What is it like to be an orc?

What are orcs good for, apart from taking a surprising amount of time to die? This is a reasonable question at first glance: purely by looking at the Kin talents, you can construct for yourself a hierarchy of interestingness, with humans at the top (a bonus to using skills, the most expensive and resilient points you’ll ever spend in the game), elvenspring closely behind (increase the effect of your willpower points), dwarves interesting in certain circumstances (pushing a roll again if you rolled no banes is a free hit), and the least said about wolfkin the better.

Coupled with their, shall we say, unsubtle nature, this can easily also explain many Kin’s instinctive attitude towards orcs: it’s easy to believe that people were created as a slave race if, at first glance, they look like one. If elves are art nouveau, and dwarves are art deco (log in to Twitter to see the rest of the thread!), orcs are “I bodged together a bunch of rough-hewn planks, will this do?”.

And there is a lot to be said against the lazy idea of a “proud warrior race”, especially if they proudly reject the technology other Kin use (e.g. advanced agriculture, metalsmithing, magic, basically anything in the Forbidden Lands technology tree): how did they get to this stage without being wiped out? How have they not been out-competed?

What makes the orcs interesting, unlike the saurians and wolfkin, is that this is a question they ask themselves.

First you need to understand the gender divide

Orc biology is very different from other Kins’

The first thing to note is that most Kin reproduce in similar ways. OK, halflings and goblins have that weird split Kin thing going on; elvenspring live really long so shouldn’t abide by standard human patterns of breeding; and elves are even weirder in that they basically don’t die, so new elves are similarly rare. But otherwise, when a mummy and a daddy love each other very much, there’s a baby, and its sex is a toss-up.

This is not true for orcs. “Orc litters tend to consist of three to five newborns”, “Out of eight newborn orcs, one is female and seven are male, on average”, “Only half of the male orcs reach maturity”, “Duels in the clans … the fight is usually to the death”, “Any orc who shows fear or who surrenders in a duel or on the battlefield is immediately reduced to slave status”, “Orc slaves … make up half of all orc males” (all GM’s Guide, p. 62). There is a serious imbalance between the sexes, that ridiculous levels of violence among males don’t go far enough to resolving.

For every female orc, seven males are born, which after savage infighting becomes about 3.5 adults: “competition among them is fierce and they are all brought up to be aggressive” (ibid.). If you think the females are also competitive, so sometimes they kill each other, the ratio might rise to 1:4; conversely, if you think that some males might die from malnutrition but the females are always given priority, the ratio might descend to 1:3.

Regardless, the next question is: how many adult orcs are straight-up killed in duels, and how many surrender and accept their status as slaves? “Losing a fight determines rank, but is not seen as dishonourable”, and “It is not uncommon for slave orcs to geld themselves to make it easier to make peace with their new status” (ibid.), so that feels like there’s a standard thing orc males do, which is to try and fight for supremacy a few times early on in their life, and then accept that they’re never going to win, and become a slave rather than constantly being beaten up by the bigger guys.

If you say that more orcs would fight to the death than accept slavery, you can get to an equilibrium where for each female surviving to adulthood, there is one intact male, one gelded slave male, and one or two dead males. Females are likely to live a long life, as are male slaves to a lesser degree, while males will be constantly challenged by other males, potentially resulting in death or enslavement. Against this, there is a constant supply of new initially-intact males.

Regardless, there are at least twice as many male orcs, intact or not, than females; and possibly more. This is either a very male-dominated society, or one where democratic ideals have no place.

Who of the intact males gets to rule and breed?

It gets worse, because even if there are as many females as intact males, what is the likelihood that each male and female get to pair off for life, like a typical 1950s suburban lifestyle?

