the Drow were 'evil anyway.'
Luckily, in between the two campaign sessions, the rest of the party changed their minds - and even seemed shocked at my confusion when then they discussed their revised plans. ;-) I just have a problem with an entire race/species/etc... being inherently evil - far too much like real world propaganda for my tastes.
Also, people should remember that Tolkien himself wanted to change his Orcs somehow. As a catholic, he had a problem reconciling the concept that the orcs were wholly irredeemable.
Very well said!
@@SupergeekMike Thanks!
An interesting observation here is that every time we ask why they're evil, if you don't stop at "they just are" you make them necessarily deeper and more interesting, and also remove that inherent part of evil. Maybe all orcs are evil in this world, but if they actually have a story explaining it, it is coincidence that all are evil and none removed those villainous shackles, not an in-built frature of their entire being.
I've always liked the idea of solving the whole Gruumsh problem by adding a fairly simple idea to a setting: *Gruumsh isn't actually the creator and patron god of orcs even if though he claims to be.*
The general concept being that Gruumsh is just one god among several orcish deities with as wide a range of alignments/personalities as any human pantheon, but has convinced some (though not all) orcish cultures that he's the rightful ruler of all orcs and all orcish gods, and within those cultures their mythology has been warped to idolize him above all. Basically, imagine if Bane claimed to be the patron god of all humankind, and in cultures that revered him had his church push revisionist history depicting Bane as humanity's creator and rightful ruler of the pantheon.
The key to making it work well would be to give orcs some nuance and have plenty of orcish cultures that worship other gods and aren't anywhere near as antagonistic towards other cultures as Gruumshite cultures. Could provide some interesting worldbuilding to have non-Gruumshite orcish mythology heavily feature stories about Gruumsh being a rogue tyrant that much of the rest of the orcish pantheon fight to resist.
"Basically, imagine if Bane claimed to be the patron god of all humankind..." Bane the Batman villain?
@@Lordmewtwo151 Bane is the Forgotten Realms deity of conquest, tyranny, and so on.
@@mr.incorporeal7642 Ah, Got it. I thought that role was filled by Hector (Hexor? Something with an h). Different setting.
@@Lordmewtwo151 Yeah, Hexor is from Greyhawk.
Thing is even if grumsh is their creator god both in people's campaign and I believe in lore their are good orcs goblins and even mind flayers so while orcs are evil their can still be out liers with drizzt the drow being the best example.
16:43 if you haven’t already, I’d recommend watching “Norsemen” (aka Vikingane) …it’s great.
Edit: 11:00 - and thank you for that!
Recently found your channel and I have been really loving it.
I've never really liked alignment and have always had some against-type factions in my worlds. Sure there are the scary sppoky goblins, but there are also the mongolian-inspired nomadic goblins that are sometimes allies, I have a noble aloof aristocratic Vampire who just wants to protect his village (for that sweet blood tax), orcs with complex cities. Story telling is too much fun to try to stuff whole species into 9 neat boxes.
Over the last few years I have been attempting to add nuance to my portrayal of Orcs, Goblins, Kobolds and other ancestries commonly denoted as Evil with a capital "E" in D&D. I started my current campaign running "The Sunken Citadel", where I gave Meepo's tribe of Kobolds a clearer motivation. They were living in the citadel before the Druid and his Goblin followers took over the area around the Gulthias Tree. They want the goblins to return their dragon wyrmling and to stop attacking them. To this end I made them willing to negotiate with the party, and Meepo and some other Kobolds accompanied the group to fight the Druid.
Later on the group encountered a peaceful Goblin with a pet snake who was quite friendly.
I added a Hobgoblin Warrior traveling under peace banner as an encounter, and an Orc Wizard who was evil, but not because of Gruumsh's influence, and who wasn't an opponent of the party.
My next adventure will include an Orc member of the Athar, handing out pamphlets denouncing the Orc pantheon.
I love it!
Man I want a book of history and lore for DND gods. I know a few TH-cam channels do it but I just love mythology and the like
It was so fun, but man it was daunting; I missed or had to leave out a bunch of stuff lol
I mean, orcs being evil because of their god are due to Morgoth creating them. Which is the issue that orcs were made so that Tolkien wouldn't be glamorizing violence against "real" people. The argument is that you've already "humanized" them and made them something different from zombies.
On orcs being vikings, I've toyed with that coding, but also being germanic tribes in a Roman based setting and as Mongolians with cars, being the only race that knows how to make them with other races trying to steal their war machines.
Given the context of this video, I thought it might be interesting to know that in "Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer Issue #6, the UK exclusive magazine, there is a short part on Gruumsh and Orcs in "the North" of the Forgotten Realms. Quote: "Since then, Gruumsh has led his followers across all planes of existence in a mission of ceaseless destruction - though, of course, not all orcs swear allegiance to him. Those that do are largely ravagers and raiders." Later in an encounter provided in the issue for Phandalin it reads "Orcs sometimes roam the North but rarely raid or pillage its settlements" which I thought was remarkable given how previous editions had made it quite clear that the original Phandalin was destroyed by a massive orc horde. In the encounter itself, orcs surround Phandalin after a greedy human mercenary killed two young orcs at a private wedding ceremony on a mountaintop and took the offerings the pair had brought for Luthic. The orcs also don't immediately attack and kill everybody, but hurl a message tied to a javelin into town, proclaiming how their queen demands blood and requests for representatives of the town to meet with her at some standing stone. The magazine likely does not constitute the "most official" of sources, but I still thought it was interesting.
Lawful evil? I always thought of them as more chaotic evil.
@zooker7938 That does make a lot of sense, thanks for the insight!
Melkor. Sauron's evil god. He made orcs that way. The trope pre-dates D&D, it's right there in Tolkien.
And Sauron's sign was the unblinking eye. So they clearly just transposed that over into D&D.
Mike, good sir, that is a nice suit.
Content wise, thanks for making this, I unfortunately never used or saw Orcs as simply evil foot soliders. I'm a big fan of Warcraft Orcs and I kinda make it my goal to make them honorable as all hell.
I really dig your videos, keep up the great work!
Thank you so much!
Check out the "Orcs and Half-Orcs" episode of the Manifest Zone podcast.
There are a lot of orcs among the Gatkeeper druids, who maintain the seals which keep aberrant extraplanar threats sealed away.
The Gatekeepers are the oldest of the many druid sects of Khorvaire, though they were heavily decimated during the invasions of the daelkyr. Their main task is to defend nature against aberrations, outsiders, undead, and similarly unnatural beings.
The first of the Gatekeepers, orcs, were taught their magic by the dragon Vvaraak.
Nice twist with the voice over bit.
Great vid overall
Thank you!
Nice job handling such a complex topic. This and the last video hopefully provide people with the opportunity to be a little introspective on these matters. Yes the context here is D&D but you pointed to some IRL parallels that I hope didn’t go over anyone’s head. Bravo.
Thank you!
In the DND world I'm creating Orcs are Nomads. Taking something from Tolkien Orcs in my universe were once elves. But they betrayed their own people for more power. A conflict known as the Elven Civil War. When they lost the war as punishment for their hubris and treachery the elven god(Not sure if it's gonna be Corellon or a homebrew god yet) transformed the dissenters into monsters and stripped away their magical power. From now on they would be known as the orcs and doomed to wander the world forever without a homeland.
