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.)

So there’s something that’s been bothering me for a while now. About a month or two ago, it started trending online where people were saying that orcs in D&D were racist because they were biologically required to be evil. Now Wizards of the Coast have published an article pretty much conceding that the orcs and drow do rely on essentialist ideas about race.

The problem with all this is the fact that they’re actually not required to be evil as a rule. It’s more of a trope or cliché. In fact, as of my writing this, TV Tropes had this to say about the matter:

“In-universe, the ‘usually evil’ nature of some races is justified by their racial deities, such as Lloth for the Drow and Gruumsh for the Orcs, being evil. These gods also work very hard to make sure that their worshippers are just as bad as they are, and any that aren’t tend to end up on the gods’ hit list. Good deities tend to respect free will more than the evil ones, so their races have evil, good, and neutral people. Human alignment is all over the place since they don’t have a racial deity to call their own. In some cases, an evil race will also have been created by an evil god.”

TV Tropes does mention that in old versions of the game, rule books listed alignments for creatures without acknowledging that they could differ from that default listing. But should they really have to? Everything can be altered by the DM on the fly as the story calls for it. Even hit points. If you want to split hairs, you could even create your own separate stat blocks for the Chaotic versions of things that are normally Lawful or vice versa. It’s a matter of writing and world-building, not mechanics.

Drow are actually a really great example of why being evil is more of a convention than a rule. In Forgotten Realms lore, the drow originally were good, or at least neutral, before they turned to Lolth for help during the Crown Wars. The Crown Wars were sort of an elven civil war that ended with them dropping magic nukes on each other before many of them retreated back into another dimension called the Feywild. As punishment for siding with Lolth, Corellon — the main elven deity — banished the drow to live under Lolth’s control underground. However, since 2nd edition, there has also been a good-aligned deity named Eilistraee that some drow worship in secret. You probably don’t see her mentioned much anymore because in old rulebooks they outright say her priestesses would do rituals where they danced naked with swords — total fanservice that likely wouldn’t go well with the family-friendly look Wizards is looking to project now.

But if drow can be good outside of Lolth’s control, then it stands to reason the same could be said for orcs. It even says as much in Volo’s Guide to Monsters, though it does also say that orcs have an innate tendency toward violence. Specifically, it says:

“Most orcs have been indoctrinated into a life of destruction and slaughter. But unlike creatures who by their very nature are evil, such as gnolls, it’s possible that an orc, if raised outside its culture, could develop a limited capacity for empathy, love, and compassion.
No matter how domesticated an orc might seem, its blood lust flows just beneath the surface. With its instinctive love of battle and its desire to prove its strength, an orc trying to live within the confines of civilization is faced with a difficult task.“

When you break it down, this passage from Volo’s Guide really can’t be taken at face value. If an orc grew up spending its whole life in the confines of civilization, how can you call it “domesticated?” That’s just not a word you use for people. If violence is in their very nature, why then would they have to be indoctrinated into it? Then you have to consider the impact of the Pygmalion Effect, where its whole life everyone has expected the orc to be violent. It’s almost as if this passage is written in-universe from the point of view of a character who is racist against orcs. (Some D&D books are explicitly written in-character, such as the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide, which changes perspectives many times throughout the book. Older books even had back-and-forths between the characters Volo and Elminster in the book’s footnotes.)

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that if you want more positive — or at least more nuanced — takes on orcs and drow, you can do that. You don’t need to buy another book rewording the rules. You just need to get creative and write. The published settings of Eberron and Wildemount already have more positive depictions of certain “monstrous” races — and Wizards tried to claim credit for that. However, the authors of those settings — Keith Baker and Matt Mercer — don’t actually work for Wizards. Keith Baker won a contest and Matt Mercer was already a well known voice actor before he got famous with the show Critical Role. Those settings came from the outside and were absorbed into the D&D brand.

I’m not really sure how to feel about Wizards of the Coast right now, because it seems like they may be doing that “absorbing” thing without credit this time. About two weeks ago, following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Arcanist Press released their own supplement on DMs Guild that swaps out race for ancestry and culture. It’s been pretty popular on Twitter and it’s already a “Gold Best Seller.” The idea that they might take a product for sale in their own walled garden and then quash it with their own product just seems… really not great.