What's your preferred aesthetic for orcs...

Warcraft does it.

I've been thinking about it lately, as well.
So far I've settled on having pig-orcs being a race called porcine that are more civilized and usually act as roaming mercenary bands, so they're sort of like hobgoblins, as well.

Oni are pretty cool, I've used them as a basis for an ogre race before where the members of the race are huge and/or have oddly-proportioned arms and heads.

Fuck you. She's a beautiful Orc princess on the inside, and that's what really counts.

I recall reading in a monster manual for The Two Towers movie that the goblins in Moria were all played by children and women. So there actually could be a beautiful woman on the inside.

>So there actually could be a beautiful woman on the inside.
That would be kind of horrifying, considering that's a sculpture and not a costume.

I'm not a huge Tolkienboo who has to have everything in his fantasy settings the way the old man did it but when it comes to orcs I'm definitely Tolkien-style-or-bust.

The green skinned supermodels with weird bottom-of-the-mouth fangs are too cartoonish for me; I definitely prefer them to just be degenerated humans or near-humans like elves. Moderately messed-up and deformed, feral but not completely unintelligent and living either underground or at least out of the broad daylight with really pale skin to match.

Basically, the orcs from the LotR movies, a more organized version of the Falmer or what the drow -should- be instead of S&M Al Jolsons.

That's pretty much my taste, except I just don't make them unintelligent at all. They're bastards, but they aren't stupid bastards.

I'll admit, it's been a long time since I've used Orcs. They just seem generic in comparison to other fodder races that have a bit more flair to them, like Goblin, Hobgoblins or Bullywugs. What makes them interesting to you Veeky Forums?

I honestly like the pig orcs the best, but sometimes I just like to nix orcs and replace with something different. Pic related is one such example of something I'd like to experiment with.

goblins are orcs in Tolkien. In some of his early notes he made a distinction, but by the final draft of LoTR he had made them the same thing.

Maybe they just seem generic because they've got presence in a lot of media. You could go with pig orcs, but bullywugs are pretty under-utilized so more power to you if you feel like they're not represented as much.
Yeah, that makes sense given how goblins are either unmentioned or given no distinction from orcs in the book LotR.

They are what you think of when you think of evil monsters and I like having them be persecuted and mostly good because it's an easy and lazy dichotomy to toss in most settings

I like green orcs.

I want to try my next campaign having pig orcs but idk if my players will reject the idea or think its stupid because of how "orc" has changed over time

Green brutes with tusks.
Alternatively, TEs or Battle for Wesnoth orcs.

If you're that concerned, maybe don't call them orcs and instead have a pig-based name, and play them up more as some kind of beast men.
What makes Elder Scrolls orcs interesting? What's their X-factor? I've never played or gotten into the lore, but they're as viable as anything else AFAIK.

I don't really like the whole "they're really good" thing. I go with "Lawful Neutral". Orcs go through with what they see as their duty, and don't really give a shit about anything that gets in the way. Their reasons make sense to them, but they don't want to waste time explaining themselves to humans who might not even speak one of the tongues they're loosely familiar with.

They've got their orders, and you better just get the fuck out of the way.

They are recognizabe green brutes with tusks, but not dumb, which is pleasant to see

>I like having them be persecuted and mostly good

I understand why people do this, but it grinds my gears. The whole point of orcs and other monstrous humanoids is that they can kill them without the modern moral discomfort. We're supposed to fill them with all the crap we hate about ourselves. Then take our evil side out into the woods and beat it to death. It doesn't help that most attempts at "good orcs" end up turning them into noble savages with stereotypical tribal trappings.

They were elfs, but a demon corrupted their leader and turned the race into beast like people that live in tribes outside cities and serve as smiths and frontline fighters for the empire in the setting. They have a homeland, but are mostly nomadic.

I explained this in simple terms for a non fan, but check them out, you might like them. TES lore is fairly deep and cool.

>take our evil side out into the woods and beat it to death.
It will never cease to amaze me, the ability of normal people to turn even the most innocent pastime into a raging morality circlejerk.

>raging morality circlejerk.

wut?

It's a metaphorical and primal thing, a lot of fantasy and myth falls into that general idea.

>tfw this is cropped porn

I've been here so long I just assume everything posted on Veeky Forums is cropped porn.

>and I find animal-people to be appealing in general.

Yiff in hell.

Objective ranking.

LOTR style>TES style>>Warcraft style>>>>>>>>>>>>Pigmen

>primal
A good description of people in general, yes.

You are God damn right it is- but it doesn't matter because I really like the design of that creature and wish I could have it copied for my game/setting.

I'm partial to the more classic "pig-orc" from D&D. The "green elf woman, green muscle-man with tusks" is so overused and frustrating. Especially if they're noble savages.

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Plains Indian pseudo demonic boar-giants. Not evil per se, but so alien to humans that coexistence is hard.