Orcs in the present day in my world are nomads found all over. While there are some who wish to move past their legacy of being betrayers and want to live in peace with other races there are just as many who want to reclaim the power they lost.
So there you go. More than enough room for a variety of moral spectrums across all Orcs in my universe.
"Gruumsh's symbol is a great unwinking eye". Or, as we sometimes call that since his symbol is presumably a static image not animated, "an eye". 😋
I think a game of D&D often benefits from having an enemy that is just undeniably "evil". I never really cared for alignment, but I make sure that there is one faction in the game where the heroes can just slay on sight.
While I agree that quick and easy enemies can be useful, I think that those enemies should not be defined as a monolithic species of intelligent mortal beings. I would much prefer to have a clearly defined evil faction which is instantly recognizable by their uniform, not their race.
@@Aaarrrgh89 Why though?
@@kurtschroeder6736 because intelligent mortals should have (some degree of) free will. If you say that beings that can think and feel always choose to be evil, that has some pretty awkward philosophical implications. Note that I'm specifying mortals here. Undead, fiends, and certain kinds of elementals and aberrations can be killed on sight without a lot of the dark implications, because their minds are not implied to be similar to human minds. But anything which experiences life in a way that is relatable to humans is effectively human, philosophically speaking. And if you say that a group of humans are always going to choose evil based solely on the circumstances of their births, that becomes highly problematic.
That’s definitely true. There’s a great Matt Colville video called “Everybody Loves Zombies” but don’t be fooled by the title, he touches on what we have covered in these videos and covers the difference between innately evil creatures and evil factions or organizations of those creatures. It’s a great vid:
th-cam.com/video/cTp9SdpcvF8/w-d-xo.html
So, there was a series of posts on the Giant in the Playground message boards that took one of the DnD pantheons (Greyhawk, I think) and tried to flesh them out into believable religions that would still put the gods in the roles players come to expect. So, for example, Olidammarra does encourage his followers to treat the world as though it's all theirs (he is still a god of thieves), but that this attitude also includes taking *responsibility* for all of it. Those helpless people? They're YOUR people! Help them! That temple to another god? It's your temple, too, so defend it!
The author never did get around to Gruumsh, but I wish they had.
Honestly, I kinda want to see a CR player play a follower of a Betrayer God as a sympathetic character (and not because they're deceived about their deity's nature)@. I get that, say, Tharizdun would be hard to give the Sympathetic Villain Motivation to, but I think it'd add a lot if the Betrayers weren't all quite so mustache-twirly.
Hey Carl was on time exactly :)
Carl nailed it!
Me as a mixed kid D&D player, “You know, I’m something of an unsavory mongrel myself”
Honestly, I think the whole discussion is just overblown and irritating at this point. People are going to have whatever kind of orcs at their table they choose. Not everyone is playing D&D for "Deep and complex worldbuilding", sometimes they just want to go kill some evil things, so that's what they do. It all really just comes down to a bunch of people posturing and having a pissing contest about "My ideal game is better than yours" while also throwing in any real world political jabs they can as well, making the entire thing one giant "bad faith" argument on both sides. I don't even run the same style of game between campaigns, I've done old school "These are all evil" just as often as I've ran games where all the players were goblins just struggling to live in a world that wants them gone just for existing. Are there discussions to be had? Yeah, probably, but videos like this in particular just come off as a long way of saying "I'm right, you're wrong, now let me focus on the weakest arguments against me so I can win in my own video", as you don't even bother having someone who's on the other side of the argument around to explain where they come from, just find the flimsiest strawman you can and say "That's the argument against this, isn't it silly?". And try to understand, I'm saying this as someone who's really enjoyed a lot of your content, but this? I honestly feel like this was just not the hill to go die on and make into such a big thing, and no matter what political side you're on, I will ALWAYS get irritated when people talking about the game where we roll dice and play pretend have to start bringing in real world politics and snide remarks.
These are my thoughts exactly. I've been a fan of this channel, but these last two videos have left a bad taste in my mouth. Especially the complete dismissal of seemingly all arguments/rebuttals against his points and the bad faith in which he's presenting opposing arguments to make them look flimsy. Everything here comes off as less of a nuanced piece or persuasive argument and more of a persecution of people in the audience who think differently than him.
I also hate that people feel the need to bring race politics into the hobby, and I'm a POC. This is literally a fucking GAME where fellow nerds improv adventures, make bad puns, and do math for 2 - 4 hours. If you don't enjoy it, change it and if you do keep it. It's that simple.
Yeah, some people find being asked to be thoughtful about the media they consume and create to be irritating.
Dammmn i ran an orc mini campaign with Luthic and Gruumsh as focal background deities and wish id known some of this extra lore to spice up the Correllon beef. Great video
Out of curiosity, have you ever looked into the world and lore of Eberron. It's probably the most "different" DND world, and Orcs there are also very different and very nuanced. In the "main" continent of Khorvaire, many became Druids under a Rogue Dragon, others became clerics and paladins of their version of the Silver Flame farther west in the Demon Wastes, where they fight off demons in their self-imposed exile, and kill anyone who enters the Waste out of fear they've been tainted. In the east, other Orcs wear armor of bones, and south there are the more savage tribal orcs. I'm just touching the surface, though
Everything I hear about Eberron is always very cool! I just haven’t taken the time to sit down with the material. But I was passingly aware that the orcs of Eberron are handled much more gracefully, couldn’t have told you the details.
@@SupergeekMike Whenever you get the chance, I would highly recommend it. Thanks to DM's Guild, Keith Baker published some more works outside WOTC that are excellent. Another group he changes is his world's goblinoids. In Eberron, they are the original occupants of Khorvaire (again, the main setting continent) and had a wide spread empire called the Dhakaan Empire, until it eventually fell after decades of fighting the otherworldly forces (often alongside the Druid Orcs. Pretty ironic considering most settings). The Dhakaan treats their people almost like ants; each individual has their assigned role and no role is without import. The latrine cleaner receives the same respect as the archer, for it is not the archer who will ensure sanitary conditions, etc.
In fact, the Dhakaan goblinoids have different terms. The Ghuul'dar (strong ones) for bugbears, the Ghaal'dar (smart ones(?)) for hobgoblins, and the Golin'dar (small ones(?)) for goblins. And while you may say, that it's kinda racist in itself to do just this, the world acknowledges that. Many bugbears in present day believe that they have been tricked into the shock trooper role over for millennia by the hobgoblins, and some tribes in the newly made goblin nation resent their current hob-king.
Elsewhere, many first human colonists would believe that the ruins they found were a previous human civilization over goblin, and treat the splintered goblin groups as, well, slaves. Up until Galifar I freed goblins in his conquest/war of unity, although they are still in ways treated as second class (the end of goblin slavery takes place 998 years prior to the start date). In Droaam, the unofficial monster nation, "Goblin" is a term that refers to small creatures - specifically goblins and kobalds. The two creatures often work hand in hand.
