The Gaming Den

"Barbarian hordes" in real life persist for a simple reason: The steppes they live in simply don't produce resources that settled people would find valuable. This poverty is why these lands remain barbaric in the first place.

A wizard or cleric won't be going into the steppes to wipe out the orcs, because other than removing the threat of occassional raiders they don't get valuable stuff for risking their lives.

Only when the Orcs do something to directly disturb (eg kidnap a princess) or threaten (unite as a city-burning horde) civilization does it become necessary or even desirable to attack them. But even then the objective is limited threat-resolution, not occupation or genocide as it's just too much trouble.

Zinegata wrote:"Barbarian hordes" in real life persist for a simple reason: The steppes they live in simply don't produce resources that settled people would find valuable. This poverty is why these lands remain barbaric in the first place.

Don't D&D orcs live in mountains? That's where dwarves are. I don't think D&D orcs live in steppes. Then there's things like "This trade pass through the mountain was seized by orcs oh no!"

What level wizard/cleric/druid would one need to be to reliably commit genocide upon mountain dwelling orcs anyways?

OgreBattle wrote: Don't D&D orcs live in mountains? That's where dwarves are. I don't think D&D orcs live in steppes. Then there's things like "This trade pass through the mountain was seized by orcs oh no!"

What level wizard/cleric/druid would one need to be to reliably commit genocide upon mountain dwelling orcs anyways?

Steppes, mountains, swamps etc... Regardless the point is that these places do not generate enough resources and wealth. If they did - eg the mountain pass with trade routes - civilization generally takes over and build roads, guardposts, and a fortified town along the route if it was that important to begin with.

And what you really need to wipe out the orcs is time, not level. Even a level 5 wizard can reliably wipe out 10-20 orcs a day per fireball. The question is how many there are and how long will it take to find them.

I'm not sure why anyone would bother, the void you leave from the dead orcs would only be filled up by gnolls, bugbears, hobgoblins or any number of other D&D raiding humanoids.

Okay, so I think we've established why orcs haven't been wiped out. So, why haven't they gotten more sophisticated. Orcs are generally depicted as either nomadic or semi-nomatic savages whose technology is either stolen from more sophisticated peoples, or garbage glued together with shit. Why hasn't someone decided that if Orcs had halfway decent technology and tactics more sophisticated than "Get 'em!" they might do better the next time Humans get antsy about their raiding parties?

Desdan_Mervolam wrote:Okay, so I think we've established why orcs haven't been wiped out. So, why haven't they gotten more sophisticated. Orcs are generally depicted as either nomadic or semi-nomatic savages whose technology is either stolen from more sophisticated peoples, or garbage glued together with shit. Why hasn't someone decided that if Orcs had halfway decent technology and tactics more sophisticated than "Get 'em!" they might do better the next time Humans get antsy about their raiding parties?

I think they have. Repeatedly.

Various dark lords round up a bunch of Orcs, make them do some drill training, kit them out in non-bullshit gear, and conquer a big chunk of territory with them. The thing is, when dark lords win, their Orcish troops don't go back to the wilderness to train future generations of Orcish villagers in formation fighting. And when dark lords lose, their Orcish troops also don't go back to the wilderness to train future generations of Orcish villagers in formation fighting.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:People have a lot of problems on their plate with local manticores and shit. Riding off into the steppes to slaughter Uzbeks just isn't a high priority thing to do, even if failing to do that means that periodically there are invasions by Huns, Cumanians, Mongols, and other Central Asian nomads.

That's true IRL, but the D&D generic assumption is that there are Orcs within a few days' travel of any arbitrary starting location for a group of adventurers. It would be like having an exclave of Mongols in the middle of Ile-de-France and that exclave persisting for generations despite pissing off every neighbor on the regular.

Orcs are definitely not just a problem that comes only from elsewhere - Orcs are endemic anywhere in the world that PC characters might conceivably go between levels 1-3 or so.

The only explanation I have for this is that D&D world is a lot shittier than RL in many ways, starting with the terrain. You're not going to find a nice place like France, where the majority of the country is arable land. The best you can hope for is an Italy or Spain, where you have a few narrow and scattered strips of farmland mixed generously with semi-desert, mountains, and otherwise unsuitable terrain.

