The state of Post-OSR content

[The1True]

Orcs v Brigands.
Orcs fun.
Brigands boring.
Orcs are colourful, have a different stat profile than humans (more str/con, less int but I guess this is now problematic?) and finally immerse me in a fantasy universe whereas brigands are more gritty, grey historical realism.

 

[Pseudoephedrine]

Truthfully, I never understood why orcs have to be less intelligent than humans, except to appeal to a certain kind of Dunning-Kruger'd nerd who overloads the concept of "intelligence" with all sorts of other moral qualities and tends to hold the statistically-unlikely view that they are one of the epistemic elite themselves by dint of the birth lottery.

 

[squeen]

Who wants to fight with a orc Michelangelo or Newton? It gets messy. Beastly amoral brutes is a legitimate game niche. There are other monsters to fill the brainy upper-echelons of evil.

If you want them to have high culture---makes them people...or something else like drow.

 

[TerribleSorcery]

Since we've opened the floor however briefly for discussion of things verboten I'd like to shift the conversation towards the politicization of RPG's. Specifically D&D. Can D&D even exist without a certain dated, colonialist viewpoint? I mean, that's the D&D that I like to play and I like to think of myself as a pretty liberal minded, moderate lefty pinko.

(Pseudoephedrine's comments seem pretty good, what follows isn't directed at him but more of a 'fork' response to The1True's initial question.)

The problem with taking this line of thinking seriously is that as soon as you accept the premise of the argument you find yourself trapped. If we throw out the intrinsically-bad humanoids (let's use orcs) and try to make them 'realistic,' we open ourselves up to accusations of demonizing this or that human culture, which we've drawn on for inspiration for our more realistic orcs. If you don't look to history, maybe your orcs are similar to some real human group by accident. Or maybe your totally made-up orcs are too alien and weird and not believable.

Maybe you can tap-dance through this minefield, but - for what? Does your game get better for it? Once you internalize this searching for fault you find yourself hopping from foot to foot, casting about for some 'permitted' approach, something, anything!

The solution is simple. Flat-out refusal, at least in private. In the immortal words of Bill Burroughs, "I am not paid to listen to this drivel." Run your game exactly how you want, guided by your imagination and the principles of good play which you have (hopefully) absorbed over the years. Nothing else is worthy of consideration.

 

[The1True]

Okay, but if I write up a Monster stat block, I create an attribute profile for that creature, thereby drawing a starting portrait of that species.
If I say Black people are more muscular and better at sports or Asians are all math geniuses, that's a stereotype and though I may think it's complimentary, it's just as harmful as a more negative characterization and I 100% agree we need to do away with this sort of bullshit.
buuuuut
An Orc is a creature in the monster manual. For sure there are smart ones and fast ones and wise ones just like humanity, but as a broad cross section of their species, because this is a game, I'm allowed to say as a generalization that Orcs are bigger, stronger and more hardy than humans but not as smart. This leads to a thuggish outlook on the world which for the most part leads to tribes of brutish, primitive reavers. Of course you can sample from what you know; human brigands, barbarians and primitive tribes; but they're more than just that and if I have to start treating them as just people then yes, they might as well just be brigands.

 

[Melan]

Since we've opened the floor however briefly for discussion of things verboten I'd like to shift the conversation towards the politicization of RPG's. Specifically D&D. Can D&D even exist without a certain dated, colonialist viewpoint? I mean, that's the D&D that I like to play and I like to think of myself as a pretty liberal minded, moderate lefty pinko.

That framework, inasmuch as it is part of AD&D (and not a guilt complex projected on an otherwise innocent game), was entirely missing from the early 1990s hobby in Hungary. The dominant "idea" about the lay of the world was not the frontier, but either wilderness left behind by fallen realms (Tolkien's Eridaor and Rhovannion come to mind), or the less settled hinterlands of larger kingdoms. This was an AD&D scene that developed in an autochtonous way, largely cut off from international contact for reasons related to both communication and the costs thereof, so most of the ideas emerged on the basis of the core game texts and the very little fantasy lit that existed (really minuscule titles).

In this scene, orcs were seen not as some kind of natives, but either brigands or invading, barbarous armies (which are closer to the local historical experience). The idea that they may be specific stand-ins for real-world racial groups did not occur to the gamers I knew... even though by a fluke of chance, the gamers I knew in my area were mostly far-right types roughly equivalent to your modern /pol/ poster. If they did not think of the connection - and they might have been happy to make it - perhaps it is not as strong as it is often assumed. What's wrong with them just being pot-bellied brigands lurking out there in the woods?

