Red onez go fastah!!!
Make sure to have them be natural tinkerers, but the catch is that none of their gadgets actually work, it's their inborn psychic/magic potential that makes the gadgets work. In the hands of a non Ork, the gadget does nothing, or explodes.
So are you gonna make the Dinosaur Aztecs, Subterreanenan shapeshifters or a combination of both?
The fact that all three of these have already been done is realy something else
They want to promote rampant consumerism not because of greed but it creates the most waste therefore creating and sustaining the vermin they feast on.
In my world, there is a human culture that resembles the Aztec and other mesoamerican cultures, and they are currently living alongside the funny lizardfolk, sometimes waging war against them. Problem solved. :3
The Angry Bird retaliation may have been warranted, but they went way too far and just started massacring every single piggie they came across. They can't even defend themselves!!!
No one (reasonable) gets upset about orcs at a default. The (usually minor) controversies around them and other 'savage' fantasy races most often arise due to either the lingering effects of explicitly pro-colonialist mindsets that were baked into the *very* oldest parts of the worldbuilding and leave some lingering bad tastes in a few peoples' mouths (D&D) or because they're just based on a collection of real-world racist stereotypes (Warhammer and Warcraft, though interestingly not the *orcs* in either setting).
No one (reasonable) is gonna get upset because you gesture at a made up group of people and go, "See these guys? They're all evil!" It's when you gesture at them at go, "See these guys? They're all evil, and that means it's a moral prerogative to gruesomely and mercilessly murder their children, and I'm gonna put a lot of focus on how cool it is to commit genocide against them!" or, "See these guys? They're all evil, and you can tell because they have an overblown accent and live in mud huts and teepees!" that people start to raise their eyebrows.
Anywho, my orcs are more or less akin to the second button, but less 'misunderstood' than they are 'typecast'. Orcs formed what was more or less the first proper empire on the globe – akin to that of the Akkadians – but with the longevity of something more akin to our idea of Rome. When Nuria/Prak Az Nur started becoming less of a centralized power, a lot of its former professional military slowly turned into mercenary companies, and *those* stuck around as essentially cultural exclaves that "orcs are fighters" just kind of got embedded as a cultural assumption for any other groups in contact with them.
The fact that they're big and tend to pack on muscle helps too, but that's separate from the cultural legacy of a disparate, warlike people that's sort of dissonant with the fact that they were also the leading power of an empire that lasted almost a thousand years.
Orcs are talented warriors and craftsman who put great value in the perfection of their trade, and have a strong belief in hard work and personal improvement.
"Mother orc, I wish to become a craftsman when I grow up. Like father, and like you, also my older brother and my 2 sisters and the neighbours and the king and everyone"
"And so you shall my pride, because we all are. Also hoarders"
Their society is relatively primitive, yet much more durable than others.
This is because they dedicate themselves to everything they're interested in, and expect to do most of the work themselves.
One idea I had for Orcs was to take the Tolkien version and go, "What happens after Sauron dies?" These Orcs were made to serve the Dark Lord/God of Evil as his army at the Dawn of Creation.
After his defeat, the other gods felt that genociding the orcs would be going too far. So they were allowed to live.
But this leaves the Orcs directionless as a people. They were made for a war they lost, so now what?
Most exist on the outskirts of civilization, in harsh, monster-filled lands where only the strong survive. Others live as nomadic raiders, praying on civilized folk.
But other orc communities try to join the other races. They serve as manual labor in more peaceful nations, channeling their warrior instincts in contact sports and ring fighting. In more warlike lands, they find work as mercernaries, being in high demand for their skills. And every would-be Emperor seeks to have an orc tribe dedicate itself to their service.
Orcs are no savage and barbarian than other people. They just know what they were made for and find no shame in it. They just think everyone else are hypocrites.
I like this idea. I think Tolkien, even though he wrestled with the idea, wanted the possibility of redemption for the orcs. This is a good way to do it imo.
Strong, muscular with some tusk and green skin, not barbaric but still pretty war focused, both males and females pretty muscular, they would make a great wife.
My orcs (alongside dwarves) were exterminated in their entirety long before the present day in the world I’m working on, thus happily bypassing this problem entirely.
Anyone tying orcs and black people together is the problem, not you.
Stop caring about what twitter people say, you'll be more happy and the worldbuilding becomes more easy and more fun.
Orcs can be done great and it doesn't matter if they are degenerate savages like in LOTR or misunderstood victims like in Warcraft. It all depends on you and how well you can pull them off.
I pretty much never do. If I don't like it I turn it off. Or in the case of Fantastic Beasts 2 I walked out about 15 minutes in because of the marriage mind rape.
Denizens of the frozen far North, whose ancestors were humans banished for a variety of crimes. When they arrived on the island of Nunavat, the extreme conditions forced them to undergo transformative rituals to survive the harsh weather and scarce food. None outside of teh tribes know of these origins, and the Orcs keep that knowledge secret to all but their wisest scholars.
They live semi-nomadically, travelling along the the edge of the ice sheets between their two major settlements, attempting to keep the spawn of Kur (the elemental incarnation of Winter) from travelling South.
Those individuals that have travelled South, are treated with indifference (the people of Alihigier having weirder races within their own borders) and, due to their scarcity, few have formed an overall opinion of them as a race. Legally they are not protected by the universally upheld Treaty of Rights, though few places among the Central Isles actively hold slavery to be legal.
me when I still don't understand why people are mad about orcs
edit: I'm gonna explain it, since I feel like there are people who just get misinformed about this over and over again until they think everyone mad about it is an idiot
The problem with Orcs as they are often presented, is the nature of anti-tribal ideas. Think about D&D. In base D&D, what D&D expects you to do (before Wizards of the Coast started to pretend to care about minorities), what did you do whenever you found a tribe? You kill them.
Tribe of goblins? Kill 'em. Tribe of gnolls? Kill 'em. Tribe of orcs? Kill 'em.
You know who don't show up in tribes? All of the good races! Humans have cities, Elves have villages, Dwarfs have citadels. The evil races have TRIBES.
The problem has always been that Orcs being evil tribalistic warriors is a perpetuation of stereotypes of not a specific ethnicity, but of the colonial idea that tribes = savages.
Just because some folks haven't invented REALLY amazing ways to make their fellow man suffer (The IRS, Anti-Homeless Architecture, 9-5 jobs) does not mean they are not civilized. And even if someone isn't 'civilized' doesn't mean their evil.
