"Most orcs are shaped like humans ..."

I've been meaning to start this blog for a good year or two now. The chief topics will be books, monsters and fantasy games, but other whimsy will doubtless intrude. I have a very long and somewhat pretentious post on orcs to go up when I finish it, but in the meantime, here's a thought.

Today, I bought the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, incited to do so by the marvellous Monsters and Manuals blog. I've always been a bit of an outsider to D&D. My first RPG was Runequest. I played a fair bit of AD&D with friends and borrowed and read through many of the books (especially the Monster Manual). But I always found D&D faintly baffling - THAC0 this and hit dice that. The Basic version looked somewhat friendlier, although I only looked through it a few times at a friend's house.

Anyway, the description of orcs in the Cyclopedia is faintly familiar from back then:

"An orc is an ugly humanlike creature, and looks like a combination of animal and man. Most orcs are shaped like humans, but many have bestial facial features and teeth."

But wait! What's that? Most orcs are shaped like humans? What about those that aren't? Might there be tribes of quadrupedal orcs? Or some with tails or wings?

Or are most within a given band man-like, but accompanied by a few that hop or slither or crawl?

Now, as a child, I'd have found this heresy of the foulest sort. Back then, orcs were goblins and goblins were orcs - as in Tolkien. I approved of Runequest's non-Gloranthan take on orcs, as in Griffin Island: small, strong and hardy humanoids with ape-like arms and a preference for darkness. I disliked the profligacy with which D&D splashed its humanoids around: bugbears, goblins, kobolds, orcs, norkers, svarts and the rest.

But literature isn't gaming. Glorantha is one of the few gaming settings that is genuinely coherent in a literary way; Tekumel is another. They're quite hard to do well, though. But a pulpy, Mos Eisley-ish setting in which there are plenty of species competing for the same ecological niches? That's dead easy to do - and lots of fun.

And orcs that hop or slither or crawl might well be part of it.