Evil races in Middle Earth

[Stormcrow]

The words giant, ogre, and troll may all refer to the same type of being in Tolkien; it's not clear. It may not even be clear to those who use the words.

[Glorelendil]

The words giant, ogre, and troll may all refer to the same type of being in Tolkien; it's not clear. It may not even be clear to those who use the words.

Sure, if we are being Tolkien geeks (which we all are).

But if we are being game designers it seems like we would want to interpret on the side of greater variety, not less.

[Otaku-sempai]

The words giant, ogre, and troll may all refer to the same type of being in Tolkien; it's not clear. It may not even be clear to those who use the words.

I don't think that we can assume that though. the stone-giants of the Misty Mountains seem to have been quite different creatures from the Trolls of Middle-earth, even disregarding how Peter Jackson depicted them in his Hobbit trilogy. And we have no literary data at all on ogres other than Bilbo's suppositions while trying to solve Gollum's riddle. And there he does seem to think of both the giants and ogres as being distinct from trolls.

I will note that the description of the Marsh-ogres in the Lake-town supplement does suggest a connection to giants and giant-kin.

[Otaku-sempai]

Who are Woses?

The Woses are a primative race of Men living in the Druadan Forest at the time of the War of the Rings. Though the Woses are not--as a race--evil, the Rohirrim seemed to regard them as sub-human and occasionally hunted them for sport. This practice stopped after the Woses aided the Rohirrim during the WR; in the Fourth Age King Elessar gave the Druadan Forest to the Woses and forbade outsiders to enter it without their permission.

[Stormcrow]

But if we are being game designers it seems like we would want to interpret on the side of greater variety, not less.

You can have all the variety you want, even if you decide they're the same sort of creature.

After all, The One Ring has lots of different kinds of goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs of the worst description, even though we know they're all the same kind of being.

[Terisonen]

Wild Men. Other name is Woses or Drúedain, or Wild Men of the Wood, and they may have a link with the Pûkel-Men statue. They are not evil, just a remnant of a primitive tribe.

[Stormcrow]

In The Lord of the Rings, the Woses and the Rohirrim had territorial conflicts, and the Rohirrim were the superior military force, so they drove the Woses to a defensive position in their forest. When they needed to march their army through the Woses' forest they made a deal to resolve this conflict.

You don't need to be evil to be a problem to someone else.

[Glorelendil]

But if we are being game designers it seems like we would want to interpret on the side of greater variety, not less.

You can have all the variety you want, even if you decide they're the same sort of creature.

After all, The One Ring has lots of different kinds of goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs of the worst description, even though we know they're all the same kind of being.

So why even bother to have Spiders, Wolves, Dragons, etc? Just call them all Orcs and give them different stats.

No, obviously. Because the difference is more than just stats.

If you want Giants to be just like Trolls but with different stats, then sure they could just be called Trolls.

But if you want them to be categorically different...to have different origins, motivations, loyalties...then create a new category.

Maybe Gandalf meant he was going to find a more or less decent troll to block up the goblins' new entrance, but I doubt it.

(That said, I personally imagine Giants to effectively be LMCs, and not something that heroes are expected to fight.)

Ogres I don't have a clear image of, as distinct from Great Orcs anyway. But somebody else may have something in mind that just doesn't fit with Trolls, Great Orcs, or Ettins, in which case they should create an Ogre adversary.

[Stormcrow]

But if we are being game designers it seems like we would want to interpret on the side of greater variety, not less.

You can have all the variety you want, even if you decide they're the same sort of creature.

After all, The One Ring has lots of different kinds of goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs of the worst description, even though we know they're all the same kind of being.

So why even bother to have Spiders, Wolves, Dragons, etc? Just call them all Orcs and give them different stats.

No, obviously. Because the difference is more than just stats.

Yes. The difference is that they are clearly and obviously entirely different creatures.

The difference between, say, orcs, hobgoblins, ogres, and giants is less clear. Orcs and trolls are clearly different, but since we don't ever directly see anything called a giant or an ogre, it's unclear whether a huge troll might be a giant or an ogre, or whether giants are completely separate.

If you want Giants to be just like Trolls but with different stats, then sure they could just be called Trolls.

Please don't reduce my argument to a straw man just to argue with me. I'm not saying giants are just like trolls or that that's what I want. I'm saying that in a survey of the evil races of Middle-earth, which is the point of this thread, if one wants to consider the terms that Tolkien throws out like "hobgoblin," "ogre," and "giant," one needs to understand that neither folklore nor Tolkien have clear definitions of what these things are. If a Loremaster wants to make them completely separate races, that's perfectly fine. It certainly helps fill published books. But it's not absolutely necessary, and I stand by my wish to acknowledge that there are other ways to design a game. One can associate and maintain variety at the same time.

Are hobbits completely different beings than men?

Maybe Gandalf meant he was going to find a more or less decent troll to block up the goblins' new entrance, but I doubt it.

I doubt it too, but I don't know it, and no one can prove it. What if someone wants to go down that route, but you've been pushing the forum to accept the "categorically different" path?

In Tolkien's "Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings," he says the name "Ettendales" comes from an obsolete element eten "troll, ogre" (it comes, of course, from Old Norse Jotunn "giant"). Elsewhere he described ogres as cannibal giants.

And, of course, we know that goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs all refer to the same creatures, though "hobgoblins" are a larger kind, and orc is just the Rohirric word for English goblin, based on Sindarin orch. By your logic, we should make all of these completely different creatures, for the sake of being not-scholars and game-designers, yet the game itself makes them all of the same kind, but with variations: exactly what I suggested.

[Otaku-sempai]

The Marsh-ogre does look a bit Trollish. Perhaps Sauron (or even Melkor) at one time experimented with crossing Giants with Trolls and the Ogre was the result; not intelligent or disciplined enough to act a servants for the dark powers, they were released into the wild to sink or swim, so-to-speak, and plague the Free Peoples of the North.

Peter Jackson's team viewed Ogres as a hybrid between Orcs and Trolls.