There's also the issue that Orcs make decent trade partners when they aren't trying to kill you.

I believe I remember a post by Ed Greenwood on Candlekeep forums about orc human interactions, specifically in regard tohalf orcs, with the basic gist of it bing that most orc-human interactions are peaceful and romance is going to happen.

It then gets a bit unnecessilary detailed with various examples of human-orc romance and claims that it's common for male orcs to shack up widows and their unmarried adult daughters and have mother-daughter threesomes.

So the explanation that the orcs don't get wiped out because they're not always or even usually a threat holds.

People can be genocidal asshats who wipe out other races because maybe they could be a threat in the future, or because of ancient rivalries, or whatever, but that doesn't mean that they have to.

Mord wrote:Orcs are definitely not just a problem that comes only from elsewhere - Orcs are endemic anywhere in the world that PC characters might conceivably go between levels 1-3 or so.

But that's because the PCs start in frontier villages in Romania. Yes, if you happen to be in a place which is far away from anything that the Elven archmages care about, you will encounter lots of things that are too far away from the Elven archmages for them to care enough to take action against.

-Username17

hyzmarca wrote:It then gets a bit unnecessilary detailed with various examples of human-orc romance and claims that it's common for male orcs to shack up widows and their married adult daughters and have mother-daughter threesomes.

Dammit, Ed Greenwood, this is why WotC decided that a FR adaptation ran by Bruce fucking Cordell was a risk worth taking.

Desdan_Mervolam wrote:Okay, so I think we've established why orcs haven't been wiped out. So, why haven't they gotten more sophisticated. Orcs are generally depicted as either nomadic or semi-nomatic savages whose technology is either stolen from more sophisticated peoples, or garbage glued together with shit. Why hasn't someone decided that if Orcs had halfway decent technology and tactics more sophisticated than "Get 'em!" they might do better the next time Humans get antsy about their raiding parties?

because when a people is kept down for so long, they do not have a chance to really rise up to any other station in life. just look at the real world. is the BBEG wanting orcs that can do things other than make raiding parties? hell no, they want dumb minions to do their bidding. they keep the orcs in public schools training to go to college for a degree that will do no good as their is no job for that degre. and the degree is created but the corporations that in turn have no palces for those orcs, so the orcs are always in debt to them with no way to even come back out of debt as they have no useful skills. thus maybe the orcs ere always smarte and stick with the easier radining parties to get what they need.

Desdan_Mervolam wrote:Okay, so I think we've established why orcs haven't been wiped out. So, why haven't they gotten more sophisticated. Orcs are generally depicted as either nomadic or semi-nomatic savages whose technology is either stolen from more sophisticated peoples, or garbage glued together with shit. Why hasn't someone decided that if Orcs had halfway decent technology and tactics more sophisticated than "Get 'em!" they might do better the next time Humans get antsy about their raiding parties?

Basically what frank said, to expound though. Orcs aren't very smart, and their god has a very strong rhetoric of of the orcs being better than the other races. So orcish clerics keep telling the orcs that they are the master race and since there are no centralized institutions of learning all you've got by way of teachers are the clerics. The orcs have no incentive to adopt the policies and technologies of other races because they're basically imperial Japan, except after WWII the people who kept saying "Our ways are best, and other races should bow down to us" in Japan got removed from power and Japan said, "welp, they beat us so I guess their ways are best." But with the orcs what are you going to do? Arrest god, remove him from office? Short of walking up to Gruumsh and stabbing him in the face with extreme stabbination there's nothing you can do to cut off the source of the orc's propaganda.

Orcs of the Eldeen Reaches

The orcs of the Eldeen Reaches are an offshoot of the Marcher clan orcs, drawn to the Reaches by their close connection with nature. They are among the most civilized and peaceful of all the orcs and work closely with other druids in the great forests. The Gatekeeper faith is strongest here and a raging orc sees his fury as a manifestation of the land, the experience an almost spiritual one to true followers

I never really liked ebberon, really it speaks that the only reason why orcs haven't "evolved" or "advanced" in cannon is because of lazily sticking to cannon. Though they also got better in Faerun with the whole "Orks can haz kingdums" many arrows thing.

