Orcs as demon-corpses

So the etymology of orc is a bit complicated. Originally it appears in Beowulf as orcneas, meaning "demon-corpse." Tolkien used it as inspiration for his orcs, and C.S. Lewis anglicized it to orkny/orknies. As I've mentioned in prior posts, they're named after Orcus, the Greco-Roman demon of oaths. Although the "oath" part has long since been forgotten, both in the depictions of orcs themselves and the depiction of Orcus in fantasy fiction.

Some authors and bloggers have used this etymology as a springboard for reimagining orcs as demon corpses created by Orcus. Both because of its perceived novelty, and because it avoids bizarre moral questions like "what do we do with the baby orcs?" Perhaps these orknies are created by necromancers from spawning pools, perhaps summoned by devil's forgemasters in corpse shells, perhaps they are transformed from demikind through foul applications of alchemy... the possibilities are endless.

Links

• https://flintlocksandwitchery.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-orc-renaissance.html
• http://swordsandstitchery.blogspot.com/2020/04/blood-for-bacon-another-ecology-of-orc.html
• https://daegames.blogspot.com/2018/05/dungeons-delvers-where-do-baby-gnolls.html
• https://daegames.blogspot.com/2021/05/inherently-evil-races-arent-bad-game.html
• http://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2020/04/orcneas.html
• https://dailyadventureprompts.tumblr.com/post/637422331142307840/monsters-reimagined-orcus-the-dead-god-patron
• https://ingmaralbizu.com/about-orcs-and-our-fascination-with-barbarism/

Non-rapey orcs?

So something that bugs certain people about half-orcs is the overuse of rape as their backstory and the subsequent characterization of orcs (and/or goblins) as all being violent misogynistic rapists. So I have a suggestion for making orcs less rapey without sacrificing their horror potential. What follows is a mix of influences, including Warhammer 40,000, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, 13th Age, Alien, and Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda. 

Orcs are goblinoids (as per older editions of D&D) and the various goblinoid monsters are all instars or castes of a single species. They reproduce asexually by means of spawning pits and underground fungus wombs. They may reproduce in a quasi-sexual fashion by parasitic means too. One option is throwing victims into the spawning pits, where they are dissolved alive. Another is to lay eggs in a host with their teeth. The resulting offspring will inherit traits from the host, and this is how we get half-orcs. Goblinoids otherwise have no concept of gender or sexuality: humans and other demikind are seen as slaves and food, nothing more. Which is still plenty horrifying.

This raises a number of questions: What does it mean for goblinoids to be parasites, especially if half-orcs can become adventurers? What does this reinforce about the themes of the setting? Do the goblinoids inherit species traits or those of specific individuals?  Do they hunt down specific targets for the purpose of eugenics? How strict are civilizations about security, given that a bite can impregnate a person with larvae? Etc...

In a future post I'll discuss a treatment of orcs as demons that possess corpses.

Okay, I guess I'll give my opinion on that Extra Credits video

So Extra Credits released a video claiming that "evil races are bad game design" and got massively ratio'd.

There's a lot to unpack about the video because it conflates a lot of things that aren't actually related. So I'm just going to present a massively simplified argument:

Firstly, our elf-games are violent murder simulators that require players to mow down hordes of mooks. The game is designed that way. Most tabletop roleplaying games are designed that way. If you don't like it, then play a game that isn't a violent murder simulator.

Secondly, while you could easily play a game where you go around scalping human bandits... orcs are just cooler. The use of orcs in fantasy has nothing to do with anti-black racism. Using orcs as your mooks of choice doesn't even imply that they're "inherently evil." The "orc baby dilemma" is a really old argument dating back to UseNet.

There's no way for the players to know that there are good orcs unless the GM goes out of the way to tell them. It's extremely inconvenient to stop and tell the players the backstory of Orc Mook #294 when they're just playing for the sake of violence.

Lastly, it's entirely possible that the "pretty" races like humans, dwarves, elves, etc are just racists the whole time. The game books might be giving hugely biased accounts, I don't know?

Of ogres and orknies

Ogres and orcs are standard monsters in fantasy gaming, drawing from their depictions in Tolkien's Middle Earth and European fairy tales. The etymology of orc and ogre is a bit more complicated than that, however.

Orcus

The words ogre and orc descend from the word Orcus. Orcus was a Greco-Etruscan god of the underworld, whose name literally translates to "oath." He punished perjurers and accompanied the goddess Dike ("justice"). His appearance changed dramatically over time.

