World Building 101: Racial Culture (Yes, it's about Orcs)

So the Orc Argument kicked up again. I'll explain what that is in a moment, but suffice to say it's a fight I've been having for ten years or more now. I thought I'd collect my thoughts about it and tie in a little bit of advice on not being super fucking yikes when you include non-human races in your game. Before we go any further, though, I want to say two things.

I'm not an expert, and I'm not well spoken at the best of times.

And.

We are going to talk about real racism and real fascism and I want you to take it seriously. I'm sorry  if you feel like I'm telling you what to do, but some methods of thought or ideals we're discussing aren't okay. They cause real harm to real people, and believing these things or normalizing them is the first step down a very dark and destructive path.


I'm glad we got that out of the way. The "Orc Argument" I'm referring to is a lot of different individual topics ending in the general idea that depictions of Orcs (and sometimes other nonhuman races) is mired in racism, and the idea of an "antagonist race" is woefully terrible at best. The argument is generally one side saying "Hey maybe these are shitty racial descriptions and we shouldn't promote ideas like ingrained evil, eugenics, or stereotyped rip-offs of existing human culture" and the other side generally claiming that nothing has ever been racist or bad in the history of anything that's ever existed.

You know how racists are.

Anyway. This begins with Tolkien and how some alarming things leaked into his writing. While nothing leads to a directly stated narrative of Orcs being analogous to a real world race or culture, I hope this assorted collection of facts will get you closer to seeing what I mean.


Purity of blood and bloodlines are incredibly important in the Lord of the Rings books, from Aragorn's bloodline to Gondor's weakening totally having nothing to do with their mixing with Middle Men.

Race mixing, as Saruman mixing the blood of orcs and men, is depicted as a "great sin".

There is certainly an element of genetic imperative in his writings, from Orcs being "born evil" to the idea that Eowyn will never be happy so long as she's trying to "fight like a man" and refusing a more nurturing role in life.

Villains in Lord of the Rings are from the east and consistently(though not universally) described as dark, black, swarthy, sallow-skinned or slant-eyed.

Many of the heroes are tall and fair. All of them are white. And no, I'm not saying the hobbits or dwarves are tall. If you thought of using that as a "gotcha!" you're a jackass.

In a letter, Tolkien described Orcs as "squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."


I won't go into depictions of dwarves in his work and the yikes of their place in the world, but look up their common traits and ask yourself who it reminds you of. So, was Tolkien racist? I don't think he was consciously so. He hated the racist depictions of Axis powers in wartime propaganda and he hated Hitler. We know that for a fact. No, I think the man was incredibly Eurocentric and that's where a lot of our problems come from to begin with.

The fact is, Middle Earth was fashioned with Orcs to provide an endless supply of enemies to kill that nobody felt bad about killing. This is a handy parallel, because that's what virtually every RPG setting uses Orcs and other Goblinoids for. In most settings, descriptions of Orcs sound like someone is playing Bad Guy Trope Bingo.

Here's a collection of what Orcs are like as of 3rd edition Faerun: Warlike to the point of the concept consuming their entire lives, savage, patriarchal to the point of treating women as trophies and slaves, brutish and encouraging of in-fighting between siblings, uncaring of the weak, sickly or undersized, and fond of slavery.

The passage in Races of Faerun then goes on to explain how much it sucks being an orc woman, then describe several other types of orc who are just as bad. Some of my favorite facts include Mountain Orcs are really dirty, Gray Orcs are irrational, and Half-Orcs all had terrible childhoods and are too savage for human society. We at least got through the entire Half-Orc section without talking about rape, so that's a mild half-thumb up for Forgotten Realms.

In Warhammer and Warhammer 40k, Orks are fucking ridiculous ultra-violent soccer hooligan types who are also psychic plant-based creatures who reproduce by spores and don't even have women. If you think I'm making any of that up...save yourself. Don't look it up. I don't normally overstate how awful something is without explaining it...but don't open that stupid, stupid pandora's box. Libera tu tutemet ex infernis.

Volo's guide is a new book, only four years old and written for 5th edition, and yet...it's about as bad as Races of Faerun. In 5th edition, Orcs fight constantly, their entire lives consumed with conflict, in the hopes that they can die in battle so Gruumsh adds them to his eternal army so they can keep fighting forever after they die. It calls Orcs savage and brutish, but also states that only orcs who were "touched by Gruumsh" can control or lead other Orcs. That might have been fine if it were some sort of literary flourish or a subtle implication, but the book goes on to state that Gruumsh literally sends "particularly charismatic" orcs an actual vision which imbues them with supernatural powers that allows them to rise to a position of leadership, which would be completely impossible otherwise. Yikes.

Volo's Guide goes on to say things like the Orcs are superstitious and constantly live in fear of their gods(who are all evil, of course). They don't pair-bond at any point and see mating as a "mundane necessity of life" with no special significance. Orc children receive no maternal or paternal love and grow up in constant conflict and are left to cultists of the orc's spellcaster and assassin gods to "accept or reject" if they can't handle it. So 5e's core setting Orcs aren't even pro-social, basically.