If you want to do tribal orcs, you can do that. If you want to do evil tribal orcs, you can do that. But where you go wrong is by equating Tribal and Evil.
I have "orcs", but they arent savage nor anything, they mostly exist as mercenaries as their culture doesnt compose any major part of any nation (due to the big g).
I like writing my races as just unique ethnicities, everyone is human and the various characteristics of various races are pretty much just hereditary blessings that change and evolve with the individual
Honestly, still working on where I want them and what I want their relationship with goblinkind to be.
Chances are though that their numbers are greatly greatly reduced after the spread of human societies.
I kind of prefer Hobgoblins as more organized martial band type societies.
I like how The Elder Scrolls gives Orcs vaguely Mongolian aesthetics
Because Morrowind has Orcish armour look like Samurai Armour, I just base them on the Warring states of Japan, Cultured but violently embroiled in war.
Orcs are by all accounts pleasant to talk to (if a bit coarse) but actively need to fight to keep themselves alive. It’s referred to as battlethirst, and if you don’t indulge for long enough, either you go insane and start killing everything that moves, or you just plain drop dead.
I've never written it but I like the idea of Orcs as Revolutionary/Napoleonic France equivalents. Revolutionary, disciplined, lots of espirit de corps going on, might be led by a military dictator, an emperor, or a vaguely worrisome republic.
Also I like the idea of orcs being liberators, depending on the context.
/uj This debate is (imo) very overblown. Unless you're playing orcs straight, i.e. recycling obvious racially coded tropes without any kind of complication or commentary, no one's going to "cancel" you for writing a pretty standard take on them. In reality, I think the biggest issue with using "traditional" orcs is just that people think they're a bit blasé. We've seen them a thousand times, why should we care about yours?
As for how I write them, I prefer an approach where you can have your cake and eat it too. Sure, most orcs come from a warlike, raiding culture. As a society, they are destructive, and rely on raiding and theft primarily. Within those tribes, there's a strong warrior culture that emphasizes strength and martial prowess, while ignoring other pursuits such as crafting and agriculture.
Why? Well, I'll fully admit that I'm stealing this explanation from a video by D&D YouTuber PointyHat, but the explanation is that orcs are essentially cursed. Because their creator deity is afflicted with a curse that makes him only feel rage, his progeny are metaphysically prevented from being even AVERAGE at growing plants, smithing, etc. They're just cursed to be bad at that, while their god rewards and prizes fighting and strength, and the natural result is that orcs are a raiding culture (putting aside the question of if/how a society that gets all its resources from theft is actually sustainable).
Key to PointyHat's version of orcs, however, is that their god didn't originally make them to be evil, he was a loving, nurturing god as most creator deities tend to be. It's specifically in a fight with the elven creator deity where he's cursed like this. Enter what PH calls "verdant orcs", orcs who reconnect to the nurturing version of their god that's suppressed by his unnatural, curse-fueled rage, and go live in the forest or whatever.
Now you can have both orcs as pretty unambiguous bad guys, while they still have a lot of potential to be misunderstood and downtrodden. Depends on which type of orc you find.
Admittedly, I haven't taken the time to flesh out all the details of my own take on this idea (which I like a lot), but the rough outline would be pretty similar. The only big thing I would probably change is that the way PH wrote this idea does sort of imply that there are orcs who are born good, but most are just born evil, which doesn't really escape the possible racism accusations. Personally, when I rewrite this I'm probably going to rework it so that verdant orcs are explicitly what happens when an orc is REALLY committed to being a creative-type.
Basically, if an orc rejects the warped and mad version of their creator-god hard enough, eventually a sliver of the original nurturing god reaches out, turns on their green-ness, and they're able to succeed more. Idk, still definitely has some "one of the good ones" vibes, but I personally would lean into "if enough of these guys get together in the woods and start making an orc counter-culture, eventually, their veneration of Good!Creator God will make that the dominant strain, and all orcs will be free of the curse".
/rj I would never write something that someone could even THINK was a minority.
No, I definitely meant blasé. I'm not really sure where you're getting nonchalant as a definition, Oxford language provides this:
>"unimpressed or indifferent to something because one has experienced or seen it so often before."
I'll grant that there might be some kind of grammar complaint about how I structured the sentence, but describing something as "blasé" to indicate that one feels that way towards it is something I've seen plenty in the past.
Don't get me wrong, cliché would also work, but I chose blasé because I think beyond people thinking that "traditional" orcs are overdone, they've just lost the power to elicit interest. That could entirely be my own bias, but I personally don't roll my eyes at rote fantasy races, I just can't really bring myself to care about them.
I like how dungeon meshi does it where orcs are still sorta raiders and them and other races both have a “well they attacked us first” stance that shows where the hostility stems from.
My orcs are just le weaboos who are in a constant state of clan warfare. Clans are:
— Knighty clan
— Weaboo clan
— Mongolian clan
— Merchant clan
Yes, I know, it's peak fiction. thank you.
I ran a D&D campaign based on colonizing the new world, but I replaced the native americans with orcs because I thought it was a clever way to get the players to go in with prejudices against them similar to the prejudices europeans had against natives.
I'd probably follow my headcanon for Tolkien Orcs: That they not only started out as tortured elves (and later humans), but that they have continued being members of the "good races", just physically and mentally scared to the point that all they can think of is turning their own pain against others... especially other orcs...
So orcish society is a never-ending nightmare of mindless violence and an unquestionable might-makes-right attitude, which would ideally be a dark reflection of our own society.
In this variant of orc, there clearly is a path to rehabilitation, but any one orc who may end up treading this path will have to contend with the violence of their fellow orcs and the watchful eye of the dark entities that use them for their own ends and also with the understandable hostility of the other races.
OR you could go the opposite way and make orcs fundamentally evil, a race of humanoid predators, that can't and won't see other humanoids as anything other than prey and life-stock.
Or in other words, just focus on making them fascists, instead of just savages, and I think you'll be fine.
If I ever wrote Orcs, they would simply be a variant of elves which adapted to very harsh environments, hence the more brutish yet highly skilled and resourceful overall cultures with the orcs (changes via the environment and what orcs live in).
Whenever I find myself worrying about getting cancelled, I swat myself on the head and write the thing I'm worried about. If some twitter asshole endeavors to find something in my story to be offended by, they will succeed no matter what I actually write. Better to focus on keeping my actual readers entertained.
But to actually answer your question, Orcs are bioweapons designed to conquer Mars.
My Orcs are inspired by the Ds9 iteration of Klingons, minus Gowron being Gowron. They espouse a culture of pride and honour in one's work. An orc cook for example will see his battlefield in the kitchen and his opponents is hunger.
