ORCS ARE ORCS

 (A response to another blog written by someone who is mired in the belief that all of the fantasy gaming that came before was rooted in very not-okay wrong-thinking)

I came across a blog called "Prismatic Wasteland" written by W.F. Smith, author of Barkeep on the Borderlands. Apparently portions of his blog were printed in book format as a slick, die-cut cover, 200-page specimen. Both it and the blog it derives from were nominated for Ennies by the "masked" judges (as he puts it) of those awards. Well, those judges are hardly "masked," as I recently discovered and often prop up their like-thinking friends as well as products they support and/or bankroll, but that's a whole other topic of discussion (or rant.) I'll just say that there are certainly Ennie nominees and winners that are worthy of praise and.. well, some that are not.

The blog post that caught my attention (Killable Peoples, July 14th, 2025 https://www.prismaticwasteland.com/blog/killable-peoples) was about the classic villain categories in some of our games and why we should look at them as other than killworthy cockroaches. Okay, fair enough. But the problem with the essay given here is that the attitudes and preconceived notions it's built upon stem from other sources that perpetuate these odd beliefs. He starts with orcs (and similar monstrous humanoids) and links to another page which he must think of of as one of the seminal treatises on the topic. ( https://jamesmendezhodes.com/blog/2019/1/13/orcs-britons-and-the-martial-race-myth-part-i-a-species-built-for-racial-terror , January 14th, 2019.) You'll immediately notice with the latter, written by James Mendez Hodes, that the top has all sorts of trigger warnings about sensitive content such as colonialism, imperialism, (you-name-the-ism) and um.. anger? Good gravy. Cushion these folks in bubble wrap, they're a bit fragile. But the essential premise of this source and the blog post that references it is one where creatures of myth and fantasy are completely misunderstood from the get-go, so naturally everything that follows is tainted.

Just to give you an idea of what this person is about, W.F. Smith is a lover of such ideas as "The Combat Wheelchair" and.. bringing infants into dungeons. No, really. Your stalwart adventurer can't leave a child with another capable human while you risk life and limb for coin to buy that dream cottage with a nursery. Nope. Strap on the papoose.

https://www.prismaticwasteland.com/blog/babies-in-dungeons

This might be okay for a single adventure a la Willow, but seems ill-advised otherwise. It's also a bit disturbing that this blogger was caring for an infant at the time of the writing. Let's hope his notions of fantasy and reality are distinctly separate. Imperiling infants was the furthest thing from my mind when my son was a baby.

In case you don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole reading the Hodes page, here's a few of his talking points, summed up:

• He went to a university, ergo he knows stuff that can never be analyzed, questioned or challenged. The rubber stamp of a degree (if he attained one) magically makes his opinion into irrefutable fact. Uh-huh. Sure.
• J.R.R Tolkien was a horrible racist. His great works never began with a bedtime story crafted for his young son. Nope. He set out to write racist genocide fantasy. Sure.
• Orcs are Mongolians. Cuz, J.R.R. lived in a wartime era and.. look at these posters. Clearly orcs. Sure. (Some of these people used to say "black people," but I guess this guy needed to concoct something novel to generate YouTube clickbait revenue.)
• Orcs are victims of colonialist efforts and exclusionary politics, so damn right they are victims in this scenario. Viva El Presidente Sauron! Uhhh.. Sure.
• If you're one-half, or one-quarter or 1/100th "person of color," even though you look like J.J. Abrams' very angry cousin, you somehow have a unique perspective on history and anything written by a white man is likely to smack of racism, but saying this is somehow not racism. Riiiiiight.

The problem we see with people frequently parroting back these views is that it allowed Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast (among others, but they are the biggest mustache-twirling villains) to retroactively paint everything that came before as no bueno. They would then pretend that they had fixed what was never broken in the first place with very broad, virtue-signaling brush strokes. Of course, this approach could never have succeeded without the rising trend in academia to equate everything that came before the womb explosions that birthed future woke academics as horrible, unenlightened thoughts and deeds. If you attended a university, read a book about Critical Race Theory or attended a lecture on the evils of colonialism and the depredations of The Man, it suddenly made you an expert historian. Now here's your Che Guevara framed photo and Ridgeway hat. Go rage against the machine. 

