What Color is your Orc?

Who would have thought the humble orc would have gone through so many changes since first used in D&D?

Created by Tolkien for his Middle Earth cannon fodder, their use in Dungeons and Dragons made them a household name. First mentioned in the “White Box,” they were described as savage tribal creatures that live in caves or villages.

In pre-AD&D days, my orcs pretty much looked like the figures I found. Those early figs, Ral Partha I think, pretty much were the pig-faced orcs as depicted in Hildebrandt Bros. LOTR calendars, where more often than not they also seemed to wear roman centurion armor. Tolkien did not describe them as pigs, but having mentioned broad noses may have lead to the pig thing. I never really liked the pig look. James at Grognardia seems to have gone “full hog” with this “orc as pig” philosophy, making the orcs in his Dwimmermount campaign actually be boars given humanoid form. Hmm. That’s all good, but for some reason to me it seems less orc, and more like something from the old 80’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. When I picture a “boar man” it’s hard not to see it in a badly animated cartoon image in my mind. Not to say James is wrong , but that image is my least favorite as far as “What color is your orc.” Never mind that people are going to start confusing orcs with wereboars during the full moon.

Some pretty shitty orc miniatures came out in conjunction with the Ralph Bakshi animated LOTR 70’s film. In that movie the orcs were just dudes with fake tusks and caveman fur singlets, made to look pitch black and poorly rotoscoped. Bakshi even just shaded old footage of Zulu warriors from old movies for some of the orc scenes. There was some creep factor to that look, but it really made for some craptacular miniatures based on the film.

During the 80’s, orc figures evolved into a more ape-like look, and by around 1990 Warhammer 40000 continued with the green caveman meets ape look. Orcs now were becoming more thuggish than pure snarling evil as Tolkien portrayed them.

In the last several years, we have seen two newly portrayed types of orcs. There are the Peter Jackson movie orcs, which I really like. In the film, they come in all kinds, which is how Tolkien described them. Although I have not seen orc miniatures based on those films (I was semi-retired from gaming for most of the new millennium), I’m sure the look would/did translate well to miniature form. Especially those badass Uruk Hai.

Now, with the World of Warcraft generation, orcs have become something much more than the original basic primitive savage good and evil concepts. Later editions of D&D let you play pure orcs as characters, and WOW followed suite, even going so far as to make them cunning, brave, muscular heroic warriors. Wow indeed.

So my preference is for the snarling, hateful orcs of Tolkien. Orc women and children? Characters will never delve deep enough to find them. They will only continue to contend with gangs and troops of the foul beasts in caverns and dungeons of the sub-surface world. And they will continue to put them to sword and axe with a clear conscience. In my game world, orcs were born to die. And I guess in my world, they look like whatever figures I happen to have on hand (including my one remaining “pig-face” orc from the old days).

D&D live action movie gets greenlight

Fake. Yeah, I know, lame. If we did get one at this point, it would be a Roger Cormen-esque budget straight to video mess. Or worse, some monstrosity directed by that Uwe Boll guy who makes all the crappy video game movies.

As you can see in the Cosplay photo, the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon from the 80’s has a small cult following. With the 80’s still being mined for it’s richness of pathos and irony and middle-aged nostalgia chumps like me looking to recapture our youth, just doing a live-action adaptation of the cartoon would please us game geeks. Try to do a new story, and you’ll end up with a Wayans brother as a thief, and Beholders so weak that they have been reduced to minor guardian creatures.

Even the annoying child Barbarian and his whining unicorn could not ruin it if it was done right. To keep the kids at the proper age, you get a bunch of mostly unknowns for them, and then just get a big star for Dungeon Master and Venger. My vote for Venger is Willem Dafoe. Scrunch Gary Oldman up with the miracle of movie Hobbitization, shave the top of this head, and you gots yourself the DM right there.

We can dare to dream. If they can make it any better than the D&D movie from the 90’s, then you’ll get my ass in a seat at the local movie house. I’ll probably stash a few Fat Tire Ales in my backpack though, just in case I need to dull the pain.

What’s your alignment, baby?