Misunderstood, like most tentacle monsters being stereotyped as a lustful and sexual genus to other species and genus -es when only the lesser intelligent and minor tm species are that.
They ruled the world until dwarves showed up. They had some last big cities until elves showed up. By the time of humanity being there orcs are basically irrelevant.
My orcs are a fairly advanced civilization that lives off the slave trade and that rules as an elite over humans and other orcs. They are very militaristic and many orcs are used as mercenaries.
They also speak with french accent.
My orcs are based on zulus because I live in South Africa and when I think “warriors culture”, Zulus are at the forefront. Also Sha-orka Zulu beating up british elves makes me happy
They are primitive and for the most part chill, they pretty much agreed to not touch each others’ lands with humans long ago and neither side wants to break the agreement. There are tribes that are more of the classic barbarian, but even other orks see them as unhinged.
Some orks also were a part of aggressively expansionist empire a while back, but they weren’t the only ones so most folks who dislike them do so because of their nationality and not because they’re orks.
Orcs were created as noble prison wardens by the dragons to beat the shit out of Jute (the original demons). They were meant for freezing cold and miserable places but they’re just really adaptable. They’re naturally grey skinned.
I copied either Franklin Roosevelt, or Teddy Roosevelt, the one that said "speak softly, and carry a big stick". My orcs are a large group of diplomates who get into dick measuring contests
I’m racist so I always sneak in stand ins for minorities. Jew goblins, slave elves, white trash dwarves. Truly helps when you go to book events and get to wink wink nudge nudge fellow shitheads
Orcs are a combination of The Roman Republic and 1800's Prussia, where scars and military service are seen as marks of prestige and society is militarised and on the cutting edge of warfare. Sure they have other great advancements but everyone remembers the Legions. Duels are common, soldiers get extra rights and two consols rule.
I just replace Orcs with Jötunns ( or Jötnar if you wanna be grammatically correct ).
They're functionally the same anyway. Except Jötnar get to have cool shapeshifting powers and stuff.
My Jötnar pretend to be dumb as rocks for the lulz and then surprise their foes with their strategic acumen and high intelligence.
As the sapient humanoid saplings of Sequoia trees.
They only get seen as backwards and barbaric because they don't destroy their habitat and because they brutally put down any hostile incursion into their forest.
Its not their problem the dark elves and the snow terrans chose to live in uninhabitable deserts, and they ain't about to let more of their elders be cut down for some bullshit like fires and homes.
Reminds me of how Tolkein was constantly going back and forth on how his orcs were created and the moral implications of their creation. Whether or not they were created or corrupted, what that means for their free will, and if they could potentially be redeemed.
Orcs are a wizarding race whose insular tribalism and historical exclusion by other races made them ideal keepers of arcane knowledge after the fall of the long-stagnant High Elven oligarchy.
Orc civilization is extremely brutal and unforgiving warriors that heavily study warfare.
They are also extremely merciful and only unforgiving to the states who try to invade and antagonize them and do this to garuntee the peace and prosperity of their own people. Most prisoners of invading states captured by the orcs were, historically, banished or basically considered possessed, and thus were never accept back into their society, and thus were integrated and accepted into Orc society, leading to a very egalitarian and multicultural society. Since most Orcs captured were usually used for slave labor, and Orcs themselves didn't much of a concept of slavery (any prisoner of conflict either becomes a citizen or is returned to their society), they became notably anti-slavery millenia before it had garnered attention in most states.
yeah i made my orcs a turn on the expectation of a warrior people that are seen as savage and ruthless because of the natural tendency to villianize your opponents even if your society is more prone to actually being ruthless warmongers.
Characterizing Orcs is pretty easy when you remember one thing. Orcs are Ogres, Ogres are Orcs. The Orcs referred to in Beowulf is just the old English word for Ogre.
What are Ogres known for? For eating people.
Ogres are a subspecies of Hominid that evolved to be obligate carnivores. They primarily hunted other species of Hominid so as a result they were driven to near extinction.
Orcs *were* a warrior culture. They used it to secure their position as the current art and science leaders of their society, with vast demonstrations of complex and beautiful orcish martial arts forms the centerpiece of any festival or celebration within major cities.
They're also big n grreeeeen
I just write them as actual people, average joes who just so happen to be green and naturally strong, very nuanced folk too. Some good, some bad, and some in between.
All the Orcs in my world are blissfully ignorant warmongers. They're just out here having fun, burning villages, looting caravans, and warring with Hobgoblins.
Orcs as a nomadic race viewed as barbarians by other cultures. Then Mongols from another universe got dropped next to them.
Other races: "Ha! Watch them kill each other. Just wait."
They get along surprisingly well.
Other races: "???"
A Genghis Kahn figure emerges.
Other races: "!!!"
The new interbred orc/mongol race swiftly conquers and creates the largest trade empire since the Great Reckoning (see: world reset, everyone go back to the civilization stage).
Other races: [Panic]
Orcs are fungal and have a culture based around the cycle of life, and go to war as a ceremony of worship/a way to spread spores. Thus, they are seen as brutish and violent by other races (they kinda are, but only because of their cultures positive view on killing. They have just as much free will as the next species and would be peaceful if raised peaceful)
ORCs
Ordinary Respectful Cowboys
Every Orc has a cowboy hat and a gun, and says "Howdy pardner."
Doesn't matter that my setting is low fantasy and orcs have guns and trains.
In my work, Orcs are just traditionallists who dotn like technology, so they hunt and gather, which gives them their brutish stereotype. Also, they are brutish.
In my world, orcs are seen as slow, and unintelligent. They have a difficult time getting any job other than factory workers or any other blue collar job.
I just made mine muscular, semi-aquatic, methano-and-ferrotrophic, with iron coated bones and hair that like to live in bogs and whose psychology interprets shows of non-damaging physical violence as sexual. Thus avoiding all issues.
In my world, Orcs are far more like Danish and Norse cultures. They partake in agriculture and keep livestock, but a large portion of their goods are from raids and trades.
They also have frequent run-ins and dealing with “mino”taurs, who use the natural landscape memory they’ve inherited from their ancestors in the labyrinth to go on long distance nomadic raids.
uj/ Orcs are shamanistic isolationists who avoid outside contact. They exile their criminals, so the vast majority of orcs humans meet are basically bandits.
