Preface
Ugh. Alright, let’s get this over with.
The Orcs of Thar, written by Bruce Heard for BECMI D&D, is the 10th entry in the Mystara Gazetteer series detailing different areas of the campaign setting and how to play a game there. Orcs of Thar is a boxed set about the desolate and inhospitable Broken Lands, which are divided up between ten nations of humanoids barely united under the rule of the orcish war chief King Thar.¹
The set contains several booklets that detail the lore and history of the region, how to run a campaign in the Broken Lands, and how to play a simple grand strategy-style wargame using the armies of Thar. The players' guide and dungeon master's booklet also contains options for playing monstrous characters who hail from the Broken Lands, including the first playable shamans we've seen in BECMI so far.
It’s also my least favorite book in the entire Gazetteer series (that I’ve read, at least). Partly because I initially had unreasonably high hopes for it. That part is my fault. The book is entirely functional, and has more details on humanoids and shamans than most other BECMI books, making it a handy resource to adapt for one's game. But the style of writing throughout also seems to want to make it a tongue-in-cheek joke book.
The book's humor derives from how stupid, stinky, and goofy the orcs and their neighbors are. Slapstick and gross-out humor abound as the endless hordes churn against one another, driven by bits of narrative microfiction that read like a bad rendering of a Warhammer orc warboss’ speech. The book also has an art direction that looks halfway between “unhinged vaudeville show” and “racist World War II war bond poster”.
Less yikes but just a confusing, there's also this piece of some orc "punks" from the hard streets of the volcanic capital city of Oenkmar where everything has a vaguely Mesoamerican or Incan name for Reasons, seen here breakdancing with a boombox and massive traumatic head piercings, also for Reasons.² This doesn't really fit into my broader point, but I can't not share it.
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| Now we share a trauma bond. |
Much digital ink has already been spilled over the years by other people about the weird borrowing of both racial stereotypes and scientific racism tropes for the book’s species breakdown section, which precedes the chapter on shamans. I don’t have anything new to add to that discussion or a creative way to express how nakedly yikes the beads-and-buckskin-wearing “red orcs” or the goblinus oriensis who parrot the Mongol-coded Ethengarian peoples are, other than reiterating that they very much are yikes.³ But I’d feel derelict in my duties as a responsible wannabe historian if I didn’t bring it up briefly. Of all the legacy content on DriveThruRPG that Wizards of the Coast has slapped a content disclaimer onto, The Orcs of Thar decidedly earns it in my opinion.
But I digress.
I don’t apologize for digressing, because it’s my show and I do what I want, but I do digress.
I came here to talk about shamans. For all its 1980s cringe, Orcs of Thar gives the first bit of concrete depth and texture to humanoid shamans in this edition, where previously it was all a matter of reading in between the lines or just outright imagining that the monstrous spellcaster sections in the core rules boxed sets are more meaningful than they might actually be- I know I'm prone to hyper-fixating and reading depth into things.
And, excluding the technicality of that one OD&D clerical title, this is the first ever book where shamans became fully playable in D&D!
Shamans & Wiccas
Thar shamans and wiccas (this book was published before the Hollow World campaign set changed them to wokani) both consort with dark powers, either by worshiping them or trying to control them. Anyone looking to become a shaman or wicca must apprentice to a master, and this apprenticeship lasts for at least 1 full level of play after character creation. After this point the spellcaster’s training is complete, and they are kicked out to continue practicing on their own.⁴
I find this rule really interesting. So many other character classes throughout D&D assume that the character’s days of apprenticeship are behind them and that 1st level is the era of messing around and finding out on one’s own. Sure, a cleric or wizard PC might have an old mentor in their backstory, or a druid might occasionally have to deal with other druids in their order because of the weird cage match rules that define grove politics. But a prospective humanoid shaman or wicca explicitly has to play through an apprenticeship and engage with a master NPC in real time to gain their most basic abilities. I think that’s neat, and it adds to roleplay opportunities.
This rule also gives way to another rule that I find to be quintessentially BECMI. Because this was the edition of race-as-class much like in the first three books of OD&D, every humanoid can only ever advance as their species. A kobold is a level 3 kobold, a troll is a level 8 troll, etc. And nothing can change that. But you also can’t just slap a second class on, because multiclassing is a distinctly AD&D system (ignoring the OD&D supplements that introduced multiclassing in all but name) and doing that would probably hurt brand identity or some other "board of directors" type worry like that.
To get out of this mechanical corner that the designers wrote themselves into, optional rules such as humanoid shamans followed an additive XP track rule: every “level” in your character’s side gig is an extra couple of abilities layered on top of their base class chassis, plus a debt of several thousand extra experience points needed to advance to your next real level in whatever racial class that is. It’s harder to explain than it is to just use (much like AD&D’s THAC0), but still kind of a funny relic of the time that we’ll see pop up elsewhere.
