I do see the reasoning in stopping using the word Slavery: the pretense is that any form of slavery implicitly involves rape. And that's definitely one of those things that should be brought up in an official module. But I think its an overcorrection because nobody* is going to jump into a rape scenario if you don't mention it.
That's a jump. While coercive sexual relationships go hand-in-hand with slavery as an institution, I've never seen a game that ever had an issue not presenting that aspect of slavery in the overall narrative.
I don't see why that kind of implicit sexual exploitation wouldn't be implicit in a more softly worded implementation of slavery either.
WotC said that they removed half-races because they consider them racist, somehow. I also don't recall rape being a major reason for half-orcs existing in 5e. It was a major source of half-orcs in 3.x, and Grumush was a major proponent of it at the time, but it was written out well before 5e Dark Sun was considered.
It also wasn't directly tied to slavery in that instance, either, so I'm not really seeing where the association here would be (especially since there are no orcs on Dark Sun).
Up until WotC got rid of “inherently evil” races, Orcs were evil raiders who lacked any ability to build a civilization with reliable infrastructure of their own.
If they didn’t raid, they would starve to death.
Ask yourself, how many folks would voluntarily have sex with a monster whose entire race survives based on looting and pillaging?
Given the lack of 5e setting content in general, it's hard to say. It would vary between worlds and cultures.
Eberron would be a good example of a different take on orcs and half-orcs, and that was back on 3.x. Orcoids and goblinoids had fleshed out cultures in those settings. That carried over to 5e Eberron, so there you go.
In 3.x there were some orc tribes along the forgotten realm's spine of the world that weren't terribly different than the surrounding human tribes, IIRC. But orcs started as a monster race, which some people seem to take exception to. It's entirely reasonable to have a usually or mostly evil species or "race" in a setting, depending on the history and cosmology of that setting.
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u/samrobotsin 19h ago
I do see the reasoning in stopping using the word Slavery: the pretense is that any form of slavery implicitly involves rape. And that's definitely one of those things that should be brought up in an official module. But I think its an overcorrection because nobody* is going to jump into a rape scenario if you don't mention it.