Another Approach to Orcs

Ah, the humble orc. The HD 1 fodder enemy par excellence. What to do with them?

I'll be honest. I have a mostly secondhand understanding of Tolkien. I read The Hobbit at a young age, but it never grabbed me. I've never watched the Lord of the Rings Movies, and I've had the Fellowship of the Ring audiobook sitting on my phone for over a year without making it to the Prancing Pony. So I have no strong image of what an orc 'is' from literature. 

Very nice, but not what I'm looking for

My real touchstone for orcs is the Elder Scrolls series, which was itself inspired by someone's homebrew 2e game. In that series, orcs began as low-level enemies, and only in the third game, Morrowind, did they become a playable/NPC race. The Tamrielic orc is interesting, and gives the race a neat treatment, canonizing the 'corrupted elves' idea from Tolkien while adding some complexity to the story and making them viable characters. Still, it's not what I want in my games.

Being a relatively new GM, I've actually never had orcs in any of my games either (except for the bohemian orcs at the end of my Elder Scrolls GLOG playtest, which were only used as NPCs). 

Honestly, I have no personal attachment to orcs. Or goblins for that matter. No particular reason to use them if I were to make my own campaign world. So why am I even thinking about them?

Partly because James of the Grognardia blog (that is not dead which may eternal lie!) just wrote about them. I quote:

OD&D orcs are the kinds of nasty brutes you'd find cowed into service by an evil magician or dark knight or even a dragon, while AD&D orcs are a parallel human race, albeit an irredeemably evil one. That is, AD&D orcs have an existence apart from whom they serve, which makes it far easier to believe they have a unique society and culture of their own. OD&D, it seems to me, suggests that a race of ready-made minions akin to Maleficent's twisted goons from Disney's Sleeping Beauty.

These days, I find myself preferring monstrous monsters over more nuanced and naturalistic humanoids, so OD&D rings my bell far better than does AD&D.

 

I also just came across this Tolkien quote, from a letter to Christopher during WW2:

Yes, I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in ‘realistic’ fiction … only in real life they are on both sides, of course. For ‘romance’ has grown out of ‘allegory’, and its wars are still derived from the ‘inner war’ of allegory in which good is on one side and various modes of badness on the other. In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels.

Keeping in mind that Tolkien's conception of orcs and backstory for them was never canonically decided (I may not have read the books, but I've dug through more secondary material than I care to mention), this image speaks much more strongly to me than anything in The Hobbit, or the Forgotten Realms.

It's, dare I say it, fantastic. I picture ugly, tusked men hunkered in an Allied trench, packed side by side with ordinary humans, with savage warbeasts and bound demons, facing down a similar lineup on the other side of no-man's land. Rifle butts etched with crude Goblinish innuendo and pictures. 'Kilroy was here' graffiti marking a swath across Europe... that one's actually the same as in our world.

That's kind of the point. Stories of good vs evil, myths that orcs traditionally feature in, are an externalization of an internal struggle: ordinary people wrestle with their inner demons, and we tell stories about great warriors battling literal demons for inspiration. In the real world, it's rare to see a conflict with such a clear delineation of morality, and so the figure of the orc falls a bit flat. 

You can try to make the orc more complicated, as AD&D did, by introducing orc babies and the possibility of redemption, but then you cut against the original purpose of the orc. You can use them as an allegory for an external conflict, but there's not many places that it fits. Maybe you could do 'WW2 except the Nazis are orcs', but even then I can't imagine it being very good. I might just be remembering Bright and tarring everything with that brush, but that film has probably poisoned the well as far as 'complex orc characters' go for a decade or so.

Pictured: a monstrosity and an abomination

What am I proposing as an alternative? 

Going back to James' quote, I like the mythic understanding of orcs and the OD&D approach to orcs as monsters rather than 'humanoids.' But I'm also grabbed by the image from Tolkien's letter. Orcs fighting side by side with humans. Not just evil humans either. Orcs representing the worst of humanity, the very cruelest, most flippant and wicked, while still being able to barely function in a civilization. 

Take the very worst person you know. In particular, those who are horrible while managing to avoid being cast out of society entirely. Now turn those qualities up to 11. That's an orc.

Orcs form stable social groups among themselves, adapting to the local human expectation. Are the local humans nomadic shepherds? Are they hunter-gatherers? Sedentary city-folk? Orcs who live in the area, or are coming into it, will imitate their social structures. 

Life among the orcs is a perversion of life among the local humans. Human vices are their norm, and human virtues are absent. Orcish bands living near humans will always be pushing the line on their behavior, then backing away once they've gone too far. Any human forced by necessity to live among the orcs will find it nightmarish - but just marginally better than roughing it out and trying to make it on their own. Cruel or not, organized groups are excellent force and survival multipliers. 

Obviously, no human village or city wants an orc encampment nearby. But it's not always worthwhile, or justifiable, to expend effort to drive them out. Orcs will always be just one more offense, one more scandal or disruption away from getting a pogrom. They may be ignorant, foolish and boorish creatures, but they're smart enough to know where that line is, and how to get close without crossing it.

And sometimes, the people will need the orcs. Wartime comes and the baron's men are coming in to press new recruits. They'll never take an orc when they could take a human - they're stinky, bad for morale and barley follow orders - but will they take twelve orcs rather than ten men? Thirteen? In spite of their vices, they do make good fodder and shock troops.

All the more if there's an invasion. Orcs don't have much to plunder, usually. Those dungeon orcs with treasure are guarding someone else's stuff, and they're terrible with money. Bandits or invaders don't usually bother with them.

So, if there aren't any plucky adventurer types nearby to rescue you, how much will you offer the local orcs to help defend your town? 

It's obviously a bad idea. You know they'll push their luck, ask for outlandish sums of money or things you can't possibly give them. But are you willing to risk not getting their help at all? Worse, are you willing to bet that the invaders or bandits won't want to recruit them, or outbid you? Orcs will absolutely sell you out and switch sides if offered so much as an extra silver piece.

Orcs are the things you would obviously be much better off without; but they're here and you've got to deal with the fuckers somehow.

Nobody will blame you for putting a bounty on orc ears, though they may disagree that it's a good way to spend your money. It's also not unheard of for orcs to cut off each other's ears and offer them to unscrupulous adventurers to get the locals off their backs and split the reward. 

And, of course, there's the orcs in service to a dark magician or anti-cleric or chaotic warrior or somesuch. As soon as somebody with enough personal strength and coordination comes around offering a home if only they kill the pesky humans, they'll toady up to the new dark lord, at least as long as their chances look even. Sometimes this role is filled by an especially strong or unusually smart orc, but that's rarer. 

Yes, it's horrible whenever the new dark lord rises up and orcs come out of the woodwork to burn and pillage; but it's at least possible to buy them off or intimidate them. And if you can convince the local duke to march against this new foe, there's a strong chance there'll be an orcish battalion wearing his colors against their own.

Orcs. They're the worst. But you can't just ignore them, and one of these days you might just end up in a foxhole with an orc, or you might be wandering the mountain half starved when you see a fire in the distance and hear goblinish drinking songs on the wind. Now what?