Since my last post on how races are handled in D&D, I’ve come to the conclusion that even if Wizards of the Coast really doesn’t know what they’re doing at times, it’s all the DMs and players at home that really keep things running. It’s been a long time since I last commented on this, and since then I’ve left Twitter, where most of the “orcs are racist” discourse was happening, because it’s such a toxic environment*. Maybe there’s a right way and a wrong way to use Twitter, where you just pop in occasionally and avoid getting sucked into the drama — but it just doesn’t really feel worth it having to wade through all the crud.
Many of those trying to shame WotC have probably never cracked open the DMG, or have scarcely played in any games, so they failed to realize that the mechanics themselves are very, very flexible. If you don’t like the attributes for orc player characters, just use the versions from Eberron or Exandria. If you don’t like that the orcs are always depicted as evil, just throw in some good orcs. This is really only a problem in The Forgotten Realms, simply because WotC hasn’t bothered to write any good depictions of orcs there yet. Greyhawk technically doesn’t have any good depictions that I can recall either, but the setting is varied enough that you could just drop in a community of good orcs anywhere and it would work. It’s not so easy in Forgotten Realms because the map is already a bit over-crowded and with it being so easy to travel long distances without issue, you’d think someone would have already discovered them by now. In any case, you don’t have to buy WotC’s latest book for a mechanical fix that wasn’t really the problem in the first place.
But for a second, lets look at why in-universe, orcs tend to be evil:
The storyline in Greyhawk and The Forgotten Realms — and technically Exandria as well — starts with an event called the Dawn War. Basically, all the gods came to the world from somewhere else (beyond the Astral Sea) and created all the mortal races. Then they all came under attack from elemental creatures called Primordials. During the fighting, some of the gods turned traitor. Some of them wanted to get the other gods to give up on the world and move somewhere else, and others simply went mad. But after the Primordials were dealt with, the “good” aligned deities turned their undivided attention to dealing with the “evil” ones, forcing sort of a fragile peace.
In Greyhawk and The Forgotten Realms, that uneasy ceasefire between the gods is where things stand currently, with some gods being very active in leading or controlling the races they created. That includes the orc god Gruumsh, who demands that his followers be “evil.” This is why orcs are generally evil in D&D.
Exandria changes this. Following the Dawn War, there was a time called The Age of Arcanum where mortals got really power-hungry with arcane magic. Then another war — called the Calamity — broke out, where good deities, evil deities, and powerful empires of mortals with magic that could rival the gods all fought against one another. Some gods outright died. Mortals across much of the world were wiped out. But after the Calamity, the good deities sealed themselves and the evil betrayer gods away from the material plane, to prevent something like the Calamity from ever happening again. Between the Dawn War and the Calamity, many mortals were wiped out and had to re-populate, meaning each settlement is probably a bit more diverse and multi-cultural than what you might find in other settings. In Wildmount and Tal’Dorei, orcs may carry the stigma of being created by Gruumsch but they are not controlled by him, nor do they have to worship him at all.
Some of the push to label orc depictions as racist is a matter of optics: given the choice between what you’re told is racist and what you’re told is not racist, you’d of course rather be seen supporting the supposedly not-racist option, right? But some of it may also be because orcs fit a certain, under-supported niche in terms of character options. Maybe like the orcs of Skyrim or the Qunari in Dragon Age, players want an option that leans toward being pragmatic, physically imposing, and martially gifted — without having to be evil. Orcs and half-orcs should be well-suited to barbarian or druid characters… but the lore of The Forgotten Realms makes it tricky to do that since the map almost literally doesn’t have space to fit in any good-aligned orc communities. This is why I really like the approach taken in Exandria, and why if I did my own homebrew setting, I’d like to have the mortal races a bit more split between the different sides following the Dawn War.
(*Note: A big part of why I feel that Twitter is a toxic environment is that aside from removing depictions of nudity and graphic violence, Twitter is largely unmoderated. Flame wars and trolling are the norm. Twitter’s moderators rely very heavily on automation and consequently cannot enforce rules meant to promote respectful civil discussion.)
Just Dragon Things 