Anyway, once an apprentice has concluded their apprenticeship they undergo a ritual that leaves them a full-fledged shaman or wicca. The exact details of this ritual of passage are not spelled out in the book; only that it is probably one of the most grueling and frightening experiences of their life. The rest is left up to “you, the DM, and to your players’ tastes”, to quote the book.
That’s a moment of surprisingly thoughtful game design from an era before lines, veils, and other “Session Zero” style content discussions were common. I know it was probably written with the thought of “ooh, what kind of gross and screwed up do you fellas wanna make it?” in mind, but still, credit where credit is due.
The book does provide a table of ‘typical’ ritual effects to use, if you want. It’s a single d12 roll that explains how physically harrowing the experience was for your shaman, and how much of themselves they sacrificed or allowed to be eaten up by hungry entities beyond the veil. The damage can range from 1 or more points of permanent HP loss, to losing points of Constitution directly. Benefits include a small experience point boost, a permanent bonus to Wisdom, or just nothing at all; the powers that shamans treat with can be fickle pricks.
This ritual is undergone at the end of apprenticeship, as well as every time a shaman or wicca wants to learn a new spell from outside of their class list, replace a lost gri-gri (a tribal holy symbol that both classes require to cast magic, derived from the gris-gris of West African Vodun and its diasporic descendants like Voodoo), craft a talisman (a minor magical item unique to them), or exceed their racial spellcaster level limits (which are often quite low in comparison to their normal level limits). Over a decently long career, a Thar spell-caster will end up truly grizzled and wizened by their craft. They might even die outright from a ritual if not careful.⁵
I believe this was done in order to cement how nasty the shaman’s objects of worship are (and we will be getting to them shortly). But it does something else as well, perhaps unintentionally.
It invokes (please bear with me for a moment) the Jungian archetype of the Wounded Healer.
To paraphrase greatly, the wounded healer is someone who was drawn to their profession by the fact that they themselves have suffered similar traumas in life as their patients. The wounding is what opens up one’s empathy, and unlocks their healing powers- speaking figuratively, of course. In real life this deals with people in the professions of therapy, medicine, nursing, etc. But in the context of fantasy it is also quite literal.
Many modern writers and philosophers–mostly Westerners–connect the idea of the wounded healer with countless real life religious and mythological phenomena, including many shamanic traditions, where it is often the case that a person is considered ‘marked’ or otherwise destined to become a shaman by some ominous ordeal early in life, such as suffering from disease, injury, or mental illness.⁶
I am not going to dig deep into that theory because I don’t know the first thing about Jungian psychology and boy do I not have the patience to learn. However I will say that I'm leery of the theory and anything else that tries to orient diverse shamanic traditions around a single universality. Still, it does relate back to the real-life diversity of conceptions of shamans that I mentioned back in the etymologies and definitions post. Bit by bit, more of them are being borne out in the fiction of D&D as it grows and expands.
Religion in the Broken Lands
I’ve alluded to the dark powers treated with by Thar shamans twice now, and it’s our first taste of actual specifics for a shamanic religion, so let’s dig into that next.
The spirits and other forces shamans get their power from are very ill-defined in the text, and stand curiously separate and divorced from popular religion. This encourages you to come up with your own answers as to what they are, or leave them wholly opaque. Are they the spirits of the dead? Demons? Some other completely different entities? I don't know. All I know is that they are not Immortals.
Religion in the Broken Lands operates much as it does elsewhere in Mystara: instead of “gods” in the traditional sense, intelligent beings worship so-called Immortals. Immortals were once regular people who became powerful and badass enough in life that they ascended to immortality and carved out a sphere of deific influence for themselves. They are the “I” in BECMI, and therefore they serve not only as objects of worship for the world, but also objects of emulation for the player characters, whose long adventuring careers might just allow them to do the same.
The Immortals worshiped by humanoids tend to be former conquerors and warlords who paid for their divinity in foes slain and cities razed. The book says there are far too many to list, which encourages groups to come up with their own religions. The Immortals who are listed tend to be 1 per species, and they usually have portfolios centered on warfare, consumption, and destruction. It makes sense that a bunch of militaristic societies trapped in permanent endemic warfare would emphasize gods like that, although I think it's also a bit of a metaphorical chicken-or-the-egg situation as to whether they started to war first and picked up relevant gods second, or got pushed into forever war by their gods.
Something funny I noticed is that most of the Thar Immortals have alternate names in their entries. The bugbear Immortal Bartziluth is also known as as Hruggek, the orc warrior god Karaash is AKA Ilneval, The Shining One of the kobolds was once named Kurtulmak, etc. These are all names taken from the ethnic pantheons found in Gary Gygax’s Greyhawk campaign setting for AD&D, a decade and a half before they were turned into generic deities for 3rd edition. Another rare bit of cross-pollination between the otherwise separate branches of D&D.
