Hobo Elf said:
No, he's right. FR is boring. There are some interesting locations, but it's still boring generic shit with orcs and elves.
I think we take the idea of orcs way too much for granted.
I am sure alot of you have seen The Searchers. A bloodthirst native American tribe rapes and murders the eldest daughter of the family, scalps and kills the parents, strips them naked so that they can take their clothes for use as decoys in their ranks, and kidnaps the youngest daughter, all after pillaging and burning down their household. (This was a 1950s movie, for heaven's sake!) And after doing this, they ensure that they draw out all the white men thirsting for their blood, so they can ambush them, and destroy their strongest men then and there.
Orcish tribes are pretty much an allusion to such stories, of all those Swedish immigrants to the wild west, who were uncompromisingly hunted and murdered by such people who could not think to mingle or even bargain with them, whom they saw as a standing obstacle to their own living, and would do nothing short of destroying theirs. That's exactly what orcs in fantasy are, that same unconditionally hateful, terrorizing, and monstrous people. Much of the lore in recent D&D games is about the city of Neverwinter sitting right in the fringe of the forest inhabited by the Uthgar tribes who regularly have to fend off the orcs who decimate and smash down human settlements. And the orcs always ensure that the humans get the message, because they must deliver the ultimate humiliation to their women, so that they will have half-breed children who will always remind them of how they were defeated. And even as generic as Bioware stories may be, many of the half-orc characters are always about the theme of how they are people whose lives are based on carrying the shame that they are half-orc.
Like I said, you guys are taking certain elements of traditional fantasy and D&D for granted. Had the LotR movies not been made in this decade, perhaps there would not be such a reaction.