>check setting where orcs exist>they are lame as D&D lastest edition or the most disgusting BDSM degenerates like Peter Hackson's onesCan you give some setting, universe, lore, etc. where cool orcs exist?I read about First Age's orcs, and despite being Melkor's creations, it's amazing the realms and civilizations they created, and yet we can't see them thrive beyond the Drk Lords because the Third Age hyperfixation.PD: Idk why Tolkien had so much trouble with the orcs' origins, even today they don't have a clear origin.
Orcs are explicitly mentioned as being elves Melkor captured and magically tortured until they were a different species. Did you not read Silmarillion
I swear, species that thrive and evolve beyond the designs and expectations of their creators is one of my favorite niches. And yet, it's one of the mot underrated genres, despite it's one of the coolest. Just check OPicrel or this picrel, imagine seeing orcs with the Roman and the Eastern drips in the big screen, building amazing cities, buildings and infrastructure according to those cultures.This is what Hackson stole from us.
Sorry, posted the pic
Based and truthful hottake: Orcs are boring when they're not chaotic evil kill-fodder. Attempts to humanize them in DND and such is excessively lame.
>>97993180Yeah, I read the Silmarillion. Did you read when Tolkien said he end up disliking that origin?Did you read when his son Christopher complained against Hackson for choosing that origin (mentionated when Saruman talks to Lurtz), because when he was searching for his fathers letters, he readed about him disliking that origin?
>>97993177Traditional games?
>>97993204>"muh muh fantasy world must be moral-based">moralfag detected >opinion rejected You are so boring, anon.
>>97993186That's the premise behind many synthetic races in space settings, often enough, but yeah, fantasy counterparts of golems or uplifted animals are more rare to come by
>>97993177Can you elaborate on what you mean? Help to define "cool".Do you mean sophisticated orc civilisations with big cities and pottery etc?>>97993180Don't be so quick to correct people.JRR Tolkien didn't publish the Silmarilion, so he didn't want people to think orcs were elves. Christopher put it together and got it published but years later he regretted this specific thing about orcs. I believe he explained that he thought he HAD to provide an explanation of where orcs came from, but knew from his dad's manuscripts there was no settled answer, and then he started taking JRR's concerns more seriously. The major problem with elf-orcs is that orcs would then have proper "people" souls yet get massacred by the good guys and live lives full of sin that would condemn them to hell.>>97993223Post Uno cards.
>>97993234>ackshually, the massive 6'8 green-skinned orc is better now because he's a fruit barista with a pet catNah he's better with a great axe slamming into his head
>>97993284>sophisticated orc civilisations with big cities and pottery etcYes, plus drips like the Roman and the Eastern >>97993186If you have other ideas, please, share them, I would love to read them.
>>97993473I don't think there's that many examples, because one of the primary features of orcs in entertainment is that they're "primitive" and thus don't have very advanced material culture.I'm aware Tolkien orcs are not really primitive and are in fact very technological, but that is almost never present in any other fantasy setting, Even in Middle Earth, orc creations were functional but ramshackle and poor quality and so wouldn't have been very impressive or decorative. Isengard orcs are the rare exception because of Saruman's craftsmanship.
>>97993662>because one of the primary features of orcs in entertainment is that they're "primitive" and thus don't have very advanced material culture.I get it, but at some point cliches just give burnout, when was the last time we saw a fantasy setting that actually evolves? That all those millennia of history matter?Man, I remember watching 70s terror films with (the ultimate Kino-duo of) Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and you see this gentlemen in a fantasy setting applying science, reason and logic.I miss this (so to speak) "Fantasy2Scifi" subgenre so much.
>>97993284>The major problem with elf-orcs is that orcs would then have proper "people" souls yet get massacred by the good guys and live lives full of sin that would condemn them to hell.Not if the torture was so bad that it caused the soul to leave the still living body, leaving behind a soulless being that could be twisted into an instrument of evil.
>>97993473Sounds shit. Why even use orcs for that?
