Tim Cain speaks again, at Troika Chronicles

<-- You're wrong.

 

Somehow, I feel like sticking to the true orchs...

 

GIMP is some good stuff.

 

I love the GIMP!

Oh, nice new avatar, DE.
You know what would make that better? Nothing. Well, enough kiss ass;

Wobbler, considering all orcs stem from imagination, I can say they're whatever color I want. It's not like they've got a color caste system that delineates the specific melanin and various other tertiary body pigments. For example, DE is a dark elf. How dark? I don't know. Dark blue? Red? Green? I just know he's fucking dark, and his chosen pseudonym will suffice.
My point is, mathboy is green. He looks green. By association (or ocular suggestion), be it racist or not, I see all orcs as green. Hell, the last time I saw an orc in a D&D rulebook, it was green. Last time I saw Arcanum's orcs, they were green. So, slap some green body paint on, and go plow someone with your rampaging pork sword already. Don't be so gay about it.

 

LMFAO.

An orc is basically anything you want it to be. Orcs are fictional and thus they do not exsist; the human race cannot prove that Orcs are composed of any matter by means of science. If science is the only way to determine what may exsist in reality or in the universe, then an Orc is an immeasurable, completely abstract concept. Thus based on any human interpretations of the word/idea of Orc, it may always be different and inconsistent from the original fictional construction of what an Orc might be. Hence, it doesn't really matter what an Orc is or what color it is. For the purposes of discussion, however, we relate our generalized fictional ideas together in order to further our idea of this abstract development.

Alas, here is my favorite Orc.

 

How many stories are there about orcs before Tolkien released his books?

Therefor, since Tolkien Created orcs, I see them as the True orcs.

 

Thing is, he's right. The original orcs were not green. They were not black either. They were pale, ugly, small and utterly evil. It's D&D, or Warhammer, who created the all-masculin, muscular, green orcs. In my opinion, they suck. They're just a solution to the need of an all-warrior race to fill out the RPG.

No, orcs aren't green. They're pale. And as far as I'm concerned you're as gay on the subject as wobbler is. And now, I'm gonna go rampage some farms nearby.

 

Thing is, I never said anything about the original orcs. I just said what they look like, and how much I don't care that he says they're not green.

 

Well they're not. But whatever.

 

LMFAO

 

We aren't amoebas any more, and orcs aren't pale creatures who hate the sun any more. It's called evolution.

 

OK MATHBOY. IF that makes you happy, will say so.

We just say that orcs are green, ok?

Are you happy now Mathboy, feeling nice about yourself?

 

Sure. And next you're gonna tell me that ManBearPig doesn't exist and that he is no component whatsoever of a man, a bear, or pig. And Al Gore DID invent the internet. That wasn't my imagination.

 

Ideas don't evolve, mathboy. It's just silly americans who needed an all-fighter race for their sucky RPGs. They loaned Tolkiens orcs, and turned them into the crappiest excuse for a culture the roleplaying world has ever seen. Why are they green? There's no good explanation. Oftenly, there's no explanation to why they're violent either. Tolkien created a people, and the americans created a hideous species of warriors.

It's not evolution, it's two different ideas. And this time, the prior idea is the greater.

 

In your opinion.

 

That Tolkiens orcs are better? Yes. That the americans stole Tolkiens orcs in order to make a warrior/barbarian race? No. They could've called them anything, but the word "orc" attracted too many fans of fantasy to be neglected.

 

Ideas evolve. It's pretty much all they do. You take someone else's idea and improve on it, and in the end the superior idea is what's left, even if the previous one is still remembered for its important role in the creation of the new one.

The word orc existed before Tolikien. It might come from the Latin word orcus, who was a Roman god of the underworld, or the word orcnēas from Beowulf which means something like corpse. It also seems like the same word gave us both orc and ogre.

So Tolkien evolved the old meanings of orc, and mixed it with other stuff, and came up with his orcs, then the Warhammer creators made them green and a lot cooler.

 

Ideas don't evolve, because you can't improve an idea. You can change an idea, but that doesn't mean you've improved it. If you think you've improved an idea, someone else will think you haven't. If you change an idea, you've only managed to create an idea of your own. The prior idea is still there, unmodified.

As for orcs existing before Tolkien; rubbish, I say. He used an old-english word (orc=demon, suitable eh?) and made an entire new species from it. The original old-english orcs were demons from hell. Not quite the same thing as Tolkiens orcs, eh?

I.e, there are several kinds of orcs, most of them spawned from Tolkiens original species. I think the original still beats it's offspring.

 

Orcs, the creature with that name, probably didn't exist before Tolkien, but there had been pale underground dwelling monsters before him, so his work isn't a lot more original than the one of Warhammer. He just renamed his creation, and gave them a name related to ogres and giants, that didn't fit, and Warhammer took it back.

When you change an idea, either it gets better than the previous idea, or worse. If the idea gets better, people will start believing more in your idea than in the previous one, and the old unfit idea will die out, more or less. This is just what evolution is about. A being changes, and if it is fitter, it stays and the old one is in trouble.

And as you have seen, many members here prefer the real orcs to the obsolete ones from the past.

Preferring Tolkien's orcs to the modern one is like believing the earth is flat, or that the earth is the centre of the universe, or that the earth is 6000 years old, because those ideas are more original than the current ones.

 

Funny how THE rpg setting that popularized the "Orc" to begin with was created by a Swiss. And until you can prove that the pimple-faced, basement dwelling, RPG-race inventing geek that sat at a table full of other likeminded, pale-skinned nerds was an American and not of some other nationality, I will hold you personally just as responsible for the shortsighted stereotyping of an entire culture based on one person's uninspired interpretation of what a popular, yet blatently irrelevent, warrior-race of demihumans should be across the many, many settings of RPGs...just as you hold against "the Americans."