But yes, I usually use human brigands by default.

 

[squeen]

I do agree with you both. Make them whatever it takes to make it work for your game (and no two monsters are truly alike).

 

[PrinceofNothing]

Very true. It reminds me of learning about the atom in high school. If the electron gets too close to the nucleus it'll get sucked in. If it gets too far away then the nucleus will lose its group. In the middle area things are perfect.

Moderation is a perfect philosophy when the chips are up and the course is steady and probably terrible when your ship is sinking. I think human beings are overall very good at coming up with immediate solutions to local problems and probably terrible at coming up with solutions to long-term problems. Thinking in terms of trade-offs and seeing every system as finite is probably healthier, but that doesn't bring in the voters.

Very true. It reminds me of learning about the atom in high school. If the electron gets too close to the nucleus it'll get sucked in. If it gets too far away then the nucleus will lose its group. In the middle area things are perfect.

Fuck, I gotta think back to Quantum Physics 101 (weird flex but ok) but somewhere I seem to remember that its not a question of physical distance but more one of energy states? Its a wave function that gives you a probability of finding the electron at any given point and the energy of the Electron Orbit does not correspond to a physical distance, this is the mistake Adam Roberts made in his book Stone when he made up his FTL drive. I don't think you can RAM an electron into a collection of protons and neutrons and have it fall in? It might annihilate with a proton pair, not sure.

That's amusing. I was originally going to dismiss you as an MRA/altright blowhard, but as I looked more closely I realized there was more to you than that.

It's figuring out that there is a hierarchical set of values to a person and that ideology is not actually the number one priority that does a lot of good. Knowing the limits of a moral and epistemological framework, and when you meet someone who does not agree, assume that they have other information that led them to this point is decent practice. One should also make it good practice to not immediately accuse them of various pseudo-scientifically derived moral failings the second they disagree with you, but this is a Dutch eccentricity.

Truthfully, I never understood why orcs have to be less intelligent than humans, except to appeal to a certain kind of Dunning-Kruger'd nerd who overloads the concept of "intelligence" with all sorts of other moral qualities and tends to hold the statistically-unlikely view that they are one of the epistemic elite themselves by dint of the birth lottery.

How do you account for Orcs still living in caves and being in terms of strategy and technology, under-developed and incapable of organization if they aren't dumber or less developed? Orcs are low in the hierarchy of DnD, if they are physically stronger it makes sense to have them be dumber in order to explain this discrepancy. One could go for a sort of Neanderthal Orcs that are actually smarter then people but much less capable of organization one supposes. Regardless, the two species are clearly competitors, what accounts for the one being above the other?

 

[Pseudoephedrine]

Who wants to fight with a orc Michelangelo or Newton? It gets messy. Beastly amoral brutes is a legitimate game niche. There are other monsters to fill the brainy upper-echelons of evil.

If you want them to have high culture---makes them people...or something else like drow.

In Verra, the post-vaccine campaign I'm setting up for, which is broadly equivalent in technology and cultural development to the early 17th century, northern "Urovians" from the equivalent of the Swedish Empire, Denmark, and the United Provinces are in fact mainly orcs and half-orcs. So fighting an orcish Huygens or Leeuwanhoek is totally possible, tho' also not strictly necessary since the PCs will mainly not encounter these exemplars of reason but rather the piratical semi-barbarian orcs manning the VOC-equivalent's fleets.

You don't need to foreclose on orcish high culture so much as assume that its lower-class soldiers and warriors are not exemplary of it, much as the average US marine's main reading in life is slowly parsing the titles of pornographic videos his cousin emailed him.

 

[squeen]

@Melan : That's a very interesting cultural difference. Also, I welcome you (and others) to start taking pot-shots at the good ol' US of A. That's as much good healthy fun (for me) as dwaves and elves cutting each other off verbally at the knees.

 

[Pseudoephedrine]

How do you account for Orcs still living in caves and being in terms of strategy and technology, under-developed and incapable of organization if they aren't dumber or less developed? Orcs are low in the hierarchy of DnD, if they are physically stronger it makes sense to have them be dumber in order to explain this discrepancy. One could go for a sort of Neanderthal Orcs that are actually smarter then people but much less capable of organization one supposes. Regardless, the two species are clearly competitors, what accounts for the one being above the other?

