Is it time to go back to coding orcs as fascists?

Blogs
22

Unfortunately I’m in the TL;DR camp of the posts above. But I’ll get to them.

My kneejerk reaction is, right now, I want want a game with a fascist faction to kick the shit out of. Quite simply because I can’t do that IRL.

Need they be orcs? No. I’m perfectly happy with self-righteous goombas or faceless stormtroopers.

On the orcs thing, both iterations are interesting. OG orcs are just goombas – something to challenge players. Modern ones are “outsiders” – they can be played offensively or can be used to raise good questions.

Both create interesting questions and lend themselves to questionable roles. I guess that’s what we’re really debating here.

I’ll be back, just wanted to get that out.

1 Like
23

I find Orcs kind of make for a poor stand-in for fascists. Typically orcs are presented as chaotic, tribal, and kind of unorganized without a strong sense of a state. Like a Mongol horde. While you can have historic enemies and groups you hate, I don’t know if you can really have fascism without an organized state and the idea of an organized state as fascism tends to be all about the idea of sacrificing individual liberty for the state and organizing the state so that it can crush all those who seek to disorder or subvert it, especially the perceived ‘deplorables’ who seek to corrupt it from the inside.

To me orcs and orcish society would be too individualistic to be fascist. A much better analogue would probably be some Imperial force that’s seeking to crush rebellions and control subjugated populations.

3 Likes
24

hobgoblin for example, would be closer.

25

Or like the Huns?

I also thin the OP takes care off that argument, as the whole “chaotic horde” can be seen as part of the increased “minority-coding”, back from the Tolkienistic armies or Wizards-like mutants.

1 Like
26

I mean, the easy solution to this problem is just… to create a fascist faction that isn’t coded by race/species such that every individual member of the group is biologically determined to be evil? There’s nothing stopping you from doing that. Stick some Nazis in your game, who made the decision to believe in Nazism in a way that isn’t determined by genetics?

2 Likes
27

Bingo.

Yes, your game can have fascist factions. The fascists can even be orcs! But as soon as we say “All orcs/dwarves/elves/humans/mole men are fascist.” That’s where we get into lazy and even offensive storytelling.

I don’t want to assume its ok to kill another thinking being because “I can tell they’re fascist by the tusks.” I can tell you’re fascist because you support the warmonger Blod Irontongue, and you think all other folk should be enslaved to further the plans of orc-kind.

2 Likes
28

Of course, creating genetically predetermined fascists aligns with the worldview that helps fascism rise.

TBH though, there are agencies that employ actual, masked, body armor wearing, officers to pull people off the streets without arrest warrants, right to council, notice to families, or due process and ship them off to foreign concentration camps where they will die without ever contacting the outside world again.

The challenge is to use those goons in a game such that it causes enough discomfort to be productive.

They don’t need to be orcs or goombas, or different in any specific way. I just want a faction that acts like modern day fascists.

Now I’ve got a twisted version of N1 brewing in the back of my mind. :thinking:

1 Like
29

Orcs originally come from the ancient Roman tradition of a pre Hades god called Orco, king of the underworld and devourer of people (this is what the Italian Wiki says about it). It is often a figure used in later medieval tales as a brute person that eats children, and still today in the Italian language the word is used to describe a brutal person that treats children and women in a bad evil manner. So yes, Orcs should be a fantasy evil being, whether it’s a pig faced person or an Uruk-Hai, they are not humans but they represent everything that is evil in humans, it’s an allegory or a metaphor, like Tolkien used them. They have nothing to do with race, and if people think that, I would question why. But then again, you can pretty much do anything with your game, but I do prefer that people who make games consider the origins of this creature.

30

I’m not sure whether we should give etymology prescriptive powers here. By the same argument, there should be no difference between ogres and orcs and the demon prince Orcus, as they’re all based on the same word. Wights should be just people (or just little ones, depending on how far you wanna go back), kobolds should be helpful household spirits, not dog- or lizard-like underground dwellers? Words have origins that are often far removed from contemporary usage…

The problem with “fantasy evil” has been talked about a lot. Yes, we have lots of personifications of the evil that lurks within the hearts of men, but there’s a certain problem if you then turn those caricatures back into people. I don’t know about your campaigns, but when I’m doing torch-county OSR gameplay, I wouldn’t describe that as deeply allegorical.

