D&D General What have you done with Orcs in your games?

[teitan]

Orcs are a big part of my games. When run well they can be compelling villains and surprising heroes. Most run them as canon fodder but a horde can be an impressive story in and of itself.

 

[Slit518]

The Orcs when I generally run them have their own civilizations. They look like the Uruk-hai of the LotR films (my goblins look like the Orcs of Moria). Orcs range, just like humans. A lot of their territories are tribal, but, they do have some that aren't. A lot of Orcs the players encounter tend to be raiders and don't craft most of their own stuff, but, instead take it by force. There are some Orcs sprinkled around where the players have been that removed themselves from the survival of the fittest and keep what you can take lifestyle.

 

[FireLance]

I pretty much don't see the point in orcs anymore. If I need a CR 1/2 humanoid NPC or opponent, I can use the same game statistics as a orc (apart from darkvision) and call it human.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

My orcs are pretty much straight from Dungeon Meshi. Mesomorphic pig-nosed people with a history of conflict with the Common Folk, largely driven out of most habitable territory aboveground by these conflicts.

That's a pretty great concept for Orcs, honestly. Possibly better than anything actually in D&D.

 

[Li Shenron]

So there are a lot of options for portraying Orcs in D&D games, from Gruumsh touched 5e default ones, to Eberron druid history ones, to the alignment splits of 3e and on Chaotic Evil, AD&D Lawful Evil ones, and Basic Chaotic Orcs. Outside of D&D there are 40K fungi biologic weapons, Warcraft Orcs, Lord of the Rings Orcs, Shadowrun style metahuman Orks, and others that can be taken as inspiration.

What have you done with them in your games?

Nothing special.

Orcs = more or less Lord of the Rings, but since I'm not an expert of Tolkien lore I'm pretty sure I strayed away many time
Half-Orcs = similar to Warcraft Orcs, although in many campaigns I don't even have them at all

Perhaps the only original twist of note is that I make them separate races, so "half-orcs" is just a common name derived from the fact that they look somehow intermediate between orcs and humans, but they are not biologically related to either. It helps get rid of the horrible violence-based origin lore.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Interesting topic.

In my homebrew, orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, orogs, et al, are all a single grouping of people who self-identify as "Orschans". In the distant past they were humans, elves, gnomes but the elite of their society began experimenting with fleshwarping magic, and turned themselves into their current forms.

Now the reason behind this depends on who you ask, for the "unchanged", ie the humans, elves, gnomes etc of the setting, the Orschans are horrid monsters under a dark curse that has twisted their minds and bodies. For the Orschans, they have gained powerful bodies with their minds untouched, why would they see that as a curse? Yes, their appearance has changed, but beauty is subjective.

Non-Orschans see them as evil since they are a society that raids its neighbours and tends to wage wars of imperialistic expansion, but is that so different to humans?

 

[Minigiant]

Another thing about my orcs is that their "genetics" is unstable due to the magic needed to bond human, dwarf, elf, & goblin blood and the unpredictability of the bedroom consequences. So some orcs express more of a parent race than others.

Half Orcs are orcs with more human blood or elven blood. The elven ones have pointier ears and look like green wild elves with bad teeth. The elven half orcs have interested back into one elven nation in a way no human half orc have done in human lands. That's because elven half orcs hate the official elven crown as much as the wild elves do.

Orogs are orcs of more hobgoblin blood. The hobgoblin blood is what causes the color difference. The hobgoblinness makes them more likely to follow orders and this is why orogs were often drafted for technical missions in the Fey Wars. One of the Orc nations is mostly orogs and they mostly pump out mercenaries in their mostly neutral world stance.

Ogrillons are orcs of more dwarf blood. One would think the dwarf blood would make them shorted but the human skeleton is very dominate. The extra dwarfiness makes them more muscular and this causes most of the orgrillions to rely on brawn to the detriment of brain. Also it makes them get fat bellies. Orogs often have orgrillion spouses and SOs for military reasons.

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

I'm fine with the MM orc.

They've appeared in our FR HotDQ game as evil mercenaries employed by the offshoot Cult of the Dragon. These mercenary orcs are still following Gruumsh's plan to push other races back to claim their share of territory - but this way they get paid and can maybe redirect some retribution at the CotD. I suppose they must have a clever leader, haven't fleshed that out much.

I toy with the idea their Chaotic Evilness is a unfortunate but valid survival strategy for beings with fast maturation, high fertility and mortality, who are forced to live in dangerous marginal lands - in constant warfare with civilizations. Oh yeah, add the Gruumsh religion to the pot as well.

I sort of like this idea because it lets me sympathize with their plight and opens the possibility of some heroes changing it for the better. It also gives justification for an orc out of that environment being different.

 

[Voadam]

I expanded a bunch when running 3e's Lord of the Iron Fortress in 3.5.

Part of it is set in the Gate Town of Rigus on the Plane of Concordant Opposition next to the gate to the Lawful (evil) plane of Acheron known for eternal warfare.

I expanded Rigus to be filled with Lawful Evil and LN warlike mortal(ish) factions such as hobgoblins, fire giants, duergar, devil tieflings, zenythri law-touched planetouched, asherake (from Complete Minions) and others. It is ruled by a mercenary warlord council who sell use of their armies and is a place known where you can hire some big armies.

When the party showed up as part of a murder investigation whose clues had led there a force of about 200,000 hobgoblins were doing military exercises outside the gates. Partly as a show of force to the half a million strong horde of orcs camped outside of the gates who had shown up shortly after the city's largest army (of goblins) had disappeared in a cloud of magical birds.

So the party conducts their investigation with that as a backdrop and as they were finishing up their investigation and concluding they needed to go into the Gate, surprise! Two factions betray the city and the orc horde pours in to pillage and take over the city and access to the gate. The party was like 15th level I think and I got to have fun with lots of common orcs, bunches of low level barbarians, a huge raid leader they encountered who was 16th level and so on with chaos as buildings were burned, tons of fighting, and so on as they tried to make it to the gate.

In part I added this as a tie in to the history of LE orcs with Acheron and then current CE orc themes.

In AD&D orcs were LE and Gruumsh and Maglubiyet originally were both LE gods who eternally fought on the Hells but eventually then to Gehenna and then in Manual of the Planes their eternal afterlife war with regenerating racial warrior spirits moved to the eternal battlefields of Acheron.

It was a lot of fun to play around with massive orc armies narratively and a bunch of 3e orc stat blocks of wildly different CRs I had which went well with the barbarian CE themes and the chaos of the battle.

 

[Dioltach]

I haven't used orcs in any of my adventures for a while, but I see them figuring as a Cimmeria/Vanaheim/Nordheim area from the Conan stories: warrior tribes whose habits and values seem barbaric to more "civilised" people.

(Wasn't there a quote from one Conan story along the lines of, "Barbarians are politer than civilised people, because an insult is more likely to be met with an axe to the head"?)