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.
I think that it’s highly setting dependant, and also dependant on the kind of game your DM is running. I’ve exclusively run things in my own setting, so any particular race’s natural alignment was more of a suggestion than a requirement.
Now what really threw me for a loop was orks loosing the ‘powerful build’ feature. Orks can be twinks now and I love it.
Gary Gygax on how "nits make lice" and other awfulnesses
A setting with evil races is a setting in which genocide is implicitly justified. Anyone who finds appeal in such a setting should think long and hard about why.
I can see the arguments against the concept of evil races. It’s intimately linked with real-world racism about “wrong” groups that “deserve” to be colonized or genocided. Writing the fictional world as being populated by distinct groups that have conflicting cultural motivations is more interesting than “this group is bad because they are bad.”
But… what about demons/devils?
Just because they’re evil doesn’t mean they’re always doing something bad.
There is a bit of a distinction between each, I think. Examples below speak to mainstream D&D, where a lot of these conversations originate.
Orcs are what they are as a matter of birth. Having them be essentially evil by nature of birth draws too many parallels with real-world racism, as you mentioned.
Devils are devils as a matter of choice. Devils typically start as souls of evil mortals or corrupted celestials. But if celestials can be corrupted and become devils (e.g. Zariel), it stands to reason that devils have the potential to become redeemed—they just stop being devils at that point and become something else. So devils aren’t quite a race as much as they are a culture of evil that manifests physically.
Demons are somewhat similar to devils, but most did not really have an origin point of being something before they became demons. They’re just the physical manifestation of evil itself, which is why there are an infinite number of them. But even if they begin as demons, they still have sentience, so it should likewise be possible for a demon to become good, and they too would just stop being a demon.
For demons and devils, that usually goes straight into supernatural, as they’re not really a race, but physical manifestations of evil energies.
It’s interesting, so many cultures have demons or evil spirits. And sometimes those evil spirits can be turned to good, but not usually.
I think DND mirroring culture in this way is still mostly OK, whereas culture has thankfully mostly moved on from races being good or evil.
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.”
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?
In that case, however, Drow are the descendants of elves that followed a god that betrayed Corellon. They aren’t innately evil, they are innately good/chaotic and programmed to be evil/lawful (by DND logic).
Orcs are theoretically opposite. Evil/chaotic by essentialist, divinely mandated nature and capable of learning otherwise.
More importantly, they’re people the PCs can murder for gold with no discussion about morality… And while that’s convenient for some DMs it does have some very, very obvious problems.
Ms. Drizzt, isn’t that the kindergarten teacher that has a magic school bus?
No that’s Ms.Frizzle.
Drizzt is that dude who sings in Limp Bizkit
No that’s Fred Durst.
Drizzt is the outer colored part of the peel of a citrus fruit.
Drizzt is dripping with riiiiiiizzzzzzzzz
God, even I took psych damage from the cringe
Does his rizz come from his drip?
No, you’re not alone. There has been much ink spelled in defense of the removal of geneaological morality from the game, and from Pathfinder before it. It’s just that most of that ink has been in replies to people being cranky about the removal in the first place.
Good and evil being a racial trait is just something that about 1/3 of society seems to take for granted. It’s a belief they may not even know they have until someone does something that stops reinforcing that belief. These silent, often unnoticed beliefs are often the corner stones of ideologies, and people don’t like having their ideologies questioned or challenged. Or even highlighted, in many cases.
So, people who have an ideological belief that good and evil are simple concepts, that good and evil are inherent qualities of a person, and that good and evil are tied to heritage are going to be primed to be giant whiny babies about racial alignment being removed, and to put up a giant stink,while those who see it as a commom sense move are not going to be front and centre making headlines about it. They’ll be in the comments, getting down-voted by the tilted reactionaries who like their simplistic, black-and-white world.
Man, this was always sad when I finally realized it.
I always thought “racial alignment” was about the culture of those races conditioning those who grew up in those civilizations being raised with certain beliefs to serve as a guideline in how individuals of those races would be depicted in setting. (Or supernatural compulsions for things like Devils, Demons, Modrons, etc… but that’s different)
Then I realized most people that I played with just used it as an excuse to be openly racist.