Oh, just make them resource poor and lacking centralised political authorities who can engage in long-term political-economic projects. I use exactly this in reverse when I run the Dawnlands, where the PCs come from mainly-human plains nomads who live in a resource-poor environment that allows for little more than extended familial groups engaged in transhumance pastoralism, while the dog men across the northern mountains are much more technologically and political sophisticated partially because they are ruled by an immortal god king who thinks on a much longer time-scale than any mortal person and has established a centralised theocratic-bureaucracy to execute on his will.

 

[TerribleSorcery]

I would also like to add briefly that I have always thought the debate between "pure evil humanoids" and "another cultural group humanoids" suffers from a shocking failure of the imagination. Nobody can think of a reason why, in their game world, orcs (or other humanoids) are just purely evil shits who need to get killed? Nobody? Bueller?

I'm not saying you have to do it that way. Do it whichever way you want. But if you did, it should be trivially easy to justify that stance with two or three sentences of background.

Two examples that spring readily to mind are the Murder-Men from Patrick and Scrap's monster book Fire on the Velvet Horizon. And this: https://graphiteprime.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-osorc.html

I don't actually have a horse in this race right now, my extremely hip game world doesn't have orcs in it. Just a thought.

 

[TerribleSorcery]

Oh, just make them resource poor and lacking centralised political authorities who can engage in long-term political-economic projects. I use exactly this in reverse when I run the Dawnlands, where the PCs come from mainly-human plains nomads who live in a resource-poor environment that allows for little more than extended familial groups engaged in transhumance pastoralism, while the dog men across the northern mountains are much more technologically and political sophisticated partially because they are ruled by an immortal god king who thinks on a much longer time-scale than any mortal person and has established a centralised theocratic-bureaucracy to execute on his will.

Fuck that sounds pretty cool, and you are right. Let's not forget human beings just like us have had all kinds of political systems and societies ranging from very complex & prosperous to dirt-farmer garbage. And they didn't have an INT penalty.

 

[The1True]

The O.S.ORC

Say goodbye to green-skinned Khal Drogo. T he following fragments, penned by the Sage, Avidian, were unearthed in the wastelands east of the...

graphiteprime.blogspot.com

Holy shit this gave me actual chills. That is fucking incredible.

 

[Pseudoephedrine]

This may be the most controversial thing I've said yet in this discussion, but the Forgotten Realms actually uses this, in the specific context of orcs, in a really interesting way with the story of King Obould founding the Kingdom of Many Arrows. Obould basically realises that the orcs are trapped in a cycle of being on resource-poor land but having a high enough birthrate that they exceed their own land's carrying capacity. This turns into disorganised raids to grab more resources which inevitably fail (except at killing off the surplus population), and constant civil war (with the same effect), which then abate until the population once more booms.

Obould then has a great idea - let's come out of the mountains and grab some unclaimed land and create a sedentary society that can support our high birth-rate. So he conquers the neighbouring tribes, welds them into an organised polity using religio-political means, and invades the area north of Silverymoon. He ends up successfully founding the kingdom, takes over a dwarven stronghold in the process, and controls a substantial patch of arable land that he begins Doing a Feudalism with his major leaders.

The kingdom isn't super institutionally strong, so you have a lot of orcish veterans who aren't satisfied with their share of the spoils of the war, orcish expansionists factions who want to restart the wars to grab more land, conservative orcish elites who don't want to lose what they've got, and true believers in Obould's vision of a powerful, united orcish kingdom full of plenty for all. Also a heterodox reading of Gruumsh and co. as supporting the new kingdom, combined with religious conservatives who believe that an internally peaceful kingdom would be a betrayal of Gruumsh's vision of orcish life.

Overall it's one of the more interesting visions of orcs that I've seen in published D&D products, that neither leaves them as meaningless brigands, expies for real world cultures, or biogenetic bad boys. That it happened in the FR, the absolute squarest D&D setting ever created, gives me hope for everyone else to be able to better it with just a dash of imagination and freedom.

 

[The Heretic]

That it happened in the FR, the absolute squarest D&D setting ever created, gives me hope for everyone else to be able to better it with just a dash of imagination and freedom.

<clutches pearls> <shrieks> Yes, this is the most controversial thing you've said. I am aghast.

Actually, though, from what I can glean the original setting, as envisioned and run by Ed Greenwood, was actually pretty cool. The corporate version that TSR/WOTC has released (and released and released and released...maybe they need pepto bismal?) is generic AF.