In D&D, the name Orcus is applied to a demon prince of the undead. Not only is he infamous for employing the undead, he is even rumored to have created them in the first place.

Orcs and orknies

The word orc, as used by Tolkien, descends from Old English compounds orcþyrs and orcneas (plural). The  morpheme þyrs means "monster, demon, giant," and the morpheme -neas means "corpse." The morpheme orc has additionally been speculated related to orca, thus meaning "sea monster."

However, nobody is sure of the exact meanings. The orcneas have been various translated as "evil spirits," "demon corpses," "devil corpses," etc. I suppose that, if you were making a pun on the various etymologies, it could be translated as "sea devil" or "sea corpse."

C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe mentions "orknies" (singular is apparently “orkny”) as one of the monstrous races that joins the White Witch's army. This is clearly an Anglicization of orcneas! This should not be surprisingly, as Lewis and Tolkien were friends.

Ogres and orchi

Another descendant of Orcus is the Italian orco (plural orchi), translating to "ogre, orc." The orchi of fairy tales were hairy beasts, quite unlike the ugly human portrayals of ogres. It is here that the two general archetypes of "brute" and "lord" appear. Strange as it may seem, the enchanted prince in Beauty and the Beast is an example of the latter.

©2008 EricCanete

The word ogre has several derivatives created by adding suffixes. An ogress is "a female ogre," an ogret or ogrillon is "a young or small ogre," ogrette is a synonym for ogress or ogret, ogrish or ogry means "resembling or pertaining to an ogre," ogrishly means "like an ogre," and ogrism means "the character or manners of an ogre."

You might notice that D&D used the name ogrillon for a hybrid of orc and ogre. It is actually a loanword from French that refers to the child of an ogre. So I suppose that the D&D monster's context would be true if taken literally.

Comparative mythology

In anthropology and comparative mythology circles, the word "ogre" is used to refer to any man-eating giant in folklore. It includes European ogres, Arabic ghouls, Persian divs, Algonquin baykok and wendigo, Japanese oni, Indian rakshasa, etc. This is completely different from the D&D usage, obviously.

I noticed a few interesting parallels between different ogre myths:

• Orcus is a god of the underworld. The orknies are (potentially) demonic corpses. The Athabaskan wechuge and Japanese oni are demons of the underworld that visit Earth to eat humans. The oni are subjects of Enma, the great king of hell.
• Orcus is a god of oaths who punishes perjurers, yet his namesake refers to cannibal giants. The Algonquin wendigo sometimes arises as a result of someone being cursed for breaking the taboo against cannibalism.

I feel inspired to devise my own mythos that references all of these. Maybe something like Pellatarran orcs? Eh, I can always figure it out later!

An argument for dehumanizing orcs

I read a number of articles arguing in favor of the humanization of orcs. “Ecce Orcus!,” “God Hates Orcs,” “Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth,” etc.

I’m not going to get into a pointless argument about real world racist implications of fantasy tropes. Long story short, D&D is about killing shit and since killing people is morally wrong we use orcs as a convenient substitute to sublimate our own secret desires to kill real people in real life. Because humans are bastard covered bastards filled with creamy bastard filling.

If you want to treat monsters like people, then go read game literature like Overlord or That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. Otherwise, I suggest a few options for dehumanizing orcs (and other subhumanoid races for that matter) even further.

One option, which I surely addressed in a past post years ago, is to obviate the problem of goblin babies, or orc babies in this case. Simple solution: there are no orc babies, women, or men for that matter. The exact method of reproduction isn’t important, just that there are no non-combatants to worry about killing.

The orks in Warhammer 40,000 are a perfect example. They are praised even by critics of orcs as a trope.

That still leaves half-orcs to deal with. To which I offer two options (but by no means exhaustive):

1. Half-orcs are an artificial race created with magic (or plagues, radiation, etc), or a natural human variant that occurs as a kind of immune response to the presence of orcs a la 13th Age.
2. Half-orcs are actually half-leonorc. Leonorcs are a planetouched race of leonine aasimar orcs from the 3pp Children of the Planes. They fit the new agey orc paladin stereotype to a tee. In fact, they could easily replace half-orcs entirely.

Orcs and hobgoblins: what’s the diff?

As 1d4chan points out, there isn’t really that much of a difference between hobgoblins and orcs. There’s any number of ways you could world build a more convincing explanation in my opinion.