(And then we still only have talked about the old “should humanoid opponents be inherently evil”, not fascism, which isn’t just a synonym.)

3 Likes
31

Yes you are also right, if we would consider the etymology of these names we would get into a huge rabbit hole! Also, I personally wouldn’t dwell too much on the “fantasy evil” talk because I have no knowledge about it compared to others who have been in the Fantasy rpg world longer than I do (Horror is my main subject).
My two cents: I think there is one main problem here; us not realizing what Evil actually means in Fantasy terms. Everybody plays it as they want at their table, but Fantasy is Fantasy, it shouldn’t be realistic and it should use extremes to tell a story and allegories. I don’t like this modern idea of “but even bad people have redemption” in games. It’s like cosmic horror in Call of Cthulhu. It shouldn’t make sense and it shouldn’t have a reason because humans would not understand. I see Evil in Fantasy games as I see the horrors in CoC. This is my very brief take on the matter :smile:

32

PS: sorry I forgot to answer one thing :smile:

Yes, we have lots of personifications of the evil that lurks within the hearts of men, but there’s a certain problem if you then turn those caricatures back into people.

If you use Orcs you don’t have the problem of turning those caricatures back into people. This is exactly what happens in LotR. I don’t know, I think that if you see them as Unnatural Evil Horrors (like in Call of Cthulhu) you would think about orcs differently, and this comes from a guy who would love to play a Goblin in D&D hahah

33

once again, this is one of those topics where people talk past one another due to different framings. is fantasy SOCIAL REALISM? is it ALLEGORY? is it both? different people put the “orc problem” thru those different framings, face each other on the internet and come up with very different answers.

in person, in actual play, this is much less of a problem-- especially among friends in person, because these misunderstandings are less common due to stronger communication.

1 Like
34

Zooming out, RPGs are a medium. Fantasy is a genera than can contain social realism, allegory, social commentary, or anything else an artist wishes to explore at the table. Orcs are a common device that is used in those explorations.

I think published works and public games are held to more scrutiny because they have a wider audience. How Orcs get used reflect both the time and the author in that time. They also reflect the reader and how they perceive the world presented. This makes Orcs an interesting cultural barometer.

What’s an Orc? It’ll depend on what period you examine and how you feel about that world as an extension of your own.

I’m partial to the modern Orc and barbarians. My parents are white US Americans and I lived in Costa Rica long enough to think of myself as Costa Rican. That mix means I’m not really “Latino” and don’t feel like a white American (in spite of what I look like). I don’t really fit in either culture and feel like an outsider regardless of where I am. So the Orc barbarian as the misunderstood outsider is a great role to play.

But that’s just me and how I filter Orcs and barbarians.

1 Like
35

That is what I would call a social realism take on orcs.

1 Like
36

No, I don’t, because that’s already been done for me. I’d be fighting a lot of accrued assumptions by going hard into e.g. a children’s fairy tale view of things, because the sourcing is more LotR and its imitators than e.g. the Neverending Story. Mörk Börg does that, although I wonder how much of that gets applied in actual gaming (never played it that much, “Nihilistic Funhouse” isn’t my preferred flavor).

Weirdly enough, I could argue that games like 5E could make this actually easier than OSR-style games, as things are more over-the-top and symbolic there.

I’d say that quite often it’s because of a lack of communication. The setting designer or maybe even the GM might have some high-falutin’ assumptions about what orcs are meant to represent, but then the players want to talk to one of them, and suddenly it’s all “weird tusky dudes”…

I’d also say that in the case of Orcs and similar subjects we already transcened things like “social realism” (if you mean the art trend and this isn’t as devalued as “postmodernism” in contemporary internet discourse). There’s little interest in using Orcs and the like to shine a light on certain conditions, we’re deep into normalisation in mainstream RPG-dom. I mean, take a look at “combat wheelchairs”. Nobody cares anymore about using dungeons to showcase the problems disabled people have (“how many flights of giant-built stairs?”), it’s all about inclusion. The fact that I could damage a wheelchair is in line with plate armor being more subject to heat metal, not a GURPSian disadvantage flaw.

