Is it time to go back to coding orcs as fascists?

 

TL;DR. When I gamed in California in the late 1970s, orcs were coded as fascists. It wasn’t until later that I encountered them being coded as people of color. Maybe it’s time to explicitly add minority representation to humans and go back to orcs being fascists.

 

Back in the day orcs were evil, and they were fascists.

I think my TL;DR at the top pretty much catches what I’m going to say. When I started in what we now call “fantasy” in the mid-to-late 1970s, orcs were a timeless evil creature that helped some big-bad destroy all that was nice. They were sort of a rot that was destroying the world. Over time, TTRPGs recoded them to be various minority or – I think, more commonly – as a generic “visible minority”. Of course, once you do that, you need to stop making them inherently evil, and they should have normal intelligence, and all that. But you lose the central conflict of the world, the idea that some powerful people are manipulating the masses for their own gain and building armies of thoughtless people to enact their villainy.

Of course we have to separate these two things. We need visible minorities in games—but they should just be humans. Because… well, do I even have to say it? But we also need a cancerous evil that creeps through humanity—of all types—which needs to be fought and defeated.

I’m going to argue that we should just make sure TTRPG worlds recognize different ethnic and minority groups and then return orcs to being pig-head, low intelligence bad guys that need to be defeated before they destroy all that is good in the world.

History of the word, orc. I’m not the best person to do a deep dive on the origin of the word orc. But Tolkien did not invent it, instead he grabbed an Old English word that meant something like demon-spirit or specter or goblin and also sounded cool (he picked it for “phonetic reasons”) and used that for the servants of various evil Dark Lords. Tolkien scholars say that he was inconsistent in his notes about where they came from. Sometimes they were bred by the Dark Lord, other times they were elves corrupted by one or another Dark Lord, and even occasionally they were elves who were corrupted “in the wild”. Wikipedia covers this.

However they came to be, they were creatures of good who became evil. Now Tolkien definitely implied that modern human minorities are in some way associated with the orcs—and he wasn’t very charitable towards women either. But I still feel that he portrayed the orcs of the Third Age to be cruel, obedient followers of a powerful and evil individual.

Tolkien Apologist? It is easy for me to not get stressed over Tolkien modelling his orcs on minorities. I am certain that he did. We all have limitations. My father hated Germans, but he was very fond of African Americans. He was a working-class guy from downtown Detroit. He appeared to get along swell with American minorities, but he hated Germans. Of course, there was that time that a German fighter pilot strafed the bridge he was working on and left him with two holes in his legs which never healed. My father, like Tolkien, was an imperfect person who suffered through the trauma of war. Tolkien is an imperfect person, like myself, my father, and everyone else I know, but with his fiction he was trying to make comments about the nature of human conflict. It is the positive elements of that message I would like to focus on, well recognizing that there are negatives that should be addressed.

Don’t forget half-elves. In Tolkien’s world elves and humans lived mostly apart, except (I think) there were two cases where an elf and human got together and created half-elves. I have already written about how all this is driven by the idea of biological determinism (it is here), and how creating these fanciful different “races” with their separate origins is not doing anything good for gaming. But it starts with in D&D, with half-elves. They are an early entry. The first appear (as I understand it) in Greyhawk in 1974. By 1978 they are a standard feature of TTRPGs. This is when the half-orc enters the gaming world. So, by 1978 we are already seeing some gamers switching to “race” as ethic minority.

My Lived-Experience. I started war gaming around 1977 (about age 12) and by 1978 I was deep into TTRPGs. I was in a remote, university town and spent far more time playing in ancient redwood forests and along rock seashores that I ever spent in cities—and I had no idea of the breadth or scoop of the gaming community. But I had access to Runequest, Original D&D, Basic D&D, lots of Metagaming MicroGames including Melee and Wizards, and the AD&D Monster Manual.

How were orcs portrayed? And I don’t remember orcs ever being “stand ins” for people of color or any recognizable minority. Instead, they were fascists. I grew up in a house with multiple disabled veterans who had all been involved in fighting fascists—we all knew what and who they were. At least in my childhood home, the fascists were low intelligence, mean people who loved law and order, as long as they got to make the law and bully other people around.

How were orcs coded? For me, the orcs of D&D were always, basically, the same as the “mutants” of Ralph Bakshi’s movie, Wizards who were definitely fascists.

But let’s look at the early works. In The Arduin Grimoire, we are told that orcs have Intelligence and Wisdom limited to 4-11 (p.6, on the same 3-18 scale of D&D), so lower than human, but we are also told (p.11) that they, like elves, are immortal, they are savage and treacherous, as well as warlike, quarrelsome, and love to kill. And, interestingly, they are listed as chaotic evil.

In the MicroGame The Fantasy Trip, Melee, Steve Jackson says it most succinctly, “An orc is just like a human figure—except evil”

In the early Monster Manual, orcs (p.76) were common, pig-headed people with pinkish snouts who are brown or brownish green with a bluish sheen. They are bullies and the stronger will always intimidate and dominate the weaker. They are lawful evil and only live for 40 years.

I would argue that for TSR, even by 1978 (the year they released the Monster Manual) they are already starting the shift of orcs being coded as minorities and not immortal evil. We are told they have “unpleasant” brown or brownish green skin, and they have a short life span. But even for TSR in 1978, they were still lawful and evil. They were some hybrid of the outsider and the fascist. They were low to average intelligence pig-headed people who kept slaves and loved torture, but they are brown skinned and prolific (which I would argue are stereotypes held of by many whites of the African American community, and thus consistent with coding orcs as minorities).

Let’s make fascism evil again. Whatever their history, at least for a while in at least one place, orcs were fascists. They were low intelligence individuals who hated outsiders, who followed their leader unquestioningly, who opposed those that were not of their tribe. They were mean bullies and slavers. They were an ageless evil threatening our peace and security.

Let’s bring that back!

What I am Doing. In my current fantasy game, mean and evil people are transformed into orcs and goblins. Through the magic of the Evil powers, the worst humans give themselves over to evil. As they do, they transform physically and gain certain advantages which they covet. In this setting, orcs are not an ethnic group, they are people with similar moral convictions. They are people who give up elements of themselves for various reasons, in order to be free of needing to respect the rights of others.

Additionally, since the early 1980s, I have always tended to play d100 games which—mechanically—replace the D&D idea of “race” with cultures and ethnicities. Instead of different fantasy races or species or whatever they are, there are ethnic groups that reflect more accurately the variation in human backgrounds.

Here is one of my old Runequest worlds that I ran through much of the 1990s. There are three ethnic groups mentioned on the map, the Lomaran, Mnar, and the Loskalm. None of them exactly map to any modern groups, they are just the groups of humans in this world. In this world there were never any playable non-human races. These groups created the variation available to the players.

Racial and ethnic mixing in modern communities is for most of us a common element of our life. Historically, such mixing occurred, but there were also large homogeneous areas. Personally, since it is a fantasy world with dragons and wizards and magic and all that other stuff. I’m happy to just have all my humans be of a heterogeneous mixture of humans and not even worry about why or how. Half the town are black skinned, others are different skin tones, and others are white. I’m not worrying about why there are dragons, why the F should I care about why there are black skinned people in a medieval European-themed setting.

But what I do care about are the fascists. And yes, the Evil Overlord is raising an army. And yes, he (or she) is a threat to all that is free and good. And his pig-headed followers are a threat. They have and will continue to kill and enslave those weaker than themselves, and yes, your heroes are free to attack them on sight.

As always, think you for reading this and please feel free to leave any comments below.