Appearance of Orcs (and other Goblinoids)

[Baylor_OgreBane]

I think the original HQ orcs were a little on the small size, in contrast most orc min's now are to big. Pig faced orcs are out, unless it is their helmets.

[Anderas]

I like GW Orcs a lot. Especially that they are made of plastic, so there are endless conversion possibilities. I don't like the price of them. At all.

After, for me the first orcs i have seen were Hero Quest and Space Crusade, and the ones of Blizzard.
Blizzard had Andy Chambers working for the basic design, meaning the Blizzard Orcs are basically GW variants.

Somehow i can't see other variants as "official", maybe it is the age. So any Orc today should at least have some of these old design features.

The HQ25 Orcs are quite good, for example.

[Baylor_OgreBane]

more orcs, from might and magic

[Anderas]

The might and magic orcs are orange, all of them? ok, they wanted to set themselves apart.

When I was playing some of the early variants, I didn't even recognize that these should be orcs!

[Diggin]

I do like the look of them though, quite like the warcraft ones. i also liked the frenzied orcs from warcraft 2/3 who had drunk demonic water and turned red skin. My orc champions now have a red skin and my basic ors are green.

[Goblin-King]

more orcs, from might and magic

Wow! They REALLY didn't stick to a style!
Every single one is way different from the rest!
It seems wrong to call it "evolution" as it's just looks like 11 different people were asked to design an orc.
They even jump back and forth between pigsnout and nose!

I still like the games though... at least the old ones

[The second half of this post was moved as a quote found in Morality of Orcs, a split topic generated from a Cynthialee post originally found in this thread.]

[Baylor_OgreBane]

I found this site that offers re-casts of the original 1980's-90's FF orcs

http://www.mirliton.it/index.php?cName= ... 528mm-orcs

I like this style of orc, hunched rather than squatted and gangled limbed.
I'd be quite interested to see your campaign cynthialee, especially some of the support materials.

Have to admit though I am with Goblin King on this one. Although I don't see that there is a problem with creating alliances with orcs this way, after all the sorcerers of the world have to hire/convince them to do their bidding somehow. You can make an alliance with the orcs if you are fool enough to try.

[Cael Darkhollow]

I prefer all my greenskins from snotlings to orcs exactly that, green. Having long since melded Tolkien, Warhammer and D&D in my mind as one fantasy universe I favor Gamesworkshop/HeroQuest type orcs and goblins.I like the whole range of their art from cartoony early on to serious scary foes in paintings and figures later. I see orcs as apish, brutish, barrel chested, green skinned, tusked or fanged with a propensity for bad dentistry prognathous jaws and drool, bald and bare or nearly so, ranging from stooped and stocky to slightly taller than man sized, and stupid to the point of barely communicating with more civilized races. No actual horns but on helms is ok. Pig like features are ok to a certain extent but not carried away, they aren't pigmen. Only half orcs should have hair. Goblins are just scrawny, weedy, gangly shorter versions with more cunning and crafty intelligence. I completely ignored D&D's yellow to red goblin coloration, and pretty much so did everyone else, the Games Workshop version is the basic standard appearance of both Goblins and Orcs across most media. I am ok with the Lord of the films more realistic versions on screen, but I hate the figures of those.

[wallydubbs]

I was 6 years old when parents first got my brother and me hero quest; since I was relatively new to the world I had never heard of an orc... it might have even been the first time I heard of a dwarf... elves I knew from standard North Pole/Santa Claus stuff, so I do remember being a bit bewildered on why the elf was so tall.

I read Tolkein while I was in high school, but it didn't seem to go very far into detail as to what all the characters or species looked like. In fact, it confused me more as I noticed Tolkein used orcs and goblins interchangeably as if they were the same creature. The movies did a better job differentiating them (visually), but they were the same to Tolkein and I always carried the image of a hero quest orc as to what they looked like in my mind.

The tusk thing? That's new. I envisioned strong K-9s
... but at what point to fangs become tusks?

Anyway, the board fell into ruin as my brother and I were too young to even learn how to play... our dad wasn't that cool.
But when we got older we still had some figurines remaining from Hero Quest, Battle Masters and Dark World and from some Star Wars game, and we pretty much assembled a game of our own with the remaining figurines, calling it Dark Quest.

I seemed to have carried these memories with me to high school and had an interest in Fantasy Writing. I created a world with all types of mythological creatures... as well as scifi (yes, aliens existed too).
I had men, elves, orcs, goblins, gremlins, trolls, ogres, cyclops, fimirs, Angel's, gargoyles, imps, gnomes, demons, serpent people, etc.
Of course the type of Cyclops I had in mind was the robust man-sized as i saw from Krull... again, first impressions...
Yet oddly enough I didn't include dwarves or dark elves into the story.

