I'm playing in a casual Dungeons & Dragons game with some old friends of mine. In our most recent session, the player characters were traveling by boat toward a frontier town the bulk of whose population had either died or fled the place thirty years prior as the result of a magical plague. The PCs had been warned beforehand that one of the consequences of this large-scale abandonment was that many of the town's domesticated animals had gone feral and now posed a threat to travelers in the area. The characters were also told to be especially concerned about feral pigs, some of whom, it was said, had taken to walking on their hind legs and carrying weapons.
It's funny. This was just a small detail – a wild rumor given to the characters as they stopped by a village they passed on their way toward the aforementioned town. Yet, that rumor was terrifically evocative and compelling to me. It punched far above its weight as a throwaway explanation of the origin and nature of that stalwart D&D enemy, the orc. Admittedly, I've always been a fan of pig-faced orcs, but this little bit of background information grabbed me, so much so that, here I am, writing a post about it.
I think the reason this in-game rumor so seized my imagination is that it felt like something out of real world folklore, a horrific just-so story to explain the inexplicable. That's something D&D has rarely done at all, let alone done well. The game's approach to monsters, as exemplified by the Monster Manual, is too orderly, too rational, almost to the point of being scientific. That's the downside to Gygaxian Naturalism; it denudes the monsters of their montrosity by unambiguously laying out the truth of the matter in black and white. Come to think of it, the same is true of D&D's presentation of magic too, whether in the form of spells or magic items.
To some extent, this is inevitable. Dungeons & Dragons is a game and games have rules. Those rules need to be expressed as clearly as possible and doing so often militates against the sort of ignorance and mystery that's needed for good folklore. Fortunately, the rules of D&D have never been exemplars of clarity, which leaves space for the individual referee to put his own spin on things from time to time, as my friend did last night with his version of orcs. D&D – and fantasy RPGs generally – need more of this kind of thing.
True. Too often, D&D rules-speak turns the fantastic into the mundane, losing all sense of wonder.
ReplyDeleteWere they led by two pigs named Snowball and Napoleon?
ReplyDeleteWhat I was thinking, too, when I read this entry.
DeleteYes, this little passing details benefits greatly from resonance with "Animal Farm".
DeleteThis is an interesting take on orcs, and I think the weird origin story has a similar feel to Rudyard Kipling's Just So stories, such as How the Elephant got his trunk and How the Leopard got his spots. None but the youngest children would these days take them literally but these stories are a lot more evocative than scientifically accurate explantions about evolution. Personally I would add some sort of supernatural influence, like the swine feeding on unhallowed ground or some sorcerer giving them sentience but to each their own.
ReplyDeleteReminds me of the morokanth, too, which of couture derived from Jonathan Swift.
DeleteSpeaking of morokanth and Glorantha in general, the broo would also be a likely source of bipedal weapon-using swine. They can breed with literally anything, and the offspring bear traits of the parents. The goat-headed ones really shouldn't be as common as they are relative to other domesticated animals - pigs being an obvious source.
DeleteAn idea which has occurred to me, though I'm not sure how practical it would be in reality, is to have a game where myths and folklore suddenly come true in the modern age and make the players go out and actually research folklore on their own time to try to figure out what's going on, just like their characters would have to do.
ReplyDeleteThe Hellboy rpg seems made for that!
DeleteThe Vaesen RPG is also pretty much doing that as its core concept, although it's set in an alt-19th Century rather than a straight fantasy universe. Adapting D&D or similar games to a "supernatural investigation" mode wouldn't be overly difficult.
DeleteI agree. I've never cared for the depiction of orcs and goblins, etc., as just another savage tribe of funny-looking "humans". Besides being boringly mundane, it tends to skate too close to insensitive/offensive depictions of real-life tribal people, and I just don't feel the need to deal with that in my games.
ReplyDeleteWhen I ran my B/X megadungeon, I leaned into the "mythic underworld" notion of the dungeon, and decided that orcs were what happened to humans who stayed too long in the dungeon and gave into their primal bloodlust. An orc was something you could become, not a species. Orcs were like the fantastical extreme end point of "roid rage", and they would psych themselves up for battle by snorting "rage dust", which turned out to be made of the dessicated and powdered remains of orcs themselves. If a human snorted rage dust it would give them a bonus to attack and morale rolls for a couple of hours, but was addictive (with a corresponding and longer lasting withdrawal penalty) and would eventually transform you into an orc. None of my players were willing to experiment with the rage dust, sadly. ;-)
For my 5e Spelljammer campaign, I'm going something similar with orcs; they are basically like the Reavers from Firefly: people who went mad from sailing the void for too long and regressed into a savage, bestial rage.
I also leaned into the fey folkloric origins for goblins as well. Instead of being tribal "little green men", I borrowed from stuff like "The Goblin Market" and "Jim Henson's Labyrinth". The way to make new goblins was to feed goblin food to children or adults. (Adults turned into hobgoblins.)
Now that my days with official D&D look to be numbered (again), I'll probably be returning to these notions more and more in future campaigns.
I'm a 100% in agreement with your post. I love the folklore element and it's one of the reasons that I bought Beyond the Wall and other Adventures where you're encouraged to make up the sort of adventures you experienced.
ReplyDeleteI do understand why D&D is the way it is - it grew out of wargames which relied on a degree of standardisation and meant that once described a monster or opponent was the same in every game.
Oh man James, where were you when they were making various editions of D&D? If once, ONCE, D&D had put forth its magic and monsters in a less scientific, technical way I might actually have some small degree of love for it.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that this game of Wizards and Dragon never felt even a little magical was one of my underlying turn-offs to D&D. The technical elements never felt fully scientific either; it's not as if it gives the impression of being Science Fiction or even Science Fantasy game.
I like what was done here and wish it was done not only more often but intrinsically in the game itself.
I've always assumed, in my games (and told the players), that a lot of monsters are just...magic. Cocktrice hatch from chicken eggs. A dragon egg hatches a chimera. Some cave lions are manticores.
ReplyDeleteThey can ALSO have an ecology, and mates, and reproduce, but they don't HAVE to. Sometimes it's really just because someone did something Bad.
I wonder how a touch of the folkloric works in Call of Cthulhu. It has rather a zoological approach to the monsters, but Lovecraft's stories and how the game approaches sanity creates a more folkloric bent.
ReplyDeleteI would be worried that introducing Orcs to players in this way as pigs with armor may lead some parties to attempt to cook and eat the orcs, or at least attempt to sell them to a butcher shop.
ReplyDeleteLooks like porc is back on the menu!
DeleteHa!
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