My orcs are soulless P-Zombies created in the traditional homunculus way (lots of cum and shit in a jar), the beauty of this is that many wizards have figured out how to adjust what the resulting Greenskin looks like (or how they function) based on the ingredients and "cooking" method. This has produced a vibrant subculture of "Cortivation" where wizards try to make the most unique and spectacular type of Orc possible.This exists entirely so I can explain how savage orcs, handsome orcs, fuckable goblins and sniveling freaks can exist in the same universe.
>>97993284>The major problem with elf-orcs is that orcs would then have proper "people" souls yet get massacred by the good guys and live lives full of sin that would condemn them to hell.Huh? Aren't the elves "soulless" (eternal while on the physical plane/Valinor, but gone once slain)? Arwen choosing a mortal fate is supposed to be this grand, eternal farewell to Elrond. It's really not that big of a deal if they all end up in the same afterlife.
>>97993306Uhm, ackshually it is. It makes for amazing contrast to see one of them choose a peaceful life. Think about it. The capital-E evil shit orcs get up to is a choice meaning they are evil because they want to be. Don't those creatures deserve our hate more than "animals following evil instincts"?
>>97994007I can dig it. Are they able to reproduce? Do they live on borrowed time? Are they born adult? Basically how Blade Runner replicant are they?
>>97994111>Are they able to reproduce?Sort of, they understand the method of making more Orcs and especially ambitious individuals can make "filth pits" where they mass produce more Orcs.>Do they live on borrowed time?Yes and no. Orcs have failsafes built into them to ensure they don't become self-sustaining, and the most famous of these is that their sapience is tied to the amount of protein they can consume. I got this idea when I went a half-week without a good hamburger. Orcs who regularly intake meat are analogous in intelligence with Humans, but the longer they go without protein the more they devolve into unthinking, savage beasts. This is also used to explain how smart orcs can exist alongside dumb orcs, since war-chiefs deliberately keep their orcs half-starved so they don't get ambitious. Cum counts as a protein source, for you disgusting goblin fuckers.>Are they born adult? Basically how Blade Runner replicant are they?They're born adult in a smellier sort of "mud pit" like from Lord of the Rings. There are a variety of methods to make it cleaner or more advanced if you're making a "designer greenskin" but the iconic production method is some poor dung collector sifting through a field of shit for flesh potatoes.
>>97993177>Idk why Tolkien had so much trouble with the orcsbecause LOTR has vaguely christian values. If they are corrupted to evil then there should still be the potential for good in them, and that makes genociding orcs in totality a horriffic thing to do - they should be given the chance to convert and find salvation. if orcs are born evil then when did they stop having souls and free will? man and elf arent enhanced animals, and so they shouldnt be reducible to animals the way an ontologically evil orc is. neither idea fully satisfies the virtues tolkien held when he wrote the books, so it stays an uncomfortable contradiction to this dayas for interesting, what is interesting to you?
>>97994151Doesn't stray too far Jackson's LotR...Do they have distinct sexes? Or gender identities?And what about prions/cannibalism? Why would goblins bother sucking humans off if they could literally eat that dick instead?
>>97994195>Do they have distinct sexes? Or gender identities?Depends on the "batch," greenskins are ultimately genderless and sexless but can be molded into whatever identity the creator wants them to be. Female-presenting goblins might suck and fuck any man they see and use she/her pronouns, but she doesn't have a womb and can't actually have kids. She was "made" that way by somebody who specifically wanted a little sex freak, possibly for their male clients/friends. If you want to get cynically topical, greenskins are modern-day "consumer cattle.">And what about prions/cannibalism? Why would goblins bother sucking humans off if they could literally eat that dick instead?Greenskins can eat each other, but as you might expect that's a spiral of diminishing returns. I didn't really think that far about why goblins would eat the dick instead of suck the dick, but I guess that would be a combination upbringing and nature. Their compulsion to gag on some guy's girth is stronger than the compulsion to bite down on it. In this regard, I think the cum the wizard got to make the sex goblin was gathered by getting cock-sucking experts to snowball their loads into the jar.
>>97993234D&Detard detected. Fuck off and stay fucked off.
>>97993204>chaotic evil kill-fodderThe most boring thing ever, might as well just replace with robots.
>>97994694>The most boring thing everHow so? What kind of stories are you missing out on if Orcs are chaotic evil cannon-fodder?