So basically... yeah there's gruumsh, but you can totally make the orcs eventually led by druid animists or some such. I think its the strange stats they get that keep them down also come to think of it.
They have a "-" in every caster stat... so there's that also, because basically they can't get better societally on that type of frame and it resonates with the authors everywhere.

Orc society gets better by listening to the ostracized guy who rolled high in Int, Wis or Cha. Generally, all of orc society centers on the physical and the exercise of personal physical strength. When a little orcling gets born and displays a facility with numbers and words, that kid gets ostracized, if not straight up killed.

Now, it is possible for this to work out. It doesn't take intelligence to recognize that someone who is smarter than everyone else can be useful. But basically it's the captain of the football talking to the geek saying "use your smarts to make us play better." The inclination to do so despite previous treatment all but requires traits that orcs aren't known for, such as altruism (although the knowledge that the tribe doing better means he is doing better would likely be possessed by SmartOrc), so the chief is going to have to make promises to SmartOrc, and he's going to have to follow through on them, unless he wants SmartOrc to sabotage the tribe later.

edit: alternatively, if an Orc chief gets his hands on a Headband of Intellect he might start thinking stuff up on his own.

Intelligent orcs, by and large, do better by abandoning the tribe and making a life for themselves. Sure, they will get treated badly by most everyone, but how is that different than life at home (unless they're also really strong).

Yeah, pretty much. Also, the way they're treated badly in the world is probably not as bad as the way they'd be treated badly in the tribe, so it really would be unusual for an intelligent orc to stay with his tribe.

Despite what happened in high school to you, it's really not that uncommon for people who are athletic to also be pretty smart.

Orc society gets better by listening to the ostracized guy who rolled high in Int, Wis or Cha. Generally, all of orc society centers on the physical and the exercise of personal physical strength. When a little orcling gets born and displays a facility with numbers and words, that kid gets ostracized, if not straight up killed.

If only this were true. Seriously, our society is littered with good ideas by the ostracised guy with high Int, which were never adopted. What matters more than that is social cohesion and social organisation. The Mongols didn't conquer their empire due to any sudden technological advances, they did it through their unification (and taking advantage of China's decline, but mainly through their own unification.)

Intelligent orcs, by and large, do better by abandoning the tribe and making a life for themselves. Sure, they will get treated badly by most everyone, but how is that different than life at home (unless they're also really strong).

The orc brain drain is a nice image. I imagine that this is actually where most half-orcs arise: I'm South African and left the country, and if I have children with the local English young lady I am currently seeing then they will be half-South African ethnically but entirely English culturally. By analogy, you'd expect most half-orcs to be ignorant of their orcish heritage, probably not speak orcish, and be brought up to be as human as possible.

Is there such a thing as a quarter-orc, or would it simply be a matter of the green-skinned genes popping up every once in a while, as a reminder of people's heritage?

Laertes wrote: Is there such a thing as a quarter-orc, or would it simply be a matter of the green-skinned genes popping up every once in a while, as a reminder of people's heritage?

When I have seen the subject of 2nd Generation halfbreeds brought up at all in fluff, the rule is usually that if you have any racial mixing in the memory of your family history at all, you are considered a halfbreed for purposes of assholes being assholes at your asshole. Someone who it is known his great great grandfather was an orc will probably still be treated like a half-orc even though he's probably more or less completely human by that point. And when he gets pissed off at people treating him like shit because it's known there's a greenskin somewhere in his family, people will just shrug and say he's a halforc, and everybody knows they have a bad temper and are prone to violence.

Mechanically speaking, no. At that point you probably use whichever racial template you figure has more dominance.

Desdan_Mervolam wrote:When I have seen the subject of 2nd Generation halfbreeds brought up at all in fluff, the rule is usually that if you have any racial mixing in the memory of your family history at all, you are considered a halfbreed for purposes of assholes being assholes at your asshole.