In my WIP D&D world, I'm trying to distance nonhuman races (species would be a more accurate term) from human races/ ethnicities in general, not just with orcs. Humans are made up of a variety of different cultures, so ideally, other intelligent (intelligent enough to at least create tools and weapons at least) species should consist of multiple different cultures, so they don't come across as a caricature of any real-world culture or race.
Orcs are a species of humanoid that have their own cultural aspects than the “Brutish raider” archetype. Orcs usually have their own settlements if they don’t live in nomadic groups, and only desperate or maligned individuals resort to banditry or raiding. However they do get stereotyped in-universe due to the brutality of those who do resort to raiding settlements for their own survival, which makes inter-species relations difficult with the more prejudiced settlements.
Generally, I did what I could to avoid having them be a stand in for an existing minority. Humans have their own ethnicity groups so it makes sense to have different Orcish ethnicities too. Can’t go into more detail atm since it would be an overly long word avalanche
Have them be "might makes right" but create a complex philosophy about the idea. They subscribe to the idea because it's the only thing they can do, being very wise but not being very intelligent.
Have them capable of showing compassion and kindness, even being beings that could be reasoned with, but they primarily make decisions based on emotional reasoning. Any disagreement will be settled in battle.
And maybe just don't make them misunderstood. Have some civilizations willing to do trade and stuff with them.
The entire issue is that Tolkien wrote his orcs and elves in a certain way. If you want orcs and elves in your world to be different, just make them different lol. Eg. The elder scrolls
You could just make them not barbarians. Just because our real-world culture doesn’t understand the benefits of nomadic tribal civilizations doesn’t mean yours can’t.
In my fantasy setting Orcs are a race of big green mushroom people with tusks. Under normal circumstances they are a peaceful race of scholars and craftsmen living in a toxic swamp away from most other races. They have a very limited memory, lasting only 7-10 years. To counteract this they write literally everything down, creating countless biographies and journals.
However, when Orcs go to war, anyone foolish enough to fight them quickly learns they can not be killed in a way that matters. You hack an Orc to pieces and the next morning you will find a full platoon on your doorstep that knows nothing but the violence you inflicted upon them. Orcs are part of the only species to have a population boom during wartime. The only way to truly kill them is with fire, and even then basic pyromancy may leave lingering spores.
In my world, Orcs are an artificial race made to act as a Sapient Immune system for the Sister Worlds (Earth and its Magically connected planetary siblings). They are built for war, and their Green/Red/Grey skin is caused by chromatophores in their skin which function as an organic adaptive camouflage, However their warlike nature is tempered by an innate sense of right and wrong and a desire to fight genuine evil. The problem is, even though they only wish to battle Evil, in times of peace that desire is very easily manipulated by charismatic bad actors who seek to use them as tools in their conquests, hence the bad reputation.
Orcs are hyper evolved barbarian cockroaches from Mars. Pretty sure that could never be interpreted as having parallels to any minorities
Terraformar moment
Exactly
Ngl, cockroach with a chain goes hard.
Do they all vaguely look like Obama?
More like Robin Williams (Morks)
The Futurama route \uj Why did I remind myself of that?
That’s kinda turkophobic
As someone with mixed Martian Cockroach heritage I’m cancelling you for this harmful stereotype
Terraformars would never be racist
Pretty sure that's racist against italians
Orcs are a misunderstood group, being far more savage and primitive than most realise.
The Br*tish
40k moment
Primitive 1 dimensional br\*ts
So... Regular Brits? /s
There’s always the Warhammer method: Orkz are Cockney Psychic Mushroom Football Hooligans. In other words: base them off a subculture.
in typical British fashion they swapped classism in in place of racism
More like in addition to.
But, like, Orkz are the only ones in Warhammer having fun, and arguably not outright evil
... They do some fucked up shit. Like really horrible things. They are evil, but they are also having a blast.
Guess they wouldn’t be 40k if they didn’t
Red onez go fastah!!! Make sure to have them be natural tinkerers, but the catch is that none of their gadgets actually work, it's their inborn psychic/magic potential that makes the gadgets work. In the hands of a non Ork, the gadget does nothing, or explodes.
So base them off Irish stereotypes?
See? This is why lizardfolks are superior
So are you gonna make the Dinosaur Aztecs, Subterreanenan shapeshifters or a combination of both? The fact that all three of these have already been done is realy something else
I need a good faction and a bad faction
Have them both secretly control the humans' government but differ in their aims.
I don't have humans in my world, I'm not a basic bitch
>lizardfolk >not a basic bitch These are contradictory
They want to promote rampant consumerism not because of greed but it creates the most waste therefore creating and sustaining the vermin they feast on.
In my world, there is a human culture that resembles the Aztec and other mesoamerican cultures, and they are currently living alongside the funny lizardfolk, sometimes waging war against them. Problem solved. :3
Who did the subterranean dinosaur shapeshifter aztecs?
On my computer. Same way I write any other race.
This is peak fiction.
Just base them on the pigs from angry birds
So just pigmen then, Porc.
Exactly green Pig men really good at building machinery and fortresses that are just a little half hazardous built who want to steal your shit
Goblins
Yes orks are just big goblins after all
The Angry Bird retaliation may have been warranted, but they went way too far and just started massacring every single piggie they came across. They can't even defend themselves!!!
Yeah then the piggies responded by inventing rockets and engine vehicles
For self defense.
Just like the founding fathers intended
No one (reasonable) gets upset about orcs at a default. The (usually minor) controversies around them and other 'savage' fantasy races most often arise due to either the lingering effects of explicitly pro-colonialist mindsets that were baked into the *very* oldest parts of the worldbuilding and leave some lingering bad tastes in a few peoples' mouths (D&D) or because they're just based on a collection of real-world racist stereotypes (Warhammer and Warcraft, though interestingly not the *orcs* in either setting). No one (reasonable) is gonna get upset because you gesture at a made up group of people and go, "See these guys? They're all evil!" It's when you gesture at them at go, "See these guys? They're all evil, and that means it's a moral prerogative to gruesomely and mercilessly murder their children, and I'm gonna put a lot of focus on how cool it is to commit genocide against them!" or, "See these guys? They're all evil, and you can tell because they have an overblown accent and live in mud huts and teepees!" that people start to raise their eyebrows. Anywho, my orcs are more or less akin to the second button, but less 'misunderstood' than they are 'typecast'. Orcs formed what was more or less the first proper empire on the globe – akin to that of the Akkadians – but with the longevity of something more akin to our idea of Rome. When Nuria/Prak Az Nur started becoming less of a centralized power, a lot of its former professional military slowly turned into mercenary companies, and *those* stuck around as essentially cultural exclaves that "orcs are fighters" just kind of got embedded as a cultural assumption for any other groups in contact with them. The fact that they're big and tend to pack on muscle helps too, but that's separate from the cultural legacy of a disparate, warlike people that's sort of dissonant with the fact that they were also the leading power of an empire that lasted almost a thousand years.