>>97993204I both agree and disagree. Treating orcs as competent enemies with their own histories and tactics and dare I say it cultural outlook is fine. It makes for an enemy you can learn about and adapt to. That said it's better for gameplay when the cultural outlook of the orcs (and other beastmen) is fundamentally incompatible with those of humans and demi-humans. Some cultures and peoples are incompatible with civilised existence - the orcs are in that category, kill away, nits make lice.The modern leftist idea that all cultures are somehow acceptable and viable, combined with the fact that the left sees orcs as black for some reason(when they're obviously germans) means nu-DnD will try and humanise them.>>97994701The one where his super special orc OC is able to open a starbucks franchise in fantasy Seattle obviously. The orc OC will constantly be 'a victim' of some sort of oppression while not actually being victimised because that would be against the X card or some shit.
>>97994701NTA but orcs having life beyond killing and being killed massively expands the gameplay options available, including negotiation.
>>97993177I like this version: https://philhammer.com/warhammer/fantasy/wfrp-bestiary/orcoids/>I really like the idea of Orcs as a force of nature. It moves them away from pantomime villain, being evil for the sake of being evil, towards a creature with alien motivations that result in far worse evil (in human eyes). It makes them seem like a natural disaster, an act of god, like a tornado or tsunami. They become a personification of Mother Nature's vengeance, the ultimate eco-warrior (and they’re green like plants so it just seems to fit). This can be linked into the legends old, like the Orc-néas, adapting the Undead angle to fit. The Orcs are like super tough rage-zombies (from 28 days later), except smarter, faster, and stronger. They could be highly resistant to arrows and bullets!>Orcs do not have to be just another generic bad guy. They do not have to be an evil 'human' wearing a scary mask.I do treat orcs as >>97993204, a mindless, literally soulless, monster. Frazetta apemen and Congo's gorillas, plus a couple unique traits.The "humanized orcs" are instead like >>97993186's pic, in that they are hobgoblins, mostly barbarians but also with more civilized populations. My first images to show them were Elder Scroll Orsimers. Skin colors: green, grey, red etc. Tusks grow like antlers as they age. Invented composite bows to rebel against the not!Rome that enslaved them.
>>97994871>https://philhammer.com/warhammer/fantasy/wfrp-bestiary/orcoids/Thanks, anon. I'm going to give it a read.
>>97994871>Orc do not have to be generic bad guys>Name translate to "bad guy"?
>>97994158I think the contradiction is because "orc" is derived from "orcneas", which essentially just meant "demon" or "evil being". So when Tolkein was deriving his Orcs, the name defined the thing, that being, Orcs are "orcneas". But this pagan idea contradicted his catholic beliefs. So the underlying reality of the idea is that, yes, orcs are completely evil by nature. But Tolkein could not stomach that idea. He basically shot himself in the foot, and had to paper over it by just leaving it up in the air.
>>97993177while on the visual subject of heavily armored orcs, I think having orcs kind of like darknuts from twilight princess could be interesting. Extremely heavily-armored opponents with layer after layer of armor, possibly fused to it. Plenty who've played the game think they are knights of Hyrule who were corrupted by ganondorf, and you could just twist that to be more like Tolkien's theming of orcs being man's worst impulses made manifest. So an orc would be a warrior who has fought so long, they have literally fused to their armor and lost any identity apart from it. Under their armor, they are twisted, bestial things, though fusing to their armor prevents most from knowing this. I think I just figured out what my EvilGoons™ for the next setting will be.
>>97993204I think there's room for both. Some enemies should be capable of redemption from their people's savage nature, but others can just be complete bastards that need killing.(or, hot take, both can be true because their culture may genuinely be shit.)
>>97993177In my setting, orcs are a giant empire similar to the Huns. They’re fearsome conquerers a la vikings. They extended so much that the common tongue is orcish.Humans are still a minority. And on the run from Orcs when they’re not assimilated as second citizens.
>>97993177I see orcs as black people
>>97994701Cannon fodder enemies are basically something I see these days as very video game like and inherently limited and unnecessary in tabletop. You can't meaningfully do anything with them besides killing them. It's like if you filled your game with rabid animals.
