What if orcs evolved through inheritance of acquired characteristics, so that a one-armed orc produced one-armed progeny; a body-builder orc produced more muscular whelps; a studious orc produced more knowledgeable offspring, and so on? What if orc breeds branched off from each other whenever a group of orcs began to act differently, or were subject to different environmental factors, or decided to purposively evolve?
How long would it take for a group of orcs to evolve themselves - through learning, exercise, surgery, and so on - into species of thing altogether different, so that they resembled dragons, displacer beasts, pegasi, and so forth?
Perhaps less ambitiously, how long would it take for a group of orcs to evolve themselves into three-armed variants, two-headed variants, super-intelligent variants, magical variants, and so on? How extreme would orcish body-modification get if they thought they could pass on their modified forms to their children?
Perhaps orcs are not degenerate elves... but elves are evolved orcs?
ReplyDeleteThe thought did cross my mind!
DeleteYou’re describing goblins in Clinton R. Nixon’s sword and sorcery story game The Shadow of Yesterday. They can adapt their bodies to fit their environment, but they sometimes lock into long-term ur-types like Orcs, Trolls, Apes, Ghouls, various animalistic types, etc. They also pass their adaptations to their offspring. Their ability to adapt is linked to fulfillment to a specific addiction — these addictions can become linked to the ur-types as well: an orc is addicted to violence and rage, a troll to domination, a ghoul to human flesh, etc.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I've kind of sworn off new games. But that sounds like a cool idea.
DeleteIt would be a neat way to explain the entire dungeon ecology. (Why's there's a displacer beast in the room next door to the three-armed orc tribe? Because they're cousins!)
ReplyDeleteBut then again, as I've just argued, why call them orcs at all?
https://hobgoblinry.blogspot.com/2018/08/whats-in-name-hobgoblins-grumkins-and.html
Yeah. "Orc" just becomes a name for "enemy" or "monster" or "dangerous thing".
DeleteWhich might actually be a good thing, not least for keeping the players on their toes.
Delete(Just spotted my typo in the previous comment - urgh!)
Like in the old Norse Sagas, where "troll" is often a catch-all term for "obnoxiuous supernatural type".
DeleteTaking the idea into a more 'muted' direction I believe this could very much help explain the various transitions the orc archetype has seen in fantasy albeit not exactly in any real-life order: the tolkien orc, the ugly brute, the green Neaderthal and the green Klingon. Assuming a less drastic change between orc generations and a mixture of Darwinian and Lamarckian genetics this could very much explain all the orc archetypes we've seen in fantasy, who vary in size (from hobbit-sized to 7ft tall), appearance (ugly pigmen to green tusked humans), culture and intelligence level.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere there is a PhD thesis being written about orc subtypes.
DeleteI’ve never really used it in a game, but I like the idea of Lamarckian evolution as a way to explain why wizards experiment with things. For example, if he wants fire resistant orcs he blasts then with fireballs and then breeds the survivors. Of course, the downside is that the children not only inherit their parent’s resistance to fire, they also inherit a memory of the pain and madness that comes from being an experimental breeding subject. So there will always be secondary consequences to those experiments.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing that I’ve thought about in that regard is that it would slowly change the appearance of creatures, but it might do it in a way that could be mimicked with tattooing. So the basis of magical tattooing might be trying to mimic the outward signs of inherited ability. It would be as if the descendants of the first belters in The Expanse were born with neck markings that granted them the ability to operate in vacuum and then Inners would get “Belter” neck tattoos to gain the same abilities.
Nice ideas!
DeleteI could easily see this adapted to a racial mythology. According to orcish culture and religion, all sentient beings are orcs, having branched off from the ur-orc or proto-orc in ancient days past.
ReplyDeleteNaturally, elves and dwarves are horrified by the concept and humans... I dunno, feel pity for orcs?
Maybe not a racial belief but a cultural belief, common to certain groups of orcs (and elves and dwarves and...).
First this is a form of transhumanism, not Lamarkian evolution. My problem with the latter is if it did apply to orcs, why would there be any baseline orcs anymore? They would have forced themselves into the more powerful forms as soon as they realized what they could do. But with a transhuman element, even the most modified orcs could return to their baseline, or at least have their offspring as standard orcs if they needed for some reason (like religion).
ReplyDelete