Making Orcs Great Again

>Gul'dan
>Good guy.
When? When did that happen?

So in basic, give them a violent culture that can work.

highly industrial, well organized, fairly short, look kinda like bulldogs, and have excellent singing voices

Came here to suggest this

In WC3: Frozen Throne he was a sympathetic character who only wanted the Orc to kill all the humans.

>Aren't Wookiees generally good natured?
Jesus Christ no. If you have ever played Galactic battleground you would know. I have Vietnam flashbacks to us declaring Neutrality to each other, and then them raiding my base over and over again. And getting mad at me for declaring war back on them, like they did no wrong. The devs literally programmed them to do this.

Fuck the Wookies.

Shut up, Trandotrash.

>in muh setting
My not!orcs are brutish, but not dumb. They're also closer to Tolkien orcs by being jackass industrialists with highly structured (think imperial China) government necessary to get the overly individualistic overly angry dudes to cooperate.

It works pretty well.

That isn't necessarily canon. It's a strategy game not based solely on lore.

The Phantom Menace game had Twi'leks flirt and offer to fuck with Liam Neeson to get him to meet Jabba. It also let Obi Wan kill everyone in the Gungan city. Is that canon?

...

>The Phantom Menace game had Twi'leks flirt and offer to fuck with Liam Neeson to get him to meet Jabba. It also let Obi Wan kill everyone in the Gungan city. Is that canon?
We can only hope.

Goblins raped Giants which produced Orcs, after a war of independence the Orcs free themself from Goblins. Mostly dumb and brutish but because there is hardly any fighter that can match a half giant, doesn't stop them from fighting sneaky

They strive to be evil

nobody knows why, they have no real motivation for it, and it's not a case of "their idea of good is our idea of evil".

They don't all agree on how to be evil, and most of them are more selfish than anything, but the only way they can experience personal fulfillment is by being evil. And it's not played for laughs.

There's room for shitloads of creative and challenging roleplaying opportunities that way, because generally speaking, striving to do good is more convenient and beneficial than striving to be evil, so that's a fun premise for a PC and you can take it hundreds of different ways.

Don't include orcs at all. They fundamentally fucking suck. Use more interesting races like this lil ayy lmao instead.

Never. He's been an unapologetic baby killer since he showed up in the books (and very literally in the movie). This user has just been shitposting in the WoW threads and got bored.

This is actually how I did orcs in my homebrew campaign and my group now jokes about how all orcs in my games are going to be 9 feet tall with lazer eyes after making the mistake of attempting to stop some orcs from pillaging a village. They got the absolute snot beat out of them and vowed never to go near an orc horde again. Little do they know they were just a scouting party that I had set up as an introductory encounter to the orcish threat.

My orcs are muscly, smart berserkers. In primordial days, a race of shapeshifters older than the universe tried to subjugate them. At first the orcs held their own through shear numbers and RAGE, but after heavy losses began to adopt technology and tactics.

As it is nearly impossible for orcs to take combat damage without Berserking, most of the tactics consists of getting the biggest beefiest guys to the most relevant battlefield areas and just kind of unleashing them. They eagerly got into gunpowderesque tech, but magical knowledge never really caught on. Partially because casters that drop their staff and attempt to rip their enemies apart unarmoured on receiving an arrow wound aren't ultimately that useful, partially because the shapeshifters magic became unreliable and weak in the later stages of the war.

After defeating and nearly genociding the shapeshifters, the orcs ruled the known world for around a thousand years. Ultimately a god blasted their major cities after they started a war with another newer race. Since then the survivors mostly roam the continent where their capital used to be, researching science and foraging through old ruins to see what knowledge can be gained. Each clan has their own library of all the knowledge they have collected.

So I guess my orcs are itinerary librarians who'll snap your neck if you run them the wrong way.

It is now.

I fucking hate the "badass nerd" cliché and it sounds like you're trying to make them into that.

They are organized evil. They may or may not have a majority that are just dumb and/or brutes, but regardless someone up the hierarchy has their shit shit in order, mostly the armies. They will march on you, conquer your land, enslave your people, stamp out your culture, and eat your babies.