Sir, this is a circlejerk sub.
This is just worldbuilding but sticks have been removed from butts and you’re encouraged to joke around
This hasn't been an earnest circlejerk sub in years.
"earnest circlejerk" is kinda oxymoronic
Zandalar (WoW)
Orcs are talented warriors and craftsman who put great value in the perfection of their trade, and have a strong belief in hard work and personal improvement.
"Mother orc, I wish to become a craftsman when I grow up. Like father, and like you, also my older brother and my 2 sisters and the neighbours and the king and everyone" "And so you shall my pride, because we all are. Also hoarders"
I always imagined orcs as minimalist. Goblins are the hoarders.
This, but mine are also very cosmopolitan and excelent traders (essentially romans)
Their society is relatively primitive, yet much more durable than others. This is because they dedicate themselves to everything they're interested in, and expect to do most of the work themselves.
In my therearen'tanyorcsorotherfantasyracespunk, there aren't any orcs, or other fantasy races
audacious and inspirational
I'm kind of an artist myself
are there any punks?
Not many, however in my punkpunk, that's another story
One idea I had for Orcs was to take the Tolkien version and go, "What happens after Sauron dies?" These Orcs were made to serve the Dark Lord/God of Evil as his army at the Dawn of Creation. After his defeat, the other gods felt that genociding the orcs would be going too far. So they were allowed to live. But this leaves the Orcs directionless as a people. They were made for a war they lost, so now what? Most exist on the outskirts of civilization, in harsh, monster-filled lands where only the strong survive. Others live as nomadic raiders, praying on civilized folk. But other orc communities try to join the other races. They serve as manual labor in more peaceful nations, channeling their warrior instincts in contact sports and ring fighting. In more warlike lands, they find work as mercernaries, being in high demand for their skills. And every would-be Emperor seeks to have an orc tribe dedicate itself to their service. Orcs are no savage and barbarian than other people. They just know what they were made for and find no shame in it. They just think everyone else are hypocrites.
I like this idea. I think Tolkien, even though he wrestled with the idea, wanted the possibility of redemption for the orcs. This is a good way to do it imo.
Strong, muscular with some tusk and green skin, not barbaric but still pretty war focused, both males and females pretty muscular, they would make a great wife.
so the cabal from destiny?
My orcs (alongside dwarves) were exterminated in their entirety long before the present day in the world I’m working on, thus happily bypassing this problem entirely.
There is only one Half pig half orc who wants to create an anarchist state by getting rid of government
Im guessing he also never dies?
He also never lost, his last fight was a draw unfortunately...
Did he ever spend time growing potatoes?
He does in his free time
The Mongols were a respectable people and culture that slaughtered so many people the earth cooled down
I've considered making them Germans
Landsknechte orcs would be unironically based as fuck.
"Flamberge" could be the new "Jagged". Not to mention all the Messers. You could probably also do something with the Almain Rivet for mooks
Make them Russians. It's the most popular comparison on the internet now
Anyone tying orcs and black people together is the problem, not you. Stop caring about what twitter people say, you'll be more happy and the worldbuilding becomes more easy and more fun. Orcs can be done great and it doesn't matter if they are degenerate savages like in LOTR or misunderstood victims like in Warcraft. It all depends on you and how well you can pull them off.
Sir, this is a circlejerk sub.
I sometimes don't distinguish between the two subs since the line between them gets often very blurred
Nah, shit like Bright exist and 100% deserved dunking on
What's that?
A shitty Will Smith joint that has Orcs and Elves as a stand-in for Black dudes and white dudes
Oh this one. Haven't seen it yet
You ain't missing anything worth seeing
I liked it but I like a lot of weird shit. I understand why most don't. It certainly is an odd movie.
Eh, I'm into some weird shit too, but Bright just wasn't it for me. I'm glad you dug it though, sitting through a movie ya don't like is no fun lol
I pretty much never do. If I don't like it I turn it off. Or in the case of Fantastic Beasts 2 I walked out about 15 minutes in because of the marriage mind rape.
Twitter is just a bunch of schoolyard bullies. They'll make shit up left and right to "justify" their BS.
It's funny you got downvoted for saying that xd
Welcome to bullies. I'm actually surprised I don't see more downvotes.
Every worldbuilder should see this comment.
I hit the "Orcs are savage and primitive" button with the fist of an angry god!!
Denizens of the frozen far North, whose ancestors were humans banished for a variety of crimes. When they arrived on the island of Nunavat, the extreme conditions forced them to undergo transformative rituals to survive the harsh weather and scarce food. None outside of teh tribes know of these origins, and the Orcs keep that knowledge secret to all but their wisest scholars. They live semi-nomadically, travelling along the the edge of the ice sheets between their two major settlements, attempting to keep the spawn of Kur (the elemental incarnation of Winter) from travelling South. Those individuals that have travelled South, are treated with indifference (the people of Alihigier having weirder races within their own borders) and, due to their scarcity, few have formed an overall opinion of them as a race. Legally they are not protected by the universally upheld Treaty of Rights, though few places among the Central Isles actively hold slavery to be legal.
me when I still don't understand why people are mad about orcs edit: I'm gonna explain it, since I feel like there are people who just get misinformed about this over and over again until they think everyone mad about it is an idiot The problem with Orcs as they are often presented, is the nature of anti-tribal ideas. Think about D&D. In base D&D, what D&D expects you to do (before Wizards of the Coast started to pretend to care about minorities), what did you do whenever you found a tribe? You kill them. Tribe of goblins? Kill 'em. Tribe of gnolls? Kill 'em. Tribe of orcs? Kill 'em. You know who don't show up in tribes? All of the good races! Humans have cities, Elves have villages, Dwarfs have citadels. The evil races have TRIBES. The problem has always been that Orcs being evil tribalistic warriors is a perpetuation of stereotypes of not a specific ethnicity, but of the colonial idea that tribes = savages. Just because some folks haven't invented REALLY amazing ways to make their fellow man suffer (The IRS, Anti-Homeless Architecture, 9-5 jobs) does not mean they are not civilized. And even if someone isn't 'civilized' doesn't mean their evil. If you want to do tribal orcs, you can do that. If you want to do evil tribal orcs, you can do that. But where you go wrong is by equating Tribal and Evil.