Instead of being taught critical thinking and learning to view history objectively, the budding pseudo-intellectuals produced by these institutions were instead taught to make faulty inferences. These inferences are based on prior faulty inferences. Poor logic begets nonsense conclusions. If you're citing a source that's opinion, it doesn't make your opinion or the one you're referencing any more valid, unless the original source is grounded in fact (which is absolutely not the case here.) That's not how that works, and yet there are people whose mindset is completely governed by this mode of thinking. It's the same mindset that tells you, for example, that a woman of color becoming a news anchor in 2025 is a huge achievement, even though you can point to 1970s news clips on YouTube full of black news anchors (which some of us were alive to see firsthand back then.) Nope. Never happened. Everything that came before was racist and bigoted. No one had opportunities. Granted, many things changed for all people after the Civil Rights Movement. Things gradually got better for everyone. However, some people need to reinvent racial oppression at every turn. Only by keeping it alive and relevant can they pat themselves on the back for fighting perceived social injustice. And since this attitude is so pervasive today in our society, it was inevitable that it would infect this hobby. Once major companies got on board with pitching these beliefs (and getting you to buy their products as a result because, hey, they really care.. and stuff) nothing we consumed would be safe from it.

It may seem like a stretch to go from a topic about killing orcs to the origins of uber-liberal thinking, but it's part and parcel of the problem. That problem goes far beyond our silly imaginary elf games. It's a breakdown in critical thinking. These games very often include critical thinking. I say all the the time that it's one of the many reasons why young people should be introduced to them.

What follows was my response on that blog page, which was summarily deleted. Sure, it was a bit long and I can almost understand that a blog owner may not want to launch into a protracted debate over the rehabilitation likelihood of the average orc soldier. But minus my comment, you'll find only people who applaud what the author says or offer their own convoluted ways of dealing with enemies in a fictional setting.

So here it is, preserved for posterity in my voidspace ramblings:

"The "history" of orcs you link to is a rambling essay built on a faulty assumption right out of the gate. Apparently there was a bumper crop of people with university degrees who were given cracked modern lenses with which to analyze everything that came before. I can only imagine that their parents never told them bedtime stories, read fables or taught them about the legends from cultures all over the world or even their own.

 

It's TOTALLY OKAY to have an inherently evil race/species/bag o' flesh/however you describe it AS LONG AS it is not analogous to a real world ethnic group. Having such creature types present doesn't automatically equate them to anything unless someone is purposely looking for that level of racism under every rock. I'm convinced the halls of academia are simply producing people who look to tear down and malign the past without making the present better. It's ever so easy to attack a dead author and use pseudo-necromancy to put words in his mouth. What literary masterpiece or item of TTRPG magnificence will such a critic produce to show us what should inspire us? These haters of the past usually fail in that regard.

 

Orcs and similar creatures in fantasy games were inspired by the evil beings of myths. A level of sentience in their case did not grant them the ability to choose a different path. This is a staple of our legends and supernatural fiction. It's also something that a lot of people seem to not understand today, the idea of intrinsically evil creatures or beings of pure chaos. We can imagine so many things in a context of a game, so why does this get lost? Even the with the idea of the cultists you mentioned, these may not be evil creatures like orcs, but they're evil cultists of an evil god. The idea here is that they do evil things to serve this evil deity. No great conspiracy needed. They're evil with a capital E. Even then, maybe you could redeem one and gain an ally if the DM was so inclined to allow that opportunity. This is not so with traditional fantasy orcs or any creature like them.

 

If people took the time to actually read Tolkien's stories and letters without being told what they must think about Tolkien, they might learn that his orcs were corrupted elves. They were twisted by dark magic to become evil mockeries. Had more books been written, the idea is that once deprived of the guiding hand of Sauron or other dark masters, the survivors wouldn't simply assimilate into polite society and one day have Etsy shops or run bodegas. Nope. They would continue to exist in a state of brutal savagery. Only by remedying what had been done to them could they hope to live like their elven cousins. Now wouldn't that make a great adventure idea?