 

[The Heretic]

Moderation is a perfect philosophy when the chips are up and the course is steady and probably terrible when your ship is sinking. I think human beings are overall very good at coming up with immediate solutions to local problems and probably terrible at coming up with solutions to long-term problems. Thinking in terms of trade-offs and seeing every system as finite is probably healthier, but that doesn't bring in the voters.

This is true, alas. Human nature and all that. It's much easier to remain unified when you have a common foe. Just look at NATO.

Fuck, I gotta think back to Quantum Physics 101 (weird flex but ok) but somewhere I seem to remember that its not a question of physical distance but more one of energy states? Its a wave function that gives you a probability of finding the electron at any given point and the energy of the Electron Orbit does not correspond to a physical distance, this is the mistake Adam Roberts made in his book Stone when he made up his FTL drive. I don't think you can RAM an electron into a collection of protons and neutrons and have it fall in? It might annihilate with a proton pair, not sure.

That's why I had the qualifier. I remember learning something like this, as a way to help high school students visualize orbitals and reactions etc. I'm also probably remembering it incorrectly too.

It's figuring out that there is a hierarchical set of values to a person and that ideology is not actually the number one priority that does a lot of good. Knowing the limits of a moral and epistemological framework, and when you meet someone who does not agree, assume that they have other information that led them to this point is decent practice. One should also make it good practice to not immediately accuse them of various pseudo-scientifically derived moral failings the second they disagree with you, but this is a Dutch eccentricity.

Yes, exactly, and this is why I tend to be Pollyannaish about people. People are different. They have different life stories. They have different personalities. Good old Myers-Brigg, sure, not scientific at all, but a good way to understand people. They way things differently.

I'll also say that the first time I looked at your blog is was in the middle of the last administration, and going back to your bit about moderation, that had been thrown out the door.

Also have you made your hajj to the island of Patmos yet? I heard that was required of you.

 

[The Heretic]

The solution is simple. Flat-out refusal, at least in private. In the immortal words of Bill Burroughs, "I am not paid to listen to this drivel." Run your game exactly how you want, guided by your imagination and the principles of good play which you have (hopefully) absorbed over the years. Nothing else is worthy of consideration.

This, one hundred times this. This is the core of my classical liberalism. If you don't like, that's fine. Do your own thing. WOTC is it's own company. Yes, it is woke and that can be annoying. But no one is requiring you to buy their stuff. If you don't like their politics, do something else like LOTFP.

 

[PrinceofNothing]

Yes, exactly, and this is why I tend to be Pollyannaish about people. People are different. They have different life stories. They have different personalities. Good old Myers-Brigg, sure, not scientific at all, but a good way to understand people. They way things differently.

I'll also say that the first time I looked at your blog is was in the middle of the last administration, and going back to your bit about moderation, that had been thrown out the door.

Fair. My outlook has shifted from 2014-2021, immensely even. I have learned nuance, subtlety, wit (for I do get funnier with practice!) but probably more important then anything else around that time the central orientation of my life, the combined vector of my directed energies was turned outward. Through effort upon effort, getting kicked in the teeth every day, I managed to grind out something from existential desolation and mediocrity. To be something from nothing, a waste of immense potential. A career, a girlfriend, people in your life that you admire, to look upon your accomplishments with pride, and to strive for yet greater things.

My first review was written to troll RPGPundit on his own forum. It was a pretty severe blow to his credibility, and people still bring up the fact that he ripped of Tekumel for Arrows of Indra, which I had figured out. Funny, yes, particularly the response, but also fundamentally destructive, nihilistic, envious.

Base.

Now I analyze the works of the all time greats, Gygax, Jaquays or guys like Melan, people send me their stuff, thank me, ask me for advice etc. etc. I write modules with Aaron. I still believe that PC culture is fundamentally damaging to this hobby (and more besides), and there is not a single person that I have taken a shot at that I subsequently thought deserved better, with the possible exception of James Raggi. But I also realized that nothing ever gets done by just complaining and doing edgy reviews all day. I love this hobby, I love (most) of the people in it, and I love writing. That's the difference, probably.

One more thing; If you vote for me as Prince of the OSR, I will make your wildest dreams come true.

 

[bryce0lynch]

The latest Nod has human tribe barbarians encroaching on the civilized lands of the halflings. It's one of the more interesting parts of it.