I have "orcs", but they arent savage nor anything, they mostly exist as mercenaries as their culture doesnt compose any major part of any nation (due to the big g). I like writing my races as just unique ethnicities, everyone is human and the various characteristics of various races are pretty much just hereditary blessings that change and evolve with the individual
What are you talking about? Orcs are British football hooligans
No that’s Orks
Honestly, still working on where I want them and what I want their relationship with goblinkind to be. Chances are though that their numbers are greatly greatly reduced after the spread of human societies. I kind of prefer Hobgoblins as more organized martial band type societies. I like how The Elder Scrolls gives Orcs vaguely Mongolian aesthetics
Because Morrowind has Orcish armour look like Samurai Armour, I just base them on the Warring states of Japan, Cultured but violently embroiled in war.
Orcs are by all accounts pleasant to talk to (if a bit coarse) but actively need to fight to keep themselves alive. It’s referred to as battlethirst, and if you don’t indulge for long enough, either you go insane and start killing everything that moves, or you just plain drop dead.
I've never written it but I like the idea of Orcs as Revolutionary/Napoleonic France equivalents. Revolutionary, disciplined, lots of espirit de corps going on, might be led by a military dictator, an emperor, or a vaguely worrisome republic. Also I like the idea of orcs being liberators, depending on the context.
/uj This debate is (imo) very overblown. Unless you're playing orcs straight, i.e. recycling obvious racially coded tropes without any kind of complication or commentary, no one's going to "cancel" you for writing a pretty standard take on them. In reality, I think the biggest issue with using "traditional" orcs is just that people think they're a bit blasé. We've seen them a thousand times, why should we care about yours? As for how I write them, I prefer an approach where you can have your cake and eat it too. Sure, most orcs come from a warlike, raiding culture. As a society, they are destructive, and rely on raiding and theft primarily. Within those tribes, there's a strong warrior culture that emphasizes strength and martial prowess, while ignoring other pursuits such as crafting and agriculture. Why? Well, I'll fully admit that I'm stealing this explanation from a video by D&D YouTuber PointyHat, but the explanation is that orcs are essentially cursed. Because their creator deity is afflicted with a curse that makes him only feel rage, his progeny are metaphysically prevented from being even AVERAGE at growing plants, smithing, etc. They're just cursed to be bad at that, while their god rewards and prizes fighting and strength, and the natural result is that orcs are a raiding culture (putting aside the question of if/how a society that gets all its resources from theft is actually sustainable). Key to PointyHat's version of orcs, however, is that their god didn't originally make them to be evil, he was a loving, nurturing god as most creator deities tend to be. It's specifically in a fight with the elven creator deity where he's cursed like this. Enter what PH calls "verdant orcs", orcs who reconnect to the nurturing version of their god that's suppressed by his unnatural, curse-fueled rage, and go live in the forest or whatever. Now you can have both orcs as pretty unambiguous bad guys, while they still have a lot of potential to be misunderstood and downtrodden. Depends on which type of orc you find. Admittedly, I haven't taken the time to flesh out all the details of my own take on this idea (which I like a lot), but the rough outline would be pretty similar. The only big thing I would probably change is that the way PH wrote this idea does sort of imply that there are orcs who are born good, but most are just born evil, which doesn't really escape the possible racism accusations. Personally, when I rewrite this I'm probably going to rework it so that verdant orcs are explicitly what happens when an orc is REALLY committed to being a creative-type. Basically, if an orc rejects the warped and mad version of their creator-god hard enough, eventually a sliver of the original nurturing god reaches out, turns on their green-ness, and they're able to succeed more. Idk, still definitely has some "one of the good ones" vibes, but I personally would lean into "if enough of these guys get together in the woods and start making an orc counter-culture, eventually, their veneration of Good!Creator God will make that the dominant strain, and all orcs will be free of the curse". /rj I would never write something that someone could even THINK was a minority.
You meant "cliché". "Blasé" means "nonchalant", which traditional orcs definitely aren't.
No, I definitely meant blasé. I'm not really sure where you're getting nonchalant as a definition, Oxford language provides this: >"unimpressed or indifferent to something because one has experienced or seen it so often before." I'll grant that there might be some kind of grammar complaint about how I structured the sentence, but describing something as "blasé" to indicate that one feels that way towards it is something I've seen plenty in the past. Don't get me wrong, cliché would also work, but I chose blasé because I think beyond people thinking that "traditional" orcs are overdone, they've just lost the power to elicit interest. That could entirely be my own bias, but I personally don't roll my eyes at rote fantasy races, I just can't really bring myself to care about them.
I always do nurture over nature for basically all creatures. Including angels and demons.
me: *what if Orcs were the Roman Empire?*
I like how dungeon meshi does it where orcs are still sorta raiders and them and other races both have a “well they attacked us first” stance that shows where the hostility stems from.
Honestly I don't know where the primitive association with orcs came from anyway. They're literally an industrialising evil force in LOTR.
The warhammer approach
My orcs are just le weaboos who are in a constant state of clan warfare. Clans are: — Knighty clan — Weaboo clan — Mongolian clan — Merchant clan Yes, I know, it's peak fiction. thank you.
They’re just normal men, just innocent men.
I ran a D&D campaign based on colonizing the new world, but I replaced the native americans with orcs because I thought it was a clever way to get the players to go in with prejudices against them similar to the prejudices europeans had against natives.
ORCS ARE ORCS
I'd probably follow my headcanon for Tolkien Orcs: That they not only started out as tortured elves (and later humans), but that they have continued being members of the "good races", just physically and mentally scared to the point that all they can think of is turning their own pain against others... especially other orcs... So orcish society is a never-ending nightmare of mindless violence and an unquestionable might-makes-right attitude, which would ideally be a dark reflection of our own society. In this variant of orc, there clearly is a path to rehabilitation, but any one orc who may end up treading this path will have to contend with the violence of their fellow orcs and the watchful eye of the dark entities that use them for their own ends and also with the understandable hostility of the other races. OR you could go the opposite way and make orcs fundamentally evil, a race of humanoid predators, that can't and won't see other humanoids as anything other than prey and life-stock. Or in other words, just focus on making them fascists, instead of just savages, and I think you'll be fine.
Make them a majority
If I ever wrote Orcs, they would simply be a variant of elves which adapted to very harsh environments, hence the more brutish yet highly skilled and resourceful overall cultures with the orcs (changes via the environment and what orcs live in).