Even though Dhakaan fell, it still has Kechs (think a mixture of clans and Fallout Vaults) that survived, with one being composed entirely of golin'dar (or just goblins), who use their "lesser status" as a front to spy on others. What they see is the old goblin seamstress instead of James Bond, but a goblin.
Sorry to gush about Eberron. It's a really extraordinary world, and I highly recommend it, especially if you cover subjects such as monstrous races. I believe it comes out, but Keith Baker's "Frontier of Eberron" is based on Droaam, an all but officially acknowledged nation composed of monsters. One city is ruled by medusas, one is governed by a mind flayer. The monarchs are three hags.
Eberron is a very organic world, and all I've gushed about is just cliff notes, really.
“Ytriss the White Handed has no mouth.” - but must he scream?
😜
Coming back to this now that the new PHb has had its big previews available to read and I think the route they went is sorta similar to the vikings idea by depicting them looking like cowboys. Just thinking about the cowboy/gunslinger fantasy from westerns (especially neo-westerns), they're capable of a lot of good and have lots of complex relationships and interior lives but they're also capable of pretty incredible violence if they feel like their cause is just and I think that that's a good space for orcs to exist in. They're not inherently violent or evil, but they can and will move heaven and earth to accomplish their goals and if an orc or group of orcs is evil then that becomes a very dangerous thing
I just like "there are just evil people, not evil races" style.
One of the great arguments against all of this is, "we need bad guys!". Yup, we do, but what people forget is that nuanced beings (humans we call them) have managed to create plenty of bad guys, evil and villains all on their own and don't seem to be getting rid of that "special" ability any time soon. Nuance is just that, nuance. It doesn't mean an end to evil orcs. It doesn't even mean an end to most orcs are evil. It just means an end to all orcs are evil.
D&D has, as you pointed out, tried to write more nuance into their world. In fact, some of the species we consider problematic these days were originally some of that nuance. I've said before that drow are one of the original attempts to remove the monoculture of elves, breaking with the shiny, happy, people vibe they tended to have. But even the drow were given greater nuance as time went by. As the Drizzt novels progressed, the one-dimensional portrayal of dark elves just didn't work and we learned there was a lot really bad nurture mixed in with that nature. The drow even had a few good, or at least less evil, deities that had glommed on to the dark elves.
You can even grow your nuance out of the "evil bad guys" trope. Fine, the world is full of angry Gruumsh hooligans who murder/death/kill so they can be good boys for orc Odin. However, maybe, just maybe, there are orcs out there who are sick of that bullshit and are smart enough to figure out, "Hey, ya know what, other gods don't ask their followers to do that." or "You know who doesn't starve and go without? Humans. Those guys are badasses at making their own food and building societies. Maybe we should try that."
I have been working nuance into the creatures of my world since 1979. If my crusty ol' D&D grognard butt can do it. Anyone else can too.
I still like evil drow though. (just not universally and unwaveringly evil).
So what about those of us that have games, not every game mind you, that don't have nuance? Are we bad people for having enemies for our players to fight, kill, and loot from?
@@squidpope9344 #1 Nobody is telling you how to play at your table.
#2 Nuance doesn't mean you can't have that.
I am going to bet that when it comes down to it, your bad guys have more reason than just "because I'm evil" going for them. Even when they are evil, there is likely motivation behind that evil.
I feel this argument gets a lot more energy from people feeling they are being judged or told how to run their games than any serious examination of what they are already doing in their games and how that may or, in so many cases, may not be different than what is being proposed.
@@elfbait3774 I appreciate the response! And yes, those of us that play less nuanced games are concerned about being judged for how we play.
In fact, in another comment thread I was very clearly judged for playing as a "Murderhobo" and "Psychopath".
And you are correct, most enemies in dungeons are there for specific reasons, not because they twirled their mustache that day and decided to hang out where maybe they could murder some unsuspecting adventurer's!
Very well-said 😁
I think you should highlight the part of the text you are reading, especially when you jump some part of the text (like with the text from chainmail).
I was completely lost trying to find the text you were reading, which means I did not fully understanding what you were saying at the same time.
Maybe it is only because I'm not a native English speaker, but I would appreciate if you add this kind of think the next time ^^
Even with that, your videos are still great, super interesting and well explained!
That was something I wish I’d had the time to do but just ran out of time when the deadline came - but something like that would be the plan for next time 😁
Really loved learning about the history of Orc and Gruumsh throughout the game and im definitely using some of that lore (as well as the idea of Orcs as Vikings) as inspiration for my own game :D
That this video even exists is all the evidence I need to back up my assertion that the biggest thing "wrong" with D&D is that the settings produced by the publisher of the game are too intertwined with the core ruleset, and that the biggest improvement that could be made to the game, and by extension, the entire RPG market and community, is divorcing those rules which really ought to be considered setting-dependent from the core mechanics of the game. This especially includes the cosmology, the races/species/ancestries, and the "monsters" (the single most problematic term/trope in all of RPGdom). Gruumsh? What Gruumsh? We don't need no stinking Gruumsh. There is no Gruumsh or Corellon Larethian in my setting. Not at my table. So, any attempt to justify the idea that someone is "inherently evil" because their god made them that way falls flat on its face, because in my cosmology, not such deity exists.
There is a argument that really does need to be addressed, and that is this idea that D&D players need "monsters" to kill, or there's no game there. I think this is a false argument. D&D does not need "monsters" in order for conflicts to exist which lead to combat. After all, "monsters" don't exist in the real world, yet war and combat exist in the real world.
I feel deficient because I'm not understanding the issue here.
If youre playing in a way with political and moral nuance then sure, I totally understand the desire to have complex villains and themes.
But that's not the only way to play D&D!
Should I have to bend over backwards to provide moral justification to my players who are dungeon delving as to why it's totally okay to kill these sentient creatures? Or can I just have them as enemies to fight so we can have fun kicking in the door and earning loot?
Nope, as I commented on last weeks video, its the difference in D&D. Some players see Orc and think "Enemy" Others see an Orc and think " Im gonna talk to him" Both are correct and wrong at the same time, depending on what kind of table they are at. A player who, like me, have been trained to see orcs as the bad guys, will have a hard time to find a reason to talk to an Orc if I am in a group of players who are of the " lets talk to it"-mentality. And the same will be said for the other player who wants to talk to it and the other players are already readying their weapons for a bloody fight :P
So clearly something to talk about in a session 0 :P
I agree. The orcs aren't real, the gods the orcs worship aren't real, the characters aren't real, and the game isn't an attempted simulation of real things.
However it is that you play at your table, as long as you are playing D&D and having fun, you are doing it right. Even if you harm 10,000,000,000 orcs during play, no real orcs were harmed.
@@Malkuth-Gaming Oh absolutely! I just sometimes feel there's a judgement being made against people who want to play a more simplistic dungeon-delving style of game versus games striving to be some sort of grand saga ready for Streaming/TV
@@squidpope9344 playing murder hobos is fine. It seems like a thin fantasy to explore, to my mind, and I can see how some might enjoy pretending to be a psychopath.
@@kelvinrichardson5324 Ah yes, every action RPG ever created clearly has had its main character(s) defined as psychopaths
The subject of D&D gods/pantheons is a huge topic as well… what should I discuss the next time I tackle that concept?
