h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Allrighty nice article... but there are heaps of different definitions of orcs out there... this one reads to me a bit like taken from AD&D or so... ever hear about the Orcs in Lord of the Rings? I think we are just missing a lot of the orc world here...

Chili

I agree entirely. Even in Tolkein the orcs range from scrawny little things to the Uruks and Uruk-hai, who I seem to remember were some six-foot plus. They were also more than a match for any unnamed human soldier (although the heroes went through them like AD&D characters right enough).
Plus, any discussion of orcs in recent RPGs should include at least a nod towards Orkworld [URL removed by moderator] a rather nifty-looking attempt to show the other side of orcs (not that I've actually got a copy; it doesn't seem to have been published over here and I'm damned if I'm shelling out the postage from the states).
Still; what is here is pretty solid stuff on the Standard Fantasy Orc (aka a member of the Green-Skinned Hordes).

The Prophet

Further, I'm sure this would be found offensive by any orcs, so that must be against H2G2's guidelines.

Nothing in here about AD&D half-orcs, either, which would have been nice.

(And I'm fairly sure that RPG doesn't have a 'C' for Computer in it, too....)

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And of course we'll all see real orcs when the Lord of the Rings movies start coming out in a little over a year:

The Fellowship of the Ring
Christmas 2001

The Two Towers
Christmas 2002

The Return of the King
Christmas 2003

I hope they don't try to make the apendixes into movies, too!

I hope they DO make a prequel of The Hobbit.

Maybe this yarn would work better under the title "An Introduction To The World Of Orcs"

Calling this article an introduction is a very good idea. I just thought about the literally thousands of different types of orcs. The Shadowrun Orc, The MERP-Orc, the Games Workshop Orc, the AD&D Orc and what not. The funny thing is that they are all so different from each other... I mean if somebody says "Orc" every one, who is bit into fantasy, will know what it is... but hey a Shadowrun Orc is basically a mutated human (as described in the rules) while Tolkiens Orcs are an entirely different race, even split into several sub-species.

Still we all share the same picture of an Orc... Fantasy is weird...

Enough rambling...

Chili

And as well as GW's fantasy Orcs, there's the wonders of the whole Space Ork setup. That was some quality material.

The Prophet

P.S. Thanks to those who gave me advice on finding Orkworld.

what's the spelling thing - Games Workshop have orks, and tolkein had orcs - I originally got told that this was because GW wanted to trademark the name 'ork'... but if there's an orkworld, then that can't be true...
ideas?

If "ork" is spelled differently it can be trademarked, and if "orkworld" is one word that may possibly escape violating that trademark. I'm not sure. Maybe Orkworld is owned by GW?

The words "orc" and "goblin" come from 14th century Old French from Middle High German.

When I was at primary school, many years before I read Tolkein, I had heard of Orks. In those days they were closely associated with Trolls. Trolls come from Scandinavian folklore.

Tolkein's books brought Orcs to a wider, English-speaking, audience.

I think the consensus here seems to be that this article just isn't up to snuff...

The real question is how it got to be an oficial entry when it clearly is so lacking.

Just what kind of editing review is going on? I was given to beleive that there was a certian standard.

JT, h2g2 articles introduce a subject which is them discussed in the forums. These discussions throw up all sorts of new information. Periodically the articles are updated by incorporating new info into the Edited article.

Sub-editors edit the original submitted material. They do not research and rewrite a submitted article. That is the researchers job.
This is where you come in. Write the definitive article on orcs. If it is good enough it will replace this one.

A word of warning. Orcs were around long before Tolkein, D&D and RPG. Orcs only recently became popular in English-speaking countries. Tolkein wrote about them in 1940, approx 600 years after they appeared in European folklore.

Happy researching.

Loony.

Your explaination seems right on to me. But I (perhaps wrongly) expect a certian quality in an official entry. This should be a research article, not an official edited entry. It is too incomplete to have made it in as a "real" entry. It looks like a break down on the editors side.

This should be the "starting point" for the real entry instead of a bunch of comments on how it just doesn't hit.

Am I wrong in my expectation of how this is supposed to work? This clearly didn't go through the new peer review process...

I believe the article does work in many ways. It supplies historical facts and details about orcs.

It does not pretend to supply information about 20th-century English-speaking orcs. Why don't you write an article about these modern-day orcs?

Entries that have been through the peer review scheme have not started filtering through yet. There are still about 300 articles from the old queue waiting to be subbed and posted.

As Loony points out, Tolkein did not invent orcs. As with most of his material he extracted the bare bones from Old English and Germanic sources. If the first orcs appear (in written form) in the 14th century, then both spellings were probably used in different sources, as most European languages had fairly unformalised spelling at the time.

IIRC The Games Workshop fantasy setting had the orcs, while the Warhammer 40,000 Sci-fi setting had da orks. I suspect that both are valid spellings, but 'orc' is in more general usage because Tolkein used it, whereas GW felt that the 'k' gave the word a rougher look that they felt suited the more comedic Space Orks.

The Prophet

The article is about Orcs as we all know them. Not da orks, not space orcs, and certainly not about orcs not even called orcs.

I can give the same advice as was given above, do you feel that it lacks information about some specific kind of orcs (or orks) then do an article about those.

i did this artcile because I couldn't locate any material on Orcs in the guide, and I thought that it was missing.

LewiDK

By the way: Not all RPG is paper and dice. There are variations, ex. LiveRPG and a used above ComputerRPG where the dice and paper are exchanged by a computer