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Old 10-02-2011, 01:39 PM   #1
NorphTehDwarf
 
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Default What is an Orc?

Orcs. Elves. Dwarfs. Halflings. Gnomes. We all know these standard fantasy races, and the basic cliches associated with 'em. Orcs are savages and usually bad guys. Elves come in three flavors. Dwarfs are squat, bearded, and recently Scottish. Halflings steal and like to eat. Gnomes invent and tend towards fishmalk wackiness. Oh, and humans? Humans are bland.

We all know these fantasy sapients and frankly a lot of us have gotten tired of their stereotypes. Some people deal with getting tired of the standard fantasy five by getting rid of them all and working from whole cloth to make new ones. I think it's more interesting to take the old standards and bend them into new shapes. This could mean their culture, their biology, their psychology, or any combination of the above gets tweaked.

A few examples from a fantasy world I'm working on as a campaign setting:
  • Orcs are nomadic herdsmen who have an inexplicable ability to foster lamarckian evolution in their herds. They alternately trade and war with the human and elven kingdoms. Human expansion onto orc lands and the orcs' willingness to trade with the god-killing elves are a constant source of tension.
  • Elves are reaching the end of a millenniums-long genocidal war with a human-dwarf kingdom. Elven souls are immortal (something achieved after killing their gods), and they are consistently reborn into elf babies, but their population has dropped to several thousand and so there are now millions of elf spirits crowding their afterlife and fighting over these newborns. Every living elf therefore has a thousand years of memories and skill and a hate for other races so ancient that it may never be broken. Meanwhile, in the Waiting Realm, certain elven spirits have despaired of finagling their way into a newborn elf and have instead inhabited human or orc bodies, producing this world's half-elves, who go to great lengths to disguise their true identity.
  • Dwarfs are divided by politically between red and white factions and their mountain realm is in the middle of a civil war between loyalists of the Under-Tsar and revolutionaries who among other things want dwarven society to recognize that their species has two genders (oddly enough, it does not).

I'm not really looking for a critique of world, although I recognize it's got gaping holes. What I'd like to hear from y'all is what you've done to spice up the racial menu, or what you've read elsewhere and liked.
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Old 10-02-2011, 01:45 PM   #2
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Default Re: What is an Orc?

How can gender exist among the dwarves if it isn't recognized? Did you mean sex?

What sort of animals do orcs herd, and what sort of biological changes have the orcs fostered in their herds?

How do the humans fit into all this?
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Old 10-02-2011, 03:00 PM   #3
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Default Re: What is an Orc?

I noticed some time ago that the Sidhe of Celtic legend bore a striking resemblance to the Moon-Eyed People of Cherokee lore. That got me to thinking, and my standard fantasy campaign was soon established as a kinda-sorta alternate North America, my interpretation of what the Beyond World of American Indian mythology would look like if various "lost" groups from our own world had actually made transit to it.

The elves in my world are rather attractive, with pale skin, white hair and large eyes. Their society is largely matriarchal, and most of them use magic to some degree and live in a large underground city. The predominate deity is called Grandmother Spider.

Sound familiar? Yeah, that's what most of my players thought, too...at least those that forgot Jimmy's Law #1.* My daughter, however, quickly decided that there had to be more to these "drow" than met the eye. She called my brother (our resident expert on post-Roman and Anglo-Saxon Britain) and he identified the elves for her as my version of the Sidhe...which, he warned her, made them no less dangerous but not necessarily evil.

Anyway, the Sidhe are ruled by Queen Titania from her palace in Alfhame [Mammoth Cave, Kentucky]. Cultivated spider silk and phosphorescent dyes are just two examples of commodities traded by the Sidhe.

The Dverge (dwarves) came to the campaign setting with some of the Norse colonies and created the citadel of Dvergeheim in what we know as the Iron Mountains of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. They are, naturally, master metal-workers and craftsmen, and are known for making magic items of all sorts.

Nobody knows for sure where Yaktayvian Pygmies (halflings) originated. From what little information that has been gathered, most of their dark-skinned people farm the slopes of a mountain far to the west [Mount Shasta] that contains a miraculous subterranean city. Some few of their number are known to be in the employ of various nobles as tinkers and engineers, and nearly everyone has at least heard of the troupes of Masked Yaktayvian Pygmy Wrestlers that mysteriously appear and disappear throughout Tir Afon (the campaign setting, analogous with eastern North America).

Rumor has it that the Skraelinger (orcs) originally came from the densely forested mountains north of FuSang [Pacific Northwest**, centered on Seattle] and were driven east for some reason. They quickly adopted the prairie llama for its meat, fur and as a beast of burden; some tribes have been known to ride horses as well. They are generally considered to be a scourge on the land; the only thing that keeps them in check seems to be their tendency for warring upon one another.


* Jimmy's Laws were codified by a former player of mine and named in his honor. He came up with just under a dozen of them, and they are frequently quoted in my games. #1 states that "Take nothing at face value; what you think you know is likely to be wrong."

** The Skraelinger in my game pretty much originated with a "lost" group of Neanderthals that some cryptozoologists believe still inhabit remote portions of British Columbia. In the context of my game, this group fell under the control of a group of dero, who spent several Skraelinger generations warping their society in cruel ways before eventually tiring of the game and abandoning their playthings.
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Old 10-02-2011, 03:04 PM   #4
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Default Re: What is an Orc?

I've worked up a variant of dwarves based on Norse mythology, but I haven't used it yet.
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Old 10-02-2011, 03:17 PM   #5
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Default Re: What is an Orc?

