Although player characters may be of any alignment whatever their chosen race, the humanoids are unanimously bad guys, being Chaotic in Basic D&D and various flavours of Evil in AD&D. In D&D’s wargaming roots, these represented the different troop types available on each side (Light vs Darkness, Good vs Evil, Law vs Chaos and what have you). Humanoids were orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, kobolds, gnolls, bugbears, and ogres. Demi-humans included elves, dwarves, halfings and gnomes, generally any race that could be selected by player characters. In D&D, one of the many divisions of the game is between humans and demi-humans on one hand, and humanoids (sometimes ‘goblinoids’ or ‘giant class’) on the other. I can’t have been the only one that wanted to know more about what was going on with Shagrat and Gorbag than Elrond and Galadriel, can I? In this series I’m going to try and get to grips with both the great appeal of orcs to me personally, their place in Dungeons and Dragons, and various ideas on how to expand their use in the game. Maybe it was the fact that they were so undeveloped that made them so much more mysterious and compelling. Maybe it was that bad-boy, underdog appeal. Even as a child reading The Lord of the Rings I always found them more fascinating than the elves and dwarves and hobbits. The primitive, the bestial, the savage, the demonic. The be-tusked nemesis of the fledgeling adventurer. They’re Tolkienesque fantasty cliche, over-used and under-utilised, but I love orcs. –Phil Barker, Sue Laflin Barker & Richard Bodley Scott, Hordes of the things We might instead think of such goblins as a fantasy counterpart of the apocryphal northerner: clannish, rough spoken, given to imbibing of strong but peculiar liquor, keeping analogues of whippets and pidgeons, prone to mob violence at away fixtures and perhaps too easily influenced by radical politicians of other races. It is interesting that Tolkien’s characters describe them in terms very similar to those used by medieval chroniclers to describe Mongols, who in our day are considered a nice friendly people of slightly eccentric lifestyle. They are fanatically brave in spite of being weaker and less practiced than most other humanoids, and must be kind to animals, since they train them so well. Thanks to Mike Monaco for providing this excellent and amusing summary of generic fantasy orcs from UK wargame Hordes of the Things:Īlthough the dictionary definition of orc is merely “monster,” modern authors universally follow the lead of Tolkien in using the term as a synonym for a large goblin. We track a lot of different crossword puzzle providers to see where clues like " Dungeons & Dragons humanoid" have been used in the past.One at the back is all, like, ‘fucking hell Grishnakh, do you just have to be so dramatic all the time?’ Recent Usage of Dungeons & Dragons humanoid in Crossword Puzzles
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