>>97993177Why using them if you feel they end up badly or at least boringly stereotypical, and you have trouble making them cool?
>>97995249Well anon im sorry to break it to you, but what you just described are Chaos Warriors from Warhammer
I have borg-fatigue.
>>97996451I've never understood this. Orcs were literally based off people like the mongols, never black people.
>>97996553>werethe tense is important here
>>97996581>the tense is important hereHow
>>97996603orcs WERE based on mongolsthen they were based on africans for a whilenow they're mexicans or something
>>97996581I'd be hard pressed to find anything "african" about orcs as well.
>>97996624>then they were based on africans for a whileI can't recall Orcs ever being africans in any mainstream media I can recall.They've always been Germano-mongols.
>>97996624>>97996603>>97996625If you looked at body types, most Africans would be Elvish.
>>97996636Meanwhile slavs would probably be Orcs.
>>97996644>slavs
>>97996675That's not a slav?
>>97993177Same but swap orcs for elves.
>>97993177>Can you give some setting, universe, lore, etc. where cool orcs exist?elder scrolls orcs as a warrior culture of honor autists who are the least elf-like Mer in the setting and that's meant as a compliment since elder scrolls elves are such assholes. The average Imperial citizen is perfectly happy to see an Orcish legionary or an orc blacksmith open up shop next door, meanwhile seeing a bunch of high elves will give him a headache.in Golarion the not-darkest-africa orcs in the Mwangi are also pretty cool and not mud people or BDSM degenerates. They live in the jungle surrounded by giant demon apes and demon worshippers and make a living by hunting and killing demons and live in fortress cities, they also see half-orcs as highly desirable and give them elevated status and raise them as mages and leaders, so there's a high demand for human adventurers and traders to come and marry locals. They kill demons and then grind up their bones and blood into powder and snort it as a drug which is definitely unsanitary but also quite metal.
>>97993204counter-counterpoint: orcs as musclebound green elves with tusks are hot and it's way more realistic for humans to be horny for them and making a million half-orcs the same way there's a million half-elves than anything else.
Honestly, "Orcs are an industrialized power" is underutilized and that's sort of what they were in Lord of the Rings but no one really uses that.
I like Orcs when they are baby-eating turbo-rapists with zero redeeming qualities, because their name has demonic connotations at it's root, and things names should reflect their nature.
>>97993221Who cares what someone did or did not like? What matters is what is readededable in the text, and those are the origins of orcs.
>>97996628It's an internet thing from the 90s to about 2010.Americans see big muscle monster + savage and see black people or Red Indians.And Indians in pop-culture got all noble savage, which Warcraft drew on when making orcs less evil.Warcraft in particular drew on rap and hiphop jokes for many of it's orcish /funny lines.
>>97997747Warcraft orcs are basically a mix of mongol raiders and germanic/norse pagans. They ride giant wolf cavalry, have shaman wearing white wolf pelts calling down thunder and lightning, they have horned helmets and use gigantic steel axes as their signature weapon, their leaders are farseers who are literally just norse seers with the power of Seidr, their most iconic racial leader's weapon is literally a knockoff of Thor's Hammer and they're led by a guy from the Frostwolf tribe. They're also an industrial power like Tolkien's orcs drilling for oil and building giant smoke belching ironclad ships and dreadnoughts as early as Warcraft 2 Tides of Darkness. Trolls have way more blatant African/Caribbean/Rastafarian influence. They literally practice voodoo, they talk like rasta stoners, island trolls have explicitly Jamaican accents, they have witch doctors as their signature racial special unit, they make shrunken heads of their enemies, their ranged units are literal spear chuckers instead of archers, they put bones. Ironically they completely missed all the dumb "orcs are black people" discourse of the 2000s and 2010s because they're a mostly original race to warcraft, they're called Trolls but they don't really have anything in common with most depictions besides regeneration so they're mostly their own thing, and they're one of the more popular and liked races in the setting so nobody ever made a big deal about them even though they're literally ooga booga spear chucking voodoo Jamaicans with bone piercings
>>97993177I like their fantasy Warhammer version. A simple horde built for war, often taking cues from popular barbarian and steppe cultures with a smidgen of that European armor reflectibg their durability and bulk. Not every Orc has to be a riff on the old concept, especially when there's more than enough stories to be had with the basic template. In Battle Brothers they're basically either tribal Vikings or big fat dudes in armor and they remain soulful, hard to beat an Orc.
