Orcs and the "gamefication" of Middle Earth

[Vermis]

Fantastic post, Hobgoblin. Right cheered me up, that has.

I only take the orcish bits seriously! Honest ... well, apart from the trolls and the balrogs ...  

We need to get you onto the subject of how skinny elves were, and how pointy their ears.

As this discussion is now touching on fantasy worlds that Tolkien didn't create, I think that the orcs, goblins and other "goblinoids" of non-Tolkien fantasy settings have plenty of self-worth as what they are (as opposed to what they're not, which is to say Tolkien's orcs).

Which would be fine, except the GW style orc seems to have become the default setting, and the most common type. DnD, WoW, Rackham, etc. etc. I think I've moaned about this before but we're at a point where e.g. Mantic and Shieldwolf can release green gorillas with tusked bucket-jaws, and someone'll wax lyrical about how they're totally different from GW orcs.

IIRC the most prominent Tolkien-ish (sorta kinda) orc release of recent years, outside of GW's LotR ranges, has been Wargames Factory's plastic set, with their delightful double-fronted torsos and mitten hands. And now their probable disappearance into a Warlord Games black hole, anyway. And that leads me to agree with your next point:

I'll go a bit OT here. While I find that some old ranges are unsatisfactory in terms of sculpting quality, I do agree that the "wargamefication" of orcs and goblins (and other fantasy classics) into figures lacking personality (by way of "standardised" poses, overly similar weapons, armour and clothing, and a "streamlining" of details) is a bad development. What I hate the most about it is that it's leading to a competitive culture of "haves and have-nots" among wargamers and miniatures collectors, a culture which boils down to owning difficult-to-acquire OOP figures.

While Hobgoblin's already pointed out that a lot are still in production, I have to think that they're not altogether visible or well-marketed. (Only just found out about some of them through Hob, myself) And although I've been tempted, I also have to agree that the sculpting is... to put it diplomatically, a bit 'aged'.

What we need is more new figures (not least of orcs and goblins) that aren't so "wargamefied", to replace (and improve upon) those that have gone OOP and to provide a better alternative to modern "wargamefied" ranges like GW and Mantic.

I've thought of giving it a try. Short orcs are already part of my little fantasy background.

But it'll probably take years.

And someone'll come along and do it better anyway.

I am trying to figure out how to represent a supply train for a Goblin army where the pack animals wouldn't be eaten before the battle.

Trussed-up wargs. So mad that you dared tie them to a cart, that they'll eat you before the battle.

[Digitarii]

IIRC the most prominent Tolkien-ish (sorta kinda) orc release of recent years, outside of GW's LotR ranges, has been Wargames Factory's plastic set, with their delightful double-fronted torsos and mitten hands. And now their probable disappearance into a Warlord Games black hole, anyway.

I had to comment on this - I managed to get hold of two boxes of these mitten-handed abominations. I built 3 of the little darlings and decided "Wow, these suck!" The only useful bits out of the box for me were the heads and the crescent shields. I was able to go forward with my Dragon Rampant Hobgoblin army using these bits in conjunction with Frostgrave soldier and cultist bodies and Fireforge Foot Sergeants bodies. Arms came from these sets as well.

Trussed-up wargs. So mad that you dared tie them to a cart, that they'll eat you before the battle.

Now that's funny!

[Blackwolf]

Now if only someone could write something similar about Elves,not I unfortunately,my expression is rubbish
Again; well done Hobgoblin,an excellent example of LAF at it's best!

[KGatch113]

I like the WGF Orcs! I use the bodies and then add arms from the German warband kit, and will mix in other parts when I can.

[beefcake]

Very nice read there Hobgoblin. In LOTR gaming terms I really think that the best range of orcs/uruks/goblins are the Asgard ones. They come in a variety of different sizes and have a stooped look to them.

[SotF]

With orcs, I tend to try different things with them as the one most tend to think of ends up being something that feels far to much like a Saturday morning cartoon villain group. Games Workshop tended to be a major contributor to that, and WarCraft has tended to go to far into the "misunderstood" victims side.

The big thing I've gone with in the warbands I've been working on and for the D&D setting I've been hammering out is taking them in a more nomadic trader type culture. They've got mammoth caravans that wander around while still taking a lot of the barbarian aesthetic for them.

Not Tolkien, but not the parody versions there.

The major setting I've used for a while has highly militaristic orcs and goblins in it, one where there had been a magical war that went, essentially, nuclear and left a good portion of the world in ruins. Orcs and the goblinoids descended from the military caste of one side of that and had been selectively bred for their military then, a process that, somewhat, continued with the clans having keepers of the lines as a major part of the culture where they are still trying to improve their warriors by pairing the best of them...

