The Gaming Den

I like what warhammer did where they're a kind of fungus that spore and emerge fully formed out of the ground. Their mindset is also set permanently to "hooligan". This means there's no warren of baby goblins for paladins to angst over or orcs suddenly wanting to 'uplift' their race from being trash mobs into someone you can trade with.

What other ways are there to make orcs, goblins, kobolds and whatever your ravening horde of badguys guilt free to kill? I was thinking of that medieval belief of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation , where flies will just appear out of shit because flies and shit are always found together, so badlands and uncivilized/abandoned places spontaneously generate orcs/goblins so they don't have any sexual cycle or gender, they just appear from places where nobody is around to see it happen (it is a mystery). So their reproductive goal is to turn the civilized parts of the world into the ruins/badlands/dungeons where they spawn from. Of course in such a setting there is no such thing as half orcs but I don't think that's much of a loss.

Then you can make speculations about orcs being some kind of supernatural monster or "A mad wizard weapon of the ancient past" and whatever suits your setting and narrative.

*Going for a more overt warhammer inspiration, you could associate orcs and goblins with slimes (instead of mushrooms like in warhammer) and scholars can speculate some common origin of the two as they're always found in the same dank, abandoned places.

Actually, even if we completely disregard the old Warhammer fluff about how there are Orc women and half-Orcs and shit, the newer fungal Warhammer Orcs don't get us anywhere. They still have a society, they still have humans living in that society, and they still have Orcs living in human society. There's still trade between Humans and Orcs. You're still killing them over what is in essence a political disagreement.

Fundamentally, this is a lemma with no solutions. Enemies who aren't thinking creatures with culture and opinions are basically boring (see: Zombies), while killing enemies who do have those traits is basically immoral unless they are actually doing something bad (see: Nazis).

Killing creatures who are new to the world and haven't had a chance to do anything is at best tragic (see: newly turned Zombies), and at worst immoral (see: baby Kobolds). Your best bet is to fight the Orcish army of evil, and then never murder the women and children in the Orcish village at all. Genocide really never feels good, or at least it fucking shouldn't.

-Username17

If their army is coming at you and doing bad things, you're allowed to run in and kill that army. That should be fine. I'm pretty sure no DM will revoke Paladinhood because "You killed the invading army that was murdering civilians and started the fight, but you see that one guy in the army was actually pretty nice, he just fell in with a rough crowd*".

So just don't then go to their home and kill their kids. That hopefully shouldn't be too hard.

I suppose you have other things that have to keep killing people to exist and thus need to be slaughtered (mind flayers, vampires), and that also spawn by killing more people (so you don't find their babies, you find "more of them, and this one looks like your friend Bob"). People are always happy to kill mind flayers.

*If they wanted to be assholes on that level, they'd just say "You were in a fight that included evil things (killing them). That means you consorted with them (violently). CONSORTING WITH EVIL, YOU FALL!"

The easiest way is to make them a race of irredeemable sociopaths. Not because of culture, but because that's the way their genetics are made up. You may be able to control them from killing/robbing people, but it's only because they think they can't get away with it. Eventually when they feel they have an opportunity they'll go back to their evil ways. Even their kids are born without a conscience and freely go around torturing animals and later people and no amount of education will change them.

So, kinda like normal Humans then i guess . .

Cyberzombie: you could, but why would want to? The game is universally more interesting when it's not just you vs. the red dots. When 4e did basically that to a bunch of classic monsters, everyone thought it was dumb and boring.

Schleiermacher wrote:Cyberzombie: you could, but why would want to? The game is universally more interesting when it's not just you vs. the red dots. When 4e did basically that to a bunch of classic monsters, everyone thought it was dumb and boring.

I suggested that mostly because the OP asked for ways to have guilt free orc slaughter. As for my own games, it depends on what kind of game I want to run and what the group is. Some groups want a more casual style where they can haphazardly go around killing monsters and not have to worry about moral ramifications, so I can totally understand why you'd want to set up a black and white type of game sometimes.

While I sometimes find it interesting to explore (and sometimes deconstruct) the whole adventurer lifestyle, but that's a little too deep for some of the groups I've played with. Some people just want it to be like Lord of the Rings where the orcs are established as the bad guys. And that's the way it was in classic D&D, where orcs as a race were of evil alignment and were just straight up bastards.

I recommend giving your always-hostile race a hive mind of some sort. That way they can both have sophisticated military tactics and be automatically hostile to you.

Orcs are some sort of breed of demon.

The thing that makes murdering Orks ok in the 40K universe is that they don't fear death. A 40k Ork feels almost no pain and has no survival instinct. Since you walking up and murdering that Orc is something that meets both of your goals it's not morally questionable.

Just because Orks are plant-people doesn't mean you can kill them freely, the fact that they actively want you to come over and try to kill them is what makes it fine.

deanruel87 wrote:The thing that makes murdering Orks ok in the 40K universe is that they don't fear death. A 40k Ork feels almost no pain and has no survival instinct. Since you walking up and murdering that Orc is something that meets both of your goals it's not morally questionable.

Just because Orks are plant-people doesn't mean you can kill them freely, the fact that they actively want you to come over and try to kill them is what makes it fine.

Oh, sure, you say that, but when I tried it in the bar last night, I got the cops called on me...