I still think we’re quite far from the fascism points we started out with. I mentioned it before, but how would the people here who are “pro” treat this: Are we talking about mere superficial elements? Orcs with skulls on their caps, erm, helmets (“Are we the baddies, Grischnackh?”), their evil overlord wizard-leaders in leather trench-robes? So mostly a visual reminder that, yes, only bad dudes dress as fascists?

Or are we crossing the threads and going all out “orc-dom is both mindlessly eeevil/monstrous/antagonistic/whatever and has all the tropes of Ur-Fascism”?

1 Like
37

I think there is too much reading into it that is ruining the fun of “pure antagonistic non-humans”. Let’s not call them Evil, because it implies another meaning than fascist as you said, we went into tangents with the Evil thing :smile: .
I think this argument that the original blogger started fits only games like DnD, classic fantasy, not the Mörk Borg kind of games. I don’t have much to add other than we are reading into this too much and making it too philosophical and complex when it isn’t, it shouldn’t be. Yes, Orcs with skulls on their helmets are baddies, they should be if you like them to be, period.
If you don’t, then don’t do it. Make a game where they are smarter and nicer than humans, but then they become something else that goes far from the Fantasy origin of the brute beasts born from whatever “baddie” energy/magic made them. This is my two cents, then again, I am a Horror fan and I see these things from a different perspective.

38

For me, the idea of coding orc, or any other “non - humans” as fascist is a hard no. I have several reasons for that.

First the worldbuilding one, I just consider it a bit too unimaginative. It’s soo easy to attribute and transfer faults and negative characteristics of human society from real life, into a fantasy society. Like rather than creating a unique societies or flavors, traits, takes and twists, you just kinda sloppily put a sticker we all know and hate. I mean it can work, and I do believe in copying and recreating things from our world in fantasy worlds. Just in more nuanced, novel, interesting ways.

I’m also not a fan of the law = civilization = good vs chaos = wilderness = evil dichtomy. And this kinda plays into that.

In my games I use the concept of orc in the way that Romans or Greeks used the term “barbarian” as in those not belonging to their concept of society. I have groups of “Orcs” who intentionally use this label and create a monstrous image of themselves - in the way they present themselves to the outside world - as a thing of pride.

The second reason I disagree with this take is the political dimension. I know it might not be relevant for most people.
As someone who spends a lot of time doing active antifascist work and dabbles in the theory of fascism, what I see all too often is framing fascism as an “error” / “mistake” / “blunder” or otherwise something that is external to, or does not belong into “western” political thought. I believe, and there are many relevant scholars, which would argue the opposite - and that it stems from the same fundamental “Enlightenment” processes that created conservatism, liberalism or socialism. Hence fascism is a natural process, not mistake of, western political thought. The implications of this are numerous, i won’t go into details, but it is one of the reasons mainstream antifascism fails.

By externalizing something belonging to, in fantasy terms, Human society - and lets face it, most settings equate Human society in one way or another also to western societies - to a “non-human” society, we are following and reinforcing the same, fallacious way of looking at fascism as a phenomenon. Fascist are ordinary day to day humans, not some monsterous “others”.

I do use fascism in my games, in specific contexts, but only as a thing of some Human societies. If you want to have a look at how fascism can be translated into a more (low)fantasy context I recommend the book Hard to be a God by Arkadij and Boris Strugackij, really great take that can be applied to settings based in settings modeled medieval/renaissance/early modern western societies.

then again as I always say play the game the way you enjoy. and hell cutting down some fascho orcs does sound like it can be fun.

2 Likes
39

Agreed. We have a much better understanding of the world as nuanced and fluid. Rigid worlds aren’t relatable to progressive players precisely because the worldview is different. It’s part of the reason why many respond to OG use of races as racist. They impose rigidity that players don’t perceive or experience. On the contrary, the rigidity itself can be offensive.

Cool. Added to my summer reading list.