So, the discussion about orcs and evil and what not was cool but what’s even cooler are the social things and the mythical elements that the discussion engendered. That is precisely why, when the issue first arose for me when I was a wee lad, that it was a game changer. I had to really sit down and think about my setting differently.
The first thing I did was get rid of the idea of good and evil and law and chaos. I just made things and creatures with their own sets of priorities, desires, and manners of interacting with the world. For example, a hag (or most hags), see humans as a food source. That’s it. The hags consume fear for food. Humans are, of the races, the most prone to fear, nightmares, and dread. This is sustenance for hags. From a hag’s point of view, a human is akin to a deer one kills for food. This alone created some interesting offshoot ideas. Hags prefer to feed off children because they are even more prone to fear. But their intent is not to kill them, just keep them fearful. Occasionally this all goes sour and someone dies or some errant hero comes along and tries to eradicate that source of dread - as heroes do.
In the long run I allowed the players to decide upon what is good, evil, lawful, and chaotic. And this created a whole host of new issues I had to address. As I don’t want to blather on abut that, long story short, all societies have to nominally function. To function, rules, guidelines, and expectations are developed. Without these, dysfunction ensues and collapse or atomization. This created another manner of managing some creatures. They are basically anti-social and abide by no rules but their own. This made for interesting story lines that would cause some confusion and consternation with the players.
But on to the society aspect. Without a social structure, things come apart. Where is the tipping point? Its roughly 10%. When more than 10% of the population begins to stray from the path, society begins to break down. About 90% of the people are willing to do whatever just to through to the next day. There is a lot of research that backs up those numbers. Further to the point though, only about 1% of any population group is responsible roughly 50% of the bad behavior AND good behavior. By that I mean the extremes of good and extremes of bad.
Now to my final point. How many heroes are there? In game terms, the question would be how many potentially levelable characters are there? How many heroes can come from one town or for that matter, master villains? Going by the 10% rule, 10 in a hundred or at the extremes only 1 in a hundred. When you start crunching numbers, the hero is quite rare and a huge population must exist for a hero to emerge and the heroes would be the 1 in a hundred. Another thing to consider with population groups is that 90% of all preindustrial people were involved with agriculture. To support 10 people who could go on to other tasks or specialties took 90 people to feed them. All I am saying is that when I started crunching numbers, I realized how huge population would have to be to “feed heroes into the game.’
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