It's also how they're genetically engineered to be as they are. Seriously, almost all Ork knowledge is instinctual. Their language, culture, and technology are inborn (well, starts popping up one a tribe reaches the point where differentiation of roles can occur).

They're made to be an army-cum-WMD as a whole, and as near as I can tell, don't bother to fight the urges and instincts encoded into them. Killing them isn't really -nice-, but trying to kill them before they kill you isn't too complicated for me.

Orcwort + Evil Druid == Problem Solved

The beings that I know of that most resemble the kind of despicable, kill-on-sight things you describe are Broos, the rapist chaos infecting beings from Glorantha. Their modus operandi is basically: get to a town, kill all the males, gather the females (from all species, not just humans), rape them all, kill half in the process, let the other half pregnant with their seeds to spawn new Broos in a couple months. More or less like this:

(warning - strong image)

Well, that explains why a Vincent Baker fan is also a Glorantha fan.

FrankTrollman wrote:Genocide really never feels good, or at least it fucking shouldn't.

Exception: (The) Blood Wood , and all the Blood Elves.

You will objectively make the world a better place by accomplishing this. At the very least you will no long be confused by whether there is a "The" in front of Blood Wood or not. Cuz the fucking writers can't make up their god damned minds either.

Broos are a classic example of how when people try too hard to make their setting "mature" they end up making something "juvenile." Runequest was literally the FATAL of its day.

-Username17

It is the Dharma of orcs to be the bane of civilization. They accumulate merit by lurking in caves and waylaying travelers, as well as by raiding villages and cities. However, there are certain principles they are expected to abide by to keep things from getting too horrific.

Dying in battle with heroes is a great honor, assuring good odds of getting a better reincarnation. Orcs often give heroes a fighting chance even when they could use dishonorable tactics to gain great advantage, since they get metaphysical brownie points whether the heroes win or lose.

oops, double post.

FrankTrollman wrote:Broos are a classic example of how when people try too hard to make their setting "mature" they end up making something "juvenile."

-Username17

Nah, I think its more a case of having an objectively bad villain in the setting than having something to do with "maturity". *EDIT*: It seems the chaos beastmen from Warhammer are based on Gloranthan broos. At least according to wikipedia. Thats interesting.

BTW: I remember some early RQ dungeon crawl adventure where you could get infected by chaos and there was this table with mutations you could develop - tentacles, tails, horns, extra eyes, odors, etc. I found that really cool.

Sakuya Izayoi wrote:Well, that explains why a Vincent Baker fan is also a Glorantha fan.

Oh man, this reminds me of my AW hack based on Pavis & Big Rubble that I never finished.

FrankTrollman wrote:Actually, even if we completely disregard the old Warhammer fluff about how there are Orc women and half-Orcs and shit, the newer fungal Warhammer Orcs don't get us anywhere. They still have a society, they still have humans living in that society, and they still have Orcs living in human society. There's still trade between Humans and Orcs. You're still killing them over what is in essence a political disagreement.

Fundamentally, this is a lemma with no solutions. Enemies who aren't thinking creatures with culture and opinions are basically boring (see: Zombies), while killing enemies who do have those traits is basically immoral unless they are actually doing something bad (see: Nazis).

Killing creatures who are new to the world and haven't had a chance to do anything is at best tragic (see: newly turned Zombies), and at worst immoral (see: baby Kobolds). Your best bet is to fight the Orcish army of evil, and then never murder the women and children in the Orcish village at all. Genocide really never feels good, or at least it fucking shouldn't.

-Username17

This.

No matter how you try to demonize a certain race, if its capable of behaving in similar fashion to humans, thus eliciting some degree of empathy, its worth of forgiveness and another chance to live on. At least if we apply a contemporary social logic to the matter. Carry the issue to pre-modern settings and cultures and youre free to genocide any race you want. They are all barbarians anyway.

silva wrote: *EDIT*: It seems the chaos beastmen from Warhammer are based on Gloranthan broos. At least according to wikipedia. Thats interesting.

More like depressing. Once upon a time I was mildly interested in throwing together a small set of beastmen and that was just one of the many things that turned me off the idea. It really bugs me, because I'm a classicist at heart and so minotaurs and various flavors of people-with-goat-traits are some of the few animal person mashups that don't annoy me on first principles.

silva wrote: No matter how you try to demonize a certain race, if its capable of behaving in similar fashion to humans, thus eliciting some degree of empathy, its worth of forgiveness and another chance to live on. At least if we apply a contemporary social logic to the matter. Carry the issue to pre-modern settings and cultures and youre free to genocide any race you want. They are all barbarians anyway.

I've always felt a big mistake of modern RPG is that they humanize too many monsters. There's too much of a trend to make monster races feel like humans with a monstrous body. I'd like to see more focus on making non-human races feel more non-human.

Yeah. Most rpg settings consist of pre-modern periods and cultures, so one should not need to have excuses for the massacre of non-humans or even non-[my people]. Ethnic cleansing is a common thing in this context (together with slaving, despotism, rape, etc).

Besides it, there are lots of non-human races in S&S fiction (like serpent-men) that are treated in totally alien, genocide-permissive kind of way.

Well, Tolkien didn't even quite go to that extant. His orcs were (literally) evil, non-human, and sub-human from the get-go. Not a nuanced view of things at all.