Like most young D&D geeks back in the day, me and my buddies often used D&D terminology in our regular lives as kids. Obviously, if you fell off your bike or skateboard and got bashed up a bit, you’d say “I think I lost about 5 hit points there” (in reality, being zero level, we probably only had about 3 or 4 hit points max). I remember as a teen surfing with another gamer, and he asked me how many wandering aquatic monsters did we risk randomly encountering. We saw sharks and jelly fish all the time, so those topped our list. Also in there was killer whales, “kooks” and killer bacteria (this was Santa Monica Bay, after all).

But my favorite “D&Dism” was a pick-up line that I actually used and ultimately got lucky with in my early 20’s.

In our teens, I had joked about how in the far flung future world of my gameworld, people used “what’s your alignment” instead of “what’s your sign” (the big real world pick-up line of the late 70’s, early 80’s).

At a party years later, I was enjoying the kegs and open bar, when a pretty blond girl asked me to pour a beer for her. Happy to oblige and a little toasted, I hit her with it “so…I’m a cool and easy chaotic good. What’s your sign, baby?”

Not even thinking it would work, she was fascinated and wanted to know what the hell I was talking about. At that point in life I never talked about gaming around non-gamers. I was totally in the closet. But for some reason I decided to tell this girl what alignment meant, and about the game it came from. She was sort of a bimbo and didn’t like sci fi or fantasy (not even Star Wars), but the opening I got with my gibbering D&D nonsense got me into her life and dating her for around three months. If I recall, it ended because we had nothing in common but being pretty. And I was broke around that time too. That does not go with “high maintenance” L.A. chicks.

You don’t really hear that “what’s your sign” line outside of Burning Man these days, but I still think knowing somebody’s alignment is a whole lot more informative about them than what month they were born in.

Yo, Dog - it's da Urban Druid

OK, that's for a modern game, but the urban druid could fit well into all sorts of genres. But for now I'm thinking fantasy.

I love the idea of an Urban Druid. I really only GM games, but if I still played in them this would be my next character. Though created for later editions of D&D than I use, It would be only a small deal to adapt it.

Although I only discovered it online recently, it first appeared in Dragon Magazine # 317 in 2004. There is also an Urban Ranger apparently, and I will for sure look into that later.

The urban druid lives in or near major settlements, and draws it’s power from the people, the animals, and the buildings of the town or city. The buildings are the urban druid’s trees, the alleyways it’s “nature trails,” and the streets it’s rivers and streams.

Rats, dogs, cats, scorpions, spiders, ravens, and the almighty cockroach are the urban druids friends and range of familiars.

One of the coolest powers of the urban druid is Crowdwalk. With this ability, the druid can move through crowded city streets as if they are an empty field. You can imagine looking down at the teeming city streets, and the urban druid passing in a straight line through the crowd without brushing up against anyone.

The urban druid can also take on not just the animal shapes of the city, but the city itself. At mid-levels it can become wagons or doors, and later houses or even streets. I’m already thinking of a high level urban druid NPC for my major city, who likes to take the form of a mystical looking house (think Doctor Strange’s Greenwich Village pad) at the end of a street in the poor part of town. When he is on the move in humanoid form somewhere, locals go “wasn’t there an old run down house down there this morning?”

The article is reprinted at the Eberron site if you haven't seen it. Hella cool.

http://eberronunlimited.wikidot.com/urban-druid

Behold, the mighty Kobold!

These kobold guys sure get around. They have had various incarnations in D&D, none of them very much like their legendary “real world” counterparts.

I have not used a kobold (and who could use just one?) in my games for at least 15 years. There came a point in my long-running game world, maybe in the early 90’s, where I just thought there were too many non-human “goblinoids” running around in tunnels and ruins of my lands. Orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, gnolls, bugbears, kobolds, and others. And of course, if I had used every variation of these creatures that appeared in The Dragon, White Dwarf, or The Dungeoneer, It would be a goddamn overpopulated circus world down there!

I mostly stuck with orcs and goblins throughout the 90’s for my underground grunt troops. Bugbears were pretty much Uruk Hai orcs, except for the brief period I had as a kid. In those very early days I portrayed them like they appeared in a crude original D&D book – a big hairy body with a pumpkin for a head. I still used gnolls very occasionally in the 90’s (with a tendency to inhabit above ground ruined cities), and still thought of them as being in remote parts of my world. But my thinking was that kobolds just don’t exist anymore, at least where players might go in their travels.

