Orcs no longer evil in D&D Monster Manual

Changes are coming to the orcs in Dungeons & Dragons. Or, to put it more succinctly, changes are being confirmed once more – because these changes have been around for a few years. What began with Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything in 2020,and was reinforced with the Player’s Handbook in 2024 will be confirmed once more when the newest edition of the Monster Manual hits bookshelves this February.

The change concerns Orcs specifically, but also involves the whole concept of race in Dungeons & Dragons. To give some context, for decades, there have been races in Dungeons & Dragons that have been considered evil, while others are considered good. Orcs, stolen from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings along with many other things (the Tolkien estate sued Dungeons & Dragons early on and got them to change the name of hobbits to halflings) were meant to be an evil race due to them being that way in Lord of the Rings. Though in Lord of the Rings, orcs are merely corrupted elves, D&D did away with this part of the lore and made them their own race, albeit one that behaves exactly like the corrupted elves from Lord of the Rings.

From the start, there were always some players and DM’s who rebelled against the idea of evil races, and who made custom good orcs. Things were further complicated when half-orcs became a playable core race for D&D players. Some consider this to be a victory for the minority of players & DM’s who didn’t like the idea of evil races.

After the widespread Black Lives Matter protests across the world in the summer of 2020, the people running Dungeons & Dragons decided they needed to make changes to how race was dealt with.

The influx of progressive gamers into Dungeons & Dragons was cited as a major reason for the change. One lead writer of D&D was cited as saying that a majority of D&D players supported changing things. The term race was replaced with the term species, and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything did away with the concept of species always correlating with moral alignment. The Player’s Handbook made the orcs fully playable, and now the Monster Manual will completely do away with the idea of orcs being monsters.

What do you think of these changes? Let us know in the comments!


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