Why Orcs? Or, Why Do I Love Orcs?

03 Dec, 2024

It's no secret that I like Orcs. I just released a GMless game about their origins, I’m working on a trad game where everyone plays Orcs, and as a player I often enjoy making Orc characters. That’s not an uncontroversial take; if you’re in indie RPG spaces, you’ve probably encountered this excellent blog post that goes deep into the relationship between Orcs and Orientalism. It would be more accurate to say that I love Orcs – when they’re done a certain way. And I’d like to show you what I find so interesting there.

Let’s start with some nonfiction. In 1898, the cruiser Olympia leads an American fleet against a Spanish one in the Battle of Manila Bay. The Olympia is a steel warship, built just on the cusp of technological change. It is powered by steam. To keep the boilers running, stokers have to shovel coal into the furnaces. It is literally back-breaking labor. The stokers are called the Black Gang, not because of any African descent – in photos from after the battle all of them look to be white – but because they emerge from their work covered in coal. It’s always hot by the furnace, but in battle every hatch and door that can be is locked shut, so it’s even hotter. If the ship rocks or turns suddenly from a collision or being hit with a shell, a stoker can fall into the furnace and burn alive. Coal dust is everywhere, covering their skin, in their lungs, in the water they have to drink. They are stripped almost naked and shaved bald to help with the heat and with hygiene. A crewmember who wrote a book about his time on the ship later described it as “a furnace-room only Dante could portray”; he did not mean it was paradise. Locked in a hot steel box, shoveling coal into the fires that drive the war machine, the stokers have only one way to know how the battle is going – every so often someone comes down and tells them when the Olympia has destroyed another Spanish ship. Every time that happens, they shout and pound their shovels on the furnace doors, carried away with joy for the violent deaths of hundreds enemies they do not know and will never see.¹ However the battle ends, their lives are already forfeit to the fires of war; if they do not die to violence first, cancer from the coal dust will claim them. These were some good Orcs!

Most of the creatures of fantasy fiction have been with us for a very long time. Each generation reimagines them, but dragons and manticores and elves have been around long enough for their origins to be lost to time. Orcs are different. They emerge fresh from the pen of Tolkien some time between 1917 and 1949. I don’t think Tolkien thinks much of them – he does not give them a true language like he does his elves and his dwarves, just a handful of words. He certainly doesn’t write much about their lives. They are soldiers of Morgoth or Sauron or Saruman. They are not wicked men lured into service with promises, or mercenaries from distant lands, or powerful, demonic monsters. Tolkien goes back and forth on their origins often, but it’s clear that their existence has been orchestrated by their evil lords with the sole goal of making them loyal, useful, expendable pawns. They love machinery, violence, explosions, and tunneling, and when they do talk they sound suspiciously Cockney. Legitimate scholars often see them as manifestations of the horrors Tolkien experienced in the trenches of WWI.

What speaks to me about even these first Orcs is that they do not have the fundamental sense of wonder that most mythical creatures do. They do not come from the realm of the dead or the realm of the fae, they are not motivated by alien cruelty, and they wield no magic powers. They are not individuals who take on the role of a stock character or a force of nature in a fable, like the Wolf or the Ogre or the Grim Reaper; I would go so far to say that an Orc alone is almost not an Orc at all. The things that define Orcs are all very human – that they form armies, that they go to war, that they employ the cruelest technologies they can devise, and that they serve an enemy commander. The horror they bring is that of organized, coordinated violence at scale, a hyper-mundane, intensely human, intensely relatable horror. Orcs do not draw strength from war like the Morrigan or Ares; a life of hatred and violence leaves them injured, bent, and diseased, as it does mortals but more so. Like so many creatures of folklore, they can easily serve as a cautionary figure. Beware the Orc, for this is what you become when you follow an evil lord into war!

This is what I love about Orcs. They are a modern fear that has been accepted into fantasyland and allowed to sit beside horrors from the dawn of storytelling. And they are intensely relatable. To be alive in any modern society is to be a part of a vast machine dedicated to war and violence. There is no choice, no moment of temptation and decision. We are born into it and will serve it until we die. We may do so complaining, as Orcs do, or ignoring it, as Orcs do, or taking joy in it, as Orcs do. I don’t wish to discourage anyone who seeks a better world, but there are certainly many days when I don’t see any path to one, and my knees hurt, and my skin is cracked and painful, and all I can find is cleverness when I reach for wisdom, and in those days I often find myself taking solace in knowing that I, too, have a counterpart in fairyland.

Orcs don’t end with Tolkien, of course. Because of how new they are, they have the rare distinction of being codified as much by games as they are by fiction. In 1954, before games give them their modern look, Newsweek has this wonderful portrayal of them as people with giant beaks and feathers!

