I guess you do need some background information, especially because Wizards sure doesn’t like spelling it out anymore.
In older editions it was assumed nearly all half-orcs were the offspring of rape, and “the blessing of Luthic” was given to make orcs fertile with nearly every other race.
The implications were clear, even more once you start diving into things like orcish society being a rigid patriarchy with a slave economy and one of Luthic’s domains being not just servitude, but specifically female servitude.
In early DnD’s defense, monster races were objectively, comically evil, and players were pretty heavily incentivised to pick humans (and assumed to be played by extremely nerdy guys), so it wasn’t supposed to come up that much.
The fantasy was in killing the cannibal rape monsters, freeing their slaves, and not having to ask yourself “Are we the baddies doing an imperialism?” for burning down the orc village.
Oh, it gets worse.
Don’t look up what blessing Gruumsh’s wife gave to the orcs.
Tried looking that up but can’t really find anything, what is the controversy there?
I guess you do need some background information, especially because Wizards sure doesn’t like spelling it out anymore.
In older editions it was assumed nearly all half-orcs were the offspring of rape, and “the blessing of Luthic” was given to make orcs fertile with nearly every other race.
The implications were clear, even more once you start diving into things like orcish society being a rigid patriarchy with a slave economy and one of Luthic’s domains being not just servitude, but specifically female servitude.
In early DnD’s defense, monster races were objectively, comically evil, and players were pretty heavily incentivised to pick humans (and assumed to be played by extremely nerdy guys), so it wasn’t supposed to come up that much.
The fantasy was in killing the cannibal rape monsters, freeing their slaves, and not having to ask yourself “Are we the baddies doing an imperialism?” for burning down the orc village.