It’s for the best that the system is being removed, people just don’t know how to use it without causing problems. This is why we can’t have nice things.
The root of orcs as we think of them is Lord of the Rings, where they’re corrupted elves (or something like that). Literarily, they represent the evils of war. Tolkien orcs are evil.
Orcs have seen the furthest drift from those roots of anything from LotR. Dwarves, elves, orcs, and halflings saw some drift to generalize them for other tabletop settings. But the traits settled on for orcs in the 90s and 00s (strong, nomadic, clan society, warlike, brutal, noble savage stuff) can now feel insulting, because those traits are so often used in racist contexts, so orcs have seen a second drift away from those, too.
I don’t see much of a point to orcs anymore and don’t use them. Regarding 5e, I haven’t read its finished modern take on orcs but if I want Fantasy Mexico I’m just going to use human Fantasy Mexico.
I do disagree that fantasy villains need motivations beyond existing. Conscience and free will are required for protagonists, optional for antagonists. Illithids, vampires, and early Pathfinder goblins come to mind from fantasy. Strahd’s reason for being a villain is that he’s mopey. Everything in Cthulhu, likewise, lacks comprehensible motivation.
It’s hard to make an inherently evil villain that is a foil to the PC, but not every villain needs to be a foil. As a GM it can be really fun to wallow in a villain being unrepentantly, unthinkingly horrible.
If a few minutes of reading TvTropes is anything to go by, the Tolkien never officially decided on an origin for his orcs. All of the possibilities he considered clashed with his legendarium somehow. And he had some of them that actively resisted Sauron, which makes them ‘not strictly evil’ I suppose.
You can’t be evil if you don’t have free will. A tool has no evil except from what comes from the hand that wields it. So to me, orcs make more sense as a constructed organic machine, little better than automatons, and with no moral sense of their own. A dog would have more capacity for evil. But the interesting question would ask who would have the capacity to create such machines, who believes that violence is an acceptable method of achieving their goals. You say that conscience is optional for antagonists? I’d say that a complete lack of empathy is the defining quality of evil, what drives them to seek power without any care for others.
Plus, having orcs lets you roll up a whole pile of mooks for your players to fight whenever you like, and if they happen to be trying to advance your BBEG’s goal while completely indifferent to whether they cause pain and suffering along the way, all the better. Can’t give the masterplan away if they were completely indifferent to why they were asked to do something and never asked questions about it, but it gives your players some goals to work towards and some puzzles to chew on.
And yeah, Strahd’s entire backstory and motivation being ‘he is a dick’ is difficult to make interesting. A well-intentioned extremist that thought they needed power that they then could not control and which led them to darkness has the potential for some characterisation. Strahd wanted the booty but could not get the booty and is angry about it. Plus that module is just two hundred hours of one TPK after another.
I mean, if merely existing is enough motivation for IRL executives to be evil piles of shit, I don’t see a need for fictional characters to need much motivation… Some people clearly just enjoy lording over others…
You can’t be evil if you don’t have free will. A tool has no evil except from what comes from the hand that wields it. So to me, orcs make more sense as a constructed organic machine, little better than automatons, and with no moral sense of their own.
Philosophically debatable, but a reasonable perspective. More germane to TTRPGs, I think it’s a legitimately interesting way to frame orcs, both more in line with the original source material (which as you say is nebulous to their origin) and interesting for players and GMs to deal with.
To me it’s so important that different ancestries/creatures be legitimately alien. If I can find a facsimile of an ancestry in real life Earth, it’s not foreign enough that I want an ancestry. I don’t need orcs that are tribal warriors or Mexican, we have Mexico and tribes on Earth. This is one area where Pathfinder and D&D both miss the mark for me… but not Warhammer, where they’re a psychic fungus, or LotR, where they’re test tube mooks.
I’d say that a complete lack of empathy is the defining quality of evil, what drives them to seek power without any care for others.
Definitely a good way to make a villain. But I’m not convinced any one trait makes a good villain! There are a lot of villains who have empathy, across media. Adrian Veidt in Watchmen, Roy Batty in Bladerunner, Lucifer in Paradise Lost, Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. All heroes are alike; each great villain is evil in their own way.
