I really think people blow this crying about Orcs out of proportion, there was NEVER an actually interesting villain in this game whose reasons of being a villain boil down only to “I’m an Orc, Goblin, Drow or other evil race”. And saying a whole species is inherently evil effectively diminishes all evil they do because you are saying they never could choose not to do it, which reduces them to children who don’t know better. People should move on and stop flooding my yt feed with identical videos repeating the same points.
In theory I like the removal of race-based alignment from the game.
In practice, I hate the way WotC went about doing it, and it was actually one of the reasons I switched away from D&D and to Pathfinder (I bought the Pathfinder core rulebook for Christmas just a few weeks before the OGL thing), because I was sick of how lazy WotC’s development was being.
WotC could have doubled down on the idea that those “evil” races are so not because of the races themselves, but because of the currently-dominant culture among those races. Emphasise outliers like Drizzt, or the complexity of the Many Arrows Tribe. Instead, they ripped away pages full of lore from digital copies of books people had already paid for, with no recompense.
I’m also bitter that they removed one of the most poignant anti-racist messages in the game. They removed the “alignment” section on every race’s stats, but that included this beauty:
Tieflings might not have an innate tendency toward evil, but many of them end up there.
It’s an incredibly powerful commentary on how the way people are treated by others can end up affecting how they behave. How if you always act with suspicion or outright hostility towards someone merely because of how they look, and never give them a fair chance to prove otherwise, they might just end up acting the part. They might not feel they have any other choice.
Gonna write my short story about the orc barbarians who destroy human colonies that get too close to orc territory, not because they’re inherently evil, but because they’ve seen what human greed for power and domination does to subjugated races, the flow of magic, and the health of the earth. So they view humans as evil.
“Your kind knows nothing but exploitation! You drain the lands of their nutrients to feed cities of sycophants until they are fat! Tell me, adventurer, when was the last time you heard of a dragon attacking an orc caravan? We have no fear of such beings as they only attack the depraved greed of man.”
“Attacked the village? Do your handlers even lie to hired blades? Yes we burned the village you call Argath, but no one was harmed. Humans, as dangerous as you are, are still cowards. Surrounding a mining village and telling them to leave when they’re outnumbered ten to one is hardly, what you would call, a negotiation. We sent hunters to escort them out of the mountains of Gri’ut Kar and burned the village to ensure the trek was one way.”
I explicitly looked for “evil races ttrpg” in YouTube and most of the results are from 2-5 years ago.
Who’s blowing up the algorithm by raising a dead topic?
I remember there being a bunch of drama about it when the current edition-that-is-officially-not-an-edition of D&D was coming out, and that fits with the period you mention
One of the most popular DnD characters is a member of an “evil” race who proves that it’s not a racial feature but a cultural one.
(Yes I’m talking about Drizzt, AKA why every DnD group from ~1990 to ~2005 had that guy who wanted to play a drow ranger.)
I’d suggest even before then in the early character guides with the idea that one could play a half-orc. Plus a good DM would give the party options in talking to “monsters” instead of just fighting their way through. A group of goblins probably wasn’t evil, they were just trying to survive like anyone else, and sometimes they had to work with the actual evil in the game because they were tools being used for other purposes.
D&D took a lot from Tolkien, but I don’t think the mythology was included. In wiki footnotes someone had an article in a 1982 Dragon magazine on the background of orcs from a half-orc viewpoint, but I can’t find reference anywhere on that. Point being, Tolkien orcs were created by evil for evil purposes and aren’t simply just a race of creatures. D&D orcs aren’t like that from my understanding.
The article you’re looking for is in Dragon #62 - The half-orc point of view. There’s a whole series of them and they’re all good reads.
Yep, thanks. And I found a source that has an archive here. And it seems that the canon (at least back then) followed Tolkien’s lore a bit in that the orcs were made as revenge for being unfairly treated, but it’s not quite as direct with suggesting evil was directly “poured” into them but more that they’re just following the commands given without thinking about it. So is that evil, or just mislead through generations?
I long for the day when people stop kissing Tolkein’s ass and try to make everything about him, whatever direction it goes.
