Yep, this is going to be a post discussing racism.
One thing that confused me greatly about orcs and goblins is the severe difference in technological levels between them and regular human empires (also something else, but I’ll get to that later). Regular humans are depicted as being from the (unrealistic view of the) medieval period, but orcs and goblins are portrayed as being extremely underdeveloped tech-wise. Their cultures don’t feel like they belong together in the same geographical locations, and orcs don’t seem capable of learning from the people they’ve warred with for hundreds of years.
Now you may argue that that’s because orcs and goblins are intended to be genetically mentally inferior; their intelligence stat is certainly below the average human intelligence (average human intelligence = 10, orcs = 8 (5e orc = 7)). However there’s a reason why this doesn’t make sense: human barbarian tribes exist in the same regions as more technologically advanced humans and they’re not advancing either, despite co-existing or warring with other humans of their region for hundreds of years. Their tribes, unlike their literal neighbors, have been entirely unable to advance and yet remain as a constant warring group against their medieval counterparts without ever getting wiped out. They don’t live in neighboring nations, they live within the same nations as their medieval counterparts.
In the real world, you have situations like this arising because nations like Britannia (I’ve no idea what it was called before the Romans invaded) was literally invaded by a technologically advanced nation, putting them at odds and making neighbors of people who were technologically lesser. Situations like when the native actual American peoples were invaded by Europeans.
I’ve seen King Arthur portrayed as a knight fighting off ‘barbarians’ (one of the transformers movies, but also probably other depictions too), which would more accurately translate to a colonialist terrorizing the local population in this scenario, although apparently in the actual myths he was a Briton who fought off foreign invaders instead (not a depiction you see in media as far as I’m aware, especially as king Arthur is portrayed as being clad in plate armor of the medieval period).
Basically a more accurate representation of this situation in your usual TTRPG setting would depict the more technologically advanced nations as colonizers, at constant struggle with the neighboring populations that they’re actively trying to suppress, and I say neighboring because had those populations existed within their nation they would have murdered them all. TTRPG settings never depict this relationship, instead asking that you accept this current situation as though it just sprung up into its current state all of a sudden (which it did).
Going back to the cultures of orcs and goblins, they’re usually portrayed in a way that also makes them similar to human barbarians, neither of which match the cultures of the medieval peoples, but settler colonialism is never used as an explanation for why that is (settler colonialism being the only/most likely logical reason). No technologically medieval culture still has its barbarian beliefs or even traces of it, meaning they are indeed more akin to foreign invaders, which just makes the settings feel off given that those nations aren’t settler colonialist.
Now as regards orcs and goblins and their alignment by birth, I reject the automatic evil alignment they get and I reject it because in principal I repudiate Gygax’s views, which you can read here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/dtpgim/gygax_on_lawful_good/
He agrees with Chivington about the ‘nits make lice’ being an observable fact, a quote Chivington made in regards to actual human beings and not a race of beings who are objectively/genetically evil. Chivington was in the process of ethnically cleansing the region for settler colonialist reasons; Chivington’s side is the evil one and yet in a bizarre twist his logic is the one being considered as the rationale for lawful good.
Any accurate depiction of medieval societies living in such close proximity to orcs and goblins would require that the medieval society is a foreign one, where they’re the ones who are basically a pox on the orcs and goblins rather than the other way around as it’s portrayed. Orcs and goblins are always shown to be a constant threat to human societies, when in reality the inverse would be more realistic. There’s never any depictions of humans encroaching on and terrorizing orcs and goblins but the other way is always what’s presented, and that never made any sense.
Given Gygax’s son’s (Ernie Gygax) comments about native actual Americans, I got the sense that maybe he was raised on an unhealthy diet of ‘heroic’ cowboys versus ‘savage’ natives, and if this was the case, then his father probably raised him that way and had similar views (especially given his quoting Chivington as rationale behind the lawful good alignment of paladins).
When you consider Gygax’s opinions on the views of a genocidal murderer, suddenly it would make more sense to flip alignments between the medieval society and orcs and goblins (I’m not comparing orcs and goblins to native actual Americans), and suddenly paladins become basically the medieval Wehrmacht.
Unfortunately this line of reasoning brings me to…the tired old racist view that ‘technologically advanced’ = objectively good.
(oof this post was long)
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Gary Gygax was a latter-day phrenologist (biological determinist), a deeply racist guy who borrowed heavily from Tolkien and Tolkien clones and took their mostly inoffensive material and made it super racist.