I'm really not comfortable with the idea of the one-drop rule being one of the default assumptions about society in D&D. Do you have any sources handy?

What I've been doing is deciding race based on the mother. This probably leaves me open to some charges of racism because of what constitutes a 'half', but whatever.

If the father is an elf and the mother is a human, it's a human.
If the mother is an elf and the father is a human, it's a half-elf.

If the father is an orc and the mother is a human, it's a half-orc.
If the mother is an orc and the father is a human, it's an orc.

The general idea here is that the fact that it is half-something only matters when people are sensitive to that. Thus, having highly pronounced canines that look like tusks makes humans notice that you have orcish ancestry, but slightly rounder ears and paler skin doesn't make you obviously 'not orc' in the same way.

There is one culture in my game world that has lots of male dwarves producing children with female humans. Like a Tiger/Lion union, they don't have a growth inhibitor so actually grow (slightly) taller than normal humans. They fill the 'Norse' role - large hairy men that like axes. But because they're humans, they like boats, too. To be totally honest, the 'half-dwarves' are very much a minority in that culture, but most people have a fair amount of Dwarven heritage within the last few generations.

Mord wrote:

Desdan_Mervolam wrote:When I have seen the subject of 2nd Generation halfbreeds brought up at all in fluff, the rule is usually that if you have any racial mixing in the memory of your family history at all, you are considered a halfbreed for purposes of assholes being assholes at your asshole.

I'm really not comfortable with the idea of the one-drop rule being one of the default assumptions about society in D&D. Do you have any sources handy?

The PHB talks about "second generation half elves" who have more human-like eyes, but are still considered half-elves. I don't think 1/8th elves are ever mentioned. The only place where the one-drop rule seems to really apply is Fiend blood. If your great grandfather was a Cambion, you are still a Tiefling.

-Username17

Thinking about this a bit more, after a few generations of interbreeding you'd quickly end up with a very Tolkienesque setup whereby the Numenoreans interbreed with lesser men until the old Dunadain blood is mostly gone, but occasionally resurfaces in Mary Sues awesome dudes like Faramir. Which is very appropriate for a game where PCs are qualitatively better than everyone around them.

deaddmwalking wrote:What I've been doing is deciding race based on the mother. This probably leaves me open to some charges of racism because of what constitutes a 'half', but whatever.

That's probably a very good way of doing it given that, at least among humans, children are almost always raised by their mothers and so will adopt their cultural mores.

Mord wrote:

Desdan_Mervolam wrote:When I have seen the subject of 2nd Generation halfbreeds brought up at all in fluff, the rule is usually that if you have any racial mixing in the memory of your family history at all, you are considered a halfbreed for purposes of assholes being assholes at your asshole.

I'm really not comfortable with the idea of the one-drop rule being one of the default assumptions about society in D&D. Do you have any sources handy?

Honestly, while I am pretty sure I've seen it elsewhere, the only thing that comes to mind is some 2e Dragonlance book, in reference to half-elves. It's rare, and when I have seen it it's always been an expression of in-game racial prejudices and thus not backed up with mechanics. If you don't want to deal with prejudice and racial politics in your game (A very reasonable position to take), I can't see any reason why you would want to include that in your fluff.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Desdan_Mervolam wrote:Why hasn't someone decided that if Orcs had halfway decent technology and tactics more sophisticated than "Get 'em!" they might do better the next time Humans get antsy about their raiding parties?

I think they have. Repeatedly.

Various dark lords round up a bunch of Orcs, make them do some drill training, kit them out in non-bullshit gear, and conquer a big chunk of territory with them. The thing is, when dark lords win, their Orcish troops don't go back to the wilderness to train future generations of Orcish villagers in formation fighting. And when dark lords lose, their Orcish troops also don't go back to the wilderness to train future generations of Orcish villagers in formation fighting.

-Username17

So what does the "round up a bunch of Orcs" process look like? Say I'm an aspiring Dark Lord with a second iterative attack, enough spellcasting to bind Demons, and a couple squads of elite soldiers. I've that there are orcs in them thar hills, and I want to make them the backbone of my Dread Empire. What happens?