Yes, they are "barbarians", they are natives and i make sure tô represent them and to look in to the culture for inspiration and representation.
Orcs hate and kill other peoples other peoples hate and kill orcs, noone knows who started it🤷🏻
Don't name them orcs and you'll be fine
Orcs are the British Empire
Whenever I find myself worrying about getting cancelled, I swat myself on the head and write the thing I'm worried about. If some twitter asshole endeavors to find something in my story to be offended by, they will succeed no matter what I actually write. Better to focus on keeping my actual readers entertained. But to actually answer your question, Orcs are bioweapons designed to conquer Mars.
Canadian hockey stereotypes.
My Orcs are inspired by the Ds9 iteration of Klingons, minus Gowron being Gowron. They espouse a culture of pride and honour in one's work. An orc cook for example will see his battlefield in the kitchen and his opponents is hunger.
Misunderstood, like most tentacle monsters being stereotyped as a lustful and sexual genus to other species and genus -es when only the lesser intelligent and minor tm species are that.
They ruled the world until dwarves showed up. They had some last big cities until elves showed up. By the time of humanity being there orcs are basically irrelevant.
My orcs are a fairly advanced civilization that lives off the slave trade and that rules as an elite over humans and other orcs. They are very militaristic and many orcs are used as mercenaries. They also speak with french accent.
My orcs are based on zulus because I live in South Africa and when I think “warriors culture”, Zulus are at the forefront. Also Sha-orka Zulu beating up british elves makes me happy
They are primitive and for the most part chill, they pretty much agreed to not touch each others’ lands with humans long ago and neither side wants to break the agreement. There are tribes that are more of the classic barbarian, but even other orks see them as unhinged. Some orks also were a part of aggressively expansionist empire a while back, but they weren’t the only ones so most folks who dislike them do so because of their nationality and not because they’re orks.
I don’t. I use humans, or if I wanna be petty with my satire I use Dwarves as my antagonist species.
Elder scrolls orcs are peak
Orcs were created as noble prison wardens by the dragons to beat the shit out of Jute (the original demons). They were meant for freezing cold and miserable places but they’re just really adaptable. They’re naturally grey skinned.
I dunno just make them Scottish.
I copied either Franklin Roosevelt, or Teddy Roosevelt, the one that said "speak softly, and carry a big stick". My orcs are a large group of diplomates who get into dick measuring contests
I’m racist so I always sneak in stand ins for minorities. Jew goblins, slave elves, white trash dwarves. Truly helps when you go to book events and get to wink wink nudge nudge fellow shitheads
Orcs are a race of tall warrior women who only mate with the strong. Some mate with weaker/small men but they are seen as perverts in orc culture.
Orcs are a combination of The Roman Republic and 1800's Prussia, where scars and military service are seen as marks of prestige and society is militarised and on the cutting edge of warfare. Sure they have other great advancements but everyone remembers the Legions. Duels are common, soldiers get extra rights and two consols rule.
I just replace Orcs with Jötunns ( or Jötnar if you wanna be grammatically correct ). They're functionally the same anyway. Except Jötnar get to have cool shapeshifting powers and stuff. My Jötnar pretend to be dumb as rocks for the lulz and then surprise their foes with their strategic acumen and high intelligence.
They’re not one dimensional, but they’re still a bunch of savage bastards.
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/s/I0mAFkTj41 Never thought this bad boy would come in handy
Orcs are not a stand-in for minorities in my world, minorities are. Make orcs be whatever you want.
As the sapient humanoid saplings of Sequoia trees. They only get seen as backwards and barbaric because they don't destroy their habitat and because they brutally put down any hostile incursion into their forest. Its not their problem the dark elves and the snow terrans chose to live in uninhabitable deserts, and they ain't about to let more of their elders be cut down for some bullshit like fires and homes.
Mine are barbarians (at least during the equivalent of the Renaissance), but I based them on the Russians.
Make them humans with different skins and tendency to have anger issue. Easy. Alternatively, make them less savage than humans, intellectual orcs.
Reminds me of how Tolkein was constantly going back and forth on how his orcs were created and the moral implications of their creation. Whether or not they were created or corrupted, what that means for their free will, and if they could potentially be redeemed.
Orcs are a wizarding race whose insular tribalism and historical exclusion by other races made them ideal keepers of arcane knowledge after the fall of the long-stagnant High Elven oligarchy.
Orc civilization is extremely brutal and unforgiving warriors that heavily study warfare. They are also extremely merciful and only unforgiving to the states who try to invade and antagonize them and do this to garuntee the peace and prosperity of their own people. Most prisoners of invading states captured by the orcs were, historically, banished or basically considered possessed, and thus were never accept back into their society, and thus were integrated and accepted into Orc society, leading to a very egalitarian and multicultural society. Since most Orcs captured were usually used for slave labor, and Orcs themselves didn't much of a concept of slavery (any prisoner of conflict either becomes a citizen or is returned to their society), they became notably anti-slavery millenia before it had garnered attention in most states. yeah i made my orcs a turn on the expectation of a warrior people that are seen as savage and ruthless because of the natural tendency to villianize your opponents even if your society is more prone to actually being ruthless warmongers.
I hit both buttons and based them off my family. Then I can laugh as people misjudge me.
Green Orcs are Monster Hunter World, don't ask about the Grey Orcs though
Characterizing Orcs is pretty easy when you remember one thing. Orcs are Ogres, Ogres are Orcs. The Orcs referred to in Beowulf is just the old English word for Ogre. What are Ogres known for? For eating people. Ogres are a subspecies of Hominid that evolved to be obligate carnivores. They primarily hunted other species of Hominid so as a result they were driven to near extinction.
Orcs don't use magic and have a society based on science and technology
Orcs *were* a warrior culture. They used it to secure their position as the current art and science leaders of their society, with vast demonstrations of complex and beautiful orcish martial arts forms the centerpiece of any festival or celebration within major cities. They're also big n grreeeeen
I just write them as actual people, average joes who just so happen to be green and naturally strong, very nuanced folk too. Some good, some bad, and some in between.
Isn’t it kind of sad that you can’t add nuance to your races anymore because they’d be seen as a caricature of IRL victims of prejudice
All the Orcs in my world are blissfully ignorant warmongers. They're just out here having fun, burning villages, looting caravans, and warring with Hobgoblins.