Also I can’t believe that I’ve been playing or at least reading about Dungeons & Dragons for over 20 years and it took me this long to realize that the god of the gnoll hyena people is named Yeenoghu. Did anybody else miss that one? Maybe I shouldn’t be the one writing about media.
Shamans are described in this section as effectively being clerics of the Immortals, minus the ability to turn undead. Instead, they gain a unique ability that emulates a feat or quality their Immortal is known for, as well as a more general benefit enjoyed by all followers of that Immortal regardless of class.
Karaash/Ilneval for example grants his shamans better authority checks against his faithful, as well as the ability to use a pretty nasty karaash sword, which deals 1d10 damage and causes wounds that can only be healed with magic.⁷ Shamans are often quite limited in the weapons they can wield, either by sharing the cleric weapon restriction or by a requirement to only wield “tribal” weapons, so seeing a shaman with access to such a big, martial weapon is rather novel at this time. Spirits or no, they are soldiers just like everyone else in the Broken lands.
While shamans and most wiccas worship one or more gods of their respective racial pantheons in the henotheistic fashion that was already standard for D&D religions, they explicitly are not obliged to pray to them for their spells. Instead, they get their powers from those capricious spirits that accept their sacrifices and nibble away at their bodies and souls level after level. It is remarkably similar to the patron/supplicant relationship that would grow out of the many iterations of the warlock class decades later. Alas, we won’t see many other examples of this ephemeral shaman-as-warlock archetype in our survey.
Shamilitarism
Because of how militaristic humanoid societies of the Broken Lands are, shamans and wiccas serve dual roles as mystical and martial figures. They are forced into the hierarchy wherever they will fit, and often rise to positions of authority beneath the various chiefs and kings of the land. Here they serve in some capacity as an advisor, a force multiplier during wartime (which is all of the time), and a sort of combination chaplain/doctor.
This role is borne out in the mechanics of the Orcwars! pullout wargame, tucked away inside the dungeon master's booklet. In Orcwars! a chief in control of a shaman gains +1 to their combat, authority, and servility dice rolls from utilizing the shaman's mix of potent magic and politico-religious legitimacy. They also seem to be regarded as very valuable to keep alive by all sides, because shamans are not killed during battles, and they always move over to the winning side, or else flee to another territory until a chief worthy of serving comes along.
One of the last parts of the boxed set we're treated to is Thar's Manual of Good Conduct, a primer on how to give and follow orders, obey hierarchy, win fights, and generally keep the military running as close to smooth as possible. In the section on "Orcish Sanitation" the two classes (shamans more than wiccas) minister to the troops in their tribe by inspecting them during ztan-HU'T (a pun on ten-hut) to make sure they're reasonably healthy and fit.⁸
Much space is afforded to extended jokes like making sure each soldier's feet smell an appropriate level of stinky or explaining why it's bad to eat rotten meat, but shamans also do more serious work like treating wounds and diseases through mundane, medicinal, and magical means. This marks shamans and wiccas out as the specialized repositories of vital, nonmagical day-to-day knowledge in humanoid societies, just as they often are in real life human societies where the shaman is an active participant in life in the community beyond just performing rituals in a hut kept separate from the rest of the village, as the tropes so often depict. Admittedly their Broken Lands counterparts do a whole lot more heavy lifting by comparison, because of how stupid most humanoids are typed as being.
Then again, on that last note, maybe knowledge like maintaining proper hygiene might actually be viewed as overtly magical by most of the tribes of the Broken Lands...
Thanks for reading, and sorry for the longer wait between last entry and this one. Next time we'll be looking at another entry in the Gazetteer, of which I believe we'll cover 4 in total.
Or you can click here to return to the Shamans in D&D Archive.
¹ Not to be confused with the Great Gray Land of Thar, a desolate northern region of the Forgotten Realms that also happens to play host to large warring armies of orcs and other humanoids. D&D is nothing if not willing to borrow from/cannibalize itself.
² Heard, Bruce. The Orcs of Thar: Dungeon Master's Booklet. 1988. P. 30.
³ Heard, Bruce. The Orcs of Thar: Player's Guide. 1988. P. 18, 40-42.
⁴ Dungeon Master's Booklet. P. 5.
⁵ Ibid. P. 6.
⁶ Jackson, Stanley W. "Presidential Address: The Wounded Healer". Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 75. No. 1. 2001. P. 1-6.
⁷ Dungeon Master's Booklet. P. 8-10.
⁸ Heard, Bruce. The Orcs of Thar: Thar's Manual of Good Conduct. P. 24-29.
