Lore and Legends of the Dezzyverse

Multiethnic characters in Fantasy Roleplaying

Introduction

One of my longest-lasting characters is a Half-Orc fighter. I made Darshag in 1988, and played him in every edition of Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfnder 1st (except 4th,but we don’t talk about 4th.) After 37 years, Darshag is a fully realized character, he’s got a really rich and detailed career. Recently, I designed Darshag’s daughter Zhaagdar who has begun her own adventuring career.

With the 2024 revision of 5th edition of D&D, multiethnic characters, specifically Half-Orcs and Half-Elves have been “removed” from the Players’ Handbook. You may not be aware of this, but this isn’t the first time Half-Orcs have been removed from the Player’s Handbook. Back in 1989, with the publicaton of 2nd Edition D&D, Half-Orcs were also removed from the Players’ Handbook. At least with the 2024 revision of 5th edition, Orcs are used to replace the Half-Orcs.

Certain segments of the Fantasy Roleplaying Community are vocally and loudly outraged by this. “Orcs!” they say “being removed from the Monster Manual changes the game! The new players will no longer see orcs as faceless minions of evil! Orcs will be shown as kings, heroes, the Good Guys!” and they’ll rend their garments and fall into the dust in woe and despair. Okay, maybe only in social media will they take such extremes. Even the old grognard-gamers have the same capacity for drama (even if they often deny it) as the theater-kid post d20 gamer is. Much of this is simply that there are evolving depictions of the monsters in D&D. Some of it is that the fantasy folk in D&D have traditionally been starkly divided between “Good Guys” (humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings) and “Monsters” (orcs, goblinoids, drow, kobolds, etc..). The original treatments of player character options supported the good guys and varied between outright prohibiting and creating a labyrinth of rules if a player wanted to play a monster.

The good news for all my old-school grognard friends is that those rules still exist and are still supported by WotC (through Drive Thru RPG) and an entire segment of FRPG publishing in the Old School Revolution (or Original Spirit Rules, or a half-dozen other application of OSR as an acronym). Furthermore, most of the people who are complaining about the adjustments of the Players’ Handbook and Monster Manual in 5th edition aren’t playing 5th edition D&D anyway! They’re already playing their lovingly annotated 1st or 2nd edition D&D, or Castles and Crusades, or Swords and Wizardry, DCC, the Black Hack, or a dozen other games that scratch the itch.

Orcs as Bad Guys

There is an argument to be made that Orcs (and all Monster ethnicities, including Drow) are simply fodder for heroes to defeat, kill, and move on. They’re soulless, or damned, or grown from vats at the bottom of the spawning pits of Campaign Big Bad. This most commonly comes out of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth and similar worlds of fantasy fiction. The orcs in this case are not people, they may look like people, but they are soldier-ants with no wills of their own. They are extentions of the Sorcerers, Demigods, Demons, and Evil Emperor’s will. They don’t have families, they are spawned, fully grown and armed with their spears, falchions, shields and helmets and marched out to war.

This characterization absolves the player characters of any moral considerations when their 20th level barbarian cuts through them by the score every round. Wiping out a tribe of these orcs doesn’t involve non-combattants. Every single orc from the war-chief to the clan priest, to the cook is an active adversary. There’s no one who will miss them when their dead, mourn their loss, or wonder when they’re ever coming home.

These guys are born Evil (or spawned Evil) from the start because the will that motivates them is the Evil of their “Master”. They don’t have an inner life to make them sit down and contemplate “why”. This works great for video games, it works great for wargames, it even works for role-playing games so long as the setting isn’t concerned with three dimensional characterizations of the Orc Warrior.

It does come with problems though.

Having someone who carries all the trappings of being a person, does blur the lines of their person hood. What’s more, even the hordes of the Demon-King have some-sort of society, rudimentary and crude as it may be. That society can and often is based on real-world peoples. The language used starts to reflect the language used to classify and condemn real-world people as sub-human. “Savages, Witch-Doctors, Shaman, Chief, sub-Chief, Berzerker, Brute” these have all been used in RPGs to classify the different types of Orc. Even the classification of “Humanoid” is a perjorative.