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A look back at the past evolution of pantheons for the game would be cool. The first printing of the AD&D Deities & Demigods, for example...had borrowed some stuff from copyrighted works, such as the Melnibonean deities and monsters, which they had to remove from later printings. :)
Their various interpretations of real world pantheons have been interesting, I use both the 3rd edition and AD&D pantheons for my various homebrew settings, and have done a pantheon of my own...
In the broad topic of advice for DMs, I think the most salient topic to address regarding gods and pantheons is: how present should they be in your game world?
I would greatly appreciate a Planar view (even it's more of a subpoint of a larger topic) of deities, as Planescape and then later Eberron presented it. I think Planescape and Eberron are two unique settings as regards Planes and deities. Planescape in particular massively influenced main line D&D in further editions. (E.g.: 5E Planes: static.wikia.nocookie.net/forgottenrealms/images/a/a2/Planes-5e.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20180207035855
vs.
Planescape planes: static.wikia.nocookie.net/forgottenrealms/images/b/b9/GreatWheel.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120212182059 )
In another comment, you mentioned that it bugs you when players assume that nobody would question the existence or power of D&D gods. Like, people question the reality and power of things in the real world all the time! Whether it's social constructs like ideology, or scientific concepts like immunology and ecology, there is *no end* of dispute over *very real,* worldwide things. Would be cool to see you talk about that.
@CafeNelson , I think it bears noting that it also depends on the setting. For example, in the Forgotten Realms setting, the lore states that the gods are well known for their avatars showing their existence to the people. It's hard to question whether the gods exist when you see direct evidence.
But using an example from Planescape, there's an entire faction that believes the gods of the Multiverse are just powerful beings who lied to everyone, to convince the Multiverse that gods are all-powerful. (The Athar.) And that gods are powerful, but not /all/ powerful. That the gods aren't worthy of worship.
So, I guess I'm just saying, some nuance covering various settings and perceptions of deities in those settings could be beneficial, to the topic you presented.
half orcs were a huge problem
full of half caste tropes still in dnd5
specifically describes half races in way I was taught to never say dealing with indigenous people in 1990 uni and then workplace
very cliche ridden and i had multicultural family children bring me the players book to ask me about it and i gagged and explained it was terrible
I honestly always thought Orcs in D&D were supposed to be their version of Vikings, never really looked into it more than that cos it always felt right to me. Strange how you can get an idea so stuck in your head that you start to assume that its either canon or everyone else thinks the same.
I really enjoyed this alignment series! Funny thing, halfway through the video, I commented to my wife how I always found it weird that some of the illustrators depicted Gruumsh as Cyclopean when it's always been part of his lore that he lost an eye in combat. I then made a remark about Odin, so I was well primed for your Orc Vikings idea! That's a great idea to uproot them from their Tolkienesque and Gygaxian tropes.
Lol exactly!
In a story I'm writing, Orc, Elf, Human, and Dwarf gods work together to ascend the main character to godhood
There's another issue with this sort of thing, specifically in a TTRPG: Equating this metal lore, a race, and villainy denies it to the players.
Imagine if Gruumsh were presented simply as "the metal option" for picking your character's religion. The party's front-line fighter type, regardless of species or ethnicity, might be a worshipper of Gruumsh - whether they grew up in that cultural environment or they converted when they took up the axe then provides one more easy step of potential complexity.
And, note that "cultural" in there. Religion is one of many forms of culture, and this is improving the game by making cultural matters cultural. Generally, tying culture and biology weakens both.
Unrelated, a big part of why cyclopean Gruumsh looks silly is his face is modified from human. Cyclopes whose features are based on elephant skulls are a lot less silly-looking. Weirdly, the oldest depictions basically look three-eyed - with a single eye in the forehead, brows and orbits below as you'd expect for a human, and blank skin covering those sockets.
This is a really excellent point I hadn’t considered, but you’re right, it furthers the Othering of these cultures by keeping them all distinct.
I've waited for this video to come out so that I could see all of your points before responding. I'll preface by saying that in most cases, I am in favour of the 'typically X' implementation that was talked about in the previous video. I do, however, think you've been a little unfair with rounding your opposites into one somewhat strawman-esque group. An example of this is when talking about when Wizards removed the alignment from statblocks like the jiangshi you said that "exactly the people you expect" opposed the decision, which begs the question of who you were implying those people are. I was personally opposed to the removal of alignment from statblocks for two reasons. Firstly, with creatures based on myths that are not familiar to a wide audience or with entirely invented names, it presents a barrier for DMs trying to use the material that are unfamiliar with the original source, presenting more work for DMs, particularly new ones. Secondly, because some creatures, as per D&D lore, absolutely do have one and only one valid alignment. A jiangshi is actually a fine example of that. There are no good jiangshi. It isn't down to culture or some subjective element. They do not have free will. They act in very specific ways based on specifically evil motives.
I think the biggest counterargument you didn't address in your videos is that in the cosmology of D&D good, evil, lawful and chaotic are not just subjective descriptors. They are real and tangible forces in that world and setting, and that isn't something you can just retcon without remaking a huge amount of material. There are planes like Mechanus which are inherently and entirely lawful. There are creatures like demons and devils that are defined entirely based on which alignment they fall into. If they cease to be that alignment, they cease to be a devil or a demon or whatever. Alignment as a tangible thing is woven into a massive amount of D&D lore. You even touched upon this with an aside about a sword knowing you are evil.
It's therefore helpful to think of the alignments as akin to something real and tangible. Let's think about the alignments like day and night. Animals in the real world can be strictly nocturnal, strictly diurnal, largely one of the other, or ignore the day night cycle altogether, depending on the species. In the same manner, creatures in a D&D setting can have an inherent affinity for the forces of good, evil, lawful and chaotic, which varies from non-existent to absolute. Should people be absolute about orcs or any other D&D race in particular? That's up to them, I'd say no, but I'd also say that in the same way that having all members of one race be X alignment by default is simplistic and boring, having all sentient races in your setting lack any tendency towards or affinity for any of the alignments is equally boring.
Good comment, his assertion is quite intriguing indeed ("exactly the people you expect"), it can fall on many things. Who are they? Racists? Ignorants? Seems to paint his oppositors in a very negative light even though that may not having been his intention.
Though i disagree with your notion that "having members of one race be X alignment by default is simplistic and boring", it can be as boring as you can make it to be, goblins and orcs, for instance, could be seen as phisycal manifestations of chaos and entropy, it's a simple concept, not necessarily bad or boring..... There are two pitfalls that I've come across with people debating this issue:
- The first is to assume that in order for some type of narrative aspect to be good, it must be as nuanced, profound and morally grey as it can possibly be and, by default (ironically), simple concepts are inherently bad writing.
The idea that something being "complex" makes it necessarily good is nothing more than post-modern cliché regarding narrative, it started as a genuine movement to go against the cliché of simple concepts for heroes and villains that were prevalent in the twenteeth century, but eventually it simply became the new "norm", oftentimes not questioned by writers. Some go as far as to challenge the entire notion of monsters, as to even question that evil exists, leaning hard on moral relativism.
