Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans came out years before Starcraft, and the producer/lead developer of Warcraft has outright stated they based the L&F on Warhammer.
I don’t draw lines, I judge the thing as it is.
It’s just lazy cultural appropriation AFAICT. Lizardmen aren’t always-evil raping brutes, are they?
That wasn’t what my referring to the Bakshi movie was about, at all. It wasn’t about cultural references, it was about literal representation. The Orcs in the big battles are literally just Zulus with red eyes and fangs painted on.
FASA supposedly had to tell their artists to stop sending illustrations of orcs with green skin for Shadowrun back in the late 80s and early 90s. In Shadowrun, the orcs have the same skin color they had when they were humans. I think one of the earliest depictions of orcs I can remember comes from the D&D cartoon from 1983 where they were depicted as green and somewhat piggish. It was the same year Return of the Jedi was released and since then I always pictured orcs as Gammorian Guards. I think this is the same year Warhammer was released in Great Britain but I don’t know when it came to the United States.
It is changing. In 1991 seeing a Black person at my local hobby shop was rarer than seeing a girl my age. While my local game store is still overwhelmingly white, seeing a Black person isn’t so unusual as to be noteworthy. I started gaming circa 1988, but I didn’t have any Black people at my table until 2018. It was half the table and of the six players three of them were gay. Something that wouldn’t have been likely in 1993.
1st Edition AD&D orcs were essentially pig men. They are described as:
Orcs appear particularly disgusting because their coloration — brown or brownish green with a bluish sheen — highlights their pinkish snouts and ears. Their bristly hair is dark brown or black, sometimes with tan patches
The cartoon made them green, probably for “Looks better on TV” reasons and I was also implanted by the RotJ Gamorrean Guard imagery. The artwork changes over time to more blue/green skin tones though less porcine faces.
The whole “Gygax quoted Chilverton!” thing always gets to me a little because the context wasn’t “lol go kill orc babies!” but rather a player in a AMA-style thread complaining about DMs who would try to fuck with paladins and force them to break their oath (a crippling event for a 1st ed paladin). He gave an example of finding young orcs as an example; killing young orcs feels evil but allowing evil creatures[1] to remain could be a violation of oath. Gygax basically said that you could justify either (in game) if you tried and the DM should stuff it. He later acknowledged that the best course of action was to just not play with a DM who was trying to weaponize your class choice with “damned either way” style traps.
The use of the quote was tone deaf but doesn’t seem reflective of anything more than that. The conversation wasn’t about “Are all orcs REALLY evil?” or even the morality of killing young orcs but rather about dealing with dipshit DMs trying to fuck you over with sophistry.
Orcs were just straight up Lawful Evil in the 1st Ed Monster Manual, no “Generally” or “Usually” modifier included, much less special dispensation for young orcs. A DM could easily claim that any age orc is evil based on rules as written. ↩︎
Warcraft was well before Starcraft. Warcraft II was before Starcraft. But yes, both are obviously based on Warhammer (and some of the later Warhammer things were based on the Blizzard games).
Consider me corrected! Not sure where I heard the story about StarCraft originally being a 40k IP then. Unless that was true of the earlier Warcraft? IDK, never played much of either - my RTS of choice was Age of Empires. And I only really came to know Warhammer after the Total War games.
No, but they’re also not exactly good guys either; most of them are relatively mindless, nearly automatons who follow a Great Plan that they don’t understand.
If that’s about Lizardmen in general, in D&D they are of Neutral Alignment. Basically concerned with survival above all else. They might eat somebody because meat is meat, but not because they’re evil.
D&D lizardmen also tend to live in the most barren of lands, where nothing else can survive. Which does tend to sometimes lead to them raiding more abundant lands.
Do they? Traditionally, they’ve been found in swamps and similar terrain. They have a swim speed both in 1e and in 5e and I’m going to assume the same for middle editions. Anyway, sincere question since maybe they changed it up for 5.24e (I stopped following and moved to PF)
2024 5e seems to be reinventing the Lizardfolk.
Currently there isn’t an official lizardfolk but the Monster Manual 2025 has a Lizardfolk Geomancer and has this to say about lizardfolk: Reptilian Defenders of the Land
Habitat: Forest, Swamp
Lizardfolk dwell in wildernesses suffused with primal magic. While many lizardfolk are Humanoids with varied skills, some forge powerful bonds with the Elemental Plane of Earth, granting them magical connections to the cycle of growth and rebirth.
There is a playable Lizardfolk species: Still have a swim speed of 30’ and holds breath for up to 15 minutes. Creature type humanoid.
They were first made a playable race in Volo’s Guide to Monsters, also 5E but six years earlier, where they’re described as swamp-dwelling:
Only a fool looks at the lizardfolk and sees nothing more than scaly humanoids. Their physical shape notwithstanding, lizardfolk have more in common with iguanas or dragons than they do with humans, dwarves, or elves. Lizardfolk possess an alien and inscrutable mindset, their desires and thoughts driven by a different set of basic principles than those of warm-blooded creatures. Their dismal swamp homes might lie hundreds of miles from the nearest human settlement, but the gap between their way of thinking and that of the smooth-skins is far greater.
(They abandoned the reptilian psychology aspect of the species in the later book, something I have mixed feelings about).