These terms have also been used to classify people. Colonizing cultures always paint the people they colonize with these terms to justify the treatments they inflict on them. Colonizing Nations go to war with peers and have “rules”, but they cleanse the lands of the colonized people. The “rules” didn’t apply when Manifest Destiny was involved.

It’s a buzz-kill, if all you want to do is blow off steam after a week of drudgery and just be the main character of your story for a couple of hours. And then there’s this bleeding-heart making comparisons with the real-world, and honestly, at that moment you don’t care! Just roll your attack already!

The old-shool players have a point. Orcs are not the First Nations, were never intended to stand in for Africans, and are just made up. They’re just taken from Lord of the Rings, man! Even the author of Middle-Earth, and the creators of Dungeons and Dragons have been clear, they never intended their depictions of Orcs or Goblins, or Gnolls to be anything other than Orcs, Goblins and Gnolls.

The second problem, for me at least, is that having Orcs as hordes of soulless cannon-foder is boring. They’re just tallys of hit points to be whittled to zero by my dice rolls and experience to be added to my total so I can level up and gain yet more abilities to kill more of these guys faster. I’ve been playing D&D for 44 years as of this writing and I can say that I’ve done this to death. I need more.

Furthermore, video games manage this much better and far more entertaining than humans can. AND there aren’t any scheduling problems.

Orcs as people

What the trend has been over the past quarter-century is that Orcs, Goblins, Kobolds, Drow, etc.. are peoples. They do have societies, histories, individually they have goals and ambitions and parents and there’s someone back home that will wonder what happend to them when they don’t come home. People can be sympathetic. People can be complex. People, can be interestng.

In this argument, Orcs have reasons to be invading. Even if that reason is as simple as their war-chief says “invade”. They can still be minions of the big campaign bad guy. They can be devoted to the demigod, or the emperor, or the sorcerer. They can be swayed by promises that once those Elves, or Knights, or Dwarves are dealt with, their bellies will always be full. As Saruman says in the Peter Jackson adaptation of the Two Towers, “You will taste Man-Flesh!” From what I’ve read, man-flesh tastes a lot like pork, and pork products are yummy, so I can see the appeal.

Point being in this instance, that Orcs can still be Evil. They could be slaughtering villiagers (and eating them). They can be reveling in slaughter because that’s what they want to do. They can covet the riches and wealth of their neighbors because it’s riches and wealth. It’s just that in this case, the Evil of these Orcs is a choice.

Orcs as people might not even be Evil as Evil is defined by the alignment chart, they might see themselves as Good. All they really want is to make life better for themselves and their Orc-kids and Orc-families. There are non-combattants in these communities. There might be farmers who are desperate to bring in one more harvest from the blasted wasteland that their tribe lives in. The lands the orcs are invading might be fertile and rich. The Orc farmer might be telling thier chief that if they were to be farming that land, they could grow enough food for everyone and more.

Orcs with wants and needs can be negotiated with. That’s something that doesn’t happen in Middle-Earth. Orcs there don’t surrender, nor do they beg for mercy. They’re working, ultimately for Sauron, and his will is their will. When orcs are people, they want to live. In their heart of hearts they personally want to keep living, even if it’s for one more year, one more day, or even one more hour. This also provides a good opportunity to cut boring combats short. The orcs just break and run or throw down their weapons and surrender. The combat ends when the GM decides that it’s just a boring series of dice rolls and arithmetic. The orcs can be bribed. They might be convinced to look the other way with some coins offered. They can be turned. Orcs can be convinced there is a greater thread and ally with the characters. They can be shown mercy and in return, fight for their savior until they feel their no longer in debt.

This is something that video games don’t often do better than a human GM.

Like with the examples in the previous section, there are problems here as well. For one, giving NPCs goals and ambitions piles a lot more work on the shoulders of the GM, especially if these NPCs start working with the player-characters. This also threatens to pull the spotlight away from the players’ characters. Since the GM is omnipotent with regards to the adventure and the setting, that can leak over to the NPCs who interact with the characters. This can make the NPC invaluable, and coupled with the NPCs goals, the characters can end up as marginal chararacters in their own story.