>>97993204Bullshit.Orcs were invented by Tolkien to represent HUMAN evils. They were meant to be a congealing of all the worst war-mongering parts of humanity. And it shouldn't be a surprise that they excel at what they were designed to accomplish, and by contrast they flop if used too far outside of their intended purpose.Orcs are not stupid. They are not mindless. They are not chaotic evil kill-fodder. They are every man in Birmingham who worked 18 hours a day and then beat the shit out of their wives when they came home. They are every Japanese man who raped school girls in Shanghai and then murdered them. They are every British boarding school brat who laughed while watching the younger kids swarm and beat up a victim. If your orcs aren't humanised then you're just stupid.>>97994787This is even more stupid, because unlike that anon you display some rudimentary intelligence and yet use that intelligence to reach a worse conclusion. Gygax is the root of most people's misuse of orcs, because he was a dumb little shit who couldn't understand Tolkien but could understand his pulpy adventure books where a bold white colonist shines a light in the dark of blackest Africa or the Native American wilderness or the jungles of India. So he just substituted those caricatures for orcs.Tolkien was even explicit that the orcs were not Germans. You can't get anything right.
>>97993177In my setting, orcs where early humans enslaved by the the (((elven race))). Degraded throughout thousands of years, the orcs where created as a slave caste to serve elven society as labourers and cannon fodder to allow the elves to pursue the eldritch, philosophical, physical and architectural arts. Using the orcs, the elves expanded their empire, crushing and subjugating much of human, dwarven and other civilisations. As the empire reached its hight, and under the weight of the decadent elven civilisation, their grasp on the orcs slowly loosen. During the reign of the final eleven highlord and the sundering (the succession civil war that tore the elf empire appart), the orcs where, for the first time, left to their own devices. Naturally, being mindraped for a couple thousand years had reduced the orcs to a brutish and cruel race, who have since used their newfound freedom to embark on a path of savagery. Without their elven masters, the orcs have regressed into waring warbands and crude clans/tribes. Having no traditions to draw upon, shamanism and cults run rampant, further fracturing the orcs. The majority of orcs outside of their wretched hunter gatherer clans and primitive settlements are slavers and mercenaries, selling their savagery to the highest bidder, though their debased nature often needs little reward for the horrors they are given free reign to commit under the banner of whatever despot has hired them. They hold a great hatred of the elves, and predictably, the only time orcs are able to unite is to raid and pillage the remnants of the elven realms.
>>97999046I should clarify thought that the orcs exist outside of their violent culture. There are an increasing amount of orc settlements that resemble early bronze age settlements, with agriculture, less violent shamanism sects and are even capable of trade. Some orcs, born/raised outside of wider orc society in human, dwarven and even elven settlements, who are often able to lead a relatively normal life.
>>97998975>Orcs were invented by Tolkien to represent HUMAN evils>Created by a Dark Lord that existed far before humanityDumb fuck detected.
>>97997411I fucking despise how Paizo snuck that one in there. It’s such a bare-faced effort to make the Mwangi Expanse look more appealing to degenerates into “muscle mommies.” I can say this with certainty because the book you're taking that lore from was written back when everyone was obsessed with muscle mommies.>But anon, why are you so assblasted?I’m assblasted because this is one of the vanishingly rare examples of lore that suggests throwing a bone to straight players. Every other bit of lore in Gaylarion is about how all the goddesses are lesbians and all the firebrands are strong transbians fighting stinky white male oppressors, but then out of nowhere you get a, “we heard the kids are into muscle mommies, so we’ll throw that into the Wakanda book.”