Managed to really creep out a few players in that one when they discovered that part of the setting.

[ZeroTwentythree]

Great discussion. I agree with the original post in regard to Tolkien and his orcs. However...

As this discussion is now touching on fantasy worlds that Tolkien didn't create, I think that the orcs, goblins and other "goblinoids" of non-Tolkien fantasy settings have plenty of self-worth as what they are (as opposed to what they're not, which is to say Tolkien's orcs). Otherwise we may as well be sniping at Tolkien also - he's hardly innocent of engaging in the bastardisation of concepts that weren't his at first.

I do find Tolkien's legendarium, in its unadulterated and "correctly understood" form, a refreshing counterpoint to the D&D-derived traditions of fantasy, but my point is that they all have self-worth independently of each other. Even GW's gorillaform orcs have their place in the fauna (although I'm not overfond of them myself).

That's how I feel as well. As much as I love Tolkien's work, I can also appreciate other visions. Generally, I gravitate towards the term and concepts of "goblins" in gaming, though, as "orc" still has a more Tolkienesque connotation for me. I can keep the idea of a mischievous fairy "goblin" or a scheming murderous villain "goblin" separate from a Tolkien "goblin."

Which would be fine, except the GW style orc seems to have become the default setting, and the most common type. DnD, WoW, Rackham, etc. etc. I think I've moaned about this before but we're at a point where e.g. Mantic and Shieldwolf can release green gorillas with tusked bucket-jaws, and someone'll wax lyrical about how they're totally different from GW orcs.

I would tend to agree with this too. I think it's clear that they were riding coat-tails with their designs. Certainly not the first to do so, either.

I do admit to having a fondness for Foundry's largest great orc/ogre mercenaries, or at least the largest, foppish ones. But as stated above, that's something entirely different from Tolkien to me.

[Hobgoblin]

That's how I feel as well. As much as I love Tolkien's work, I can also appreciate other visions. Generally, I gravitate towards the term and concepts of "goblins" in gaming, though, as "orc" still has a more Tolkienesque connotation for me. I can keep the idea of a mischievous fairy "goblin" or a scheming murderous villain "goblin" separate from a Tolkien "goblin."

Yes - that's exactly how I feel. I read somewhere (probably on the Fabled Lands blog) that the writers of the wonderful Dragon Warriors RPG were forced by their publisher (if I recall correctly) to include orcs along side their well-developed folkloric goblins and hobgoblins. Their hobgoblins are smaller and wizened and more magically powerful than their goblins, whose magical knowledge extended to mere cantrips.

I should stress again that my original points are only intended to apply to Middle Earth gaming - and are observations rather than prescriptions! (No one should take seriously a crank ranting about goblins on the internet! )

The point I was really getting at is that there is a lot of Middle Earth gaming material that purports to be based on the books, but is really based on accretions of "non-canonical" info - from the various encyclopaedias of Middle Earth to Merp and beyond. One thing I saw, for example, on the internet was a painstaking recreation of the Battle of the Fords of the Isen - except that it stated that the Uruk-hai killed Theodred (they didn't, in Tolkien's writing; it was the axe-armed "Men or Orc-Men", who are clearly distinguished from the uruks).

Now, there's nothing wrong with gaming Middle Earth "non-canonically". But I think one of the attractions of the setting is that there's so much material that you can actually dig into it a bit and uncover certain points. In that respect, Tolkien gaming is perhaps more like historical gaming than most fantasy games.

That said, I was thinking about a game of the Battle of the Five Armies. If I were to use my distinctly non-LotR "cave goblins" (who owe their colouration to Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen - see below) for the orc armies, they actually contradict nothing in the text of The Hobbit. In that respect, it would be no different from an illustrator illustrating The Hobbit solely on the basis of the info it contains - which is a perfectly good approach (and what most illustrators, beyond the "Tolkien specialists", actually do with the book). These guys don't fit at all with the LotR descriptions, though - or those in the wider "mythology".

I do admit to having a fondness for Foundry's largest great orc/ogre mercenaries, or at least the largest, foppish ones. But as stated above, that's something entirely different from Tolkien to me.

The Foundry orc mercenaries have a rather wonderful Puss in Boots quality, I think - you can imagine them disporting themselves in lavish but ill-kempt chateaux.

[Captain Blood]

As this discussion is now touching on fantasy worlds that Tolkien didn't create, I think that the orcs, goblins and other "goblinoids" of non-Tolkien fantasy settings have plenty of self-worth as what they are (as opposed to what they're not, which is to say Tolkien's orcs). Otherwise we may as well be sniping at Tolkien also - he's hardly innocent of engaging in the bastardisation of concepts that weren't his at first.