When I was a teenager I read a bunch of the RA Salvatore Forgotten Realms novels. The whole idea behind those books is “what if a drow wasn’t ontologically evil.” About a dozen books into that series the same treatment is given to orcs. Unfortunately, my hazy recollection of the “orcs are actually misunderstood” books is that they veered into a whole host of other culturally insensitive tropes.
That said, Tolkien orcs are more advanced than their humans, so idk where gygax got his regression from
idk where gygax got his regression from
Do you really not know? Are you sure? :us-foreign-policy:
Any accurate depiction of medieval societies living in such close proximity to orcs and goblins would require that the medieval society is a foreign one, where they’re the ones who are basically a pox on the orcs and goblins rather than the other way around as it’s portrayed. Orcs and goblins are always shown to be a constant threat to human societies, when in reality the inverse would be more realistic. There’s never any depictions of humans encroaching on and terrorizing orcs and goblins but the other way is always what’s presented, and that never made any sense.
The Elder Scrolls setting has a history of Orcs (and sometimes their Goblin allies) regularly getting betrayed, invaded, besieged, and their ancestral capitol being razed by Bretons, Redguards, and other “human” races, only for Orsinium to be rebuilt generations later for another invasion to tear it down again. It’s close to that.
Elder Scrolls is great about this! I can really appreciate their approach that allows the setting to use racial tensions as a potential cause of conflict in-setting, while still emphasizing that these are all people, and that the in-universe racial stereotyping and discrimination is bullshit at its core
Will die on the hill screaming “inherent racial alignment sucks, inherent racial mental scores suck, I don’t care if it’s always been this way I don’t want way-too-close-to-home race essentialism in my fantasy!”
The ttrpg medium since it’s inception has been suffused with this thanks to, as you mention, Gygax and his ilk. I’ve gotten sick of explaining that “Orc dumb and evil but strong” is way way way too close to shit I’ve had spouted at me in real life for me to enjoy settings that use the trope without the barest critical analysis.
I actually really appreciate that more recent editions of Pathfinder and DnD have moved away from this, much to the chagrin of hundreds of grognards
Edit: actually I think race essentialism and stereotyping are fine setting and plot elements if they’re actually examined - it is absolutely great fuel for interesting stories and conflicts if the setting doesn’t treat it as universal truth, rather than the products of systems within the setting
Edit: actually I think race essentialism and stereotyping are fine setting and plot elements if they’re actually examined - it is absolutely great fuel for interesting stories and conflicts if the setting doesn’t treat it as universal truth, rather than the products of systems within the setting
I made a few posts just now discussing this very thing; the idea that a universe’s genetic system where you have beings born evil and then as per that afterlife’s system design is that they also go to an eternity of suffering is inherently evil in and of itself and players should be aware of this issue and actually trying to tackle it, as this very system is more evil than anything they could possibly encounter in the setting. Alternatively a setting could emphasize that there are people (orcs and goblins for example) suffering because the medieval societies around them basically are playing ‘cowboys and Indians’ with their lives and the lives of their families, and the players could basically get sucked in (very easily) by being hired by people to kill off orcs only to realize they’re murdering a local population and that the very medieval societies that hire them are actually quite vicious and barbaric.
The truth is that neither of the two ideas I’ve had aren’t offensive on one level or another, but I feel a lot of players don’t seem to realize that the old systems and views on race and inherent racial alignment most likely themselves came from people who saw the horrific history in a place like America and only saw basically ‘cowboys and Indians’, or John Wayne movies (never watched any; I’m assuming his movies were probably mostly about him killing tons of
nativeactual American people), divorcing the humanity of the people whose lands were being taken and them being genocided down to even the youngest life.Will die on the hill screaming “inherent racial alignment sucks, inherent racial mental scores suck, I don’t care if it’s always been this way I don’t want way-too-close-to-home race essentialism in my fantasy!”
I’ve been given so much shit for bringing it up, but because it still happens, I will once again say fuck the Thermian Argument. Just because fiction was written a way once doesn’t mean it must continue to be written that way forever and ever.
I have seen 3 posters here say lotr orcs are more technologically advanced than humans and I don’t think that’s really true when their industrialization is clearly being guided by Saruman and Sauron. It’s not like there’s a depiction of an independent orc society with similar development without their influences.
Jokes on you for exposing yourself as the liberal that you are and not having read the russian informal sequel ‘The Last Ringbearer’ where the premise is that Mordor is basically a technological wonderland and the conflict is framed as this blossoming technological revolution against the forces of ancient magics and superstitions and feudalism.