>>97999353they're not really muscle mommies, the art has them as conventionally attractive and clearly feminine women>>97999353>back when everyone was obsessed with muscle mommies.even normalfags have been wanting to fuck female orcs since 2004 when world of warcraft released, and even before that there were games like Morrowind in 2002 . I'm not sure you can confidently say it's a recent trend. Lineage 2 was 2003 and straight up had hot green-skinned babes as their female orcs. This is not a recent thing.Female orcs as green-skinned amazons is not a recent invention, and I hate to break it to you but men have been fantasizing about fucking amazons for literally thousands of years. There's artwork of Hercules and Penthisilea from like 450 BC. It's basically the fantasy equivalent of Captain Kirk banging hot green alien space babes.
>>97999717considering the alternative is the dogshit mandingo-adjacent cuck porn backstory every half-orc player used for AD&D where their mom was a human who got raped by a big ugly orc man and they grew up as a retarded rape baby, I'll take green babes hunting for human men to knock them up any day of the week.
>>97999727>>97999717I really don’t think they had amazons in mind when they were designing these Orcs, anon. Like how they made an “absolute unit” for SF2e and used some Gachimuchi type art for the character.Ultimately this bitterness comes down to a total loss of faith in the developer. I can’t not read about man-hunting orc women and think there isn’t some cynical attempt at pandering. Paizo is one of the gayest TTRPG companies out there, and in the midst of all their obsessions over the lesbian threesome goddesses and trans crusaders, they release a strangely heterosexual-oriented piece of lore in the fucking Wakanda book? I don’t buy it.
Just make your orcs a little different and they'll be interesting again.
>>97993177I have them as hired muscle for dirty jobs like mercenaries, gaolers and executioners, kind of my own answer to the chaotic evil question with their impulses channeled into shady but necessary roles for society
>>97999794>they release a strangely heterosexual-oriented piece of lore in the fucking Wakanda book?I think the Occam's razor explanation for this is actually pretty simple. For the jungle book about black people they prioritized getting black writers so nobody could accuse them of racism; the overwhelming majority of the gays and trans in their fucking Seattle Washington based office are obviously white spergs, so they had to outsource the book to black people who are way more likely to be heterosexual and less unhinged with regards to pushing the prismatic ray shit. There's like 20 freelancers credited for the book, since they tried to get as many black people as possible to avoid accusations of cultural appropriation or racism, they ended up with a book written by a bunch of heterosexual men and women and got the least-gay book of 2e, which shouldn't really surprise anyone who understands that black people are way less fond of pride flags and trannies than a white liberal in Seattle is.A quick glance at the writing credits says the first name listed is a lady from Texas whose itch.ion says she's a pro-wrestling fan. The second guy I can find is a like 60 year old black guy with a white beard who was a developer on Cortex Prime. Most of these people don't have any credited work for other Paizo books, just the Mwangi shit. So yeah, it's surprisingly heterosexual because they actually hired non-fags to write it because Paizo cared more about not being called racist than they do pandering to trannies.
>>97993204Based
>>97997447This is more common than you think.
>>97997447fr it's the whole fucken point. They represent the worst parts of the industrial revolution, as well as the war-mongering attitudes and violent hierarchy which ran rampant during it. Everything about orc culture is constructed by their enslavers in order to make them into more efficient tools, and they gleefully embrace their own dehumanisation (?). It's brutality leading to brutality leading to brutality like a gigantic champagne tower full of piss. It's a critique of a real phenomenon which can lead to, for example, the insanity of Imperial Japan. I think Tolkien was an insightful guy, even if he was also quite naive in some ways.But as usual Gygax is to blame for their current stereotypical representation as just some kind of big and tough barbarian dude. Orcs should not have tribal camps. They should have military camps.Games Workshop's interpretation is actually solid. Taking inspiration from football firms was a great choice.