- The second is to make real-life correlations with fantastical races, when you say that an orc "can't be evil because it draws a parallel with black people" then the one doing the parallel is you, it's a personnal problem that people are trying to address as if it is not, which, paradoxically, further extends the problem and make these comparisons sound plausible and logical (when they are not).
I think one of the problems with current D&D and why it allowed this issue to become as heated as it is, not addressing real-life ideological perspective per se, was not to dissociate the system from the scenario (in the case of 5e Forgotten Realms). If the system had no "standard lore" to be followed that is so ingrained into system as to become blury in trying to separate these things, people could just "feel like playing D&D" while describing their races and moral dillemas in an entirely unique way, because I think that many feel the need to rewrite lore because they believe that if they deviated from it they wouldn't be playing D&D anymore.
Edit: few grammar mistakes.
The Orc version of the Valkyries are called Claw's of Luthic, and make great War Domain Clerics. Imagine an Orc with the ferocity of a mamma bear, and spell casting to back it up.
Specifically, I believe it was the Orc from Orlando Furiosa, that allowed Orcs to survive the lawsuit. Because it was tusked, and "mossy" or "fungus" skinned depending on the translation, and probably why the Orcs have tusks and are largely depicted as green in modern media, as adopting these traits probably is what kept the orcs from being able to be targeted by the lawsuit.
Honestly, if you ask me... its kind of shifty, and shadey, and Orcs probably shouldnt have ended up in the public domain... but at thesame time, I love orcs conceptually and I would hate them to lose that status. I have really mixed feelings about it.
From what I know the D&D orc’s appearance may have some relationship with an official Lord of the Rings calendar.
To your other point, the term ‘orc’ was in use before LotR, being the name of a William Blake character and a sea monster in the Matter of France, not to mention the whale species orca and a creature type in Beowulf. Unlike Tolkien’s other creations, ‘orc’ was already public domain.
Honestly we can create better orcs than Tolkien just by looking at real world folklore.
So let's examine the Neapolitan orc and see what more southern Italian's have to say.
"Giambattista Basile, who wrote in the Naples dialect and claimed to be passing on oral folktales from his region. In the tales, Basile used huorco, huerco or uerco, the Neapolitan form of Italian orco, "giant" or "monster", to describe a large, hairy, tusked, mannish beast who could speak, lived in a dark forest or garden and might capture and eat humans."-Myths and Folklore Wiki
So let's break that paragraph down.
"Basile used huorco, huerco or uerco, the Neapolitan form of Italian orco, "giant" or "monster", to describe a large, hairy, tusked, mannish beast"
From this sentence we can introduce the following physical traits:
1. These Orcs are large creatures standing between 6-7 feet tall.
2. They are covered in coarse, protective body hair. Not unlike that of a boar or certain breeds of terrier.
3. They have tusks, further solidifying their pig-man image.
4. They have similar features to humankind. For the sake of being creative and continuing the superficial resemblance to pigs, let's say they have four toes and three fingers with an opposable thumb. Perhaps their ears are slightly pointed.
Let's move on to more cultural issues:
"mannish beast who could speak"
This one is extra interesting as if we take this very literally it implies that these orcs speak human languages. It's possible that there may be no orcish language at all and they simply "pirate" human languages for their own use. Perhaps they speak a universal common or simply the national language or regional dialect. Perhaps even entire clans or even tribes would not be able to communicate with one another, as they speak different human languages.
Now of course this can be taken the other way. In doing so the above statement implies that orcs have their own complex language. Perhaps they are even poly-lingual.
"lived in a dark forest or garden"
This is also interesting and brings up some interesting questions. For starters what is ment by "dark forest", is it dark because of dense tree cover? How do Orcs remain undected or alternatively remain a step ahead of a lord's (or even king's) rangers? Furthermore how do they creep in to gardens unnoticed?
To me it seems these orcs are skilled at the arts of camouflage, misdirection and maybe even slight of hand. They must also have some power over illusions (be it magical, technological or otherwise).
"and might capture and eat humans."
Now why would they do this? Humans are hardly the most efficient food source and there are more effective means of terrifying local peasants. Further why even strike fear in the first place when you are a 7 foot badass? You can just take what you want and do away with anyone who opposes you.
The thing that first come to my mind is a form of ritual consumption or blood sacrifice. Plenty of cultures in the real world, perhaps even most, have practiced human sacrifice. The Aztecs, Celts & Norse are among the most famous, but even the comparatively well off and cultured Carthagenians, Phoenicians and Romans have been speculated to have practiced it at one point or another.
So why might orcs kidnap, sacrifice and eat sentient beings?
Well perhaps the most obvious answers are to bring luck in battle or to placate some god or element. Perhaps thay believe the world will stop spinning if they don't. Therefore their society would be ruled by a cast of Lawful Evil Clerics and Anti-Paladins. Maybe they have a Neutral Evil, or even Chaotic Neutral emperor who doesn't believe the clerics nonsense but actively benefits from playing along.
Now does this mean than all the orcs of this particular tribe or nation believe or support this evil? No of course not. Even if it is a minority, some orcs are actively going to oppose and fight this evil. People forget that even in places like Nazi Germany there were domestic resistance movements. At the very least the vast majority of the orc population is going to be Lawful Neutral. Just following the law and going about their business as many Aztecs did. Because ultimately, people just want to get on this their own lives, and orcs would be no different. The sacrifice and consumption of some random human farmer by the clerics and their fanatics would probably not concern the average orc.
Whatever the case may be it's evil, but it's an grounded evil. One that might actually prevent some greater evil from entering the world if we feel like it. We are not even covering the Northern Italian/Tyrolean concept of the mount orc, which could be it's own thing.
Regardless we have already created more compelling evil orcs than Tolkien did imo. And just from a few sentences too. Very few individuals are evil for the sake of evil, let alone whole cultures.
I’ve always seen the stat blocks and descriptions in the books are in world notes and articles about those creatures. If something is reductive in the books, that’s because that’s how the person in world sees that topic and how it’s portrayed in the in world civilizations. This obviously doesn’t work for homebrewed settings, but that’s probably why someone is doing a homebrewed setting, to get away from the established lore and do something different.
I still don't understand why such a large portion of the community gets hung up on this one way or the other.
Being "Evil" doesn't mean bad, it means being aligned with a supernatural force on the evil team. Being "Good" doesn't mean being morally upright (see Lawful Good paladins committing atrocities in the name of their god) either. There's nuance on both sides without resorting to propagating thinly veiled racism, or interpreting these stat blocks as doing such.
Isn't it reasonable for created creatures in a world that literally has gods to be bound to their creator's faction by default? Whether or not it's always been that way is irrelevant, regardless of whether you like or dislike default alignment as part of stat blocks. I think it matters more what kind of source material you want to start working from - how much texture do you want? Getting out from under the faction you're created into is a more interesting story than... well, having nothing to work with, or forcing an entire culture to be cannon-fodder for good guys to kill without any exceptions.
I guess I'm not a fan of the current trend of turning everything into a coat of paint without any substance, lest it be interpreted poorly. I wish WotC would actually tackle the valid issues in a productive, sensitive, manner without taking the easy way out. In the meantime, I suppose I'll keep trying to help my players play the characters they want to play, without letting some stat blocks (or lack thereof) get in the way of that.