And that’s not even looking at ‘Black Book of Ardy’ which flips it around by making Melkor the good guy and the other losers the bad guys
nativeactual AmericansWhy are you doing this? Don’t do this. Plenty of indigenous people don’t like “American”. Native and actual is weird distinction to make, especially when you’re calling the “actual” people by a foreign name.
Use conventional terms or be specific or whatever, but don’t do this cute shit.
a colonial interpretation doesn’t map perfectly on all fantasy settings. just as often it’s ‘hill people’ which can be encoded with similar antipathies or even ethnic tensions, but is an ancient relationship the ‘civilized’ people might lack a ‘manifest destiny’ to go and subjugate that group. the historical basis would be like, the Welsh or Basque in Europe, Bedouin around the medditerrean—who were eventually subjugated and had colonialism done on them but generally after the stereotypical medieval setting
and like there isn’t a technological disparity with ‘hill people’, just poverty or political disorganization. a welsh shepard going to Paris in 1300 wouldn’t see any fundamentally unfamiliar technology, but perhaps a staggering abundance of it in one place
World of Warcraft goblins are more technologically advanced, they drive cars and helicopters and shit
But they were born kind of dumb, slaves to a troll empire (at least the faction of goblins in the horde) and a certain mineral they were mining boosted their intellect.
They are still kind of evil, and mostly because they are zealots of capitalism. Or the other way around.
:jesus-christ:
It’s pretty undeniable that fantasy has a lot of problematic and racist roots. Ofc there’s been a long time since Gygax was actually involved in D&D and the game has changed a lot since then, but it’s still difficult to know how to deal with this stuff. Like there’s a lot of ways to go wrong in trying to reclaim a problematic depiction, and it might be better to move away from it altogether.
Like D&D is very much geared towards combat. You have tons of combat abilities, that’s what the classes are balanced around, and that’s where the system contains the most complexity. But it’s also a storytelling game, and a group game. So you need something to be fighting that the whole group agrees needs to die. You have this dynamic where the players want something to kill because that’s what their abilities are for, and so the DM needs to engineer situations where violence is the clear solution. And that can often mean dehumanization and “Always Chaotic Evil” depictions, or it can mean cartoonish villains who want to destroy the world for no real reason. That’s not to say it’s inevitable, but it’s kind of the direction that the rules pull you towards.
Anyway fuck Gary Gygax that shit about Chivington is horrible.
They’re what medieval miners imagined were making all those weird noises underground. For whatever reason, mines emit all sorts of sounds and you can’t tell what’s making them or where they’re coming from. I’ve heard some tapes from down there and it’s creepy AF.
Oh, Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, that one.
The secret to understanding the Gygaxian mode of thought is not the Wild West. It’s the Wild East. Used to be, western culture’s frontier was in the east, in the marches, basically around modern-day Poland and Lithuania and so. The “Drang Nach Osten”, the drive to the east, was the original civilizing crusade. They would build military forts, attract settlers, make productive farms out of wildland, and so on. Out of the east came civilization’s greatest threats: Atilla the Hun, Ghengis Khan, and a thousand other, forgotten invasions. If civilization could expand far enough, it could eliminate these threats by occupying their land. Gygax the medievalist was obviously familiar with these tropes (which, to his credit, are still to this day unknown to most Americans - but Europeans know them innately).
Joke was on the Europeans, though. Asia extended further east than anyone ever thought possible. The North American continent, however, was not so large and the madlads actually did it.
They’re what medieval miners imagined were making all those weird noises underground. For whatever reason, mines emit all sorts of sounds and you can’t tell what’s making them or where they’re coming from. I’ve heard some tapes from down there and it’s creepy AF.
That’s really cool. Do you have any sort of source on these stories?
Justifying it in DnD or, say, Elder Scrolls doesn’t work because the orcs in question generally live on the surface, but it’s an interesting point anyway.
or, say, Elder Scrolls
Elder Scrolls is far kinder to orcs than Gygaxian D&D is, for what it’s worth.
That’s true, but that’s like saying “My group is far less racist than the KKK”
“Far” has room for a pretty wide spectrum, and while it’s far from ideal, the Elder Scrolls typically goes out of its way to give nuance and complexity and humanized motives to Orcs/Orsimer.