If the orcs, goblinoids, etc. in your particular game world are just another fantasy race, that's fine. But the game was built to have low level, crunchy, evil monsters present so you can eventually fight tougher evil monsters. If you're going to move further and further from the assumptions of D&D or Middle Earth, then simply play a different game, or do the work to make it believable. Even then, remember that these are different biological species entirely, something that 2024 D&D wanted to throw away, again due to some misconceptions that having species work that way is somehow any different than having aliens, mutants or anything else in a game. The WotC brainiacs also thought that apes in space were a stand-in for something else, but that's a whole other rant about people who like to take credit for fixing things that were never broken.

 

When Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson and their contemporaries set out to design D&D, it was with the premise of having irredeemable monsters that could be killed without remorse or moral quandary. You could often trick, bribe, negotiate, etc., with them, but you weren't going to convert them into upstanding citizens. The creatures of myths, legends and fantasy fiction (itself inspired by myths and legends and.. not wartime posters,) were presented as despicable enemies that were okay to destroy. The orc is no different from the vampire or worst demon in that regard. Can you run a game that makes different assumptions? Absolutely. You then have to change all of the assumptions that go along with it. Even with a game world absent of monsters, if it's based on a low tech setting with assumptions of some kind of world loosely based on our own history, you would have warring tribes and nations, xenophobia and possibly slavery. If the Vikings were known to plunder your land every so often, you might come to fear and resent them. (Those guys also took slaves who were the same skin tone as they were. True story. Crazy, I know.) Strangers might not be greeted with open arms in close knit communities, at least not until they've demonstrated peaceful behavior. History was filled with a lot of bad behavior. We don't seek to encourage those views today, but dealing with them in the scope of an imaginary game can present roleplaying opportunities. Even then, player characters could not change that world completely unless they attained great powers or an army to help maintain the type of society they wish to see. This is all fine, but then you have to put yourself in the mindset of people who lived in that type of world. They are not us. And killing your neighbor before he killed you was part of the mores of that time. People warred over land, resources, etc. The neighboring region might not be filled with "evil" beings, but if your land was warring with them, they were your enemies. I can only blame poor teachers of history for not explaining what this all must have been like to people who can summon entertainment at will and heat up a hot pocket any hour of the day. I get it it. Colonialism was bad, m'kay? Most fantasy worlds will have some outmoded version of behavior unless it's the high-magic version of a Star Trek utopian society. Remove evil monsters, traditional conflict and anything you might normally overcome in these games and you're left with a bland mess. No rich lords breaking the backs of the peasants? I guess we don't need any Robin Hoods or grubby thieves. Even if the rich lord is evil, I guess you can't kill him right? Maybe an adventure could be based on getting personality questionnaires out to the orcs before the war drums start beating.

 

I see this topic comes up often with rise in popularity of playing species like tieflings or any of the traditional "monster races." If a DM does not want to include them as an omnipresent organism and option in the campaign world, that DM is marked as rAcIsT. Ehh, no. If a character shows up in a remote village with glowing eyes, horns, smelling of sulfur, etc. that might certainly raise eyebrows, just as magic-wielding characters might. Even if the populace knew that some of these tieflings might be good, law-abiding folk (more likely they've heard the opposite,) the belief that infernal creatures are evil would make them err on the side of caution. And by "err" I mean get the torches and pitchforks out.

 

Even a fictitious world must make SOME sense. Fiction has to have its own rules and reasons why things exist as they do or it's not convincing fiction or immersive roleplaying. So in the case of tieflings, the world would have to be chock full of them with many fine, virtuous examples. Even then, you might have some stranger danger if someone lived far removed from them and had never seen one. They still look demonic. The same holds true of orcs or any other creature or species unless you've established that they're commonplace in society and have acceptable social habits that do not involve eating children.

 

We were given beautiful folk tales, fiction and later, the very games that started this hobby to experience battles of good vs. evil in their most basic form. The current trend to remove all of that has left in its place a pile of uninspiring slop.