I ran Ravenloft in 3.5 and adored playing Strahd, it’s so fun to twirl the figurative moustache. To me a huge strength of tabletop is that we get to savor things more emotionally vs intellectually compared to other entertainment, since we’re acting it out, and with simple characters you can flat out bathe in it. I don’t play 5e but I would run Ravenloft if it meant getting to run rampant with Strahd again.
Anyone who has never GMed before, believe me, I’ve never found anything like Snidley Whiplashing it up, 22 ounces of fresh cut ham on rye. All the joy of being despicable, none of the culpability.
You can’t be evil if you don’t have free will. A tool has no evil except from what comes from the hand that wields it. So to me, orcs make more sense as a constructed organic machine, little better than automatons, and with no moral sense of their own.
This paradox, I.e., if orcs have free will, they can be truely evil, and not just a tool. But if they’re predestined to be basically evil as a race, can they really have free will? I think is basically unresolvable. That’s why Tolkien could never find a clear answer.
One of the frustrating things about humans and mass communication is the “for me it’s Tuesday” effect. For someone, this is the first time they’ve encountered “maybe orcs being innately evil isn’t a good idea”. They want to explore it and go through their feelings and blah blah blah. It’s a day that might change their life. For someone else, it’s Tuesday. We’ve had this conversation a thousand times before. It’s old hat.
It’s hard to be patient to faceless newcomer #3742 when you’ve already done this conversation so many times. They feel stupid and slow because they blend in with all the other people who brought this up. They’re bringing up points they feel are fresh and clever but have been discussed and settled already. But they’re a person seeing it for the first time. Somehow.
It feels like “are you stupid? We just went over this”, but that’s an illusion. It’s new to them .
(This doesn’t account for bad faith actors, who are trash and should go away)
Adding on to everything you’ve said, the people most likely encountering these topics for the first time usually are adolescents. I feel it helps my patience trying to keep that in mind when talking with them, since it makes sense that they may not have encountered the topic before.
Yup, it helps to remember that they’re 1 of today’s lucky 10,000. That said, I do think it’s reasonable to say that certain fantasy races might tend to think in certain ways, or have certain opinions, even if only because that’s what they’re brought up with. It means you can have interesting “ugly duckling” scenarios where one is brought up by a different race and ends up with their outlook instead.
I think “cultural values” are a better mechanism for that. Like america teaches that capitalism and individualism are good values. Anyone raised here gets a lot of that, but it’s not an innate property of being from Ohio
Just look for better settings. You can even keep the DnD rules if you’re feeling kinda lazy and just swap some names.
Or play a different game altogether if you’re feeling even more lazy
I’m fine with orcs and what not being normal for the most part but I think creatures like demons should be as close to naturally evil as possible maybe just no evolved empathy
I choose to play demons as though they can have empathy, but it’s always calculated empathy.
They are intentionally and willfully choosing to act with empathy because it meets some other goal, so even though all demons are fundamentally evil, they are not all fundamentally despicable.
I say it like it’s some high holy road concept thing, but it’s just more of a general guideline.
Demons will do anything they want to do as long as it meets their current objective.
Assuming we’re talking about humanoid demon creatures and not some sort of like ethereal “presence of evil” demon.
I did have idea for a high ranking demon lord or whatever that sees overcoming his nature as a way of becoming more powerful in that to be able to act and think truly selflessly would be alien enough to his peers that it could give him an advantage so he’s taken on the form of a traveling hero but has laspes into cruelty and his true power level if he gets too annoyed by his foes
So, you’re playing human CEOs
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
It’s a matter of world building. Orcs can be noble savages, or violent monsters. The main problem is humanizing these creatures. If you instead imagine a separate evolutionary path, then the race can be inherently “evil”.
If orcs have evolved for conflict and violence far beyond human levels, then by our standards they would be evil. At least by the philosophy of a middle ages like world. Catholics and Protestants considered each other evil for a few hundred years. A violent species that destroys humans on sight due to their violent instincts would easily be evil. Exceptions could exist, but the mass of individuals would be “evil”.
New lore: orcs are evolved from ducks. That explains everything
Can you give some context?
But saying that Orc and Drow are biologically evil feel like good old racism. The whole Drow let’s take a nice race and make an evil dark-skinned version of them way more problematic than the Drow is blackface debate
