Are orcs human?

Better than Garl Glittergold.

>evolve
>high fantasy

Pick one.

Why can’t evolution exist in high fantasy? That’s like saying the water cycle can’t exist in high fantasy.

Who?

Meant for that second one to quote

I don’t get it

Evolution can exist in High Fantasy, and its not difficult to explain along with various pantheons.

more so then niggers

But there can only be one true religion in a story at any given time. If elves have their own creation narrative that contradicts the goblin creation narrative, which one is correct?

Given that half-elves, and half orcs can breed true elves, orcs, humans, and maybe dwarfs are technically the same species.

At least 5e's PHB implies as much so this only applies to a few D&D setting's.

No, they are humanoids. Similar, but not the same.

Human is a spectrum and a social construct.

No, but they ARE people (in most settings, anyway). This is an important distinction. Humanity is a genetic state of being, the state of belonging to the species known as Homo sapiens. Personhood is something decidedly less physical, based on traits that include sapience (and therefore a brain capable of it) but also include certain spiritual and communal aspirations or inclinations which are not so easily codified, but can be understood to be present or absent by those observing it in action.

A cat, for instance, can be your friend, but it is not A Person, nor does it see you as A Person. Apparently it sees you as an oddly-shaped, gigantic, incompetent cat, but that is not quite relevant here. An orc is, on the other hand, A Person in most settings. You may not LIKE this Person, the way you like your cat, but he or she is very clearly A Person.

I bet you thought that was terribly clever.

Back in AD&D, dwarves could breed just fine with humans, gnomes and halflings, but the offspring were considered to be statistically indistinguishable from dwarves. They could also breed with elves just fine, but the hybrids were never stated because this was the age of monolithic racial cultures and thus "hybrids like that would never be common enough to be worth statting". Same justification they recycled for the Giamarga, the half-elf half-vistani, in Ravenloft.

Depends

On

The

Motherfucking

Setting

What a more worthless post than OP.

>Why can’t evolution exist in high fantasy? That’s like saying the water cycle can’t exist in high fantasy.
High fantasy can exist without the water cycle if there's a nymph who sits on a mountain and pours out a Decanter of Endless Water that runs to a portal to the plane of fire on the other side of the continent

No. They're orcs.
What kind of retarded questions is that?

Still better than dwarfs, which apparently still haven't evolved.

that's like saying christian and buddhist creation narrative contradicts each other, which one is correct? neither you retard, they are both fiction

Following Kingdom's of Kalamar or whatever D&D 3.5 splat I read, Orcs were literally Gruumsh's plan of making better races that the current ones dominating the planet using attributes taken from various species. They started out in the forests, murdering the shit out of everything, and basically had Skinwalker status at some point until they actually showed up Warcraft style, and began fucking everyone up for the first time.

Elves and goblins are also fiction you braindead imbecile

In my setting Orcs used to be human barbarian tribes that migrated to the large steppes of not!Mongolia. There a mysterious spiritual event happened that engulfed all the steppes and turned them into big, hulking, green dudes.

Hell, essentially a majority of races in my setting comes from humans due to the fact that humans were created as a incomplete species by the gods due to a incident that did make the latter incapable of finishing them. This imperfection resulted in humans to change/mutate if they were affected by magical events of extreme proportions. Also this justifies why humans can so easily have hybrid kids with most races since the latter's descendants used to be humans.

I usually like to have elves as precursor race that is extinct now (mostly because I don't like elves in my setting outside of dark elves or drows maybe) and hybrids make more sense too. I like idea of nomad orc though.

D&D patron god of Gnomes

There's no particular need for any creation myth to be completely true. Mortal races aren't omniscient, and in many settings neither are the gods they worship. Creation myths can be just different interpretations of the few incomplete and partially misunderstood facts people actually know about creation. Aside from that, having various pantheons doesn't necessarily mean there have to be various different creation myths. Pantheons can be more like clans of related gods or gatherings of like-minded deities, separated by ancestry and philosophy more than anything else. There doesn't hve to be any great disagreements about the nature and origin of the world.