>>97993177>PD: Idk why Tolkien had so much trouble with the orcs' origins, even today they don't have a clear origin.The reason is simply that he could not decide on what they even really were.The problem stems from Tolkien's personal religious morality. In terms of their use in the story what he wanted were inherently evil, bestial mongrols that could be killed with zero moral qualms.But because of his Christian conviction he did not believe that there should be such a thing as a being that both has free will AND is inherently evil. If someone has free will then they must be a moral agent who has the ability to choose to be good and who thus would also deserve pity and mercy in the way that, for example, Gollum or the Easterlings would.Within the books themselves the orcs vacillate back and forth on this point. In the chapter where Sam follows the orcs that capture Frodo after the fight with Shelob we hear a long conversation between two captains where they private discuss their feelings about the war and their plans for the future. They express both dissent towards the Nazgul and intent to slink away and desert if they get the opportunity, which would seem like strong evidence towards them having free will. But then after the fall of Sauron we get a description of how the Orcs are also so utterly mentally dominated by Sauron that once he is destroyed most of them literally kill themselves on the spot, which doesn't seem like something a free willed being would do.Ultimately the books themselves don't provide a clear answer on this point. Later in life Tolkien appears to have decided that Orcs do not have free will at all, that they are effectively animals and that their speech, even their words of rebellion, are effectively 'parrotic', having been put there directly and intentionally by Morgoth/Sauron when they were created.
>>97998975>Orcs were invented by Tolkien to represent HUMAN evilsEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHHHHWrong, retard.From the short essay 'Orcs' by J.R.R.Tolkien, published in The History of Middle-Earth volume 10:>In summary: I think it must be assumed that 'talking' is not necessarily the sign of the possession of a 'rational soul' or fea. The Orcs were beasts of humanized shape (to mock Men and Elves) deliberately perverted/converted into a more close resemblance to Men. Their 'talking' was really reeling off 'records' set in them by Melkor. Even their rebellious, critical words - he knew about them. Melkor taught them speech and as they bred they inherited this; and they had just as much independence as have, say, dogs or horses of their human masters. This talking was largely echoic (cf. parrots).Orcs are inherently evil animals
I don't know why people are so scared of the concept of irredeemable evil. The orcs in Tolkien lore weren't anything you could rationalize with. You could, at best, bargain with them if the orcs thought they were getting something far more valuable than you (with you operating at a loss, always). Hence why Mordor had a temperate region populated entirely by non-orc human farmer-slaves. They didn't kill and eat those human slaves because they served the orcs. But they sure as shit brutalized them. Orcs ARE supposed to be rabid evil dogs. That's what made the Tolkien world interesting, the fact people were restricted to tightly bound settlements because the hinterlands were filled with shit that would kill them. People rarely traveled alone, and more often than not traveled in groups, because otherwise they'd be waylaid by orcs or goblins, or some other horrible creature. It was life constantly under siege. That's why the Fourth Age was considered to be the age of lasting peace. It wasn't just that Sauron was destroyed. The orcs were also gone. Areas that were uninhabitable for millennia suddenly became habitable again, and could be rebuilt. Orcs are meant to be representative of the worst aspects of mankind, with zero positives. That's why humanizing them comes off so incredibly cringe. Dragons are another creature that was once considered almost always evil. But now they've been gayed up, and furried up, and people make gifs of them fucking cars. Thus dragons are now pathetic and lame. This appears to be what people want for orcs, too. I don't consider 40K orcs to be a good rendition of them either. They're just dumb working class british people. That's all they're meant to be in that universe.
>>97993204People who bitch and moan about evil races are genuinely pussies. What, you can't kill a nuanced, intelligent creature? You're fighting the orc because he needs resources to survive, has an ideology that opposes yours, or is simply a conscript in an army that picked him up and gave him his comically oversized axe. You need to be aware that and kill him anyway."Tee hee he was actually a chaotic evil philosophical zombie, literally no implications in killing him!", absolute copout, like an anon said above, at this point kill robots or mindless undead or constructs or shit like that.
>>97996526Why? Are you talking about Star Trek's borgs?Meaning of picrel?
>>98000539HOME is hardly definitive canon. Partilculary, that part was written in the later 50s, he wrote things pretty opposite to that version in later years.Myself, I don't think it's something you should care much of. It's actually better if left ambiguos.
>>98000923It baffles my mind how this became such a widely held concept, it's like they need to solve a stand for a solution to a problem that doesn't actually exist. Traditionally the most common thing you kill in fantasy is literally other people, you can't get more "nuanced" than different humans. Yet somehow, you need a pure evil non-human as a frequent enemy in order for it to be "okay" to kill.