I do find Tolkien's legendarium, in its unadulterated and "correctly understood" form, a refreshing counterpoint to the D&D-derived traditions of fantasy, but my point is that they all have self-worth independently of each other. Even GW's gorillaform orcs have their place in the fauna (although I'm not overfond of them myself).

But the central point surely, is that it's all derived from Tolkien?
Of course there were goblins, elves and dwarves before Tolkien, in everything from Norse mythology, to Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm, and widespread in folklore of many cultures for centuries. But these were very different from the serious 'races' that Tolkien created. And orcs specifically, were his invention. So to say there are alternative, 'non-Tolkien fantasy settings', or a 'D&D derived' fantasy setting involving orcs, which are somehow original and owe nothing to Tolkien misses the point. They are ALL derived from Tolkien. Every single wacky little games company or kickstarter running today, churning out yet more green-skinned, Mockney 'orcs', can trace a line back to Tolkien's original creation. The whole massive fantasy wargames industry is derived from Tolkien. Because if Tolkien had not defined (or redefined) orcs/goblins, elves and dwarves in his books, there would be no D&D or Warhammer or all their thousands of imitators and spin-offs - miniatures, RPGs, books, films, and so on.

You may be right that many of these legions of sub-Tolkien creations and settings now have self-worth independent of each other. But Hobgoblin's central point is (and I paraphrase) that most wargamers' notion of orcs in 2016 bears little or no relation to the orcs invented and described by Tolkien. Over the course of 70-odd years, his creations have been taken up, commercialised, bastardised and distorted to such an extent, by tens of thousands of people riding on the great man's coattails, that if you now go back to the source material, and want to portray the Middle Earth described in Tolkien's books, 99% of the commercially available orcs from wargames figure makers, look nothing like it. Basically, through a process of evolution, Tolkien's original concepts have been hijacked, gradually bent out of shape, and redefined in the popular imagination for two generations of gamers. And it's the ersatz image which has stuck, and not the original.

Which is, for me at least, a pity

[whiskey priest]

To add another stem to the argument, I'd have to say that one of my formative images of Orcs are from Ralph Bakshi's version of Lord of the Rings, mainly as I would have seen it for the first time around about the time I first read the books. How do we think they fit in with the changing image of Tolkien's creations?

[Evil Doctor]

Whiskey Priest, I love those Bakshi Orcs! Always look menacing and the shear diversity of forms was great. The black riders were well done too. Not sure about the Balrog...

I'm with Captain Blood. You can do what you like with Goblins, but call them Orcs and you are referencing Tolkien. Otherwise, why call them Orcs at all? I agree that all of our modern fantasy tropes (or at least the majority) derive from Tolkien. Ask a person one hundred years ago what an Elf is (faery, fey, inhuman, magical, cruel, immortal), and you'd get a totally different answer compared to asking someone these days (human sized, pointy ears, immortal, noble, wise, kind).

Oh and Hobgoblin, I can't get enough of your Orcs!

EvilD

[Evil Doctor]

Oh, and another point on the figures available these days. What wargaming/GW has led to is the idea of miniatures made to look good in regiments. This has meant (certainly in the early days) lots of regimented poses, with commonality of weapons and kit, and finally of appearance. Even now with more variation in poses, the models are the same sized and armed the same way. They may have their weapons in different positions etc., but they look like an army of clones.

People come in all shapes and sizes, fat, thin, handsome, ugly. What I love about the miniatures that Hobgoblin has shown is that they look like individuals, like each one is a character and has a story to tell. They are a joy to paint, and even if you bring a common style to them as I and Hobgoblin have done with ours (I'm a fellow pre-slotta enthusiast), they still look like individuals. This is true of many of the early miniature designs, which were built for RPGing I believe - they certainly look like the sculptor just made what they fancied rather than churning out multitudes of basically the same figure. I think there is some desire to go back that way in miniature design, especially with the popularity of skirmish games, but I lost interest in Citadel when they stopped making characterful RPG models and started churning out armies. Not my bag at all.

EvilD

[Sunjester]

Well done Hobgoblin for a great initial post and I've enjoyed reading through this thread.

My own orcs are a wide mixture of types from Chronicle and Asgard to Vendal and Ral Partha. 400+ figures and not a single slota-based GW amongst them. Many I've painted myself, but a lot of the older models are ones I've picked up ready-painted secondhand. Although I mainly use them for gaming Middle Earth, I am aware that many of them are really too big for what they are representing. However at the end of the day, if I liked the models, I bought them. My main criteria was that the captured the "feel" of Tolkien's works, rather than that of D&D or GW. I played D&D in the 70s and owed appropriate orc models, but they were never part of my ME armies.

