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- cross-posted to:
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I really think people blow this crying about Orcs out of proportion, there was NEVER an actually interesting villain in this game whose reasons of being a villain boil down only to “I’m an Orc, Goblin, Drow or other evil race”. And saying a whole species is inherently evil effectively diminishes all evil they do because you are saying they never could choose not to do it, which reduces them to children who don’t know better. People should move on and stop flooding my yt feed with identical videos repeating the same points.
I have a character I’d like to play in a one-shot someday. He’s a brutish, cruel and irredeemable orc bandit on a quest to enlighten the world about the virtues of orc culture, because he’s sick of humans thinking being an orc is what makes him a monster. He is a monster, but not because he’s an orc.
“Orcish poetry is so beautiful that many front-line orc soldiers comfort themselves by thinking about their memorial poem. Personally, I think poetry is for sissies, but most orcs disagree with me!”
“Grug brings dishonor on family! Grug’s parents no want grug speak like this. Grug supposed go be cleric or wizard like brother or philosopher like sister!”
Oh man, now there’s a take on Orks. They’re just a population that happens to suffer from higher-than-average rates of speech pathologies. They’re not evil. They just need speech therapy.
See i was picturing a gangbanger whose siblings and parents have doctorates. This kid is talking like orcish Jrock while their parents are using perfect orcish and lamenting their kid having fallen in with a bad crowd.
They don’t even need speech disorders. They just aren’t native speakers, and orcish has wildly different gramatical structures to humanic (or “common” as humans call it). If you spoke orcish, they’d seem more like a race of poets.
At times like this, I regret that I am bound by the ancient Orcish custom of not giving a damn about what Humans think of me. But you’d better believe that if I wasn’t an Orc, I’d be bashing your head in!
It is an ancient Orcish custom that one should take pride in the work itself and not seek glory from others, yes. This is one of the virtues of orcish society he points out to his survivors while making it clear that he DOES want the glory. Not all orcs are the same. Most are more virtuous than him.
One of my players is that. His parents were an orc and a bard so he’s trying to atone for what they’ve done
That’s kind of the opposite, actually. This guy absolutely doesn’t want to atone, but wants to make it clear that most other orcs have nothing to atone for. And the idea that a monster seeking recognition and a half-blood trying to atone for perceived sins of the father are “the same” because they’re both orcs is part of the problem.