What is a human in a fantasy setting?

Player.

The player has a choice between many PC races, so that can't be it. Also think more in context of setting rather than game

Are Blacks human?

It's an insult to orcs to be compared with them.

Genetics point to yes.

My case is that humans were the last race made by the gods, whereas Elves were done at the same time as Dwarfs, and the first one to be made were Draconians (who are extinct BTW).

The first three races managed to create their own sub-races and completely different progenitor races that differ widely from them (Draconians only made the Lizardmen and mostly as a backup plan so that their culture and achievements wouldn't get wiped out).

Also my Orcs are semi-nomadic. Most of the time they are nomads, but there is a couple of large fortress-cities where clans/tribes can meet with each other for various reasons.

Monster Hunter

orcs are people, but they're not humans

In my own original donut steel setting, humans are what happens when dwarves and elves domesticate orcs. Like what pigs are to boars. Orcs are most often nomadic pastoralists, while most humans have become settled agriculturalists in imitation of elves and dwarves. Human barbarian tribes are a result of half finished or unsuccessful domestication, or humans for whatever reason returning to a life style closer to that of their orc ancestors, barbarian tribes often include half orcs, whether due to interbreeding with orc tribes or eventually regaining orc traits.

They're goblinoids. Now, are goblinoids human?
Depends on the setting.

Orcs rule.

>orcs are people

>humanoid (orc)

I’ve never said this before because I think it contributes nothing, but... depends on the setting.

Orcs are lesser spirits in Elder Scrolls for instance (every thing is to be honest though). They’re elves in LotR. They’re mutant humans in Shadowrun. They’re probably a type of hominid in D&D

>Are elves human?

Them's fighting words in Arcanum.

They haven't been goblinoids for a while now

yes

Kek

No one is gonna get that.
....
You green, tea loving, subhuman

Let's settle this once and for all:
Orcs > Elves > Dragons > Dwarfs > Mer-people > Humans > everything else

humans > lizardmen > dwarfs> orcs > everything else

In my campaign world they are pretty close to humans, although all offspring between the races is infertile. Dwarves and Orcs are far closer. Both having almost more neanderthal traits. Greater cranial capacity, intense xenophobia which even extends to new technologies (more of a effectiveness analysis culturally rather than effectiveness/cost. Leading to them using bronze for far longer, until Chinese style refinement of steel was invented) and so on. Generally they tend to be intensely logical and strong, but pretty bad in terms of common sense and getting along with people.
Elves are brainlets and still aboreal, an abundance of food in their natural habitat and clement weather all year means they have little reason to innovate. Since anyone can survive, the primary determinant of who gets to breed is sexual characteristic with them. So the women tend to be thicc

No.

>So then what species of ape did they evolve from?
They didn't. They are a divine creation made by a god. Just like all the other races.
>Are elves human?
No.

Your first mistake was trying to shoehorn your meager knowledge of how the world works into the fantastical and magical realm that these races exist in. They are not humans, but can breed with them because they are compatible on some level. It is not genetics, otherwise dragons would be human, but they aren't. So it must be some other means of mixing.

There are many ways in which you can make a race or species mix with another seemingly incompatible one. The first is simply divine decree, that the gods will it so, so it happens. Obviously this isnt going to sate your idiocy. So let's go with something more interesting. Rupert Sheldrake is a "scientist", a crank, a loon, who has come up with his own "theory" about how life evolved and how it changes down through heredity. His pseudoscientific "theory" is called morphogenic field theory. Basically all creatures emit a special field (basically a soul without being a soul) around them that tells their cells what shape and configuration their body should be. Why can a human and and an orc breed? Because their fields are compatible, resulting in a mixed field that results in half orcs. This also explains half dragons, half celestials, and all the other weird hybrids, along with polymorph magics that can change your shape and even species.

Evolution is a basic, tired, high school knowledge level idea for how races mix or evolve. Go weird, go interesting, go with pseudoscience and folklore and mythic narratives.

orcs = dwarves > lizardmen > elves > humans

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