I think part of the problem here is that alignment as more "Red team vs. Blue team" worked better in players' minds when the alignment spectrum was just Law vs. Chaos. Those ideas, I think, are easier to understand as cosmological "teams."
Calling a character "Good" or "Evil" feels like a value judgment, even if it's not intended as such. Like, once upon a time I had a character's alignment changed to Evil because she *opposed* slavery. I still bring this up in alignment discussions because while this technically made sense cosmologically based on the setting and whose slavery she was opposing, I think it also makes clear how that sounds absolutely bonkers if you're not using the terms "good" and "evil" in this specific jargon-y way that isn't explicitly stated in most modern D&D materials.
@@honoratagold Yeah, I agree. I guess I wished WotC made more of an effort to onboard people in this specific jargon-y way. Buuut, I get the feeling that the people working on these products also see alignment as prescriptive of behaviour rather than descriptive of... well, cosmic alignment.
One thing I really miss from stories of D&D from before I was born is that sort of moral complexity around how people on the good team aren't always good. They can do terrible things and justify it (fun catholic church and police parallels). Whereas I think we'd get a "what's your alignment?" question at a lot of tables these days, enforcing a nebulous rule that Good characters can't do bad things because it goes against their alignment.
When I'm DMing, I like to allow PCs and NPCs to be "unaligned" meaning they don't worship or pledge service to any particular god(s) or cosmological force(s). Let them roleplay how they want to play without worrying about character alignment unless it's something they actually want to explore.
comment for algorithmical engagement
This is a very fascinating video for me as orcs are my favorite fantasy creature. I’ve always loved the faceless henchman cause they are usually quite funny and interesting when you take a step back. Shadow of mordor and war really crystalized this as not only was it my funny cockney brutes, they had real personality and some incredible variance and looks into how they are not a monolith, and thats all while they still remain in that “naturally evil” thing that is usually problematic. It probably helps that Tolkeinian orcs really don’t have any cultural parallels while also being technologically adept so claims of primitivism or savagery are kinda silly.
But in any case they have always been special to me and when I finally started playing dnd and made my first orc character (who has become my favorite character) I can’t tell you how ecstatic I was with how good the volo’s guide to monsters depiction of orcs was, and how much better it is when compared to some of past iterations. The myths (and they are typified as myths rather than facts) around Gruumsh and Corellan are left perfectly vague to fill in gaps and really let them grow on their own. The descriptions of the other gods, specifically Luthic, instantly gives so much possibility for variance and nuance within orc culture.
Before Volo’s orcs were described as largely patriarchal and often had some very nasty connotations (rape) behind some of that inherent sexism. But with the expansion of Luthic and dropping of that terminology orcs are instantly made more meritocratic as well as maybe even giving a space where females are revered and respected do to their place within whats important to orc kind. And this is not to mention what Yurtrus and Shagraas offers orcs that deviate from normative pictures of orckind. Its just so good how much nuance and interesting possibility is breathed into the race with just what little Volo’s did.
Increasingly the reason I continue to love orcs is people recognizing the potential with them. They can fit into so many archetypes and be typecasted so widely thats its hard not to find something to use them for. But also they seem to me to be one of the most adaptable creatures in genre fiction. Most races in fantasy have remained tropey, dwarves and elves and halflings are still trying to escape the tolkein mold, but orcs are going all over the place. WoW orcs are different from 40k orcs which are different from dnd orcs. Nuance and different interpretations are everywhere. There are norse coded orcs, mongol coded orcs, golden-age arabic coded orcs, etc etc. They are really exemplifying the potential of fantasy rather than remaining part of its stagnation and problematic past.
When I learned Monster of the Multiverse officially retconned Volo’s I was pissed. The official blurb for dnd orcs is now as milquetoast and barebones as every other race. It was a huge step back because while it gives free possibility, it does not give easily recognized potential. No longer can you look to Luthic and Ilneval and wonder how orcs focused on protection or their kind or strategy and honor can be so easily labeled evil. Gruumsh has no interesting depth to him listed, being read as a generic over god or just a generic brute bad guy. Gutting substance from races is not what is going to allow races or species to be variable and nuanced and non-monolithic. It just makes them bland and more likely to be branded with equally bland characterization which sets everything back a decade. Theres a massive difference in removing alignments and removing entire sections of lore. I agree alignment should be removed or modified, and so should lore, but not in this way. Its just really sad to see that this is what is being done, as it comes of as careless and pandering rather than thoughtful and genuine. I want good orcs, I want evil orcs, but mostly I want interesting orcs.
I have tried to start using the default D&D God's instead of making up my own, but then you have boring Gods like Gruumsh and I just throw it all out again.
I would lke to point out you skipped a step. You mentioned Tolkien popularizing Orcs, but didn't look at whether Tolkien blamed an evil god for making Orcs evil. He did, and so baked int people's connotations for orcs is that they work for an evil god. Skipping this seems like a huge oversight, and undercuts your point. That said, I agree that its a cop-out and frustrating, and the thermian argument still stands. But pop culture orcs were always evil because their god made them that way.
And there goes me thinking I was original with my Interpretation of Orcs.
Lol they lend themselves to it so well!
My campaign hinges on the fact, that there are "orcy Orcs" who just make war because that's what orcs do, and a faction of landseeking orcs just looking for a place for their clans to stay. The second are not at all subtle in their approach, but at least they have a purpose.
Also... political shenenigans.
Also also: They are clearly ancient Germans. 500-800 before the vkinigs :-D
I may have missed the point in the end, and I accept that possibility. I don't think it's bad to have a race (or species, or whatever you want to use to refer to sentient, self aware life) that is considered evil...because I'm sure we can all think of a culture, society, or group that holds ideas in such opposition to our own that you at least wouldn't choose to interact with them if you knew it. And thats where the players likely start. Of course all orcs are bad and we shouldn't feel bad for killing them, Whisseldorf was literally erased from maps because of them! But as a good storyteller it might not be a bad idea to know WHY your orcs are 'evil'. Did they kill the men of Whisseldorf (and the women and children too) because it was a territory war and there's a permanent orcish camp in the area? Or did the land Whisseldorf occupied once belong to the orcs generations ago and a strong, warlike leader finally rose up to reclaim their lands, even if it was against the wishes of an elder council of shamans and druids? As far as the players know, until they choose to investigate further, it's just orcs doing what they've been told orcs always do. Look to history, how long did it take during WWII for "all americans" to villainaize "all japanese" and send their neighbors off to...well...thats probably a different video. I think my point is that it's ok to have a race or multiple races that your PCs will initially consider to be all evil. Because from a world building standpoint even if the totally evil orcs of pillaging etc. are originally a much more peaceful society of druids and such with fringe extremists, based on my understanding of common practice world building, your characters have likely grown up with hundreds or thousands of years of propaganda informing their initial worldviews. As a DM it's up to you to decide if that worldview is ever challenged.
