I got the idea for a game I’ve never had the guts to actually run. The game was replete with casual, fictional racism toward fictional species like the infamous antipathy between dwarves and elves. It slowly dawned on me, that this was racism.
If they could turn out good, why couldn’t other orcs be good too? Why were they listed as evil? It wasn’t ‘tends to be evil’. I kept thinking about those orc babies raised in a town to be not-evil. Unfortunately, I was a curious and inquisitive child, so my brain still wouldn’t let go of this whole orcs and good and evil thing. Finally a solution! The only readily available not evil choice for the orc babies was take them to town, make sure they find a good home, and are raised virtuously! Huzzah! These are the problems that develop when you take a literary symbol of evil and try to put it in a game like D&D and flesh it out. If taken to town, perhaps they could be raised to be not evil. A half orc could be of good alignment, so it seemed plausible that these orc kids were not predestined to be evil. You see the racism angle rearing its head here right?
So taking them to town as babies was just delaying the inevitable wasn’t it? Would it really be ‘good’ to take a young evil creature to a town full of innocents? That felt less psychotically evil, but even then, wouldn’t the orcs turn evil as adults and have to be killed in town? I looked at the rule book and right there it listed them as chaotic evil. The next most obvious choice was gathering up all the kid orcs and taking them back to the keep to be raised in an orphanage. So that’s an evil act right? Murder by inaction or something? Okay so not that. A bunch of orc kids in a dungeon full of the rotting corpses of their parents were going to die fast. I decided fast that leaving them in the room was also not an option. What should the players do with a bunch of orc kids? Killing children was right out. I decided that the women could perhaps fight, but the children clearly couldn’t. I was running headfirst into the (imaginary) horrors of war and racism and child killing and some serious shit here man. Before I could coax my idiot players to something approaching the right decision I had to decide what the right decision was, and I had a seven year old brain to figure it out. This bothered me for at least six months as I tried to figure out what the players were supposed to do with the women and children. Their blades are dripping with blood, the air sizzles with burning orc flesh… and then… I’m imagining my brother and his friends, swords drawn, spells ready, charging into this room, slaughtering the twelve guy orcs. The few furnishings in the room are likewise of no value. The males have 2d6 silver pieces each, the others have nothing of worth. COMMON ROOM: Here are quartered 12 male orcs (AC 7, HD I, hp 4 each, #AT I, D 1-6, Save F I, ML 8) and 18 females and 9 young (who do not fight). All was going well until I came to this room.ġ0. As I read I tried to imagine what would happen in each room, and what I would steer my rambunctious players into doing there. As DM, I had to read the adventure, and I quickly figured out that even though I was three years younger than the players, I had a lot of control on what they did even if not directly. You start at the keep, you hear about a cave system that has about a dozen tribes of humanoids living in caves cheek to jowl (which never really made any sense but hey) and then you go there, kill the bad guys get the treasure and go back to the keep as heroes. Yeah that went about as well as it sounds.Īn adventure came with the basic DnD set called Keep on the Borderlands. They figured out they needed something called a Dungeon Master, and as the picked on nerdy kid brother, I was handed some books and informed I was going to be DM. My older brother was 10, and he and is friends decided they wanted to play, and of course wanted to be the heroes. I became a dungeon master in 1979 at the age of 7.