In the late 1970s, Orcs show up in early Dungeons & Dragons as hunched, gray-skinned humanoids with an orderly and cruel society. In some artwork they are much smaller than human adventurers, but mechanically they have a single hit die, like the average human. A funny thing happens to them; with every edition they become bigger, greener, and more chaotic. By third edition they are chaotic, gray-green, stronger and taller than humans. At some point along the way their society becomes tribal. By 1994, Orcs in the first installment of Warcraft are already bright green and muscular, with Viking inspiration and a society organized into clans. In later installments they become cartoonishly large.

Somehow, Orcs go from soldiers to warriors, from warriors to barbarians. Some creators try to portray them as noble savages. I hate this take! Issues with the trope aside, the noble savage is the opposite of everything the Orc should be. The Orc is industrial and militant, existing in angry rejection of the ways of nature and the world, wielding banal mass violence in a way that is difficult for a tribal society. The Orc is the modern soldier hacking a path through the forest to haul in artillery, not the tribal hunter living in harmony with it. These barbarian Orcs are not really Orcs at all. They are, at best, Conan with green skin, and at worst, just plain old fashioned racist tropes.

There are a couple Orcs from games that I think are great examples of what can be done with Orcs.

The Space Orks of Warhammer 40K were a living weapon built by an advanced alien race. In a nicely cynical touch, the creators of the Orks did not die at the hand of their creations; they just lost the original war and perished at the hands of their original enemies. That was roughly sixty million years ago; since then, the Space Orks have survived, expertly designed to win a war that can no longer be won. These Orks are a fungus, growing from spores. When they encounter violence they grow larger and smarter, unlocking ancestral memories of how to build technologies up to and including spaceflight, computers, cybernetic augmentation, and FTL travel. They instinctually organize themselves by role and rank. When they are killed their bodies release spores that become more Orks. They are intensely British, taking inspiration from soccer hooligans. Most of the other sentient species of WH40K live miserable existences, relying on nightmarish technologies to survive constant conflicts and supernatural disasters. The Space Orks alone seem to be having fun. Their synthetic origins as a product of an existential war have accidentally left them with the ability to flourish and enjoy themselves in a galaxy where the same existential warfare threatens all other sentients; it’s the kind of strange hope that you’d find at the end of a Phillip K. Dick story.

The Orcs of Shadow of the Demon Lord are almost more interesting. They were created and bound by magic to serve as the shock troopers of an empire that came to dominate the known world. They were taught from a young age that, as a reward for their military service, they would be allowed to retire to farms in the north of the empire after they aged out. While a small number of farms were maintained for show, most Orcs who hit retirement age were ground up, made into rations, and served to Orcs in the field. After hundreds of years, a particularly depraved emperor sought to torment the general of the Orcs by revealing this secret to him. The orc general’s outrage was enough to allow him to overcome the binding magic and slay the emperor, freeing his people forever. The general, Drudge, has crowned himself King and seized the capital in an Orc revolution. The vassal states of the empire have begun to secede, seeing an opportunity and unwilling to be ruled by an Orc. Drudge commands the single most powerful army in the world, but only that – he can command obedience and buy his people safety through violence, but he has few tools to build respect or stability. To make matters worse, the world itself of SOTDL is an unstable one, and the collapse of the empire weakens the very bonds of reality. Drudge has won his people freedom from an empire that literally eats them alive, but if he can’t find a way to broker a peace with both the people who used to command him and the people he subjugated in their name, demons will overrun his world and reality will dissolve into chaos.

These two flavors of Ork are examples of the kinds of themes that I want to explore when I play Orcs, or put them in games, or write games about them. From the angle of speculative fiction, Orcs let you tell transhumanist stories about what it means to make or modify people for warfare, with much less of the wish fulfillment that tends to slip into stories about supersoldiers. From the angle of character-driven fiction, playing as Orcs lets you find meaning and purpose in a culture defined by violence and conflict, whether by carving out a role within that culture or defying it. Orc characters can face a triple challenge: they are looked down on as mere brutes by anyone more powerful than them, they are hated by those their people have made war on for very real atrocities they have committed, and violence may still be the tool they’re best equipped to use to solve problems, or at least the service they can best convince other people to buy from them.

I think that’s about all I have to say on Orcs for now, but if you’re interested in a more dispiriting conversation, ask me about selkies sometime.

As always, you can find all my contact info at https://linktr.ee/lymerpg. I'd be particularly grateful if you feel like backing or sharing the news about my current Kickstarter for Dawn of the Orcs, a GMless dark fantasy worldbuilding and roleplaying game where you play the technocrats who build the Orcs and tell the story of how the Orcs become their own people. Also, I'm on Bluesky now, @lymerpg.bsky.social.