>having one eye in the centre of his forehead was silly
Cyclophobe
0:52 Was this really the case? As far as I can tell, the first published Lord of the Rings wargames were 1975, years after Chainmail's fantasy supplement included orcs. And the first LotR-based fantasy miniatures (though unlicensed) seem to be a series called Mythical Earth, from 1972, also after the 1971 fantasy supplement. My impression is that it's Chainmail (followed by the D&D little brown booklets), and the fantasy RPG movement which resulted, that produced a market for LotR-themed miniatures, not the other way around.
Oh interesting! I knew there was a lot of LotR influence on D&D despite Gygax not being a huge fan, I knew his players would’ve wanted that stuff, I must’ve assumed the LotR war games were out at that point. Funny!
@@SupergeekMike Yeah it's kinda wild, it seems like the fantasy wargaming boom must have unleashed the fandom's dormant desire for LotR gaming.
So Gruumsh being like a cyclops is silly (12:25-12:36 and 12:45-12:52). Got it.
Can we also appreciate the fact that the creation of the one-eyed orc god is just a quick shuffle after getting slapped by the Tolkien estate and likely having entire armies of orcs painted up with the eye of Sauron on their shields.
"So, how can we sing this? i know, we'll file the serial numbers off Odin, give him a stereotypically orc name that any 10-yr old deciding to make up an orc would come up with and call it good. There, problem solved. No eyes of Sauron here. Just the one-eyed orc all father."
Yep - and the original orc tribal names were also taken directly from Midfle Earth lore... :)
"The White Hand? No, that refers to, uh... the god of death! Not Saruman at all. Lots of people have white hands."
Let this be a lesson to the "DMing is hard" crowd. You can literally steal from the greatest fantasy story ever and a pretty well known mythology and make it part of your campaign world and people will love it.
Now I have an Orc Gruumsh worshipper wriggling around in my dome, There's so much untapped potential with that idea alone. Also now I know why my first DM was hesitant to let my half or be part elf bc I had no idea that half orcs couldn't be part elf, oopsies lol
Ultimately part of the problem in discussing this subject is that it requires that all parties agree on the desired outcome for their games. Arguing with nuance or grey morality as benefits of excluding evil races falls flat on people who do not want to add greater nuance or situations of grey morality to their games. Having one of the outlaws who the PCs viciously slaughtered in an ambush be carrying a letter from their sick child is a situation that players may hate for a variety of reasons, one of which is that it isn't fun for them.
To delve into potentially even more over-discussed waters I'd mentioned the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Finn should be an expectation-shattering character for us and our perception of the world. Storm troopers are not irredeemably evil. Every Death Star explosion should be observed with thoughtful silence at the decision to kill thousands without trial or chance at redemption. Would that be fun? Does Finn grimly set about every battle he's in, aiming for incapacitating shots and managing the logistics of prisoners each time? No. He lets out shouts of joy as he wastes dozens of his former comrades.
I'm not saying you should have evil races, I'm saying there is a reason why some of us will continue to do so and I think we are sometimes given plenty of descriptions in bad faith. Honestly I couldn't care less about Gruumsh. My orcs are my own, my world is my own. My players and I all work in a high-stress field and need to be able to turn off and do cool things to evil creatures
That’s totally fair - it’s one of the reasons why I try to put my focus less on what people do at their games (although that’s unavoidable, in part because those are the people who are the source of the comments/arguments that inspired these videos), but instead put more focus on how this information is presented to DMs.
As an example, a few people in the comments of Thursday’s video shared stories where their players ignored the DM’s attempts at nuance with these ancestries, and just tried to kill all the drow and orcs they saw, because “They’re always evil.” In a lot of ways, that’s the same issue you pointed out - it’s a misalignment in the players’ expectations.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with some evil orcs, and honestly if everyone at your table is fine with it, that’s cool. But as long as DMs and players are receiving the proper tools they need to understand that nuance is an option, and to help groups get on the same page, then that would be the game moving in the right direction, as far as I’m concerned.
I think anyone drawing connections between D&D races and real-life races is the problem, not the fact that some races in D&D can be evil-by-default or lean evil. It's never crossed my mind to equate a fantasy race to a real-one, since all real-world races would fall into human in the game.
That said, the Viking Orc idea is genius and it's a really great way to sidestep the entire argument, I love it.
The problem is that people *do* draw those connections, in non-gaming contexts, all the time. For example, a new meme going on since the invasion of Ukraine is using orc as a slang term to mean "Russian". Why do they call Russians orcs? "Because there's something about Russian people that makes them intrinsically irrational and violent all the time, you know, like orcs."
@@nicholascarter9158 So, people are taking the traits of a fantasy race and projecting them onto a real race. The problem is still with the people doing the action, not with the portrayal of the fantasy race. The orcs are innocent here
@@chaqalaqalaqa I'll grant you that, but I want you to consider this: If you were sitting down to play a game of D&D with a Russian friend of yours, would you explicitly say "Hey, in this game we'll be exploring the question 'What if all the bad stereotypes that people said about Russians were literally true, but about orcs instead of Russians?"" and also expect your friend to not find that kind of insulting when the orcs- who at no point are called russians- start painting z's on their horses?
@@nicholascarter9158 It just seems like a very forced issue when you have to jump through so many hoops to make it one. I just don't see any similarities between orcs and real-life groups. No real-life group is giant and green-skinned, going around as a force of nomadic violence or anything, you know?
@@nicholascarter9158 IDK, I just fundamentally don't really agree much with the whole argument. This video/creator explains it much better than I could near the end of the video: th-cam.com/video/PjmhfsiBFFI/w-d-xo.html
One thing with Orcs is that Gruumsh is also a jealous god, worshipping other gods tends to draw his attention to punish them...such as why Malar became a far weaker diety after attempting to steal some of them from him. The other orc gods are allowed, but stepping outside it, especially for elven gods, is going to draw him in (AJ Pickett has a video from a few weeks ago that covers that pretty well).
Part of the thing is that you can still have "good" orcs mixed in, they might be looking for a way out from under their gods so that they can live at peace with most of the others. You also have some of the other Orc gods who seem to be trying to direct Gruumsh in different ways...such as Ilneval.
But the issue is one where when you have gods involved, they need to be considered with things. Without something that can save you, you aren't likely to turn apostate when the god is likely to smite your ass...and Gruumsh's existence being defined later on than the introduction of orcs doesn't really work when it's a thing as lore expands and they'd give an answer for who various other species would be worshiping and expand as a general thing how different species and groups handle themselves.
I tend to see "Evil" as being used as the default label for enemies in general.... The assumption of Orcs=Evil comes from them just being the designated enemy of the players.... As the game evolved and players started to want to play Orcs and Goblins and all of that well we needed an explanation for why the non-NPC Orcs were enemies to the players.... (Kind of like how it's generally assumed that Bandits in any fantasy setting default to evil.... )
In my worlds, almost consistently, Orcs are just as nuanced as any other race. Lolth and Gruumsh are just one God for each race; just like not every human is Catholic (and I promise that's not a 1:1 comparison for any Catholics reading this)
But the general idea is that Orcs, for the longest time, were "outcasts" all the same...but for the same reason Elves and Humans or Dwarves and Elves clashed; their cultures were SO different. Orcs felt that the best way to fortify their homes was to clash. The losing group would take the others help to defend them. Essentially making sure "The Strongest Survive" but the weak don't die off. There were still EVIL Orcs, sure, but once the Orcs established "Not everyone wants their village ransacked to make sure they've got the most capable fighters" everyone kind of settles in...and Orcs now serve as town guards, military, etc. to still fulfill cultural ideas without harming anyone.