Even in Skyrim, they still ultimately depict them as tribespeople living beyond the margins of society with incomparably more primitive technology than anyone but the foresworn, with even bandits being more advanced, with very little demonstration of why they would live this way except for the idle inference that it’s in their blood and then whatever nuanced Deep Lore reason you will find buried in the pages of an in-game book. They still have the inborn ability “Berserker Rage,” they still don’t let non-Orcs even set foot in their encampment without a blood pact, including those groups that are really just as theoretically marginalized like the Khajiit, they still conform to these tropes in every respect except for the made-to-be-ignored texts, so when the player receives a radiant quest to kill a local chief, what reason do they have to not think of it like Goblin Slayer?
Of course, in older games it is much worse. In Daggerfall, orcs were not a playable race at all, and were just a type of monster to be exterminated, though there is plenty of dialogue indicating that they are subtextually specifically subhumans rather than beasts in human form, like how a character might have a malicious rumor spread about them that their parent was married to an orc or something.
The medieval Germans called them knockers, and I’ve seen a couple of Youtube videos from mine explorers where they’re down a mile or two and there are these knocking sounds coming from God knows where . I don’t easily get creeped out but something about this did it.
Tolkien’s orcs (and goblins, he uses the words interchangeably) lived in mountains. Notably Goblin-Town in The Hobbit. Here’s the song “Down Down to Goblin Town” from the Rankin-Bass movie from The Hobbit (1977). You know you want to listen to it. They tried using men’s choirs for all the goblin-songs to make them menacing, but they only succeeded in making them sound bad-ass. Go ahead and crank the sound up.
Fun fact: One of the singers of this song is none other than the legendary Thurl Ravenscroft himself. That’s right, the voice of Tony the Tiger is on the bass part.
You go my lad! Ho, ho my lad!
There’s also this banger in Return of the King from the same studio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsKY3P14Wdk
And this banger too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCmfxVXCVG8
Oh boy this topic again.
You hit the nail on the head pretty much.. The problem started with Tolkein (who, to at least give the benefit of the doubt, was a product of his time)- this is what happens when you frame the cannon fodder grunts that your heroic band of heroes need to mow down as ontologically evil, because you’re trying to tell a simplified good vs evil narrative, but then just happen to give them dark skin and features similar to a Jim Crow caricature. Intentional or not, racists will latch on to this depiction to reaffirm their own views.
You can try and reclaim the depiction the way that Warcraft did (although that kinda opens up it’s own can of worms, the Noble Savage is probably just as pernicious a trope), but realistically the easiest way to dispense with the racism is to abandon the concept of a sentient being being ontologically evil at birth, which as I understand it the new editions of DnD do (to give scant credit where it’s due).
You hit the nail on the head pretty much… The problem started with Tolkein (who, to at least give the benefit of the doubt, was a product of his time)- this is what happens when you frame the cannon fodder grunts that your heroic band of heroes need to mow down as ontologically evil, because you’re trying to tell a simplified good vs evil narrative, but then just happen to give them dark skin and features similar to a Jim Crow caricature. Intentional or not, racists will latch on to this depiction to reaffirm their own views.
I know a fair number of chuds offline that get enraged, like, visibly enraged if some fiction they’re presented with suggests that the ugly-therefore-evil people maybe aren’t evil after all. :frothingfash:
Unfortunately as I continued to write, I got sleepy and missed a few points I’d actually intended on including in my post; One of my additional issues that I took with orcs and goblins was…where do they go when they die? It makes no sense for them to go to the abyss or hell because that’s where evil beings go and like…orcs and goblins didn’t choose to be evil, so what are they being punished for? If you have a setting where beings can be born evil without the choice to become evil, and they go to hell because ‘they deserve to because they’re evil’, then it kind of means that any actual hero would be trying to tackle this system because there are beings being punished for choices that were never in their hands to begin with.
You’d end up with a situation where you literally have evil babies, and if as a heroic character you literally see nothing wrong with the world operating like this, then your own character is either evil or insane.
I think the original lore was that orcs and goblins go to their own plane where their god resides, where they get to continue to do what they did in life in the afterlife i.e. pillage other planes, in a weird parody of Christian “a life of service will lead you to his side” theology. I guess the eviller you are the more you’re rewarded in the afterlife by your evil god? But my recollection of Dnd lore is hazy, I’m not sure if that’s really the case even.
There was that post about JRPGs and killing God, which I think would be the thematic ground you’d want to take to tackle/deconstruct this.
