The First Orc Hero

Reprinted from Dragon Magazine #312, page 16 (2003). [original formatting]

This refers to early games before the publication of D&D for the general public. Rob Kuntz first played D&D in 1972, with the initial publication in 1974. It is an interesting look into how early games were played, and how orcs were handled.

THE FIRST ORC HERO
HE'S GOT STARS IN HIS EYES
by Gary Gygax

It didn't take long for the regulars in my GREYHAWK campaign to discover that it was cheaper and easier for them to subdue and conscript orcs into their attack forces than it was to find and hire mercenaries. Tenser, Terik, and Robilar were aggressive and ambitious characters, going so far as to clear a dungeon level, fill it with their own orc warriors, and use that as their adventuring base for dungeon delving. The captured and "converted" orcs usually didn't survive long. Eventually, both Tenser and Terik decided to forego such troops, so among the PCs only Robilar remained in charge of any considerable body of these humanoids.

Here I must make a seeming digression. Rob Kuntz was always ready to play just about any challenging game, and he played to win. In one case he attempted to foist off "quij" as a word when we were playing Scrabble. Of course we called him on it, and thereafter gave Rob a hard time about it whenever the subject of "fudging" in game play came up.

One fine day not long after the Scrabble incident noted above, Rob asked to play D&D, and I was happy to oblige as DM. In the course of exploring a side level of my Greyhawk Castle dungeons, Robilar and his guard of about a half-dozen orcs were surprised in a large room by a party of ogres. In the melee that ensued, the orcs fell rather quickly—all but one, that is. In short order, there were but three ogres left alive, two attacking Robilar, and one squared off against the sole surviving orc from Robilar’s force. Armed and armored as he was, the fighter was hard pressed to manage the two big humanoids, and by the time he finally managed to finish off the second ogre, he was very near zero hit points! These ogres were tough, and a lot of high numbers came up when their attack rolls were made, so Rob was sweating the outcome. Had the third of their number managed to join the fray against Robilar, he would have been slain.

As Robilar was exchanging attacks against the pair of ogres, smiting them hip and thigh, his valiant orc faced his ogre adversary alone. If I was rolling well for the pair taking on Robilar, I couldn't avoid rolling poorly when it came to this humanoid's attacks. The ogre hit only once in about 10 rounds of the exchange between it and the orc. The latter, however, hit the ogre about every other time, so as Robilar dropped his last assailant, so did the orc that served him. Even I, as DM, was impressed by the way the dice favored that orc.

"The orc is well above the run-of-the-mill humanoids of his ilk. Defeating an ogre single-handed is most unusual," I said to Rob. "I'll roll 2d6 to see what his new hit point total is."

So I rolled the dice and they came up boxcars. "Twelve points," I exclaimed. "This is an orc hero! You can roll 4d6 for him if you want, or keep the 12 total he now has." Of course, Rob rolled the dice and got a higher total for his new 4th level orc fighter. "By the way," I added as he was noting the hp information, "his name is Quij."

So that was how the first orc hero came into being, and how I made sure that Rob could never live down his fudging in the Scrabble game. It was scant compensation for the affair, because Rob had made a considerable coup. He valued Quij highly, and the orc hero went on many subsequent adventures with his master, serving Robilar well indeed, until they came to the Temple of Elemental Evil. That episode in the history of Quij is a whole different story...