Just a premise that I would like to play, read, or watch.
I haven’t looked into any of these, so I’m not aware of their general quality or content warnings.
Books: The Goblin Emperor, The Goblin Quest, Grunts!, Unseen Academicals.
Comics: Goblins, Orc Stain.
There’s an old text adventure game called Knight Orc that is really awesome and worth playing. Any “abandonware” should have it and it has some simple scenery graphics too. The game opens up with you, the titular Knight Orc coming to after a night of partying with friends and finding yourself forced into a jousting tournament with a bunch of hostile humans and having to deal that. Anyway it was ambitious for the time because many of the NPCs move around on a schedule and also because the story has the Orc figuring out how to travel between his world and the “real world” where he finds out that he and most of his friends are NPCs in an MMO and you spend the rest of the game going in and out of the game and the real world to convince your pals to escape it with you. This game is from 1987.
Bright is a terrible movie.
It has an orc main character, but it’s a terrible movie.
The only good part of this movie was Margaret Cho absolutely earning whatever they paid her.
In light of less terrible things, Grant Howitt (gshowitt on itch), best known for Honey Heist, has made several RPGs where you play as non-humans.
Big Gay Orcs: exactly what it says on the tin.
Kobold Endeavor: impress a dragon king with a silly heist
Goblin Quest: Finally, this is a full 120 page RPG with art and scenarios about goblins meeting their untimely end in goofy catastrophes.
I feel like I saw a different than the rest of the world because Bright was fine to me. Not amazing but not even close to the disaster level impression of it I got from folks. It’s good enough to have on while doing something else if you want an orc media thing to check off.
“Snuff” by Terry Pratchett. The goblin isnt THE main character, because vimes is, but she is around a lot and the plot revolves around goblins.
Trolls and dwarfs are a major part of all the city watch books, but Men at Arms spends a lot of time on them. Also Thud.
Nine Goblins by T. Kingfisher is a short novel about a goblin warband trapped behind enemy lines. It’s much funnier than that sounds.
Since @vehemently mentioned Goblin Quest i am also going to suggest this actual play session of it, done by the great podcast group Six Feats Under and Grant Howitt. The actual session is the one titled “hootenanny hijack” and it is a grand old time.
I immediately thought of Styx, stealth game where you play as a goblin. I can’t personally vouch for it but the steam reviews seem positive.
RE:_Monster, another one of those reborn in a game fantasy world light novels (I read some of the manga version). The main character is an esper from another world who dies and gets reborn as a goblin, and gets lucky as he retains his memories and gets powerful dark magic.
It’s difficult to recommend because while I really enjoy the world building and seeing how the character solves problems through the first person narration, it suffers from a lot of the usual LN problems, what with the harem power fantasy stuff and the main character leaning a bit on the amoral side, not to mention edgy and gross detail like (CW: Sexual Assault) the cave of human sex slaves the goblins keep to breed, though at least the main character does see this as horrible and stops the practice.
If it ever gets an anime adaptation and they remove that crap (which wouldn’t be hard), I’d say that would be worth a watch.
The Shadowrun games let you play as trolls and orcs.
As a Troika developed rpg, it’s an absolute mess to play, and I’m sure it has its fair share of iffy politics which I never got far enough (AKA made it out if the first town) to see, but Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura allows you to play as orcs and half-ogre’s and still has an absolutely killer hook. Imagine: a Tolkein inspired high fantasy world where we humans have had our industrial revolution.
The Goblin Emperor is an excellent novel that touches on racism and classism and court politics in excellent ways. It’s also a standalone novel so it’s entirely self-contained.
I just finished Battle Chef Brigade, which has a substantial portion of the game where you control an orc character. It was pretty good!
I cannot remember his name, but yes, he is very good. He is my husband.
I didn’t read back up to see what this was a response to because
is just too good and pure.