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I made the green ones a type of goblin. They're the muscle to my magic conman goblins' schemes

Good origin stories for pig orcs that isn't just demon pigs or le magically created super soldiers?

Well it's bloody unconventional, but I sort of have a soft spot for the orcs of Takir.

*tips d20*

Why not demon pigs? Either make them people corrupted by Legion-style pig demons a la Darkest Dungeon, or maybe make them the children of a hostile but not necessarily super malevolent entity. I like to model my orcs (and their god) after Isidoros from Exalted. He's a big, eldritch being who values freedom and strength over basically everything else, and has weird demonic morality to boot. Seems like the perfect base for some rampaging barbarian pig man tribes

>fodder race for the players to beat at low levels

These weird things mentioned at a scary nature thread fit in.

I don't like porcs, but I like the pigmen from Darkest Dungeon. All the upsides of porcs without the association with weebshit, plus a cooler backstory

Those "bottom-of-the-mouth fangs" are called tusks, user.

They're somewhat notable for not really doing the dumb orc thing, with orcish smiths in particular being really good - orcish armour and weapons are really good shit.

Isn't there something about a race-wide curse to always be outsiders and misfits wherever they go.

It starts with their bodies, which aren't quite elves and aren't quite beast men, and extends to the fact that they can't hold on to a fixed homeland.

How's this;

Long ago a great culture of humans came to power. Due to their great irrigation canals, knowledge of the arts and sciences and magic, and great culture and people they became very powerful and wildly known throughout the land. Their power branched from a god of plenty, named Swinus- represented by a great fat pig.

The other Gods, jealous of their followers inability to match the great Swinus and his empire, decided to curse the great people with stupidity, gluttony and lustfulness. In turn they turned to swine men, all of them, and their great empire came crumbling down. Now the pig men chase humans through their wet ruins of what was once an irrigation canal, or sit upon a throne made of cracked marble that was once a great observatory.

There, a bit generic and tragic, but also makes them out to be monstrous things you shouldn't trust.

Well you're a furfag and your opinion should be discarded out of hand, but since Tolkien Orcs are basically mongoloids and pig men are for hipsters and elf rape doujins, there's no reason the former can't be half-orcs and the latter beastmen.

I think the point was that people are too scared to give the "attractive green humans" real tusks, so they just have weird slightly protruding fangs instead.

I also prefer porcs.

Oh yeah. I like them too. Tarkir gobbos are nice too

Ive gotten sick of both p'orcs, which are just boar folk, and green skinned savages with tiny fucking noses. Tolkien can fuck right off.

I want something that is actually a mix of human and boar. I want their face and nose to resemble a pig's ,but you can't immediately tell since it's oriented like a humans. Their hair is thick and bristly, and is practically fur. When it comes to skin, I'm still rather undecided about whether it should just be shades of normal skin color from boars and humans, or something more outlandish like oranges and greens.

Like pic related but with a much thicker nose bridge and smaller ears. There is so little art for what I want.

Nothing is wrong with furfaggery.

That's pretty common friendo

Your newness is showing

Porcs make me think of Captive Market, which then makes me think of massacring them all, as such is probably more conductive to have green skins as orcs

Where is that from?

Tolkien's menacing monstrosities are olny good orcs

Can you give the source

Same here. Bug grey brutes are best orcs. I don't like to make then stupid and savage though. I try to give them a range of cultures and styles. But they are all big and muscley

That's pretty interesting, I hope you can get to do that in a game you're running or however you like it.

It's hard to say, in my opinion, orcs should at the very least
>Be green, yellow, or grey
>Have a brutish culture
>Be intelligent enough to be a functioning society
>Be ugly or unsightly, no green anime elves
>Have unique clans or factions with their own methodology
I don't like Porcs, but that's mostly because I hate their Japanese representation, never once has a rapist pig sounded interesting enough to me to feature a campaign around.

In the first two Warcraft games, they are just an evil enemy race. You're not supposed to relate to them.

Doomhammer is a sympahetic villain in WC2

I like the orks as they are, but for fantasy I generally despise blizzard orcs and goblins and go for a mix of horrificly mutated goblins interspersed with similar ogres.

Porcs are the only good orcs, everything else looks bleh in comparison.

But they're not menacing at all, they're cannon fodder.

What do you get when a Dwarf fucks a pig....an Ork!

This is a really rude joke in my D&D campaign and Dwarves take a lot of offense to it because it might actually be true. This is kind of a shameful story buried so far back in dwarven lore that there really isn't anyway to confirm it. But the story has persisted for so long that it is possible a shameful incident caused the Orks genesis. What is recorded is that at some point in Dwarven history they started using Orks as mining slaves in the deepest parts of the underworld. This is also considered a note of shame in Dwarven history but the proliferation of this practice lead to a heightened militarization and apartheid in Dwarven culture.