This approach also makes the moral landscape more complex. When Orcs and other human adjascent monsters become people, they often have families, communities, in short, innocents. When confronted with this it becomes a moral choice for the players as to how their characters will manage a newly-defenseless Orc community. It’s one thing to burn the spawning pits of faceless hordes, it’s entirely different to put a village to the torch. For many players, this isn’t why they play D&D. Instead of being boring, this approach can become too demanding.

So what about Half-Orcs?

The simplest solution, is to just use the Half-Orc (and Half-Elf) entry from the 2014 Players’ Handbook. The 2024 revision remains very compatable with 2014, and very little alteration needs to be made.

Another very simple solution is to choose the character’s species’ abilities from one parent or the other. “Little Blorg sure takes after his Mother, an orc just like her!” Of course, the GM can make all sorts of house rules for Half-Orc player characters tailored to the character and the campaign.

With regards to the Half-Orc character’s circumstances of birth and parentage, it is imperative that the primary choice belongs to the character’s player. That being said, the other players in the group and the game master also get to have an opinion. Remember, everyone at the table, including the game master are there to have fun and everybody needs to accomodate one another if D&D is to be a positive and fun experience. But this is really true regardless of a given character’s species. Any species option could have as pleasant or problematic histories as any other. An argument can be made that even if the Half-Orce can be as virtuous as possible, if the assumption towards their history is problematic because Orcs are involved, that’s just as racist as assuming the character is “rude, crude, crass, and generally obnoxious” or mandating that all Half-Orcs get penalties to Charisma or Intelligence while getting bonuses to Strength and Constitution at the same time.

The reactions of NPCs to Half-Orcs, or Orcs for that matter should be established and agreed upon by the players and the game master. Role-playing racial abuse is difficult. “We don’t like your kind ‘round here”, while likely authentic and supportive of verisilimitude, can be uncomfortable or unfun for everyone involved. Thus, the degree to which racial segregation is detailed should be agreed upon early in the campaign, and should be open to revision at any time during game play.

What about the Drow?

Many of the same issues facing Orcs in D&D also affect Drow. On the one hand, Drow can be Evil from the start, corrupted by their intimate spiritual connection to Llolth, Demon Queen of Spiders. Only in very rare cases can individuals overcome this damnation and pursue a life not beholden to Chaos and Evil. And on the other hand, Drow can be born withough predestination towards Evil, but learn how to survive in a Chaotic Evil society. Individuals born with strong empathic instincts or kind hearts seldom survive with those virtues intact. If they survive at all.

The difference between Drow and Orcs in the fictions of D&D and fantasy literature is that Drow are seldom portrayed as mindless hordes. Drow are seldom characterized as being spawned fully grown. Drow, it is commonly agreed on in the writing, are born of mothers and have childhoods.

But Drow and Orcs do share a similarity with regards to the approach that they are both Evil from the start of their lives. With Drow it’s the influence of their Demon Goddess. In this approach, the Drow don’t have agency, never do, even Drow infants are Evil and devoted to their Goddess. This approach also suffers from the “Orcs as midless spawn” problems described earlier

Drow born into an Evil society maintains the possibility that if the Drow infant is born and raised outside of the influence of their Demon-worshiping society, they will develop with agency and free will. They may still turn out evil, of course, but it’s not a predetermined result. This approach does mitigate some of the moral quandries because Drow society is so thoroughly dominated by worship of Llolth that only the youngest non-combattants encountered will not already be devoted to the cause of evil. But it still has the same moral quandry mentioned with the Orcs. What to do with captives who are not only innocent, but helpless as well. Not every player group wants to play the adventure where they shepherd a nursery out of the dangers of the Underdark.

Conclusion

This simply is a non-controversy. Despite the amount of noise surrounding it. To which this article is contributing, if we’re keeping things 100. It still boils down to playing a game with friends telling the stories you want to tell. Showing one another some basic respect, and understanding that the ways to play Dungeons and Dragons are as varied as the millions of people who have been playing D&D for more than 50 years at this point. If you’re having fun, you’re doing it right.