As an old fart my view of orcs is more influenced by Tolkien's writings and the artworks of the 1960s and 70s, rather than Peter Jackson's films. I enjoyed both trilogies, but (for me) they were just NOT Tolkien!

[Rhoderic]

So to say there are alternative, 'non-Tolkien fantasy settings', or a 'D&D derived' fantasy setting involving orcs, which are somehow original and owe nothing to Tolkien

I didn't say this. D&D is derived from Tolkien. Many other fantasy settings are derived from D&D in the first order, and Tolkien in the second order. "Non-Tolkien fantasy settings" simply means fantasy settings which the man himself did not directly craft. Non-Tolkien, not non-Tolkienesque. I doubt Tolkien himself (persnickety man prone to a disapproving attitude as he was) would have labelled Greyhawk, the Warhammer world or the Warcraft world "Tolkien fantasy settings"

They are ALL derived from Tolkien. Every single wacky little games company or kickstarter running today, churning out yet more green-skinned, Mockney 'orcs', can trace a line back to Tolkien's original creation. The whole massive fantasy wargames industry is derived from Tolkien. Because if Tolkien had not defined (or redefined) orcs/goblins, elves and dwarves in his books, there would be no D&D or Warhammer or all their thousands of imitators and spin-offs - miniatures, RPGs, books, films, and so on.

No disagreement from me

You may be right that many of these legions of sub-Tolkien creations and settings now have self-worth independent of each other. But Hobgoblin's central point is (and I paraphrase) that most wargamers' notion of orcs in 2016 bears little or no relation to the orcs invented and described by Tolkien.

I think the point was that most wargamers' notion of the orcs of Tolkien's legendarium bears little or no resemblance to the orcs invented and described by Tolkien. Certainly D&D, Warhammer and the rest of it have had a damaging "backfeed effect" on Tolkien's legendarium. But just to be clear, I think the blame for that lies on the collective of wargamers and other fantasy aficionados making that conflation, as opposed to the "alternative" fantasy settings themselves, or their creators. Gygax and other people like him crafting Tolkien-derived fantasy settings weren't (presumably) trying to impose themselves on Tolkien. The public at large just made it turn out like that anyway.

Over the course of 70-odd years, his creations have been taken up, commercialised, bastardised and distorted to such an extent, by tens of thousands of people riding on the great man's coattails, that if you now go back to the source material, and want to portray the Middle Earth described in Tolkien's books, 99% of the commercially available orcs from wargames figure makers, look nothing like it. Basically, through a process of evolution, Tolkien's original concepts have been hijacked, gradually bent out of shape, and redefined in the popular imagination for two generations of gamers. And it's the ersatz image which has stuck, and not the original.

Which is, for me at least, a pity

I agree that it's a pity that Tolkien's image of orcs is less available in miniature form than many of the alternative images, especially the dominant gorillaform orcs (because in an ideal world there would be no "dominant" image). Tolkien's orcs have self-worth as well (obviously! ), so there ought to be miniatures for them, just as there ought to be miniatures for the alternative images that have self-worth, even the gorillaforms.

[Hobgoblin]

Oh, and another point on the figures available these days. What wargaming/GW has led to is the idea of miniatures made to look good in regiments. This has meant (certainly in the early days) lots of regimented poses, with commonality of weapons and kit, and finally of appearance. Even now with more variation in poses, the models are the same sized and armed the same way. They may have their weapons in different positions etc., but they look like an army of clones.

That's the point I should have made when I was talking about "wargamefication". It's interesting to look at two of the best ranges of Citadel orcs (not very Tolkienesque, but wonderful in their own right): the C15 Armoured Orcs and the first slottabase Orcs (see below for both; both are by the Perrys).

One of the things that's so great about these is how varied they are. It's not just that they've got interesting details, but they've got tremendously varied equipment. They're not uniform and optimised for Warhammer. So, in the preslotta range, we get heavily armoured orcs with shields and two-handed weapons. We get orcs with javelins, and an armoured crossbowman. And we get a couple of orcs in heavy armour with shields and darts.

In the slottabased range, we get a leader in light armour with just a mace; he's a great figure, but he's not optimised for gaming (e.g. with a shield or a two-handed weapon) - and all the better for it (the original Grom was just the same). We get a cyclops orc with two scimitars, just for the hell of it. We get a couple of spearmen without shields. And we get a heavily armoured orc with a two-handed axe and a bow. But that variety wasn't to last. Soon after Kev Adams took over, Citadel's orcs became much more regimented: dual wielders; polearm types; those with "had weapon and shield"; and fairly uniform archers. The charming irregulars (who still owed a considerable debt to Tolkien - look at those bandy legs, scimitars and the proliferation of archers) were no more.