What if every race evolved from Orcs? What would the ramifications of that be?
Some of that would definitely have to be explained via magic or divine intervention. How would each of the PC races have developed if orcs were the progenitors?
Elves… this might be easily explained as some sort of fey-touched orc… that might be interesting in and of itself.
Humans… would have to be the next evolutionary step… Hmmmm… and what if Half-Orcs, instead of being a human/orc hybrid were the missing evolutionary link. 🙂
I’m not sure yet how to explain the other races… Any suggestions from the peanut gallery?
Dwarves could be orcs that evolved to deal with the tight spaces underground were endurance and intelligence were more important than strength.
Gnomes could be dwarves that were fey-touched. Perhaps elves and gnomes came about at the same time.
I am not sure how to explain halflings. I always like the idea of them as interdimensional interlopers who came to the present world through the Plane of Shadow though.
Ramifications depend on what the orcs are like. Are they like traditional orcs in the MM? Are they dominant or have the new races forced them down?
Jesse Dean.
The orcs can be the same… or similar to the MM Orc.
Perhaps a powerful outsider wanted to develop an army of these new creatures. After many failed attempts… the Orcs are created. The Outsider institutes a breeding program on some backwater continent (some kind of extreme climate would be suitable for this) on some backwater planet. Everything goes well for centuries…
Oh but this backwater planet is also inhabited by fey creatures. They had been watching the development of these “Orcs”, but weren’t quite sure what to do with the large ugly brutes. “What if we had some big brutes of our own to do things for us?” was a common question amongst the fey that had witnessed the size and strength of the orcs. What if… indeed. At first they tried taking orc babies and training them, but that never seemed to work. The orcs never lasted long enough to get any real work done. What to do… What to do… Aha… The idea of the Elf was born. The Elves were created to serve the fey. At first they were nearly as tall as the orcs, but much more slender. Subsequent generations of elves became smaller and seemingly more fey-like.
The Elves produced quite a bit of offspring… as compared to the fey… and soon the fey were overrun with Elves. It is unclear if the fey grew bored with the maintenance having Elven servants required or if the Elves just willfully left the service of the fey. In either case, the elves were on their own as a separate class of beings.
The orcs largely ignored their new neighbors… they new their destiny belonged with their outsider creator so they trained for war as was their duty to their “god”. But the Elves were quite curious about their ugly, brutish progenitors so they tried and eventually succeeded in establishing relations with them.
As a suggestion when writing these replies, could you, rather than replying to your post, reply to my comment.
That way I get e-mailed with a notification that you replied. Otherwise I won’t know except by chance.
I will actually respond to this a little later. 😉
Jesse D.
No problem… wasn’t thinkin’…
–sam