>Ultimately a god blasted their major cities after they started a war with another newer race. Since then the survivors mostly roam the continent where their capital used to be, researching science and foraging through old ruins to see what knowledge can be gained. Each clan has their own library of all the knowledge they have collected.

This looks like Deus Ex Machina to nerf the Orcs

I played that. Your wrong. He was clearly portrayed as a bad guy, sure bad guy that got fucked, but still a clear bad guy. Your a moron.

But all he wanted to do was kill the humans from another planet that wouldn't give themselves willingly for fel sacrifice.

In a setting I made some years ago, orcs were almost like changelings, only, in reverse. They were human and elf children mistaken for fey and taken to the Fade (analogue for the Feywild before that was a thing). There, after attempts were made to forcibly "return" their magic to them, they were unceremoniously tossed aside and forgotten, said to have borne the taint of mortal men. Malformed and disfigured by the improper infusion of fey magics, they wandered the Fade, alone and afraid, until they eventually found each other.

As congealed masses of erroneous fey energy, their muscles and bones swelled and contorted under the abrasive influence of said magics, until their bodies eventually settled and hardened, permanently taking on the bruised pigmentation of their previously supple forms. Their minds, scarred beyond measure, too settled on a brutish and hateful demeanour.

Turning their animosity toward the true fey, they used their newfound strength to wage guerrilla warfare on their inadvertent kidnappers, nearly destroying them and their courts entirely for their feckless torture and abandonment. That is, until they were lead to escape to the prime material plane by their captors, setting them free on the mortal world, to ever ravage the kingdoms of their long repressed kin.

Eh, the campaign is set immediately after god blasts another of the aforesaid newer race that has become powerful. A fair bit of the overarching story is why the gods blast some people but not others.

The whole thing actually came from a "make a setting" thread I liked, and I've just fleshed it out and expanded on bits i liked.

When was that consider good? At no point has Fel been good. Not till Naw with the Elf Illidan. And even then it's very well placed as a bad thing. At no point did blizzard try to push Gul'dan as a good guy, exspecialy in your scenario.

What the literal fuck are you talking about?

>The Phantom Menace game had Twi'leks flirt and offer to fuck with Liam Neeson to get him to meet Jabba
Which game was it?

It seems like Blizzard retcons pushed the "Orcs as good guys" since WC3.

In Warlords of Draenor, the orcs go back in time and refuse the demon blood and could stay on Draenor, but instead they have to revenge all the orcs that would die on Azeroth and go to kill the humans out of revenge.

See pic related.

You just make them dumb and brutish but focus on doing it well rather than trying to have some special snowflake 'my orks are different and UNIQUE' in the misguided belief that badly done originality is in any way exiting.

>retcons pushed the "Orcs as good guys" since WC3.
>go to kill the humans
The only good thing the iron horde did was organize and not be slaves. And not drink mountain Dew. That doesn't make them good guys.
The only real time the orcs where being pushed as good guys was Cata and Mist with Garrosh, but blizzard made it very clear they want that to be Bad guy thing.

Killing humans on revenge isn't a good thing, and I don't think it was entirely or even remotely about revenge for the orcs in an alternate timelime, I think all the revenge comes directly from Garrosh and only from Garrosh. And it is clearly done in a way that made him the bad guy.

Do you even know what warcraft is?

Wookies are good boys though.

This is how I run them in most settings, but with goblin conscripts and a diverse selection of slaves. I reason that a state that relies on pillaging and enslaving more civilized races would strive to be the best at warfare in all ways (form, tactics, technology).

My point was that in denying the Fel, they could have saved Draenor.

Yet instead, Garrosh and Gul'dan send the orcs through the Dark Portal anyway. Because Draenor is saved, they must have gone through out of anger to the humans.

I also never said it was good, but that Blizzard portrays them as such. Especially by making humans racist to Orcs, even if their racism is justified given the above.

By making them alltrough powerful but generally cursed to never have a civilization of their own.

They survive with their own superiority in intelligence, power and such but any time a large amount of them get together it all crumbles and falls apart terribly.

I really love orcs and their relationship to pain. Ritual scarification and piercings, even mutilation like cutting off your hand and putting a blade on the stump. Your scars tell your story.

