Yep, this is going to be a post discussing racism.
One thing that confused me greatly about orcs and goblins is the severe difference in technological levels between them and regular human empires (also something else, but I’ll get to that later). Regular humans are depicted as being from the (unrealistic view of the) medieval period, but orcs and goblins are portrayed as being extremely underdeveloped tech-wise. Their cultures don’t feel like they belong together in the same geographical locations, and orcs don’t seem capable of learning from the people they’ve warred with for hundreds of years.
Now you may argue that that’s because orcs and goblins are intended to be genetically mentally inferior; their intelligence stat is certainly below the average human intelligence (average human intelligence = 10, orcs = 8 (5e orc = 7)). However there’s a reason why this doesn’t make sense: human barbarian tribes exist in the same regions as more technologically advanced humans and they’re not advancing either, despite co-existing or warring with other humans of their region for hundreds of years. Their tribes, unlike their literal neighbors, have been entirely unable to advance and yet remain as a constant warring group against their medieval counterparts without ever getting wiped out. They don’t live in neighboring nations, they live within the same nations as their medieval counterparts.
In the real world, you have situations like this arising because nations like Britannia (I’ve no idea what it was called before the Romans invaded) was literally invaded by a technologically advanced nation, putting them at odds and making neighbors of people who were technologically lesser. Situations like when the native actual American peoples were invaded by Europeans.
I’ve seen King Arthur portrayed as a knight fighting off ‘barbarians’ (one of the transformers movies, but also probably other depictions too), which would more accurately translate to a colonialist terrorizing the local population in this scenario, although apparently in the actual myths he was a Briton who fought off foreign invaders instead (not a depiction you see in media as far as I’m aware, especially as king Arthur is portrayed as being clad in plate armor of the medieval period).
Basically a more accurate representation of this situation in your usual TTRPG setting would depict the more technologically advanced nations as colonizers, at constant struggle with the neighboring populations that they’re actively trying to suppress, and I say neighboring because had those populations existed within their nation they would have murdered them all. TTRPG settings never depict this relationship, instead asking that you accept this current situation as though it just sprung up into its current state all of a sudden (which it did).
Going back to the cultures of orcs and goblins, they’re usually portrayed in a way that also makes them similar to human barbarians, neither of which match the cultures of the medieval peoples, but settler colonialism is never used as an explanation for why that is (settler colonialism being the only/most likely logical reason). No technologically medieval culture still has its barbarian beliefs or even traces of it, meaning they are indeed more akin to foreign invaders, which just makes the settings feel off given that those nations aren’t settler colonialist.
Now as regards orcs and goblins and their alignment by birth, I reject the automatic evil alignment they get and I reject it because in principal I repudiate Gygax’s views, which you can read here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/dtpgim/gygax_on_lawful_good/
He agrees with Chivington about the ‘nits make lice’ being an observable fact, a quote Chivington made in regards to actual human beings and not a race of beings who are objectively/genetically evil. Chivington was in the process of ethnically cleansing the region for settler colonialist reasons; Chivington’s side is the evil one and yet in a bizarre twist his logic is the one being considered as the rationale for lawful good.
Any accurate depiction of medieval societies living in such close proximity to orcs and goblins would require that the medieval society is a foreign one, where they’re the ones who are basically a pox on the orcs and goblins rather than the other way around as it’s portrayed. Orcs and goblins are always shown to be a constant threat to human societies, when in reality the inverse would be more realistic. There’s never any depictions of humans encroaching on and terrorizing orcs and goblins but the other way is always what’s presented, and that never made any sense.
Given Gygax’s son’s (Ernie Gygax) comments about native actual Americans, I got the sense that maybe he was raised on an unhealthy diet of ‘heroic’ cowboys versus ‘savage’ natives, and if this was the case, then his father probably raised him that way and had similar views (especially given his quoting Chivington as rationale behind the lawful good alignment of paladins).