>>98001155Methinks this was actually Tolkien's take. He wanted big action and battles but he felt bad about heroes killinig lots of faceless humans, and orcs were the solution. So... not really a problem, honestly. You want some sanitized standard-ish dnd? Have orcs, by all means. Definitely unnecessary to play action fantasy, diss them when bog standard heroism isn't there. No biggie.(I think orcs aren't that cool in dnd, but I tend not to like the more "generic" races)
>>98001155Too many GMs think it's cool to dump the moral dilemma on you every time you fight a thing that's sapient like you're a fucking generic capeshit superhero. It gets old killing the pillaging orcs just to find a crying baby orc with their raiding party for some godforsaken reason.
>>98001263That's the other side of the coin, and I agree it's obnoxious, but there's a healthy middle ground behind that and "Every fight we get into must be a morally justified one according to my IRL worldview or else I'm going to feel bad about it". I mean, I played with people like that and it made me physically fatigued.
>>98000092I'm strangely attached to Balumbdar, simply because he's the purest expression of... Well, being a martial character in Pathfinder. You know exactly what I mean because Balumbdar is the God of Big. One of his titles is, "He Who is Massive." His whole thing is being big-bellied, big-framed, big-armed and BIG.>Balumbdar is considered brutish and dim-witted by most other gods, but always commands respect due to his towering sizeHE IS THE BIG.I think the gayest part of the Mwangi Expanse lore is how they removed Sargava as an afterthought. It's Vidran now. They could have given us a cool AP set in Sargava where we bash the fash and dismantle white supremacy and they completely circumvented it.
>>97993177>I have orc-fatigueI used to have orc-fatigue. I fixed this by adopting pig orcs as my mainstay orc of choice. Which I'll admit sounds like a trend or a meme, but they're surprisingly *versatile, just "other" enough that people don't immediately make stupid fucking assumptions, and furries don't seem to vibe with them as much as they could. This was a pre-covid decision I made as a dm and I haven't gotten tired of it. *I mean this too:They can be insufferably mud-slinging industrialists, they can be brutal, savage, man-eaters spilling out of caves and forests, and they can be quaint dirt-farmers living in mud-huts. They can also be all of the above and still retain continuity. The synthesis of man+boar/pig has numerous uses and roles.
>>97999126do you think that fantasy books are documentaries of fictional worlds?
>>98002352
>people itt insisting that orcs have never been black coded>thread title is literally riffing on an anti-black slogancurious
>>97993204Based, thats why I run all my pig faced orcs as gang bangers complete with all the stupid pink lighter shit
>>97999794>I don’t buy it.Good. If only more people were so sensible. But I think Pozzedo will persist, sadly.
>>97999717>the art has them as conventionally attractive and clearly feminine womensilly anon, those aren't exclusively white supermodels with blonde hair so they are deeply unfuckable. we're on wwe rules.
>>98002726Darkies invented fatigue?
>>97994503Ultima VI in 1990 did the demon one pretty okay.
>>97996679NTA but pretty sure that's a Saami or Laplander, who are Uralic rather than Slavic.>>97998975By the whine in your tone when you type I expect you're a cucked leftist white who believes all that marxist shit about colonialism being bad or you're some sort of colonial claiming oppression because the Europeans did to your people what your people would have done to the Europeans if you'd managed to figure out buildings over two stories tall.>>98001263Kill it, nits make lice is a perfectly valid argument for the time periods generally represented in generic fantasy. As >>98001286 says "every fight must be morally justified IRL" is just as retarded as creating mindless evil robots. The past was not a great place (nor to be fair is the present or future) it was violent and brutal and it was very do unto others before they do unto you.
>>98003062I’m holding Paizo to the same standards I do with Gacha, which means I expect tits and ass in my face.>This is the part where somebody insists Paizo is a mature, sensible company with firm morals and ethics. The same company that released “funny pug men” as a race.
>>97993177>PD: Idk why Tolkien had so much trouble with the orcs' origins, even today they don't have a clear origin.His christcuckery made his brain short circuit the longer he thought about orcs and their evil nature because his mind pictured the scenario of an orc asking Jesus for forgiveness and he couldn't decide on what would actually happen
>>98004903>Having moral dilemmas makes you a cuck