Autochthones and Gegenoi

In Greek myth, the giants and other races were spawned by Gaia. There are even a few different names for this: autochthones, gegenees, spartoi. 13th Age borrows this same concept to explain where its depiction of orcs come from: they spring fully-formed and holding weapons from gashes in the earth, then go forth to destroy civilization as Gaia demands. This concept is really useful because it sidesteps having to worry about things like orc non-combatants and so forth. So I would like to apply that concept to most monsters, at least the humanoids, beastmen and so forth that parties are typically expected to slaughter as a matter of course.

Orc lives matter (too!)

Psyche! I could go on a rant about how the portrayal of orcs in fantasy role playing is politically incorrect, but I decided to sidestep that debate entirely. This is fantasy escapism, not politics!

Do you want to add more depth to orc culture but still keep the stereotypical violent savages? Then justify their behavior by giving them a religion that literally claims god hate orcs!

Do you want to introduce a culture of good orcs alongside the stereotypical evil orcs? Then drop in the leonorks from Children of the Planes by Tangent Games, an entire race of goodly orc paladins right out of the mirror universe!

Giving depth to orcs:

• Orcs as corrupted elves. (Lord of the Rings, Elder Scrolls)
• Orcs as fantasy indigenous peoples displaced by human colonialism.
• Orcs as distant relatives of humans who lack self-awareness but excel at learning. (Ravenflight)
• Orcs as fantasy Mesoamericans who sacrifice people to keep the sun burning. (God hates orcs)
• Orcs as an entire culture of fantasy Christian crusaders. (Ravenflight)
• Orcs as a fallen people enslaved by conniving demons. (Warcraft)
• Orcs as the mellow descendants of a collapsed expansionist empire. (World of Aruneus)
• Orcs as cute monster girl amazons. 
• Orcs as pig men. (Animal Races: Clan of the Pig)
• Orcs as Gaia's vengeance (13th Age).

Other ideas:

• Pig-faced orcish Clans: Boar, Hippo, Orca, Pig, Warthog, 
• The Orcish Empire was a Mordor-like expansionist empire that ruled and conquered vast tracks of land in ancient times. After reaching its peak the empire collapsed and its citizens were left to fend for themselves.
• Amazonian Orcs: The Amazons are an orc ethnicity characterized by several distinct biological and cultural traits. They are all-female and cannot carry sons to term. They are dismissive of orc males and view human males as optimal mates. They specialize almost exclusively in violent pursuits such as hunting and warfare. They raid human villages to acquire slaves to perform other roles required to sustain their tribe.

Orc Ethnicities, see Tome of Horrors series

• Orc, Black... death worshiping orcs
• Orc, Blood ... even more violent orcs
• Orc, Common
• Orc, Ghost-Faced ... shadow orcs
• Orc, Greenskin ... forest orcs
• Orog (Greater Orc)
• Leonorks ... aasimar orcs 

Even more ideas:

• While I have nothing against people who prefer the traditional portrayal of orcs, if you want something new or fresh then I will provide. My cosmology uses a mix of Stormbringer and Manicheanism that divides the universal factions into Cosmos, Order, Discord and Chaos. All of them except for Cosmos are objectively evil, but all four sides consider themselves morally right.
• Orcs serve the forces of Chaos. Like most humanoids, their belief system is a strange mix of Aztec and Gnostic. They openly worship the evil archdemons and believe that the gods of demikind are evil too (why else would they prohibit drinking, prostitution, gay marriage, etc?). If the archdemons and gods are not entertained, then they will kill everyone or worse. So the orcs engage in raiding and other activities that cause suffering, but themselves are fully capable of altruism. They might adopt human orphans and raise them in the orcish faith.
• Orcs have multiple ethnic groups, like black, blood, greenskin, ghost-faced, etc. One incongruous ethnic group in particular is the leonorks, who are characterized by their allegiance to Cosmos and proclivity for the paladin profession.
• Options: The problem with treating orcs as people is that fiction typically uses this as an excuse to turn them into caricatures of Africans and Native Americans. Indeed, most of the time these stories don't have people of color at all. The WarCraft movie is a particularly racist example: all the orcs are played by black actors and all the humans, dwarves and elves are played by white actors.

Links: 

• http://incrediblevehicle.com/2014/09/24/evil-races-in-dd/
• https://cartographyofdreams.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/orcs-the-irredeemable-race/
• http://www.haresrocklots.com/words/essays/yrch/
• http://keepontheheathlands.com/2017/07/06/presentation-tropes-monster-races-fantasy-games/