When you consider Gygax’s opinions on the views of a genocidal murderer, suddenly it would make more sense to flip alignments between the medieval society and orcs and goblins (I’m not comparing orcs and goblins to native actual Americans), and suddenly paladins become basically the medieval Wehrmacht.
Unfortunately this line of reasoning brings me to…the tired old racist view that ‘technologically advanced’ = objectively good.
(oof this post was long)
They’re what medieval miners imagined were making all those weird noises underground. For whatever reason, mines emit all sorts of sounds and you can’t tell what’s making them or where they’re coming from. I’ve heard some tapes from down there and it’s creepy AF.
Oh, Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, that one.
The secret to understanding the Gygaxian mode of thought is not the Wild West. It’s the Wild East. Used to be, western culture’s frontier was in the east, in the marches, basically around modern-day Poland and Lithuania and so. The “Drang Nach Osten”, the drive to the east, was the original civilizing crusade. They would build military forts, attract settlers, make productive farms out of wildland, and so on. Out of the east came civilization’s greatest threats: Atilla the Hun, Ghengis Khan, and a thousand other, forgotten invasions. If civilization could expand far enough, it could eliminate these threats by occupying their land. Gygax the medievalist was obviously familiar with these tropes (which, to his credit, are still to this day unknown to most Americans - but Europeans know them innately).
Joke was on the Europeans, though. Asia extended further east than anyone ever thought possible. The North American continent, however, was not so large and the madlads actually did it.
That’s really cool. Do you have any sort of source on these stories?
Justifying it in DnD or, say, Elder Scrolls doesn’t work because the orcs in question generally live on the surface, but it’s an interesting point anyway.
The medieval Germans called them knockers, and I’ve seen a couple of Youtube videos from mine explorers where they’re down a mile or two and there are these knocking sounds coming from God knows where . I don’t easily get creeped out but something about this did it.
Tolkien’s orcs (and goblins, he uses the words interchangeably) lived in mountains. Notably Goblin-Town in The Hobbit. Here’s the song “Down Down to Goblin Town” from the Rankin-Bass movie from The Hobbit (1977). You know you want to listen to it. They tried using men’s choirs for all the goblin-songs to make them menacing, but they only succeeded in making them sound bad-ass. Go ahead and crank the sound up.
Fun fact: One of the singers of this song is none other than the legendary Thurl Ravenscroft himself. That’s right, the voice of Tony the Tiger is on the bass part.
You go my lad! Ho, ho my lad!
There’s also this banger in Return of the King from the same studio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsKY3P14Wdk
And this banger too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCmfxVXCVG8
Elder Scrolls is far kinder to orcs than Gygaxian D&D is, for what it’s worth.
That’s true, but that’s like saying “My group is far less racist than the KKK”
“Far” has room for a pretty wide spectrum, and while it’s far from ideal, the Elder Scrolls typically goes out of its way to give nuance and complexity and humanized motives to Orcs/Orsimer.
Even in Skyrim, they still ultimately depict them as tribespeople living beyond the margins of society with incomparably more primitive technology than anyone but the foresworn, with even bandits being more advanced, with very little demonstration of why they would live this way except for the idle inference that it’s in their blood and then whatever nuanced Deep Lore reason you will find buried in the pages of an in-game book. They still have the inborn ability “Berserker Rage,” they still don’t let non-Orcs even set foot in their encampment without a blood pact, including those groups that are really just as theoretically marginalized like the Khajiit, they still conform to these tropes in every respect except for the made-to-be-ignored texts, so when the player receives a radiant quest to kill a local chief, what reason do they have to not think of it like Goblin Slayer?
Of course, in older games it is much worse. In Daggerfall, orcs were not a playable race at all, and were just a type of monster to be exterminated, though there is plenty of dialogue indicating that they are subtextually specifically subhumans rather than beasts in human form, like how a character might have a malicious rumor spread about them that their parent was married to an orc or something.