The Dungeon Industrial Complex
You’re a hard orc to find, Blitzgrim Warsong.
No one thinks to look for an orc in a dwarf bar, for good reason. I hope my disguise and accent are convincing. I’ve been practicing.
Very. Your secret is safe with me.
Let’s get down to business.
You’re in charge of the Green Front. Did you found it or do you just organize it?
No to both. The Green Front is a grassroots movement which arose independently in numerous Orcish communities at the same time that I became politically active. Fate and sympathy threw us together; and I’d stop short of calling the Green Front “organized”—yet.
What are the Green Front’s goals?
We want to improve the station of subaltern races—that is, what your people call the “evil races”: ourselves, goblins, hobgoblins, lizardfolk, kobolds, dark elves, dark dwarves. The list goes on.
You mean drow and dvergr?
We prefer “dark elf” and “dark dwarf.” We’re trying to reclaim that term, “dark.”
What difficulties would you say these races face?
“Difficulty” is a rather delicate way of putting it, don’t you think? Most of us face perpetual violence: murder, robbery, eviction. The few of us brave enough to try to make a living among the empowered races are criminals at worst, second-class citizens at best. The best compliment we can hope to receive is that we’re “not like all the others.”
Why do you think that is?
The problem originates in the economy. This world’s most powerful and successful capitalists are adventurers. They devote all their time and energy to accumulating wealth; and they are able to enforce their will through violence. A single adventurer has more agency and purchasing power than most towns. So industry and trade revolve around these adventurers: supplying and housing and feeding them on one side, and trying to murder them and take their stuff on the other side, the dungeon side. Adventurers go into dungeons to accumulate capital; dungeons lure in adventurers and then kill them so their accumulated capital drops into the dungeon and goes back to whoever is in charge—often a retired adventurer who invested their ill-gotten gains in a dungeon to keep them safe and funded. But dungeons don’t run themselves; you have to staff them with people willing to live in the worst places in the world. Spirits and constructs are too expensive and too dangerous; so the job falls to us, the subaltern races, who have been driven there.
You say “driven there,” but critics of your theory contend that orcs and goblins and so forth work in dungeons because they’re used to living underground anyway.
Ah, but why do we live underground? Creatures which have lived and evolved in the Underdark are pale. We’re not: we’re dark, the color of creatures who live in the forests, or under the sun. We once lived above, but were driven under by force. To justify our disenfranchisement and genocide, those in power created the fiction that we are inherently evil, and so do not deserve the light of the sun—let alone to live among them. This, I think, is the greatest sin of the Dungeon Industrial Complex: convincing people of the patently absurd notion that a child can be born evil.
What steps will the Green Front take to address this problem?
Publicity and aid. We’re trying to get the truth of the Dungeon Industrial Complex into people’s heads, so they know what’s really going on when adventurers come to town. In conjunction with AfroFuture, we’re also preparing our own teams of field operatives to bring aid and information to those of us isolated in dungeons of all kinds.
Very. But we’re excited to put a few arrows in a few knees.
I’ve said too much already, mate. Don’t push your luck.
