Orc Babies and Civilization

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.