Orcs are the baddies and fantasy games need baddies

You know where you are with orcs. Slaveringly ugly, utterly evil and just the thing to test to edge of your human paladin's blade or the power of your elf sorcerer's fireball. If you're stuck for some monsters to pad out your dungeon slap in a few orcs, sprinkle on a goblin or two and have them ordered around by an ogre.

The original 1977 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual has this to say about orcs:

"Being bullies, the stronger will always intimidate and dominate the weaker. Orcs dwell in places where sunlight is dim or non-existant, for they hate the light..."

It goes on...

"Orcs are cruel and hate living thing in general, but they particularly hate elves and will always attack them in preference to other creatures. They take slaves for work, food and entertainment (torture, etc.), but not elves whom they kill immediately."

Pretty clear, orcs are the baddies.

It seems, however, that these simple days are over as the plague of woke-ness spills into the world of fantasy role-playing games:

The publisher of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) says it will adjust the way it portrays some of its “evil” races, such as the “savage” orcs and the “depraved” dark elves, as part of a broader push against racism in the wake of George Floyd‘s death.

For a long while our world of fantasy gaming (and the wider world of fantasy literature) was largely immune to the 'everything is racist' tendency in the wider world. Occasional flares erupted when some English literature professor chasing a headline would say something like "Tolkien “created the blueprint for the troubling relationship between race and fantasy that would govern twentieth-century fantasies.” Now it seems we have to take the bizarre idea that orcs aren't essentially evil and lump it into our games, not because having a lawful good orc paladin is a cool idea, but because some people who don't play the game have decided that the orc is some sort of racist sterotype.

All this - outside infuences pushed onto the game - reminds me of the campaigns by Christian groups to get D&D banned because it normalised witchcaft and satanism. The assumption from the woke puritans (in taking up the battle from their Chrsitian puritan predecessors) is that the presence of 'races' with different characteristics somehow twists the minds of the people, especially young people obviously, playing the game. After three hours slashing, bashing and fireballing we come out worse people because we played a game with different 'races' - I toured a dungeon a week or so back with a man-sized turtle and what amounted to a tin man not sure what to make of that.

Later this week I'll be taking a half-orc paladin on a continuing quest to kill some drow (dark elves that live in a hierarchical society that happens to be a matriarchy) - quite how this sets me on the 'drow and orcs are a negative racial stereotype' continuum I'm not sure. What's clear to me from playing the game is that most players walk round the stereotypes because that makes the role play more engaging. For sure the orc tribe in the mountains are baddies but you might do better negotiating with them to stop the slave raids or the pillage rather than taking the old-fashioned route of extermination.

People outside the game seem not to appreciate its flexibility and the scope to play all the foibles of human psychology. If folk want a woke version - "orcx" as one wag on Twitter put it - there is nothing to stop you doing so right now. If what you want to do is make the game completely different because you (a political activist who doesn't play the game or a literature professor looking for career brownie points) dislike its central concept of 'races', then don't be upset if those of us who play the game - and have done so for over 40 years without turning into fascists - tell you politely to take a running jump.

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