Its really funny that I am just now watching this video because I am currently in a campaign where my Half-Orc Ranger wants to kill off the Orc pantheon because he thinks the only reason Orcs are considered evil is because Gruumsh made them and he is evil. And he wants to free them from Deities that keep them evil.
Aight. So the way I write orcs is as nomadic tribes across the planes. The various clans worship “the great wanderer” (gruumsh)
Gruumsh was once peaceful but was torn from that when the Great War of the gods began. His eye was torn from him by the elven god of death when he stole a hunt from the god. Because of this insult to death itself, Gruumsh was banished from each plane and forced to roam endlessly for a home death had not seen yet. The orcs search for their “clan father” hopping from plane to plane, from each corner of the world. Some clans give up and stay put in a single place, hoping that the wanderer comes to rest with them, while others see Gruumsh’s path as a route of conquest, hoping to find him and give him the spoils of war, hunting with the wanderer across the planes.
Oooh I like this!
@@SupergeekMikefeel free to take it! I also run orc variants. Basically feats that allow orcs to have different resistances depending on the plane they were born in. Nomadic warriors with differing variant philosophies definitely make running orcs more fun. And just having players join an orc clan for a planar jump makes finding orcs a lot more fun for players. Like “oh! Maybe they’re headed to the city of brass to sell all the pelts they’ve gotten.” (Also, sorry about the delayed response lol, was rewatching and just saw you responded)
As always, I really enjoyed this video. I got to learn more about the history of a race in DnD. Yay!
However, I do disagree, mainly on the overarching statement regarding the Thermian Argument, which is the same issue I have with the Folding Ideas video. And that's the simple fact that criticism of a work based on the Thermian Argument, effectively boils down to "You didn't *have* to write it that way!", which is a criticism I find entirely hollow and empty. I have no issue with the specific example you chose and your approach to it, because you didn't do that. You critiqued the general argument by pointing out where it is factually wrong.
But what about works where that isn't the case. Works where, from the onset, a specific race is just inherently evil for some in-universe reason. You can absolutely debate whether or not the method used was well-executed, or express your general displeasure at the idea, but the Thermian Argument is basically just a case of "I don't like that, you should change it" as though it is an objective flaw. And if that became a legitimate point to use again a creator, literally every reason for every choice made in the creation of a world, setting or story would be open to it, and someone would use it.
After your last video i wanted to wait for this one before commenting, so I could get the full picture. I'm relatively new in the world of D&D and so I'm not quite familiar with the history of the game apart from what i've seen on this channel (big fan by the way).
But I dont get it. I don't mean this in bad faith as I'm very open to being educated. I just don't understand how having orcs or goblins in my game be evil makes me racist. I get how it is somewhat lazy game design and not having this be your default opens up the moral dilemma's of slaughtering a cave full of goblins for a bag of gold, but I also get that some people just want to roll some dice and get loot and having a default bad guy makes that easier.
It doesn't make you racist, evil guys aren't bad faith, and it isn't lazy game design.
Know the sociological connotations of having all uncivilized ancestries be evil and worthy of extermination. See if your players are engaging at that level and if having all goblins be evil will turn some players off to the hobby.
If not, beer and pretzel tomb raiding campaigns are amazingly fun.
But if someone is trying to play a half orc at your table to work through their discomfort in navigating the workplace as a second generation immigrant, maybe you can let them have a different flavor of orcs because it means more to them than it does to you.
Basically, don't be a dick.
This bleeds over into real racism at two different points:
The first place is that the original designs of the D&D monsters have been inspired directly by real life racist propaganda: The 5e writeup on orcs invokes the One Drop Rule, the oldest surviving illustration of goblins is a French tapestry that specifically takes pains to point out "We gave the goblins long hooked noses because goblins are a metaphor for Jewish people", basically all racist propaganda has as its ur- theme "They are not human, and their species is metaphysically limited to being violent and stupid no matter what". It would probably help a great deal if Gary Gygax were not on the record as saying that the genocides of the European Invasions were the pure undiluted goodness of the Christian god working upon the earth, and only pure sadism or mental illness could make a person think that anything more moral than the genocide of indigenous North Americans could have ever happened in history.
The second point is that in the last ten years or so these depictions have leaked back out into the world as racist propaganda going in the other direction. For example, a recent meme that is growing since the invasion of Ukraine is to use the word orc as a slang term for all Russian people- the logic being that, like orcs, all Russian people are sub-human, know only hate and violence, and it is not just necessary but really funny when they are killed.
@@andrewduitsman3918 I think that a specific dimension of this is that if the species is actively supernatural as individuals, the problems with them all behaving in a single very stereotypical way goes away in most people's minds to a great extent.
A big part of why beholders aren't ever considered a metaphor for white supremacists, despite their defining trait being crippling xenophobic terror and a need to murder every other living person while constantly navel gazing about how their own compatriots aren't pure enough to be spared, is because beholders are levitating orbs covered in eyes who reproduce by having nightmares of racial panic so bad that they vomit up egg sacs of children.
In my setting I didn't make goblins and orcs not evil, I made them not-mundane: Goblins are literally fae who crawl through portals to the unseelie realm that form out of the shadows of people having nightmares, and are basically fear manifesting physically on the material plane. Orcs are a kind of captain america/incredible hulk thing created by the alchemist labs of the Crimson King, interplanar tyrant.
The problem I think is when you've got a creature that is so obviously just human: Living in a non-magical, sexually reproducing body that exists in a complex society of emotional ties and specialized division of labor, and then you throw "The one thing about them that's supernatural is how bad they suck." in there on top. That's a weird thing to add.
Also the issue at hand is basically this: If you were sitting down to play at a table where the DM introduced a brand new, never before seen monster as "I imagined what it would look like if every Nazi propaganda piece about Jewish people were literally true, and made that a race." That would be really fucking weird. That's exactly what happened with some fantasy monsters, which are basically old racist propaganda transformed into fairy tales. It just doesn't feel as weird because it's never explicitly presented that way.
Wait I am not the only one who makes their orcs like vikings. Well I base mine off skyrim but same thing basically.
They lend themselves really well to it, it seems!
On my homebrew I use a bit of ideas from the 5E, but the gods are from some Humanoids were the giants gods, and they made a pact bidding them and the giants (the Ordning, that still aply to the giants more or less) and after that, they made the humanoids to break it. The God of Winter is the patriarch of the orc pantheon, but there are other gods and orc cultures; the more druidics are more akin to the WoW shamanic ones for example, others worship the god of the land and the strength.
In fact I use the idea of elves and humans on conflict from Dragon Age, but in a different way. My elvish people lives more on Communes, with every group of elves being a "elvish" territorie, and that canot work on the biggest human empire (besides religious laws). So the conflict is political, and not about being evil or not. The different lineages of elves have different versions of this selfgoverment.