Early Orcs were indeed the primordial pig faces of faerie tales. But after numerous slave rebellions and escapes Orcs quickly crossbred through war crimes. Many made cultural alliances with goblins who also shared a hatred for Dwarves and where prolific tunnel squatters.

What eventually became the barbaric warlike Orc was a series of bred mutations with humans and the unhesitating reintegration of Half Orcs back into Orc communities. Breeding with hag covens and a proliferation of various nefarious incidents conspired to make the Barbarian Warrior Orc we know today.

Orcs do still possess the ability to spontaneously generate from primordial filth. But this is conscious practice undertaken by villainous masters in lairs of unquestionably evil intent. Other times it can be a product of poor waste management in large Orc communities. Though in general filth spawning is a practice undertaken far more prolifically by Goblins than Orks.

>Tolkien's menacing monstrosities are olny good orcs
you're thinking of peter jackson

Just saying,the guys in that picture are hobgoblins.

Shit your right.

I like classic Tolkien. Small, more or less human colored, claws and fangs but nothing too ornate or pronounced, best at striking from ambush, don't haveuch stomach for pitched fights.

I think jackson's orcs fit tolkien's descriptions well.
At least in lotr movies
Because srsly fuck the hobbit

Honestly, muscular green amazons, but barring that I like them as green, hostile, and semi-nomadic tribal brutes, not completely savage, but more concerned about the survival of the tribe and with an us vs them and might makes right (unless it's used against us) mentality towards everyone else

Lots of variation, lots of trollish features.
Peter's are rather different to tolkiens, keep in mind that even uruks are like 5'6" on a good day and that the hobbits were able to disguise themselves as orcs without much issue in Mordor.
I thought the first hobbit movie was nice actually. And the costume design and art direction throughout most of the other movies wasn't all that bad either. Story and choreography...questionable.

Jacksons non-uruk orcs are smallish actually. And height aside, they were surprisingly close to how i imagined them when i was reading the book, few years before the movies came out

Once upon a time, a man fucked a pig, and nine months later, 40k was born. Okay, maybe that's a bit unfair. How about these ideas?

1.) Orcs are what happens when a person grows increasingly greedy, violent, and/or lustful. They transform under the new moon into an orc and rampage out to find others of their kind.
2.) A factory farm gone awry, in that the farmer-wizards tried to create bigger, better swine. The semi-bipedal pigs turned on the farmer-wizards and ate them. The magic-suffused flesh turned them into orcs.
3.) A half-dragon balor lich began shitposting about how great it was that only liches, dragons, and demons were the only BBEGs Veeky Forums could come up with. The internet fucking exploded and orcs began pouring out of it, squealing, grunting, and shitting from the furfaggotry that helped spawn them.

Big green brutes are best orcs. Peter Jackson's Orcs were better fits for goblins.

Well they aren't that bad, just that calling tolkien's orcs "menacing monstrosities" and posting a picture of a towering Azog/skyrim orc loading screen hybrid is a bit off base for what they are.

>I think jackson's orcs fit tolkien's descriptions well.
They don't really. Tolkien descriped them as
>...they are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.

Orcs were also small, ranging from the size of halflings to short humans. Saruman's Uruks were notable for matching human's in size and thus being humongus by Orc standards.

Goblins and orcs are the same thing in lord of the rings

The moria ones aren't bad then. The later "men with nasty makeup" ones found later are more questionable.

Generally speaking, the first movie did a lot of things right, and the sequels did a lot of stupid shit and are best forgotten.

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I have all three types of orcs in my setting

I think the uruk's were also good. The only one's I'm bothered by are the barely-distinguishable-from uruk ones.

>kitchen sink settings

That's not my point. My point is that, beyond the confines of Tolkien's work, what Jackson did with the Orcs was more fitting for how I imagine goblins in most settings, rather than how I would view an Orc.

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What's their deal? Outside of being members of the Clans I mean, what's an Orc like?

They're cannon fodder for the people in the Fellowship, who are some of the most powerful individuals on Middle-Earth. Almost everyone else is terrified of them, if nothing else due to how incredibly cruel they are

I'm writing an adventure recolving around pig-orcs and starting with an ecology of them. Turns out that wild swine are a surprisingly good fit for a race of unstoppable marauding killers

I had the idea once of combining basically all of the ideas, plus goblins, into one lifecycle. They'd start out born as goblins, then as they progressively got older would go through each stage of "standard" orcs, starting out as green-skinned types, but they'd keep growing throughout life, becoming more porcine as time went on. Eventually they'd get so massive that they couldn't even move on two legs, and just flat-out turn into giant boars.

Also take in mind that the only human settlements seen in LotR are the horse vikings and the offbrand semi-atlanteans. Saruman is able to take the Shire and Bree with a handful of barely armed half-trolls, and by that point he and Wormtongue are hobos