Thoughts on the New Orc Bard Hero?

[Kurgan]

There's only one Bard

You win... perfect!


As far as a singing Orc, what if you introduce BLACK METAL into this universe? I could see some Orcs in corpse paint throwing up the horns, growling and laying down deadly licks from their axes.

[Daedalus]

Heroquest: The Marvel Winter Special gave us some additional, second-teir canon of what an Orc is. They had male and female mated pairs, so female Orc figures should actually be a pretty good fit. They also were happy working for Morcar since he let them eat their defeated enemies (and they just plain liked fighting.)

While not the author, Baker worked in a supervisory role on the MWS project, so I'd say this extra detail counts as an acceptable baseline that shows how far Teos Abadia plans to diverge with his new canon. Hopefully the magical, ancient Orc past will fit better than the current Bard ally.

[Orc26]

Now that my initial "Wait, What, Why?" reaction has had time to settle in, I no longer have levels of "murder the nearest game developer as proxy anger that it exists but my question of "Wait, What, why?" still stands.

[The Admiral]

Does HeroQuest need to be “dark and grim” like some other fantasy series? Sure GW is great at the ‘grimdark’ and I have a crazy number of models associated with that.
Even if we consider other series, which also are pretty grim and dark, like the Witcher. As a comparable series to HeroQuest there are bards in that universe as well. There are Elves and there are sentient monsters. (Including dragons.)
Are we “expecting” orcs? No. But singing bawdy songs isn’t just a human pastime.

It does for me.
It not Bards I object to, it's Orc Bards.
I can see pissed up orcs singing bawdy songs. Just not one gently singing the ballad of Grotslag the Terrible around a flickering campfire to a group of avidly attentive orc warriors.

[Cael Darkhollow]

Does HeroQuest need to be “dark and grim” like some other fantasy series? Sure GW is great at the ‘grimdark’ and I have a crazy number of models associated with that.
Even if we consider other series, which also are pretty grim and dark, like the Witcher. As a comparable series to HeroQuest there are bards in that universe as well. There are Elves and there are sentient monsters. (Including dragons.)
Are we “expecting” orcs? No. But singing bawdy songs isn’t just a human pastime.

It does for me.
It not Bards I object to, it's Orc Bards.
I can see pissed up orcs singing bawdy songs. Just not one gently singing the ballad of Grotslag the Terrible around a flickering campfire to a group of avidly attentive orc warriors.

agreed.
a bard as an adventuring class isn't the problem, the concept of an orc bard is.
doesn't fit any previous setting material and is a drastic and terrible retcon of HeroQuest orcs.
not to mention the farcical Shrek sculpt and artwork that I loathe

[Kurgan]

Justin Bieberorc!!!!!!

[Zenithfleet]

Heroquest: The Marvel Winter Special gave us some additional, second-teir canon of what an Orc is. They had male and female mated pairs, so female Orc figures should actually be a pretty good fit. They also were happy working for Morcar since he let them eat their defeated enemies (and they just plain liked fighting.)

Don't even need to go to the Marvel special. In the original Questbook, 'Legacy of the Orc Warlord' has Grak capture you because you killed his father.

Anyway...

In Warhammer, Orc reproduction was kept carefully offstage and ambiguous for a long time. I'm not sure what it was like in 1st-3rd edition, the era coinciding with HeroQuest. But by 4th edition, when the first army books came out and the setting was heavily codified / tidied up / horribly retconned (depending on your point of view), references to Orc reproduction had pretty much disappeared.

The whole 'spores / fungus' thing started in 40K with Orks. It did get an occasional mention in late editions of Fantasy regarding spores arriving on the Old Ones' ships, but I don't think it was ever emphasised. Many people either didn't notice those rare references or ignored them because they clashed with earlier assumptions about Orc breeding.

GW was likely trying to avoid the D&D problems:

a) if Orcs have females, and the 'good guys' regularly bust into their homes to kill them, they must at some point be killing Orc females and Orc children. D&D actually had rules for determining how many would be in a given lair.

b) If Orcs reproduce like humans, and Orcs are violent and brutal, then the implications for captured female humans get extremely dark.

GW had already walked that road once with the Fimir and knew better than to go anywhere near it again. Especially with the more kid-friendly version of Warhammer in the 90s. In fact it's notable how ever since the early 90s they've done their best to avoid that whole area, even when discussing otherwise incredibly nasty beings like Dark Elves or Chaos.

By contrast, 90s D&D was much more sanitised and PC than the grim, violent and often freaky/kinky GW stuff (just look at Slaanesh)... yet had all kinds of unpleasant implications lurking just under the surface, with all its half-orcs and half-demons and similar.

But these new Hasbroquest Orcs aren't GW Orcs or even old-school D&D Orcs. They're new-school, World of Warcrafty, noble-warrior-race Orcs. Which is why someone thought an Orc Bard would make sense. The problem lies with the different interpretation of Orcs as a whole, not with the Bard concept itself. If Orcs are a noble and misunderstood race, the Orc Bard does fit in.

I prefer the old 'vicious irredeemable monsters' take on Orcs, because sometimes you just want to play a game where you kill scary monsters and take their gold, without worrying about the moral implications of committing a violent home invasion in a kids' game. Sometimes you just need Bad Guys.

[Cael Darkhollow]

Don't even need to go to the Marvel special. In the original Questbook, 'Legacy of the Orc Warlord' has Grak capture you because you killed his father.

Boom. I think that settles once and for all the question of whether HeroQuest canon declares orcs reproduce as spores or not. The spores retcon wasn't introduced until 8th edition Warhammer Fantasy (2010) and just in a cryptic single sentence in the fluff, long after 1-3 edition Warhammer having half orcs (implies sexual reproduction) which was contemporary during HeroQuest development. As an aside, female orcs were present as models in Bloodbowl (a satirical sports version of the Warhammer Fantasy setting) from the beginning.