I also like them as an artificial being. They were created for some malign purpose. They don't necessarily have to follow it, but it colours their existence,

It was kind of an understanding when I thinked about why Tolkien's orcs can't stqand the sun and realised that Sun didn't actually exist when orcs were created by Morgoth

Make them rare hermits that are in tune with nature and just want to be left alone. They spend all their time in mountain cabins, living in very small numbers. An Orcish tribe is more like a loose coalition of dozens of Orc households that keep very seldom contact with another.

Orcs generally have the kind of personality that leads to them sitting on their porches observing the landscape for hours straight, and they are very slow to anger. But once one of them gets pissed, they are a major, major threat. If one of them dies, other loosely associated orcs from different cabins when will emerge to take revenge for their kin. An Orc is a major threat, but they're the exact opposite of a massive horde of retards; they're warrior monks that serve as major problems as individuals, but don't generally group up.

An Orc wandering into town is a big deal, because it means someone somewhere has a serious fucking problem.

Gul'dan wasn't apart of going through the portal, Gul'dan was specifically against it in that situation. If you played that expansion you would understand why Gul'dan was very against that portal. At that Gul'dan had no revenge to get, he was just a Super Villan, in no way did blizzard portray him otherwise.

Garrosh only had minor gray areas, but blizzard didn't do any of this rectconing your talking about, least not the way your talking about it. If you played that expansion you would know that the Iron horde was a very clear and very obvious enemy. They only had a little bit of this gray area, they might not have been "Azerothian Super Villans", but they where by far definitely portrayed as bad guys and nothing else.

Human racism isn't a problem to blizzard, blizzard never portrayed it to be a problem. Only Fans do that. Blizzard makes it clear that Orcs are Bad and Humans are Good, no matter what.

What setting have orcs been portrayed as cutting off their own hands on purpose? Did they do that in LOTR?
I know in Warcraft one clan had that, but they didn't do it to themselves. They had it done to them when they where slaves.
But yea that is a cool bit.

D&D orcs self mutilate regularly. Maybe not cutting off hands, but they do gouge out an eye. They believe the experience brings them closer to god.

Because Thrall isn't a hero?

Because tha Alliance didn't put the Orcs in internment camps like Nazis?

Because Othmar doesn't hate non-humans?

The camps always bothered me? How did Thrall create an army from twelve orcs that escape Lordaeron? The orc forces should all be kids.

Namely Warcraft. The Shattered Hand clan did do it to themselves to escape the slavery of the ogres. Ever since then they now do it ritualistically.

There was also the Black Tooth Grin clan who smashed out some of their teeth, and the Bleeding Hollow Clan whose leader would remove an eye to see their own death in a prophecy.

My favourite clan though to this day is playing the Twilight Hammer clan in the Warcraft 2 expansion Tides of Darkness. Motherfucking Cho'gall was awesome.

Blizzard can only write one story, and that story is "morally gray due to corruption."

>Orcs are violent
Fel corruption
>Black Dragons are violent
Old God corruption
>Humans are racist
Corrupt politician, immediately killed
>Undead
Corrupted
>Demons
Corrupted
>Old Gods
Corrupted by Older Gods.
>Worship the Light
Light Corrupted
>Zerg
Corrupted
>Kerrigan
Corrupted and then redeemed
>Overwatch robots
Corrupted

You can't get more morally gray than "was a good guy until I was mindcontrolled."

Wait, the Overwatch robots were corrupted?

...

By robot Old Gods™

Seriously or are you just assuming it will be revealed they were? I thought they just went full on robot uprising with the big AIs like the one in Pharah's intro comic.

The AI Gods are responsible for turning all the good robots into evil robots, the Pharah comic shows this when the robot soldier gets turned. Bastion as a character, is just someone trying to come to terms with the things it did as a mind controlled slave, when in reality its personality is sweet and gentle.

Not really? Bastion learned to be more than a machine over years and years rather than it being the default for him.

>I know in Warcraft one clan had that, but they didn't do it to themselves.
In wc2 they did it themselves

Orcs has their own personality depending on their tribes and uprising. Tribes can go from isolationistic to warmongering. They generally dislike (if they don't hate) humans based on past history, but might be able to get along with other races. They can drive themselves into a "Bloodrage", increasing their strength to herculean levels with the consequence that their lifespan is significantly shortened.