Several settings(not just Faerun or Volo's guide) also include the idea that Orcs "respect strength" as a simple(stupid) explanation why they're ruled over by a different, smarter(more European) and more powerful villain. The idea that strength and fighting is often their only major cultural trait yet they're perfectly willing to follow orders and stay in their lane when the GM needs some weenies for a fight is a big part of our problem.

There's a lot to unpack here. I'm sure everyone who's read our examples(and many other depictions of Orcs) can tell that these are pretty bad, but maybe not why. I'm going to try and slowly unravel this massive pile of yikes for you.

First I want you to imagine I came at you with a character concept. Forget any sort of racial background. Say they're a human. I tell you they're from a tribe of barbarian nomads who survive by fighting and raiding. They didn't have a mother or father and they've been fighting their entire lives. When there's no fight to fight, they're training to fight. They're hoping to die a "good" death in battle so they can fight for forever in the afterlife. They only respect strength.

I want you to look me in the fucking face and tell me that character would be acceptable to play. Drive up to where I live, knock on my door, pull a Ted Kennedy and look me in the eye. It's an absurd character most people, if not all, would call a thin excuse to play a munchkin character who checks out of all aspects of the game except combat. You would rightly call their barbarian tribe ridiculous to the point of parody.

Except you probably noticed that all I did in that passage was describe an Orc as presented in either of our fantasy examples. Even past all other implications, these cultures are poorly written. They're slapped together with "evil" in mind and filled to the brim with ridiculous stock "evil race" stereotypes. Faerun throws in sexism for seemingly no reason other than to make Orcs a little more detestable, something I can't stand to see. Many settings imply or outright state that an orc's nature is something "inside" them, or in their blood.


In the real world, the belief that behavior is determined by an individual's genes or some aspect of their physiology is called Biological Determinism. You probably know this from three places: One is that it's a core component of Eugenics. Another is the famously awful cranium capacity measurement experiments in the late 1800s which were used to justify slavery and oppose women's suffrage and immigration. The final reason you may remember this concept is that it's often used to scientifically justify racism despite being an enormous pile of bullshit that's been discredited for over a hundred years.

So it's not that Orcs resemble a real-life culture in any way, and that's what makes it racist. Orc "culture" being expressed as a ridiculous caricature and Orcs being "genetically bad" are essentially the same thing as tactics real life Fascists and racists use against marginalized groups to justify unconscionable acts against them.

This isn't okay to do just because this is a fantasy world with races who do have striking physiological differences. Supporting fascist ideals is wrong, even implying that Biological Determinism might be correct is wrong, and nothing about this being a fake fantasy world full of green dudes makes that any better.

The idea of an "antagonist race" is a fairly toxic one in several ways. The wholesale "othering" of an entire race is a pathway to racism that I've personally seen: People who strongly identify as Alliance players have expressed radical feelings against orcs in World of Warcraft despite the story going out of its way to declare that no entire race of people is all bad. However, this declaration often comes at the end of a long, long period where the faction opposite of you is depicted as far more villainous than those actual players would know unless they played your part of the story.

It's also shitty simplistic writing steeped in old Eurocentric ideas. All the good people live in this tired pastiche of ancient medieval Europe, mostly all happen to be white, and all the bad guys are total savages with darker skin who come from a different land, live by raiding and pillaging, think of nothing but fighting, and want nothing more than kill and destroy because it's "In their blood"...

Yikes.

I mean, it sure does sound worse when I spell it out, right? But I just described the classic Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Most of the people reading this will probably have played in a game like that. I truly, sincerely hope I don't need to explain what's not okay about that.


It's okay for races to have differences. It's not okay for races to have a biological component that drives or determines their behavior. It's okay for a culture to have negative aspects. It's not okay for any culture to be wholly and ridiculously evil. It's not okay just because they're racial cultures. It's not okay to use an entire race as antagonists in any sense. It's bad writing, it's a bad habit, and it's supporting bad methods of thought.

The idea that a villain has mobilized an entire race of people to do his bidding is another concept born from racism. It doesn't make any sense and is born from the sweeping generalizations racists love to make. Organizations, tribes, cities, individuals will work for villains for a variety of reasons. An entire race is absurd. If you want mooks and weenies in your fights, and stock villains you can easily use in fights, I promise you that you're not gonna have to stretch to make your party not care about killing them. You don't have to fuck up your whole world to achieve it.

If you want to use Orcs as villains, fine. If you want to tell a story about racism, wonderful. If you want people in your world insisting that Orcs(or tieflings, or aasimar, or any other race, even the planetouched) are just "born a certain way" and "have savagery in their blood", fine. It's not okay for that claim to be literally true.

Coming up with cool organizations and compelling villains is part of the fun of world building, anyway. Nobody's asking you to have a dense, morally grey plot. Just think about the decisions you're making and ask yourself why you're doing it. "That's just what D&D is" or "It's Tolkienesque" have been the crutch our hobby has been limping forward on for too long. Cast it aside and be better. Write better worlds.