All right, let’s do this.
RETURN TO GLORY is a @Wizards_DnD Adventurer’s League module, where a group of Lvl 6 Orcs “Reclaim what was once [theirs],” recovering a dead orcish city from under a mountain.

It’s a clear response to the orc discourse of a month ago, relating to the lazy and bioessentialist way that D&D wrote about orc player-character stats in Volo’s Guide to Monsters.

For the details, here’s my thread on the disc-orcs: https://twitter.com/ajeypandey/status/1254442473474199553?s=21

So, first impressions:
- Drive-Thru RPG’s interface sucks and I hate it
- You’ve got GLORY, DOMINATE, and TRIBE on the cover. Not promising.
- The writing team seems...mostly-white? After discourse about racism in writing about orcs?

Hey uh, @JamesIntrocaso? You know the thing about writing with people “not exactly like you?” You know that centering Black and Indigenous writers on a module about orcs would like...at least offer a good impression?

You WERE aware of the discourse: https://twitter.com/jamesintrocaso/status/1254502025691185155?s=21

Anyway. Not promising, although the skull gauntlets at least look cool.

So the background is that your party of orcs are digging through an underground city inhabited by a unified orc culture that has since split into four tribes after some forgotten cataclysm.

Neat premise.

The city had an aqueduct, an order of bard-hunters, an underground agriculture facility, and an order of mage-scholars.

Sounds like an interesting city. Shame it’s a ruin now.

The first thing you pick for your PC is a set of superstitions and omens.

Not “traditions.”
Not “religious practices.”
Superstitions and omens.

And the omens all seem to be proverbs and talismans.

The writers could have just called them holy symbols, but they didn’t.

The party starts the adventure at a graveyard of sorts, fighting orcish legends rising as regular undead.

Yeah, the orcish legends? Normal stat blocks. Level 6 scrubs can take ‘em.

I guess only the “legend” part was mortal.

Then the party enters a museum with some history of the city and a wedding cove imbued with the CEREMONY spell.

The history has a little stuff about infighting being a common problem, until folks united at this city.

This...underground city, populated by nomadic cultures?

The party then travels through the personal chambers of the Overlox (basically the leader of this UNNAMED city), then through the dungeon, where a group of kuo-toa has taken residence.

You can slaughter them all, if you want.

The dungeon is where you learn a bit about the Watchful Eye, an order of guardians that prize keen perception.

You can find a magical CCTV system to scan the entire UNNAMED city.

The party then travels through the sanctum of the Song Trackers, who are basically ranger-bards.

You find some Song Tracker instruments! There’s...a lute, a drum, and half a flute.

Bog-standard Western Fantasy.

Seriously? Not even a morin khurr or something? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morin_khuur

They have neat automaton scouts, though.

Next you get to a Lake of (literal?) Blood dedicated to orcs who die a “good death” in battle—but not to orcs who fought in losing battles, for some reason.

I guess taking rear guard to protect retreating allies is a sign of weakness.

Eventually, you get to the keep of a now-ghostly healer. Apparently the city got wrecked when the ruling clan abdicated for no reason.

This was apparently enough to throw an organized city into civil war.

The healer doesn’t tell you what the city was called.

The party collects three ritual items and kills a boss monster that subjects party members to their worst fears, and that cleanses the city, which in turn reunites the four orc tribes.

...That’s all it takes?

It took a prolonged campaign to build up this STILL UNNAMED city in the first place, but centuries later, five now-Level 9 wanderers can replicate that success immediately?

No politics? No negotiation? No culture shock? No CONSTRUCTION EFFORT?

Overall? Solid-looking mid-tier dungeon crawl. Sounds like fun.

The writers gave the orcs a neat little underground city with sweet technology and a spellcasting tradition.

But it’s still a culture with practices called “superstitions,” that:
- Sees soldiers of losing battles as weak, without nuance
- Collapsed for petty reasons
- Can be reconstituted by killing ONE boss monster and doing ONE ritual

It’s not enough. The writers scribbled a standard Forgotten Realms city atop cobbled together practices of Forgotten Realms orcs.

They could have done So Much.

They could have doubled down on weird spiritualism.

They could have made ancestral bonds mechanically relevant.

They could have given the orc spirits a new stat block.

Or given the ranger-bards unique instruments.

Or made the mushrooms near the lake legit holy.

Or put more thought into why a HORDE—a NOMADIC PEOPLE—wouldn’t at least live on TOP of the mountain instead of UNDERGROUND.

But they didn’t. They made an interesting dungeon out of a boring city.

A city with no houses.

A museum with scraps of history.

A wedding ceremony that’s just wading into a cove.

A place with spirits who remember its heyday, but none who remember its name.

And they don’t even have the decency to make a new orc stat block.

After all this discourse, and a month to write a lovingly-crafted dungeon module, orcs still get -2 to Intelligence.

No changes.

Also here’s the credits list: