The party
defeats the orc tribe that has been preying on merchant traffic. The orc
warlord, his armor festooned with the blacked skulls of countless innocents he’s
murdered and feasted upon, did not prove worthy against the righteous blade of
the party paladin. The orcish lieutenants, and all of their fighting men,
decimated by the party. But those warrens are not just filled with snarling orc
maniacs, but also with their wives, and their children. What the hell do you
do?
This is a
usual ‘problem’ for adventurers, a problem that arises because back in the old
days of D&D someone decided to add a phrase akin to ‘there are
non-combatants equal to X% of the fighters.’ Namely, you just beat the bad
guys, but the bad guys had themselves a village, a tiny civilization. So what
the hell do you do with the left overs?
Poor DMs, or
DMs who have a poor grasp of ethics, tend to use this as a kafka trap for the
party, and especially for that erstwhile stand-in for morality and ethics in
D&D and Pathfinder, the paladin.
The Kafka
trap goes..
Orcs are
evil (says so in their monster manual entry) so you should kill them, right?
Even if they’re infants and wizened crones.
BUT
Orc children
are children, and their wives are non-combatants. So killing them is killing
someone defenseless.
BUT
If you don’t
kill the children, they’ll grow up to be more chaotic evil orcs.
And so on.
This is
usually tied in with the question of what an alignment on a creature means. I
think it ties in with something deeper, and something that would be liable to
make certain gamers uncomfortable.
It ties in
with Civilization. Big C.
See, in the
old school, which is where this info comes from, the primary driving forces
weren’t good and evil. If you go back to the original D&D, your alignments
are Chaotic, Lawful and Neutral. ACKs returns to this somewhat. These
alignments basically boiled down to where the character stood on upholding
Civilization.
Orc tribes
were viewed as reckless merciless savages, not as people dedicated to civilized
society.
The orcs
have a tribe because they’re essentially a tribe of ‘savages’ you have to deal
with, degenerate by virtue (or in this case vice) of their own twisted
upbringing. When you fight them, and see
the squalor and filth they live in, this sends a message. That message is ‘this
is what being like this earns you’ and ‘this is where you will end up if you
don’t honor your father, your gods, and the polis.’
A lot of old
schoolers would’ve just left the orcs behind after the threat was dealt with.
Civilization reasserted itself, and hopefully the next generation of orcs would
rise up realizing that if you messed with the city nearby, you got your skull
pounded in, and therefore learned to play nice. Although most players didn’t
expect orcs to learn.
I heard a
definition for barbarian once that basically stated they are people who apply laws
inequitably, who view it as an affront that the same blade they cut you with,
can be used to cut them. Essentially,
that their society is like a giant child, all front, all swagger, and no real
strength to it.
That, is
essentially what the humanoids were meant to be. Stupid, brutish, and mean.
Full of threats and bluster until confronted with someone who proved their
equal, and then quailing and running away until they thought they could get
away with it again. Their society, their
culture, is garbage. They contribute nothing. They are prone to being used by
the evil, chaotic and perverse because all they understand is how to tear down,
and their works are designed only to denude and pillage, not to enrich.
Acknowledging
this is difficult for a certain breed of gamers because they’ve been poisoned with
the belief that all cultures are equal, all are equally valuable, and that
society is somehow an ‘experience.’ These are the gamers who sadly possess the
belief that a society living in quaint mud huts with respiratory disease and rickets
and who stone their every third child if he has red hair, is of equal value
with say a democratic society with medicine, music and no ginger stoning.
One
disposition, an obvious one, of the orc child also represents a terminal threat
to these people because of, well.. Educators of the Native American tribes in
the United States had a phrase ‘Kill the Indian, Save the Child,’ and in
Australia there is a constant talk about a ‘Lost Generation,’ basically,
children in both cases who were raised by one society and left the other. One
culture was supplanted by another. In real life the comparative value of these cultures
is somewhat arguable, but I’d be hard pressed to think that educating a child to
prefer a system of representative government, equal rights for all, and so
forth over one where ‘the tribe’ takes primacy, would be the objectively wrong
act.
That obvious disposition I mentioned above, is
to take the children, and raise them as members of the adventurer’s society.
This is actually how I handled these things in my homebrew campaign setting.
Goblins, Kobolds, orcs are typically now active members of society. They own
property. They follow the law. They join the army, start businesses, become
mayors and aldermen, read papers, and do everything that a normal member of the
society would. All because, over the years, dozens of campaigns against humanoid
tribes ran into the situation of what to do with the women and children, and
their answer was..save the children, destroy humanoid culture.
In my
campaign setting, Orc culture has been more or less eradicated, studied by only
a few historians, linguists and the like. The language is even starting to die
out. However, aside from a few dodgy places, and a few dodgy people, there
really is no ‘orc threat,’ anymore. Orcs in the hills aren’t referred to as ‘orcs
attacking our merchants’ but as bandits, or insurrectionists. They aren’t separate
anymore, they’re inside. The ‘real’ orcs are the guys kicking back pints in the
bar, the ones with head-dresses and crude battleaxes squatting in caves are
atavists and intentional ones at that.
The problem
of the orc child is really more a problem of the long term requirements of the
adventurer’s society and civilization. They’re a pain in the butt, and a moral
pain in the butt, but it’s one of laziness vs diligence, society versus
barbarism, and how far the party is willing to get engaged and sacrificed to
enrich one and fight the other.