But in trying to come up with a quick mini-adventure with a bit of combat for next week, kobolds came to mind. I have a party of mid-level characters in my current campaign, and I am adding a couple of new players into the mix. Hmm, what to throw at the party where 1st level dudes can fight next to the bigger guns. I know…a troop of kobolds! Little goblinoids with 3 hit points each! Everybody kills one when they hit! Nice!

But how to portray them at this point? In the old days, they were pretty much little dog-headed goblins. Before AD&D, the “white box” described them simply as small goblins (as if goblins weren’t small enough). At some point in later D&D evolution, they became non-goblin and somewhat reptilian, their dog heads replaced by lizard heads. I think I read somewhere in the nineties that they were now related to dragons! Wow, I remember that art in the DM’s guide (I think in there) with a bunch of kobolds attacking a dragon. Now they are related to them? Jeez. Third Edition described several kinds of kobold, including aquatic, desert, jungle, etc etc etc.

Who knows what the hell they are in 4th ed?

Although I just need them to be weaker goblins for my encounter (I want to describe all these little pricks running around the village making off with wine barrels and livestock), I sort of want to make them more like the legends as well. In myth, they did actually come in a variety of types. Some helped around the home (in one description I read they sound a lot like house elves from Harry Potter), some lived in troops underground and worked mines just like their D&D counterparts. Folklorists have proposed that the mine kobold derives from the beliefs of the ancient Norse or German tribes. It is suggested that the Proto-Norse based the kobolds on the short-statured Finns, Lapps, and Latvians who fled their invasions and sought shelter in northern European caves and mountains. There they put their skills at smithing to work and, in the beliefs of the proto-Norse, came to be seen as supernatural beings.

Some even snuck aboard sailing vessels to help sailors. That is very unique in legend – not many mystical creatures were helpful towards sailors. The seas were all about the terror.

Although I like the idea of expanding the kobold beyond the barking reptile dogmen of D&D past, I really already have pixies, fairies and boggarts to play these parts. Because I have Scottish parents I have heard a lot about Brownie legends, and use them for needed purposed in games at appropriate times. They can do everything from help an old man repair a shop full of shoes, to making a farmers milk go bad.

But at least I have rediscovered the humble D&D version of thekobold, and will use some in my game next week. I just wish I had about 50 miniatures of kobolds to use. That would spice-up the ol’ greasemat.

D&D TV?

Comedy Central’s new show Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (ha ha), while obviously based much on Conan movies and other fantasy fare, does indeed seem to have some D&D inspiration. The flaming sword of the title (that so far seems to have a bit of a mind of its own, a very classic Dungeons and Dragons trope) seems to hint at this, as does the skill - varied party of adventures that make up Krod’s gang.

OK, OK, D&D probably only enters into it a bit, and this show seems to be taking a shot at being more like a cross between the wildly popular Xena: Warrior Princess show from the 90’s, and the Robin Hood parody series When Things Were Rotten from the 80’s. Maybe a bit of Shrek in their as well. The main difference here is that while Xena had wild action sequences and was actually funny a lot of the time, and had a fairly big budget, Krod doesn’t really have either quality in decent amounts.

Show creator Peter Knight sites Monty Python and the Holy Grail (a movie he claims to have seen more than any other – and it’s possible we have that in common), but I see none of that classic comedy going on here so far.

Some of the humor seems to come from the Get Smart school (characters who are skilled yet seem to fuck up all the time). But whereas I laugh my ass off watching Get Smart, I was only mildly amused a couple of times during the hour-long pilot: once when Krod’s pig-faced henchman accidentally pins Krods hand to the back of a bad guy with a crossbow bolt (this happened in the first few minutes of the show, and gave me great hope), and then in the evil villains castle. The bad guy likes to ride around his castle corridors on a full-size horse, while his advisors walk alongside it scrunched up against the walls. I liked that.

Game fanboys are likely to appreciate the female of the group. She is a lovely, exotic type who would rather seduce enemies than fight them. Portrayed by India De Beaufort, gang bang humor abounds around here. She is this shows “Kelly Bundy.” Krod wants her to be his girlfriend, while everyone else snickers about her whorish passions.