I've patterned by orcs after the African lion. Females orcs stay with their families throughout their lives. Young males orcs are driven away by their fathers when they reach puberty and form roaming bachelor bands. When the males are old enough and strong enough, they take over a harem and start their own family. They will kill or drive off the old males and kill the children so the females can raise theirs instead.

It's these roaming band that give orcs their nasty reputations. Since they're about as intelligent as Homo erectus, they attack farms and villages to get their goods and weapons. They also tend to kill the men and children and rape the women. If any female offers resistance, they kill her too. It's this behaviour that is the reason other humanoids hate them.
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Old 10-02-2011, 03:44 PM   #6
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Default Re: What is an Orc?

I've only just started to give thought to this; been busy with my space opera campaign, which is still pretty new. The players are only just starting to get a sense of what the big conflicts are and where they stand.

Anyway, I plan to run a fantasy campaign sometime down the road, where long-living elves experience amnesia (only occasionally recalling ancient events, often forgetting specific events more than a few years recent) and dwarves apply the scientific method and exchange technological wonders and expertise for human wives (think the seven dwarves with telescopes and germ theory each writing a Da Vinci's notebook-style treatise).

I might steal orc ideas from this thread, if it is alright; matriarchal herders with roving bands of males and odd herd animals (some of which have gone feral over eons) sounds like a pretty great mix to me. It also provides a rationale for a novel bestiary.
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Old 10-03-2011, 02:45 AM   #7
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Default Re: What is an Orc?

+1 for stripping the orcs of their "Always Chaotic Evil" - although I have run them in the past in campaigns where the PCs culture regarded them as ACE (they were actually magically GM'd humans and the fact that they had human souls was meant to be one of the significant secrets of the campaign).
I quite like giving the orcs an Amerindian theme and using them as 'less advanced neighbours'.

If I want a roaming menace - especially for plains and savannah - I use centaurs. Canivorous of course (try getting enough grass through a human mouth to run a body that size) and something like a neanderthal stuck to the front of a horse. Horses, of course, are terrified of them which makes them quite hard to fight - they raid human settlements for food (livestock, stray children, anything else that can't defend itself) and for metal weapons.

The lion/orcs are a great idea though.

I also love using hobgoblins in my settings - often with a vaguely fascist overtone and normally as everyone's favourite mercenaries. In one setting, their version of Sun-Tzu was a hobgoblin (or, more accurately, I recycled Sun-Tzu quotes into the setting with his name on them).

My elves tend to be Tad Williams style at best - and may well drift into Terry Pratchett territory. I find the post-Tolkien D&D elf grating. I also dislike the nasty hobbitses and the even nastier gnomes/kender and related vermin and tend to eradicate them.

As for dwarves ... well it seems they really are all the same, although someone around here spawned the idea that they could be used to fill all the niches traditionally given to hobbits and gnomes as well ... which, as stated above, would appeal to me.
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Old 10-03-2011, 06:49 AM   #8
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Default Re: What is an Orc?

I sketched out a thought-experiment once where the different "demi-humans" were patterned heavily off other primate species, instead of being patterned off humans.

Orcs were nomadic cattle-herder baboon people based off a blend of ancient Cetilc and Maasai cultures; this of course makes them rather prone to night raids and stealing all the livestock (and often anything else that isn't nailed down), which has really done nothing for their reputation with other peoples. That, and Orcs don't have domestic canines and really like to make crude jokes about the relationship humans and dogs. The existence of werewolves among humans is all the justification they need, really.

The "Elvish" forest people were slimly-built, long-armed, singing gibbons, with tree villages that were more likely to be connected by single hanging ropes for brachiating under than rope bridges. When you've got arms longer than you are tall, you can get some seriously dangerous draw length on a bow.

I was debating casting "Dwarves" as either Japanese macaques (with a passion for hot springs) or as mountain gorillas (which would make them not particularly small...)
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Old 10-03-2011, 07:28 AM   #9
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Default Re: What is an Orc?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruno View Post
I sketched out a thought-experiment once where the different "demi-humans" were patterned heavily off other primate species, instead of being patterned off humans.

Orcs were nomadic cattle-herder baboon people based off a blend of ancient Cetilc and Maasai cultures; this of course makes them rather prone to night raids and stealing all the livestock (and often anything else that isn't nailed down), which has really done nothing for their reputation with other peoples. That, and Orcs don't have domestic canines and really like to make crude jokes about the relationship humans and dogs. The existence of werewolves among humans is all the justification they need, really.

The "Elvish" forest people were slimly-built, long-armed, singing gibbons, with tree villages that were more likely to be connected by single hanging ropes for brachiating under than rope bridges. When you've got arms longer than you are tall, you can get some seriously dangerous draw length on a bow.

I was debating casting "Dwarves" as either Japanese macaques (with a passion for hot springs) or as mountain gorillas (which would make them not particularly small...)
I quite like this. I would have probably based my elves on the peaceful, matriarchal, oversexed free-loving Bonobo. Allowing for Chimpanzees with their harem culture and nearly cannibalistic practice of hunting and eating other primates as a particularly vicious and frightening variety "dark elf".
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Old 10-03-2011, 07:34 AM   #10
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Default Re: What is an Orc?

That's definitely a good idea, but the gibbons are more arboreal, more "fragile" and less physically robust, and they sing - elvish bards are such a strong steriotype I'm not sure I can shake it :)

Although... chimps are natural drummers...
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