I'm overdue to say something about Alexander Macris's video channel. Alex is the writer of Adventurer Conqueror King and he's been doing a YouTube channel for several months now where he tackles game theory and being a better referee. He's got a collegial style and well-articulated positions. Last week he tackled the question of whether your RPG should have "inherently evil races" (video is posted below).
This question has been around. It's been a lightning rod in D&D style games since the Keep on the Borderlands introduced tribes of humanoids just up the road from the Keep (and it's usually accompanied by a debate on colonization in gaming). Over 40 years, designers and authors have granted more sympathetic attributes to the humanoids in their game worlds, prompting Wizards of the Coast to declare there were no longer evil humanoids in modern incarnations of D&D, but rather they would have all alignments like humans - a sort of "Fantasy Star Trek", where through cooperation, inclusivity, diplomacy, and cultural exchange, everyone can find common ground and have a place in the Federatio… er, Forgotten Realms.
At that point, might as well admit James Raggi was right 15 years ago when he dumped fantasy settings for the early modern and said, let's just place adventures in the real world and have complex conflicts with human antagonists without the furry costumes… but that's another game, another post. Alex is clinging to heroic fantasy with its panoply of sentient races.
Alex offers a workable solution to the question of innately evil races. An "innately evil race" would be one where coexistence is not possible at all - the evil race represents an existential threat to human civilization. The example he uses in the video is the xenomorph from the Alien series. You're either on the side of civilization or you’re siding with the enemy and betraying it. The scientific term for this unresolvable clash of species is "competitive exclusion theory".
The problem is that humanoid depictions became relatable and too human. Orcs are a misunderstood culture, like a fantasy version of Star Trek's violent yet honorable Klingons. They're no longer Tolkien's implacable forces of destruction and death. In the movie Return of the King, there's a visceral experience of orc hatred of humanity when the orc commander proclaims, "The age of men is over, the time of the orc has come." The battle of Minas Tirith is an extinction event - the stakes are victory or the fall of civilization. In Middle Earth, Fantasy Star Trek is reserved for the humans, elves, dwarves, and hobbits to become kissy-kissy allies and cohabitants. The spawn of Morgoth (and the orcs) have no place in Eriador. (And yes, I'm side-stepping any broader discussion of the orcs based on Tolkien's letters or life experiences - here I'm just reacting to the representation in the fiction).
Tapping back into the Trek universe, maybe the Borg are the best example of that existential threat. Or the Gorn. In fantasy, something like GRR Martin's White Walkers are a foe with whom there can be no compromise. But for mainstream fantasy games, 40 years of treating orcs, goblins, and hobgoblins as variant people, has gone too far to reclaim them as an irredeemable enemy. Were the seeds sown as early as the 1E Monster Manual, with it's complex and naturalistic depiction of humanoid tribal life?
But we will do as we will, in our home games. Here is the video:
One parting thought - I'm intrigued by the idea that depictions of orc-like monsters and boogeymen in fairy tales and literature may hearken back to some "species-memory" of conflict between homo sapiens and the Neanderthals during the Ice Age. Instinctual memory sounds like goofy pseudoscience, but it's fun to think about. It brings to my mind the horrible "Wendol" from the movie The 13th Warrior (Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead novel), where the Wendol are a nigh-supernatural force of Neanderthal-like primitives that emerge from remote caves to terrorize Viking villages. There are no universal translators, parleys, or requests to negotiate anywhere in sight - just battle axes, swords, and a doughty crew of Northmen to hold the line and stand for the survival of mankind. Along with Antionio Banderas.
The problem of goblins/orcs and whether they are evil (inherently or no) was a big deal for me in the process of preparing for my upcoming campaign. I wanted to have my inherently evil humanoids and make them intelligent and negotiable too; I finally settled on goblins/orcs etc all being the same sort of thing, humans who have been transformed and become implacably evil through a curse, just larger or smaller depending on how much human flesh they've consumed. It's still possible to redeem them, similar to curing lycanthropy, but there's way, way too many of them to make it practical.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good approach, I like the idea of "de-naturalizing" the humanoids so they're not just fuzzy people. I've had goblins sprouted from pumpkin patches and orcs brewed from larva (lawful evil souls).
DeleteMy go-to bad guys are now just undead beast-men raised by the sorcery of necromancers. They have no culture, no feelings and no free will. Dispatch with them guilt free.
ReplyDeleteI like the original idea of law v chaos. Orcs and what have you have chosen the side of chaos, which is existentially opposed to law. No need to bring the word evil into it.
