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.

  

Fearing the End: Good Deities

Now.

Good deities.

As I stated in the last post, you want to make a world where your players fear the end. Then I went on a several paragraph rant about how evil deities need to give something. I did that for a reason, so I can set up an important counterpoint.

Good deities need to take things.

A lot of good deities in core games are sunshine, rainbows and self-esteem boosting nonsense. Their philosophies sometimes are pap that people can go along with. This is because most publishers don’t want to offend anybody.

To quote G.K. Chesterton, “The Christian Ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult, and left untried.”

Good deities typically should make demands. But the trick is, the demands have to be reasonable. Those demands can however be onerous because well, people are jerks.

And that, is why you need to work on the good deities to make the end scary. Because for a really scary end? You need the good guys to do it.

Ragnaroks aren’t scary. Going to die with Odin might be grim, but its something you’re average player character can undertake with an almost jovial mindset.

Cosmic Horror stories can be filled with despair, and the concept that life and existence are meaningless can be terrifying, but there aren’t really many true apocalypses in Lovecraft.

But the idea of  the good, loving deity letting the world’s sky roll up like a scroll, flames raining from heaven, death riding on a pale horse across the world, and a final judgment? That’s a bit more frightening. Its more frightening because it’s the /good guys/ doing it.

My campaign setting has one of those ‘end of the world prophesies.’ Supposedly after the recurring bad guy who shows up every few centuries or so to try to destroy the world runs out of ideas, his good superior counterpart is going to wake up and put an end to ‘everything that is not good.’ This unsettles people.

It unsettles the damn paladin.

It unsettles the paladin whose nickname is ‘Heaven’s Guillotine.’  

Why? Well, I think it ties in with a Lewis quote.

“As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it is also dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can’t eat and home the very place you can’t live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable. Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played”

Imagine being found wanting. You who thought you were a good person, discovering you just weren’t good enough at the end. That your vices, your shortfalls and shortcomings have resulted in you meeting a terrible fate.

And it is a fate, which you know that you deserved.

That, in my opinion, is a hell of a lot scarier than some blind idiot god in the center of the galaxy deciding not to play his flute today and condemning all to nonexistence.

Good deities should have bits that make average people frightened of them. Not like secret evil aspects, but dogmas they struggle to really deal with, events they struggle to justify.

The party will be a bit less blasé about threats of the end of the world, if instead of approaching it like a place where they get to face down the legions of hell, they instead have to face down the prospect that if they fail to stop the apocalypse clock from counting to twelve, then their time, and the time of the people they love and care about runs out, and that fair, just judgment starts.

Fearing the End: Evil Deities

Fell behind already on my posting schedule. Yeesh.

Anyway, today’s theme is making the end of the world scary. And by that, I mean approaching a problem common in world design.

Let say our prospective deity designer sits down, has his map, has his cultures set up, but somehow doesn’t have his gods or religious philosophies built. Well, firstly I wonder how this guy has his culture’s set up, but..

He needs gods. Why? Well, gods are important, whether they be “powers,” “wizards,” “eidolons,” or the dozens of other stand ins for them in fiction and world design. They’re little polestars for PC philosophy, but where we have good aligned clerics worshiping good deities and good people following good deities, what about the evil ones?

That, you see, is the frequent problem. One I want to touch on before we move on to that whole ‘making the end of the world scary,’ thing.

Now back to the “where do enemy clerics come from?” problem, some get around this by having different cultures both have goodly deities but are in opposition. This works, because after all you had European history to go off of there. However, it seems trickier when you’re dealing with the objective good-and-evil baked into some settings.

Why would people build a temple to Lovitar, Bhaal or Bane in Forgotten Realms? Who wants to spend months erecting a benighted terror building to a deity who’s literal guide post is betrayal, murder and pain? What kind of lunatics worship Xon-Kuthon from Golarian? That we know. But who actually builds his temples, and why? Why does Bob down the street decide he’s going to throw in with a guy who’s literally a lunatic deity dedicated to pain? Finding workmen, supply trains and the like of crazy folk is difficult and not every hedge temple can be erected by zombiefied build teams or fiends.

It’s for this reason that your well designed evil deities have to have, well, a point. The point they have, is of course wrong, but it has to be something that could honestly seduce someone to following them, showing them homages and building them a doom fortress. If you can’t think of why the common man would have some reason to toss some blood on the altar, make them treated like a cult.

Only in Japan does organized crime hang a shingle outside saying ‘Hey Fuggadaboutit!’ Similarly an evil god whose sole function is to be propitiated isn’t going to have an enormous bleeding temple in town with ample underground adventuring space. Someone’s got to be motivated to build that, dig up stone, move through the earth, lunch beneath the leering eyes of the soon to be animated statuary and construct the spike lined electric shark pits. Also, even in the case of organized crime, they tend to be Lawful Evil, and give something to the community. See that’s the thing.

Evil gods like Bane from Forgotten Realms? They give something. Worship me and I will give you stability. Emulate me, and you will be strong. You can picture somebody telling you about how Bane’s religion is one of peace and order, with everyone having a place in the grandiose order set down by his iron hand.  Evil gods like Second Edition’s Cyric? They don’t give anything. “Follow my orders or I’ll freaking cut you!” has trouble dealing with the marketplace of deities. And when your clergy and practitioners pray to not be an unreasonable raving maniac like you, well, something is up.

Let’s do a more one-for-one comparison so I can try to make my rambling point clearer. Namira the daedric prince from Elder Scrolls, and Urgathoa from the Pathfinder core setting.

Urgathoa is one of those ‘why would anybody not crazy follow this god’ gods to me. The pallid princess is all about how death is the true state of the living, and also bizarrely about gluttonous and lustful excess. Her worshipers are like if you took epicureans but made them all think it’s their job to speed people along the ‘tomorrow we die’ part.

But, see the thing is this.. she’s not the only deity offering parties and licentiousness to her worshipers. We’ve got Desna, Cayden, Callistria, and even an (in my mind) inappropriately NG angel all focused around ‘do what thou wilt and pass the beer.’ Except none of those guys are demanding you murder people or consort with the dead on a regular or intimate basis. Ugathoa really works better as someone running a cult, but there she sits, pallid princess and queen of depravity with suitably large terrifying temples in creepy bad guy towns. Who, aside from necromancers, lunatics and the undead would worship this one? Like can you picture a ‘ground level’ Urgathoa follower who isn’t an orc?

Now Namira? Namira doesn’t have temples. She is entirely about cults. Secret cults. She’s a deity (of a sort) dedicated to the outcast, the things that crawl in the dark, cannibalism, ugly people and things people would rather not think about. To be honest, I think I can see people making a temple to her much more easily than Urgathoa. See, one of Namira’s thing is she also looks after the ugly, the forgotten, and those looked over. She’s the protector of beggars and undesirables. Cannibalism falls under her purview because its practitioners are those people who others despise and look down on. So you have a deity who could be worshipped not only by cannibals, necromancers, assorted weirdoes, but also by beggars, the cast off, the deformed, and people who are otherwise, well, normal but looked down on by their society.

I can see a Namiran opening an orphanage and it operating entirely normally, right down to the happy well-fed and healthy kids, except until you find out how she’s been making ends meet on her meat budget.  Urgathoa? I have more trouble there.

To summarize. Evil deities need to give something to their worshippers besides cleric levels. Otherwise they’re something that only crazy people should follow. And that’s ok. But crazy people rarely have the where withal to make large dungeon complexes.