The Pros and Cons of a Monstrous Punching Bag

Or, you may want to think twice about orcs in your setting.

Lawrence E. Grabowski
Cultivating Wonder

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Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

You’re sitting in a tavern with your level-one friends, price tags still on your swords, when a mysterious old man approaches you. Or maybe it’s a weeping woman. Either way, they are desperate for help from people like you, adventurers.

Their sob story has everything to hook a novice adventurer. There’s a stolen relic. Or is it a missing child? Whatever it was, it was taken into the mountains by some monsters. They draw you a convenient map. And they say there’s a reward if you come back alive. Your eyes light up and you get ready to kill some monsters. I mean, recover the object or rescue the kid. Or whatever.

There’s nothing like sitting down at the table with a few friends, a bag of dice, and several gallons of Arizona Green Tea, gamer fuel we call it, to play some Dungeons and Dragons. Whether veteran or novice, everyone has been sent by a stranger in a tavern to kill some monstrous humanoids and recover something from their camp. The monsters may have been orcs, goblins, kobolds, or something entirely different, but they’re always there. And they are always interchangeable. They are all monstrous punching bags.

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Lawrence E. Grabowski
Cultivating Wonder

Kung Fu Nerd, Gamer, Writer. I write about setting, plot, and characters as well as teach Spanish. I also dabble in writing about other things.