Pig-faced orcs!

I've long marvelled at Spooktalker's superb conversions of old Grenadier orcs - "the pig-faced orcs that never were", as he puts it. The skill in the sculpting and painting is daunting. Yesterday, though, I saw Mike Monaco's conversions, which added an additional dash of inspiration

As I had one of the same plastic miniatures kicking around, I thought I'd have a bash at some conversions last night. An hour or so of fiddling with green stuff, and these four snouted villains materialised. I hope to get at least some of them painted tonight.

Although I think that Tolkien's orcs are far more interesting than anything that RPGs have produced, I've always had a soft spot for D&D's pig-faced orcs, which may owe their appearance more to Disney's Sleeping Beauty than Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Pig-faced orcs offer a few advantages in D&D games. First, they're suitably distinct from goblins and hobgoblins. Tolkien's orcs, of course, are goblins (and some of them are hobgoblins too). So humanoids that are visually distinct from the goblin-hobgoblin-bugbear types add variety.

Also, pig-men just work well as a monster type. Pigs are dangerous, undiscriminating in their appetites and uncannily close to humans in various ways.

Finally, having pig-faced orcs as just one type of orc creates an interesting diversity and the potential for orcish tribes with local peculiarities. We might boil down the function of orcs in RPGs to Dragon Warriors' "archetypal hench-things of evil". But I think we can tease out a strand within that: orcs are "archetypal hench-things of evil" that are created by evil. Whether by the corruption of "rationale incarnates" or the elevation of beasts or the animation of stone (just some of Tolkien's theories of orc origin), orcs serve as both the instruments of evil and its products. They're the result of tampering with the natural order of things, whether that's done by Morgoth or Sauron or Saruman or Moreau. So pig-faced orcs can function as the creations of one particular sorcerer - whereas those of another might resemble apes or dogs or whatever.