Have you watched the Bastion intro? Without an overlord AI controlling him he is able to resist his programed urges to kill. He learns this immediately after waking up after being abandoned on the battlefield. Zenyata and all his Techno-Buddhist friends started a religion of inner self identity, only after the God AIs are defeated.

...

>browsing Veeky Forums
>Nekrogoblikon out of nowhere

I turned mine into not!Texan Orkz with heavy emphasis on southern hospitality.

Doesn't a wood-pecker trigger his ptsd murder-mode rather than a mind controlling overlord?

No, that was never his goal. Gul'Dan is a power thirsty character, he wants power. He launch the horde trough Azeroth to find the Tomb of Sargeras. That was always his goal, to be all mighty and all.

He was never portrayed has a good character.

If there are no female orcs, where do new orcs come from?

Not only are the AI Gods not responsible for turning all the good robots into evil robots, but they're more a product of the Omnic Crisis.

The Bastion unit was designed to be a weapon from the start, Torbjorn helped design them. Bastion the character is an anomaly.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asexual_reproduction

I knew a guy who ran a not-Shadowrun game based off his time in D&D.

He made the orcs and trolls act like stereotype Hawaiians (like Tito from Rocket Power) and the drow as Rastafarians and Cubans.

Tolkien races are tired beyond reproach. The way to fix them is to quit being a lazy uncreative writer and not fucking use them.

Yeah. He's still a weapon but, to quote Kirk 'We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes'

I'm disappointed that no one has posted this yet.

It's also technically on topic. Weeping Orc is clearly a merchant with an established place in society that could be informed by his race but isn't defined by it.

When dealing with classic fantasy/Tolkien races, go against Tolkien and don't have race and nation be the same thing in every situation. Maybe the standard empire is mostly human, maybe it isn't, but either way you can have the nation itself have a culture rather than Stereotypical Elf Nation being next to Stereotypical Dwarf Nation which get raided by the Stereotypical Orc Tribes.

>I'm disappointed that no one has posted this yet
Because everyone knows about it already. It's an epic meme alright.

Make "Orcism" a disease.

Human warriors who go mad with bloodlust become orcs. Kinda like wendigos

Not that dissimilar to their original origin.

Stage 4 has actual porn you know.
No I don't know the source but i saw it on aco

That was never a really confirmed origin, though, just one theory that made it into getting mentioned in the Silmarillion.

...

This is pretty funny, really. The left one is describing Tolkien orcs and the right one is describing Warhammer-esque orcs. Now I wonder, which one doesn't have femaler ocs and which one does? Yeah. Tolkien has female orcs while Warhammer orcs are the ones who reproduce asexually and are mushrooms.

It's not a theory per say. It's one of the origins that were at one point canon in Tolkien's mind. I think the chronological order is: orcs were men --> orcs were elves --> the origin of orcs is unknown. So orcs being elves was at one point canon, but Tokien changed it and Christopher left it in the Silmarilion for an unknown reason.

Indeed. We're not 100% sure how the orcs were actually created. I think the two theories are basically this;

Elves tortured and corrupted by Morgoth into the stunted creatures known as orcs over generations(?), or creatures made in mockery of the elves and life itself with primitive animal beast's souls at best as Morgoth is incapable of creating life.

The former sounds cool, but raises more questions than the latter. The fact that orcs lose direction and part of their will to fight when there is no dark lord to direct them with his will also suggests that they're base creations of Morgoth.

It's fair to say that if Tolkien ever settled on an origin for the Orcs, he never told anyone what it was and the notes he left behind aren't conclusive in either direction. We have for example a letter from him where he talks a bit about how Orcs are perhaps redeemable and maybe could turn back into Elves if they truly became good or something like that. But then we also have notes from him that talk about the exact same thing with later scribbles over them saying "Change this. Orcs aren't Elves!"