 

J.R.R. Tolkien's closest friend said it best:

 

“Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”

― C.S. Lewis

 

You can have monsters be evil monsters. You can have monsters with the capacity to be good. Just have it make sense. I always say these games are just like the cave on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back. What's in there? Only what you bring with you. They should be worlds that are not our own, but help us to weather this one through our enjoyment of playing these games. No one ever worried about the moral implications of shooting Space Invaders on a screen, and I’ve never mistaken a human for a space alien. All this retconning of fiction and game design history serves to do is suck the fun out of our games. If you want Smurfs in your campaign to be evil, demonic imps hellbent on enslaving all of humanity, then may those little blue b@st@rds be put to the sword."

So that was my long-winded response. Do you think the Prismatic author bothered to read it in full? Maybe. Or perhaps he scowled with rage while simultaneously deleting it and wishing me into a cornfield (I really do like that Twilight Zone analogy.) Who knows? I really would like to sit down with some of these people and find out why they believe the things they do, especially when factual evidence conflicts with it. Does it simply boil down to wanting to be part of the cool clique, the proper-thinking hive mind collective?  People like this bill themselves as "modernists," with the unspoken assumption that the rest of us are primitive Neanderthals.

What the "Enlightened Folk" seem to miss is that these games were created as an exercise in thinking and collaborative imagining. Heroes and villains, just like in the classic fiction and folklore that preceded these games, were depicted as black and white (no, not the ethic groups.) The basic dichotomy of Good vs. Evil could be played out. Nothing was a stand-in for something that existed in our world, other than bravery and overcoming great odds to succeed. Those were the fundamental concepts that existed in The World Oldest, Most Popular, Yada Yada Fantasy Game in its infancy and continued to exist for many years until the "Oh No!" crowd saw fit to swarm in and hit everyone with Thought Police batons. Anything present that mirrored conventions of medieval life, for example, only served to simulate the periods of history familiar to us. If you remove modern trappings and try to imagine a low-tech world existing in a quasi-feudal state, you go with what you know, because that's 100% believable in a fictional sense. There might be bad behavior. You don't have to emphasize it in any particular campaign, but dollars to donuts it exists somewhere in that world. It's also why the many pirate-themed or other semi-historical games that popped up recently can get a bit ridiculous if you ignore too much of what that particular setting might include. Having any sort of unthinkable-in-real-life activity in a game does not mean you somehow condone that behavior in real life.

I stated in my blog comment that it's perfectly acceptable to de-villainize some classic monster race and ponder what their place might be in some fantasy world. However, you can still have them be rampaging monsters that must be killed, just like the Xenomorphs in the Alien movies, as one person suggested in a comment on that blog. No acid-for-blood tinkering is required. Orcs. As-is.

The traditional orcs, or goblins, or kobolds, or other crunch all you want, we'll make more monsters that have existed in my classic fantasy RPGs are never Africans. Neither are they Mongolians. Never would they be Māori, or Belgians or even Mexicans, as WotC saw fit to portray them as in their 2024 iteration of D&D. My orcs are just orcs. Half-orcs are most often the product of horrible acts and anyone who plays one may have to endure the scorn for their parentage while simultaneously earning their place in the world. It would work similarly if I was running a game with a tiefling PC in the group. It makes for great roleplaying opportunities and requires the chops to go that route as a player. The naysayers and -ism-callers would rob you of that.

If gamers can't handle the ramifications of evil monster beings, how well can they present the actions and motivations of standard humanoids? The short answer is, they can't. If you clear the playing field of easily discernible threats, what's left are standard humanoids with good and bad and every shade of gray in between. And could you negotiate with every one of them to achieve a peaceful solution? No, you could not. Sometimes, the bad folks just want to bump off the player characters.

Roleplaying games are simulations. If you remove too much of what they're meant to simulate.. you're left with a crappy simulation.

So let the P.C. PCs hug kobolds, sing Kumbaya with them, have picnics in dungeons and bring social worker and psychologist class characters along to psychoanalyze the mindflayers and form drow labor unions. I'll be over here playing a real game. Maybe orcs will be evil fodder. Maybe they'll be the princes of the universe or.. bartenders, like the goblin in Smith's fantasy pubcrawl. But at least it will make sense.