The Culture: Stop Pretending That They're Not Just Orcs

Basic Expert did a good video on Goblinoids.

I feel it, but here's the truth: in gaming and in fiction, A is A.

It doesn't matter how you describe or name your monsters. Orcs are Orcs, Elves are Elves, and so on; we've long ago passed the point where truly unfamiliar entities are tolerable to audiences or players on a mass scale. The cognitive terrain is throughly explored, mapped, conquered, pacified, tamed, colonized, and civilized. There are is no more space for anything else.

I wish I could blame this on commercial incentives. You can argue that in fiction, in film, in television, or in videogames. Those media work more alike than not, so patterns that arise in one replicate in the others; this is why changes between appearances either don't exist or are irrelevant in practice.

That's not the case in Fantastic Adventure Games on Tabletop. The problem is the nature of the medium itself. In short, this is the Lindy Effect feeding back into the Network Effect.

A thing is Lindy if it is more likely to stick around the longer that it sticks around; this is a form of anti-fragility. A thing benefits from the Network Effect when its utility increases with the number of people using it. Tabletop as a hobby is both, which is why the Game That Matters is the oldest one and why older iterations remain strong despite the interference of outside factors.

It's such a long-running problem that there's a Trope Wiki entry about it:

We're in space, so regular old Earth flora and fauna just won't do. Solution: Introduce creatures (or sports, or political institutions, or dishes, etc.) that are just like familiar Earth concepts that the audience will recognize but IN SPACE, and give them funny names. Older and more retro series will forgo the funny names entirely and call everything "Space this" and "Galactic that". This trope may be the result of Translation Convention. If the viewpoint characters in the work encounter a lifeform that's new to them, but already familiar to an alien culture, the alien culture will probably have their own word for it, and there's no reason for that to match the common real-world name of the thing. However, in monocultural stories, it's much easier to overuse this trope (in this case, calling it a "space rabbit" might even be more realistic in colloquial speech, by analogy with things like "sea cow"). Although using such proprietary terminology can give a work its own flavor, keep in mind that Tropes Are Tools; having too much such terminology can make a work feel pretentious or too confusing to follow.

So don't even bother. 50 years of constant usage in the hobby alone, and longer outside of it. It's all settled and trampled down harder than granite by now.

Gaming, writing, all media: stop pretending. Your precious darlings are Just Fucking Orcs. Use the term we all know and be done with it- unless you're corpo twat looking for something to trademark so you can grift off language like a certain British Toy Company.