While keeping with the notion of giving my ideas of background based on the Warhammer world I thought I would write something about Orcs. Firstly my one completed. army is an Orc and Goblin one. Secondly I have, at one stage or another, played Orcs in all Fantasy games I've played. Finally it is Orctober so I should do a post about Orcs!
A bit of background and the problem with Orcs.
The history of Orcs in fantasy has been well documented by a lot more knowledgeable writers than me. I don't want to get into debates about their historic meanings or if Orc really means foreigner and reflected a subtext of racism in Tolkien's work, as interesting as such debates can be. Having said that I do find it a bit strange that a man who was a Roman Catholic and believed in the Latin Mass, would of had that much of a distrust of anything foreign.
For me, though, the idea of Orcs as the big, ultimate bad guys stemmed from their use as basically foot soldiers in Lord of the Rings. My interest in green skins generally, came from the Goblins in The Hobbit. Malign Goblins living on the out skirts of society, riding wolves and attacking strangers fired my imagination when I read The Hobbit. In particular the description of Wolf Riders gave a sense of evil at the side of society.
Warhammer originally showed goblins as similar to this with their harder bigger cousins the Orcs being a separate entity (they even had a paint called Orc Brown. In my D&D games and AD&D games I tried reflecting the Goblins in this Tolkienesque vision with Orcs, if used at all, bein g the hired muscle for evil. Even as I started appreciating the subtlety of using a group of Orcs to provide a good kicking, they tended to be the hired henchmen of evil, not a force in themselves.
By the end of WFB 2nd edition Orcs and Goblins were part of one big hooligan family called the Green skins. This was reinforced with WFRP and the decision in Warhammer armies to stop you taking an all Orc or all Goblin army with a compulsory choice of 20 Orc archers and 20 orc boyz coupled with a compulsory 20 goblin stickas and goblin spearmen. The reasoning behind this basically turned the Goblins into a subservient race. It was no longer the Goblins who brought down the dwarfs but Green Skins in general.
This helped make the Green skins more of a faction in themselves and the notion of dangerous wilderness was taken over by chaos in the form of beastmen, the chaos wastelands and an enemy within (and under if you count the skaven). They made an excellent replacement and the only time I used Goblinoids in WFRP when I was Games Master was with the encounter with Elf Wardancers originally printed in White Dwarf (an encounter that is all the more interesting if someone is playing a miserable and angry Giant Slayer who has little time for Elves at his best but also has little hope of fighting the troupe and surviving, But I digress).
This left the Goblinoids, now dominated by a hierarchy starting with the Orcs, at a bit of a loose end narrative wise. On the one hand you had a competent army that was portrayed as a kind of fantasy group of football hooligans, ready to take on all comers, living only for the fight wandering and marauding. This was fine for the tabletop battles and provided me with a lot of amusement. I happily let chaos take the sinister threat role and started collecting Orcs, or proxying them with card due to not being able to afford a full army, as did nearly everyone my age back then.
On the other hand Orcs were meant to be organised in some way.. They had tribes and they lived in the unexplored darklands. While they could be used as mercenaries because of their love of a fight, it is also suggestive that they had some kind of family life with reproduction being between male and female orcs. It was also possible between Orc and human with half Orcs being mentioned in WFRP and WFB 3rd edition, suggesting rape is one of the things the marauding bands of Orcs get up to. Jack Yeovil, in the over-rated Drachenfels, mentions Drachenfels Orcs abusing young boys stating
"A raiding party of Orcs from the fortress had made sportof his two little sons, and killed them afterwards." Drachenfels 1989 p.13
In the short story Red Thirst Jack Yeovil again uses this metaphor, writing "Always he allowed the goblins to pick out a woman or two , or perhaps a comely youth, and watched them at their sport." Red Thirst 1990 p.15
This is distasteful. But it is also a fine picture fo Orcs and Goblins. The problem is they are not really Orcs or Goblins with these descriptions. The two aspects above could very easily describe any human group of warriors and the things the Orcs do have been done throughout history. From Viking Raiders and Genghis Khan through to modern wars in Africa. From Operation Barbarossa through to modern neo-Nazi thugs, there is nothing particularly Orcish about Orcs other then their look. Their stats are similar to humans, their organisation is similar to some human armies and their background is no different from thuggish humans. You begin to wonder, why have Orcs at all when you could have humans and followers of chaos fulfilling their role while fitting the Warhammer world just as well. They are not ultra thugs when compared to some historical raiders and the fact that writers feel the need to get them to take part in child rape to make them scary, something plenty of humans have done during war, means to me, that these writers are struggling to make Orcs and Goblins different from humans and to develop a fantasy race that has a purpose ands is realistic.
The rape stuff and half Orcs comes across as desperate and is covered in a more scary way with the Fimir. By drawing Celtic myth, a race was created that is different, repugnant and playing on genuine fears, while, through the use of Daemons and the tribes matriarch, is not doing something that could just as easily be done with a human tribe. The same with Beastmen. While making a good table top force, Orcs became something that was redundant in the Warhammer background.
I will try and look at solutions to this in my next post tomorrow.
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