In my writing the orcs reproduce sexually, but as they don't follow the same emotions humans do it happens more along the lines of rape. Of course the females sometimes have a tendency to kill the males afterwards if they can catch them off guard. I've taken the concept of hairy Orcs from Tolkien, but they can grow bald, losing most body hair, looking like they do in Hero quest. I felt it gave orcs a greater variety in appearance as there were several orc characters...

[Cael Darkhollow]

I really hate the current version of Dungeons & Dragons orc in 5th edition, often shown with gray or very light green skin and a ponytail of dark hair. They look much more like skinny ogres to me. This is what I might envision as an orog: a half-orc/half ogre might look like.

Makes all of the current orc miniatures unbuyable for me.

Or worse, they are often depicted as just humans with tusks and gray skin

this makes them far less brutish, primitive and warlike for my tastes and immediately implies cognitive abilities I would never assign to a orc. They shouldn't be shopping at the bazaar for fruits and fabrics, sipping their beverage at a table with friends in a tavern, or waiting in line for their turn at the counter of the local armory; they should be ambushing caravans of wagons, using equipment and weapons pillaged or improvised, and living in dungeon or nomadic tribes that are under might-is-right strongest rules management, or ruled subtly by slightly smarter but far craftier goblins coercing orcs to think they are in charge and the goblin is just a "consultant or advisor." The only orc organization comes when they are commissioned as an army or mercenary force by bigger badder bad-guys and then they might have military style rank and file organization and equipment and limited discipline based on fear, to some extent ala LOTR.

no wonder we got stuck with a lame orc bard in the reboot HQ from Hasbro, anyone who didn't grow up with 70's 80's and 90's orcs doesn't seem to have any idea what an orc is or supposed to be.
They seem to think an orc is just basically Beast from the X-Men completely shaved down to show gray skin instead of blue.

Orcs should be a different race completely than humans with completely different attributes, mentality and way they are roleplayed or depicted (so should elves and dwarves for that matter.)
Gimli was awesome and looked like a dwarf in the LOTR movies while the "dwarfs" in the Hobbit films had the same proportions and features of humans. Fail. I hate hobbits or halflings depicted as just small humans too, I want them to have different obvious anatomical differences, I much prefer the rounded little GW halflings or the chubby cartoon Hobbit from Rankin and Bass style with oversized hairy feet. Why have all the fantasy races including orcs been somewhat humanified in modern depictions?
This "She Hulk with elf ears and tusks" image of orcs in the public consensus has got to go.

Orcs should have the proportions of apes. Any species of real world apes from gorillas to chimpanzees would do. Longer arms, stocky barrel chested torsos and relatively shorter legs. Some can be shorter, skinnier, or more comically caricatured with exaggerated features. Some can be taller, more muscular or with scarier fangs and tusks that is fine. Green skin all the way for me. I don't like any hair on orcs unless they are half-orcs. The Games Workshop style orcs throughout the years have always been my idealistic orcs whether slightly cartoonish or the more realistic and scary looking hyper muscular versions in the later years. I don't mind some piggish early D&D influence but I wouldn't make them pig men. But even the Gamorean Guard in Return of the Jedi is more orc than the "orcs" in the Warcraft movie to me.

Greenskins or goblinoids should be interbreedable variants (subspecies) only named as specific types based on gradated differences in height or build, cranial features etc. a spectrum of increases from a diminutive weedy snotling, to a large nosed and eared skinny and short goblins, to squat and thick orcs with bandy legs, to larger muscular boss orcs, to huge big or war boss orcs and towering powerful black orcs. Black orcs with stronger discipline and greater calculation can be terrifying foes based on later GW models while the run of the mill standard orc could be from earlier GW figures. Greenskins is the race; orcs, goblins, or gnoblars are just the types of greenskins.
Hobgoblins could be more man shaped and more professional in their war attire, with greater mental acuity.

I have the same disdain with the current D&D version of Hobgoblins, this looks like a lion-man or illustrated Beauty and the Beast in fantasy armor rather than any sort of goblinoid.

It should look like this perfection of a hobgoblin from AD&D 2nd edition by Tony DiTerlizzi you can see the primate influence in the coloration of the nose reminiscent of baboons, drills, and mandrills.


HeroQuest, Battlemasters, and Warhammer defined the look of orcs for me forever. I hate all other fantasy franchise depictions of orcs. While I understand the limitations of makeup and prosthetics and CGI, the Lord of the Rings movies orcs just look like dudes in masks rather than another species entirely, which they are supposed to be. I liked the movies and it is as good as it can be but wish to see the GW style orc onscreen someday.