ReplyDeleteThat's what I'm doing in the ACKS Greyhawk game as well, I'm using simpler BX style alignment (Law vs Chaos) where one side stands for civilization the other stands for it's destruction.
DeleteI find the standard D&D humanoids pretty boring, and it is a bit too easy to skate too close to recognizable tropes surrounding "savages" in real history. My preference is often to just use other humans as antagonists. Although when I ran my B/X megadungeon, I recast orcs as human adventurers that had spent too much time in the dungeon and gone feral, regressing to a bestial savagery. And my PCs were on quite friendly terms with my more folkloric goblins, at least until it became clear the goblins were turning children into more goblins and it became necessary to stop that.
ReplyDeleteThese days I am mainly interested in Dungeon Crawl Classics, which promotes an philosophy of making monsters unique in each adventure. So you might encounter a group of savage humanoids that do all the "orc stuff" and try to kill the PCs for no reason except they are violent brutes, but the characters would never be already familiar with them to say, "Oh, those are orcs, they're like that." Are there other groups of these humanoids that are friendly and civilized? Maybe, but you may never find out. All that matters is this group of monsters in the adventure at hand.
Orcs (and their kin) are not just misunderstood IMC. They are murdering, raping, slave-taking, human-eating monsters.
ReplyDeleteI have gone halfway to xenomorphs myself -> https://wanderinggamist.blogspot.com/2020/04/bug-orcs.html
ReplyDeleteI never liked the evil race trope especially when you show them having their own culture. Some of the comments in that video really rubbed me the wrong way lol.
ReplyDeleteBut if the species is just animalistic like the Aliens? Yeah that's fine with me. Cult, corrupted Religions, Corrupted Goverment, Nobles are all pretty easy picks for me when picking who's going to be the cannon fodder for my players :)
Very late to this party, but it's interesting to see that one of my settings essentially settled on the "coexistence is impossible" solution for a sentient species that you almost always have to fight. In this case, it's a setting with "spontaneous generation," where certain biomes will literally create certain forms of life, and it turns out that ruined buildings will naturally "spawn" orcs and goblins.
ReplyDeleteThe trick is that orcs and goblins, being sentient, realize that a good way to increase their numbers is to produce more ruins, and the most efficient way to do that is to find structures built by other sentient races and destroy them. And so you have a harsh existential struggle: humans building a town encroaches on the orc lifestyle, while orcs burning a town down encroaches on the human lifestyle.
One assertion in this post that I find very lacking is the assertion that "At that point, might as well admit James Raggi was right 15 years ago when he dumped fantasy settings for the early modern and said, let's just place adventures in the real world and have complex conflicts with human antagonists...." -- I mean, why?
Yes, if all races contain all alignments, lazy or ignorant world-building could lead to deeply uncomfortable situations where an entire fantasy "race," no matter where any given individual lives and works, is a monoculture with its tropes based on gross stereotypes about some real-world culture or other. But to be blunt, that's even easier to do in an alt-earth early modern setting! I see far more opportunities for bigotry to slip into a setting where you need to answer questions like "what's going on in the local [Romani/ Jewish/ Polish/ Italian/ Libyan/ Irish/ etc.] community?" than one where you need to flesh out a dwarf character and decide how tropily Scottish you're going to make them.
But... why not allow players and DMs who like the aesthetic to put pointy ears, or fur, or whatever onto a given character? It doesn't need to be any more problematic than an "early modern" setting where some of the humans are left-handed, or dark-eyed, queer, etc., and saying "If I can't have inherently evil orcs then nobody gets any fantasy races at all" would make no more sense to me than saying "If I can't make the family's meal with mounds of garlic and then everybody has to eat peanut-butter sandwiches." As long as they avoid harm, let people add their preferred flavors to things.
Coda: While I mostly agree with your closing thought on the video in question, its thesis struck me less as "goofy pseudoscience" and more as "aggressively wrong." Like, outside of Africa, pretty much all modern humans have some degree of Neanderthal DNA, which implies that rather than existential conflict being so unavoidable that it would be ingrained in our deepest subconscious, that instead coexistence -- and indeed "friendly relations" were fully possible. Add to this the blatant fact that orcs-as-we-know-them were created by Tolkien that previous to his writing boogeymen were based on purely human tropes (the creepy dude who lives alone in the woods and probably attacks strangers; the old woman who dares to have unexpected skills and opinions; the bandit clan that keeps raiding our village, etc.), and the whole piece comes off as someone who had a thought and was more interested in sounding clever on the internet than following up on the idea with any degree of rigor.
I guess it's at least useful as a conversation starter, though.