Ebon Mirror by Penumbra has a community of lawful good orcs, admittedly with an unusual reason for existing, and a half-orc whose orcish side is her better half. Dead of Winter on the third ed. CD has some "noble savage" orcs; I don't remember their alignment as I was playing rather than GMing, but it pretty clearly wasn't evil. My PCs ended up liking them quite a bit. The bad guys were all human. Shattered Peace by Penumbra has orcs and half-orcs of various alignments probably including LG, and a main orc enemy force which behaved as LE rather than CE though I don't remember what their given alignment was. (We didn't run this; it didn't seem as though it would work.) The fact that 2/3 of these are from Penumbra is no accident; their house style has a lot of role-reversal. (Notice that I'm not defending alignment here. I don't find it particularly useful. But factually, the LG orc does exist in published work.) An alternative [to alignment] is Cook's _Arcanus Unearthed_ which does ditch alignments and does the spell-system work for you. It's otherwise pretty similar to v3.0. I've been running it for a while now; I'm not entirely happy with the classes, but otherwise it seems to work well, and there are no gaps showing where the alignment system used to be. In my homebrew we redefined the alignment-based spells to be religion-based; "Detect Evil" detected things strongly associated with the enemies of the caster's faith (and wasn't cast by mages). This meant that the two PC clerics could and did disagree on what was "evil", which was fine by me. Aligned items were replaced by religion-specific or pantheon-specific ones. It didn't seem to require large changes in the spell system, though we were making so many changes by that point (the homebrew was closer to 3rd Ed than 1st Ed, which is what it was based on) that a few more were hardly noticable. Arcanus goes the other way in that it's a setting in which religion is not powerful at all. I wish the authors had put in a little more cosmology, because I'm finding demons in a religion-poor setting a little hard to grasp. Back to Table of Contents -- Game! # 9 To Game! List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by George Phillies. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com