But these new Hasbroquest Orcs aren't GW Orcs or even old-school D&D Orcs. They're new-school, World of Warcrafty, noble-warrior-race Orcs. Which is why someone thought an Orc Bard would make sense. The problem lies with the different interpretation of Orcs as a whole, not with the Bard concept itself. If Orcs are a noble and misunderstood race, the Orc Bard does fit in.

I prefer the old 'vicious irredeemable monsters' take on Orcs, because sometimes you just want to play a game where you kill scary monsters and take their gold, without worrying about the moral implications of committing a violent home invasion in a kids' game. Sometimes you just need Bad Guys.

Standing ovation.
You sir have encapsulated the situation precisely, the new Hasbroquest orcs are a serious retcon from anything HeroQuest, and the original game was clear on their position=bad guys.

[wallydubbs]

But these new Hasbroquest Orcs aren't GW Orcs or even old-school D&D Orcs. They're new-school, World of Warcrafty, noble-warrior-race Orcs. Which is why someone thought an Orc Bard would make sense. The problem lies with the different interpretation of Orcs as a whole, not with the Bard concept itself. If Orcs are a noble and misunderstood race, the Orc Bard does fit in.

I prefer the old 'vicious irredeemable monsters' take on Orcs, because sometimes you just want to play a game where you kill scary monsters and take their gold, without worrying about the moral implications of committing a violent home invasion in a kids' game. Sometimes you just need Bad Guys.

Very good insight.
Hero Quest originally came out when I was 6 years old. My brother and I never learned how to play it the first time around and the board fell into disrepair. Looking back, I think it was the first time I ever heard of orcs.
I remember being confused on how tall the Elf was because at that point the only stories I knew of Elf were in relation to Santa and the North Pole. Goblins I had heard of because of the movie Nilbog.

A couple years later, although the board was destroyed we still had bits and pieces of the game and my brother and I combined the game with pieces from Dark World and Battle Masters and sorta created our own boardgame not too far removed from Hero Quest. But this idea and story stuck with me for a long time.

It wasn't actually until high school that I read Lord of the Rings and gradually became interested in the fantasy genre. This is also around the time the Lord of the Rings movies came out. So, from the books and movies I applied their interpretation of Orcs. However, upon reading the Hobbit, I found that Tolkien had used Orcs and Goblins interchangeably, which was confusing. Upon reading some of R.A. Salvatore Forgotten Realms, I found he had a different outlook on Orcs then that if Tolkein.
That's when I researched the origins and found that the term never had a definite meaning as it was only popularized by Tolkien. Much like Elves have changing descriptions depending on the writer, this seems to work the same with orcs.

I would imagine most of us have a Tolkeinesc outlook on orcs. This can change due to playing World of Warcraft or Warhammer as the species have come a long way since Tolkein.

I started writing a fantasy novel around age 23, which incorporated several orc characters, and do I had to come up with my own outlook on orcs. Are they misunderstood or evil? I think they just have different way of looking at things. Good and evil is a matter or conscience, so if they have a relaxed sense of ethics, they may not recognize as what they do as evil. Perhaps I have an ingrained outlook on orcs based on my past considerations of them. But nor does it seem that this Hasbro team recreating Hero Quest has the same outlook as those who originally put them in the game.

The Orc Bard hero totally throws a monkey wrench into my own personal outlooks on Orc, so I can't really accept this character without experiencing some form of cognitive dissonance.

[Pancho]

Don't even need to go to the Marvel special. In the original Questbook, 'Legacy of the Orc Warlord' has Grak capture you because you killed his father.

Boom. I think that settles once and for all the question of whether HeroQuest canon declares orcs reproduce as spores or not. The spores retcon wasn't introduced until 8th edition Warhammer Fantasy (2010) and just in a cryptic single sentence in the fluff, long after 1-3 edition Warhammer having half orcs (implies sexual reproduction) which was contemporary during HeroQuest development. As an aside, female orcs were present as models in Bloodbowl (a satirical sports version of the Warhammer Fantasy setting) from the beginning.

But these new Hasbroquest Orcs aren't GW Orcs or even old-school D&D Orcs. They're new-school, World of Warcrafty, noble-warrior-race Orcs. Which is why someone thought an Orc Bard would make sense. The problem lies with the different interpretation of Orcs as a whole, not with the Bard concept itself. If Orcs are a noble and misunderstood race, the Orc Bard does fit in.

I prefer the old 'vicious irredeemable monsters' take on Orcs, because sometimes you just want to play a game where you kill scary monsters and take their gold, without worrying about the moral implications of committing a violent home invasion in a kids' game. Sometimes you just need Bad Guys.

Standing ovation.
You sir have encapsulated the situation precisely, the new Hasbroquest orcs are a serious retcon from anything HeroQuest, and the original game was clear on their position=bad guys.

It’s pretty obvious from the Heroquest canon that orcs are brutish, loutish characters. They have guttural, unsophisticated speech and awkward, ugly, primitive names. The idea of one of them being a dashing bard like character capable of singing songs that would inspire the more intelligent species making up the Hero group is, frankly, laughable. And when you look at their uncouth, hulking frames, the idea of them wielding rapiers is even more ridiculous. The rapier isn’t even a one-off for one orc Hero, it’s the starting weapon for the whole class of the buggers! Madness!
I have no problem at all with people enjoying the orc bard and looking forward to trying him out as a bit of a lark, but let’s be honest, the character does not belong in Heroquest officially.