I actually did have a story element I’d intended on dropping on my players’ hands (had my campaign lasted that long); the idea was that in the heavenly realm, divine beings were split in a debate in regards to whether creatures like orcs and goblins were innately evil or whether it was learned, so to create a controlled environment to test their views, they would have goblin babies be raised away from civilization with little influence on them up to the point where they could raise and take care of their own children and then immediately left to their own devices. It would be the players’ duty to watch over this tribe without influencing it and to ensure that no outside influence affects the village; the village does ultimately encounter outside influences, negative ones, but the idea was that regardless of the negative encounters, it doesn’t make the goblins lean towards evil or violence, instead they persevere and maintain a neutral society, perhaps more hostile to strangers, but not ‘evil’. I wanted to make the players think about the nature of evil in traditional fantasy settings and about the innate absurdity of ‘born evil’ races.
Tolkien’s orcs weren’t black people. They were Huns and Mongols - people from the east, from the distant landmass of Asia.
Yes, Tolkein himself specifically described his orcs as “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types” (Letters, p. 274), but to a white supremacist everyone whose skin colour isn’t theirs gets lumped into a large Black mass anyway.
As I said, intentional or not, racists will latch on to this depiction to reaffirm their own views.
Also, to head off a potential argument at the pass, minorities don’t get the privilege of ignoring problematic elements- we will end up finding out what racists think of us one way or the other.
Edit: Also also, before I get accused to trying to cancel Tolkein:
“His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is, where he came from. And if he was really evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home. If he would not rather have stayed there… in peace”
Just like I said - the peoples who invaded Europe from the east. We’re agreeing with each other.
Also also, before I get accused to trying to cancel Tolkein:
“His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is, where he came from. And if he was really evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home. If he would not rather have stayed there… in peace”
This just means that these peoples should stay in their own lands (which is about as common a racist trope as you can get).
Ah ok, fair.
Yeah, but at least Faramir treats them as people. Not much, but better than nothing.
Sometimes goblins are depicted as tech experts, usually with steampunk or clockwork.
But I think you’re analysis is dead on with the classic dnd orc/goblin.
I think uncritically absorbing ‘heroic’ cowboys versus ‘savage’ natives is most of it. I’d also look at the Mongol invasion of Europe in the 1200s; they only got to Eastern Europe, but that terrified the rest of Europe and was heavily mythologized. That’s a case of an extremely foreign culture (besides just being from far away, nomads and agrarians are just wildly different), with no apparent technology (because agrarian Europe thinks technology = forges), suddenly being a huge threat, from seemingly nowhere (actually like a couple days’ ride into the steppe, but that might as well be the moon).
So Europeans have this internalized idea that low-tech nomadic hordes are this massive peer-level threat. Which then gets projected onto the plains Indians in pop culture.
You can see an example of this conflation in practice, in George R R Martin’s works. He says:
The Dothraki were actually fashioned as an amalgam of a number of steppe and plains cultures… Mongols and Huns, certainly, but also Alans, Sioux, Cheyenne, and various other Amerindian tribes.
GRRM is talking complete shit here; he doesn’t know anything about any of these cultures. But it shows the idea of an equivalency in the minds of western fantasy writers.
The Mongols made such a tremendous impression because they mass murdered anyone who got in their way. They easily brushed aside the armored knights of Europe. They would have made it all the way to Portugal except for the fact that Ghengis Khan died and they were called back to Mongolia to decide on a new leader.
In lotr the orcs are more technologically advanced than the humans, it was part of the unintentional WWI allegory that was going on
Unintentional?
Tolkien famously hated allegory. He had a rant that was basically, “Does every book have to be a fucking allegory? Why can’t I tell a story and it’s just a story? Jesus, people.”
He may have hated it, but even as a Tolkien enjoyer I believe it is absurd to nod along to his claim that he totally wrote all his fiction in a vacuum with no prior influences entirely out of the aether.
engage with other fantasy outside of everything inspired by forgotten realms and tolkien
even firmly within that wheelhouse, Tolkien’s orcs have the tech advantage (as another poster already mentioned), and MTG goblins are frequently weird lil science guys. This is, like, mostly a D&D and its consequences thing
D&D made it foundational to so many Gamers™️ but I think Warhammer, both 40k and Fantasy, has really done the most damage in recent years. It’s become an icon for online chuds to rally around and play out their ethnic cleansing fantasies with thinly veiled references to real groups.
If I see someone 40k LARPing in the internet wild, 90% chance I’m reading from a fascist. Other 10% is dank proppa Ork memes.
Gary Gygax and his stupid, unbalanced RPG should have died out long ago. There were better RPGs in the 1970s, for fuck’s sake. Today’s gamers have no excuse whatsoever. Hopefully that cash grab by making D&D into an app will kill it off, like a stake through a vampire’s heart.