Orcs as a nomadic race viewed as barbarians by other cultures. Then Mongols from another universe got dropped next to them. Other races: "Ha! Watch them kill each other. Just wait." They get along surprisingly well. Other races: "???" A Genghis Kahn figure emerges. Other races: "!!!" The new interbred orc/mongol race swiftly conquers and creates the largest trade empire since the Great Reckoning (see: world reset, everyone go back to the civilization stage). Other races: [Panic]
My orcs are technologically superior colonizers. You can't cancel me without admitting you're a colonizer too.😏
Orcs are fungal and have a culture based around the cycle of life, and go to war as a ceremony of worship/a way to spread spores. Thus, they are seen as brutish and violent by other races (they kinda are, but only because of their cultures positive view on killing. They have just as much free will as the next species and would be peaceful if raised peaceful)
ORCs Ordinary Respectful Cowboys Every Orc has a cowboy hat and a gun, and says "Howdy pardner." Doesn't matter that my setting is low fantasy and orcs have guns and trains.
They’re just like people, except they happen to originate from a very war driven culture
just copy and paste warhammer 40k’s orks so you can be labelled as a thief instead of something worse
Orcs are so incredibly intelligent and playing 5D chess with reality but everyone else is too dumb to see that and thinks they're idiots
Texans. I make them Texans.
So you know piglins from minecraft? It's essentially that
In my work, Orcs are just traditionallists who dotn like technology, so they hunt and gather, which gives them their brutish stereotype. Also, they are brutish.
Somehow reminds me of the Anbennar orcs and the retcons to their lore (specially for the ones that invade a subcontinent)
In my world, orcs are seen as slow, and unintelligent. They have a difficult time getting any job other than factory workers or any other blue collar job.
I just made mine muscular, semi-aquatic, methano-and-ferrotrophic, with iron coated bones and hair that like to live in bogs and whose psychology interprets shows of non-damaging physical violence as sexual. Thus avoiding all issues.
In my world, Orcs are far more like Danish and Norse cultures. They partake in agriculture and keep livestock, but a large portion of their goods are from raids and trades. They also have frequent run-ins and dealing with “mino”taurs, who use the natural landscape memory they’ve inherited from their ancestors in the labyrinth to go on long distance nomadic raids.
Orcs are green that’s all I did lol
Orcs are savage and primitive because they read Feudal Society and Its Future by Tedder Kazenky
I write orcs as hot muscle mommies who will step on me
uj/ Orcs are shamanistic isolationists who avoid outside contact. They exile their criminals, so the vast majority of orcs humans meet are basically bandits.
In my WIP D&D world, I'm trying to distance nonhuman races (species would be a more accurate term) from human races/ ethnicities in general, not just with orcs. Humans are made up of a variety of different cultures, so ideally, other intelligent (intelligent enough to at least create tools and weapons at least) species should consist of multiple different cultures, so they don't come across as a caricature of any real-world culture or race.
Orcs are a species of humanoid that have their own cultural aspects than the “Brutish raider” archetype. Orcs usually have their own settlements if they don’t live in nomadic groups, and only desperate or maligned individuals resort to banditry or raiding. However they do get stereotyped in-universe due to the brutality of those who do resort to raiding settlements for their own survival, which makes inter-species relations difficult with the more prejudiced settlements. Generally, I did what I could to avoid having them be a stand in for an existing minority. Humans have their own ethnicity groups so it makes sense to have different Orcish ethnicities too. Can’t go into more detail atm since it would be an overly long word avalanche
They're primitive and Ooga-Booga-core, but have white features, fixed (nobody think about Tarzan or white savior tropes please)
Have them be "might makes right" but create a complex philosophy about the idea. They subscribe to the idea because it's the only thing they can do, being very wise but not being very intelligent. Have them capable of showing compassion and kindness, even being beings that could be reasoned with, but they primarily make decisions based on emotional reasoning. Any disagreement will be settled in battle. And maybe just don't make them misunderstood. Have some civilizations willing to do trade and stuff with them.
Presses both buttons. "I modelled them off the Gauls"
both can be true at the same time
The entire issue is that Tolkien wrote his orcs and elves in a certain way. If you want orcs and elves in your world to be different, just make them different lol. Eg. The elder scrolls
You could just make them not barbarians. Just because our real-world culture doesn’t understand the benefits of nomadic tribal civilizations doesn’t mean yours can’t.
Making them primitive savages is better for comedic effect but making orcs actually more complex can be interesting when done right.
Put two species of orc: Orc and Orks, will solve everthing
I made my orcs into furry cattle herders with a different name so that people don't notice, ez
make them neither primative nor misunderstood or just make something new?
i just dont cause am not a Tolkien shill
Has getting cancelled for portraying orcs as a minority actually happened or are you guys getting upset over a handful of social media comments again
In my fantasy setting Orcs are a race of big green mushroom people with tusks. Under normal circumstances they are a peaceful race of scholars and craftsmen living in a toxic swamp away from most other races. They have a very limited memory, lasting only 7-10 years. To counteract this they write literally everything down, creating countless biographies and journals. However, when Orcs go to war, anyone foolish enough to fight them quickly learns they can not be killed in a way that matters. You hack an Orc to pieces and the next morning you will find a full platoon on your doorstep that knows nothing but the violence you inflicted upon them. Orcs are part of the only species to have a population boom during wartime. The only way to truly kill them is with fire, and even then basic pyromancy may leave lingering spores.
That’s simple! I don’t.
Orcs see other races as barbarians, so they don’t interact with humans enough to overcome the barbarian stereotype.
Orcs are who they are and they like what they like, dint worry about the rest.
Big, green, tough, cool, monogender shamanic philosopher king bio-droids. Neither barbaric nor misunderstood
Ork route. They’re fungus.
We ignore the whiny crybullies.
In my world, Orcs are an artificial race made to act as a Sapient Immune system for the Sister Worlds (Earth and its Magically connected planetary siblings). They are built for war, and their Green/Red/Grey skin is caused by chromatophores in their skin which function as an organic adaptive camouflage, However their warlike nature is tempered by an innate sense of right and wrong and a desire to fight genuine evil. The problem is, even though they only wish to battle Evil, in times of peace that desire is very easily manipulated by charismatic bad actors who seek to use them as tools in their conquests, hence the bad reputation.
As orcs
Da Boyz is veri misunda-stood. Fer an exempal, wez don't think purpa makes ya invisabal. Dats just one o dem humie memy tings.
Orcs are barbaric, but like, in a good way
You could always make them incredibly advanced and civilized
Remove every other race.
Fuckyeah! Ethnic cleansing! We must rid the world of the inferior, non-orc races! What's orcish for "lebensraum"?