Several other possible explanations exist among his notes as well. An early theory seems to have been that Orcs might have been made out of stone and mud and could only function while Morgoth wanted them to, similarly to the early Dwarves. Other theories include that they were animals turned humanoid and ugly by Morgoth in mockery of elves, and their ability to seemingly speak and think either being because they had part of Morgoth's spirit within them or, in reality, being little better than that of a parrot or a tape recorder; they could only say what Morgoth (and possibly later Sauron) had taught them to say. In one of these theories Tolkien laments that the Orcs may have originally been a combination of twisted animals and corrupted Men and Elves which Morgoth bred together to create the modern Orcs. But it's hard to say which of these theories, if any, he eventually settled on.

The right is describing dnd, warcraft, and otherwise utter garbage orcs with no thematic depth. Green elf bodybuilders with tusks who have female elf bodybuilders with small tusks adds nothing to any story except hamfisted lessons about how racism is bad. Vat spawned, or otherwise asexually produced, lesser beings adds an enemy that is arguably subjected to our ethics code as they exhibit sentieny traits but are still wholly evil. It also makes sense when a hero can fight tons of orcs on their own as opposed the the right pnes because no human should be able to take on several of them because they are hulking masses of rage and muscle.

the green elf bodybuilders are only good for fueling my fetish of dominating (or being dominated by) muscular women of other cultures

The reason isn't unknown though. Christopher has said that he hadn't yet read or found all of his father's notes by the time he compiled The Silmarillion. Had he, there are several things that would have turned out differently.

>It also makes sense when a hero can fight tons of orcs on their own as opposed the the right pnes because no human should be able to take on several of them because they are hulking masses of rage and muscle.
Orcs are individuals threats in most settings; They are meant to curbstomp all but the best of the best heroes. Tolkien is actually the odd one out in that respect despite being the origin. Dare I say but the fantasy community has actually exhibited creativity and evolved the concept beyond Tolkien's framework.

Further proof that offspring shouldn't attempt to complete their father's literary work *cough* Brain Herbert *cough*

I'm glad Terry Pratchett's daughter at least had the sense to say she'd never attempt to publish her father's incomplete works.

Maybe a bit clichè but perhaps sais Orcs were isolated, perhaps in a place where it was beneficial or even essential to develop a more sedentary, agrarian lifestyle? Maybe a God made a pet project out of 'civilising' them to pass a century or 12. Maybe they have a society akin to that in the Elder Scrolls, as a type of elf with a very distinct culture. Who knows...

D&D Orcs are far more similar to Tolkien Orcs, apart from size.

>Tolkien is actually the odd one out in that respect despite being the origin. Dare I say but the fantasy community has actually exhibited creativity and evolved the concept beyond Tolkien's framework.
flanderization

Porcs > Orcs

A race of the perfect raiders is an interesting idea and can be a compelling enemy, but when given humanity and romanticized, imho they become the lamest thing in any setting. Im really just against green elves (warcraft, dnd, elder scrolls) because I like ethical grey areas and actual racial variation (Tolkien, warhammer). I dont feel like the fantasy community has improved on tolkien, rather they took the superficial concepts and turned it into a highly marketable, power fantasy for, excuse my dated generalization, nerds. While i understand there is a very real desire to play or watch objectively superior beings to what we are in real life, it offers no compelling themes, because all the races are essentially the same. I also don't like good guy vs bad guy because its always cliche and lame and will always create/seek two competing ideas that are valid in their own right.

Sorry for kinda rambling but I hope i got my point across

Other than being generally shit at things, they have no similarities. D&D gave way to green elf bodybuilders with tusks

Depends.

I'd go with crazy survivalists that have a combination of brutality and cunning, being resourceful and cool in the most lethal of situations. They live in a place that is absolutely lethal and will murder you for one false step.

Or...

Militant industrialists whose tech is very rough compared to other races, but is practical and can be used for mundane situations.

You know people say things like this yet all the settings you're against have examples of ethically grey and culturally varied races. Warcraft orcs have a whole drama of swinging between marauding lunatics and proud dindus, dnd has several examples of diverse racial offshoots and TES has of the most elaborate and believable setups for it's races' cultures.

grey

Tolkien orcs are GOAT

>D&D gave way to green elf bodybuilders with tusks
More like GW.