OK, “big laughs.” But where is my D&D TV, dammit? Why not? How about a show similar to Firefly, but with a group of disparate adventurers in a fantasy world (Baldur’s Gate!). Start them at a tavern, and have the first episode be about a dungeon delve. Thow in the tropes: ten foot poles, gelatinous cubes, corridors with strange sounds and colorful magic gases, goblinoids in large numbers camped out in a cavern, carrion crawlers, etc etc etc.

And I don’t mean make it funny. Make it a big grim and gritty. Let humor come from pathos and irony, like they do in old school games that took things fairly seriously. Get the characters fleshed-out in city scenes in between dungeons. Have the larger “Underdark” be the whispered about realm that the party will eventually go to (shit, do the entire Against the Giants/Vaults of the Drow storyline). Man, that would be cool.

Then I woke up in a cold sweat, and realized that only American Idol and Flavor of Love was on. Sigh.

My Two Pence on Dave

Even though I have been a gamer for around three decades, I do not consider myself any kind of expert in the history of RPG’s (one of the reasons I decided to take a more low-brow approach in my blogs). I was mostly about the gaming, not the “Behind the Music” stuff. But I am old school, and I did love Blackmoor like I did so many books and supplements of my youth. But 99% of what I know about the man behind Blackmoor, I learned in the last few months.

I am indeed a child of the white box, and I owned the Blackmoor supplement in Jr. High. I didn’t know a ton about the dude that put it together, I just knew I loved what was inside it, including that Temple of the Frog. I probably used that setting a half dozen times when I needed a quick adventure. I probably only used “The Lichway” from White Dwarf magazine more for first level games.

Most of my friends had gotten into the game a couple years after I discovered it, and by then were picking up the newer, larger box Dungeons and Dragons books, so Blackmoor was my little secret. It had already been around for quite a while by the time I got my own group together. Before that, it was all about reading those original booklets, and day dreaming of the adventures to come (I also played in solo games “run” by the dickwad who got me into the game, but he didn’t own any books. He just had dice and made it up as he went along (You can read about this in my first post at my secret blog mygaminghistory.blogspot.com).

So outside of that, I didn’t know much about Dave. What little I did beyond the Blackmoor book I probably overheard at Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica when I hung out there. Let’s face it, Gygax was the man. To me and my friends, he was the God of D&D. I didn’t know that Gygax was the “money man” who handled the biz, and also that Gary wasn’t all that fond of what made Dave’s games great (I imagine, anyway) – Gary was a rules guy, and Dave was the role-play guy.

Now I have to say, I just gamed over the decades and didn’t put much effort into learning the behind the scenes antics. But as an adult I love that stuff, and so in the last year or so have learned so much about Gary and Dave, and others who made the hobby what it is. My minor heroes included Dave Hargrave and Paul Jaques, but Gygax and Arneson got the boat sailing.

It seems that Gary was more into the mechanics of things: encounter charts, stats, lists, various minutiae. But Dave was the true role-player with the unique voicing of NPC’s and getting deeper into characterization. The role-play aspects are what I love the most; the power of bringing a personality to life. So really, I guess in that respect Dave H. is my father of role-playing. That he was a true wargamer, but softened up to include personality and warmth into his gaming style, says a lot for the guy. A certain openness that I think was in my genes as well as a DM. Gary G. was into a lot of the details that I chose to leave a lot out of my game. What Dave was into was a lot of what I loved and chose to build on. I could not get enough character growth in my game.

Even so, Dave came up with a couple of my favorite mechanics – those of hit points and AC. He was a wargamer at the core, and these details came from a civil war wargame he had worked on. These were the concepts we used the most outside of games. Got hurt in the football game and was bleeding from the lip. “Shit, I think I’m down 3 hit points.” Or somebody throws something at you and you dodge it easily “You can’t hit my AC dude!” The only things we came close to using so much in real live was saving throws (“I got a cold, failed my save”), and alignment (instead of asking a chick her sign, we’d say “Hey baby, what’s your alignment?”).

So both these guys came together like chocolate and peanut butter to make a game that has taken up a lot of my life. I love them both. I just wish Dave had appeared in that Futurama episode right next to Gary, rolling a D20 to see if it’s “a pleasure to meet you!”