No, this feels more like a David Attenborough documentary, or an Arabian kingdom of old, where the ruling male gets a harem of females, and most intact males don’t get any and are frustrated as hell. From time to time someone might challenge the ruling male, and if they do they’ll either steal the harem entirely, if they’re that powerful, or have to divvy it up among their supporters if they’re not. And of course additional rectifications can happen afterwards, as a newly-dominant male tries to reinforce their power, or a supporter of a new King tries to chip away at it.

There is a glorious level of instability to orc villages, on the male side, that opens itself up to all sorts of plot hooks.

Male orcs think about age cohorts, not family or genetics

It’s not clear why male orcs should care whether another orc is their brother or sister, let alone their father or mother. Siblings are far more likely to have been a direct competitor in an early life-or-death struggle, than someone who helped you out in times of need. And your father’s pride (assuming he knows or cares that he’s your father) is that his progeny don’t need to be favoured to triumph over other children in relentless fights to the death, so he certainly won’t lift a finger to help you: if he does, he’s accepting both your and his weakness.

It’s more likely that younger orcs’ relationships are like those of gang-members. They’ll naturally make alliances with a subset of other orcs of a similar age, to watch each others’ backs against an agreed collective enemy (the alliance can naturally be broken at the drop of the hat). They may also make deals with older orcs, where the younger orcs spy on the older orc’s enemies in exchange for food and some slight amount of protection.

Why do orcs outbreed other Kin?

It says “orcs are … countless in number” (ibid., p. 62), “Based on their physical strength and numbers the orcs could dominate all the other kin” (ibid., p. 64), “the huge orc armies that fought against the Alderlanders many generations ago” (p. 65); but why is this?

OK, orc women have on average four times as many children than human women, but you have two problems now: (1) you need to explain where the orcs get the food to sustain all of these children (the forests where they live now aren’t known for being particularly fertile), and/or (2) if most of the male orcs kill each, why are there still more of them than humans?

An immediate answer might be: maybe orcs can eat things that other Kin can’t? Maybe orcs can’t eat rocks (that’s trolls you’re thinking of), but they can certainly eat all sorts of semi-rotten and disgusting things that humans, let alone elves, would turn their noses up at. Centipedes, woodlice, animal dung, even tree bark: orcs might not necessarily want to eat stuff like that, but at a push they’ll get some nutrition out of it. When Terry Pratchett talks about secretive eating establishments where the locals “are rumoured to eat anything they can down their throat best out of three”, this is the sort of people he’s talking about.

Also, maybe male orcs grow to physical maturity much quicker than other Kin?

After all, if you look at how quickly humans in our world put on weight as they grow, and compare that with dogs or cows, humans grow really slowly. That’s because we have really big complicated brains, and a lot of energy goes into that rather than muscle and bone. The effort pays off in the long run, because there are plenty of adult humans to protect the babies as they grow, and after 15-20 years the resulting babies can do fancy stuff like algebra, architecture and politics.

If male orcs don’t bother with that sort of thing, then maybe the answer to “why do you get loads of scary big orcs very quickly?” might be “they’re actually basically children”. They’re nowhere the intellectual level of a human warrior of the same build, but that doesn’t matter if the contest is brute physical violence, and the orcs have bred 3 terrifying children in the time it took you to raise half an average person.

This is a classic Zerg rush strategy. You don’t have to worry about the long-term consequences of feeding all of these terrifying murder children, because many of them will die in battle; and you don’t have to worry too much about being depopulated when they die, because while your enemies are licking their wounds and thinking about the next war, you’re breeding replacement sword-fodder. If an unfortunate outbreak of peace happens, you’re going to have to kill many of the excess children because you can’t afford to feed them all, but orcs know that life is cheap.

In rules terms, you might want to say for male orcs, they’re limited to 2 points each in Wits and Empathy, and there’s an extra / zeroth age stage of “Child”, between 6 and 12, with 14 attribute points, 6 skills, 0 general talents. They haven’t quite finished growing, and they still have a lot to learn, but a horde of Strength 6, Agility 4, Wits 2, Empathy 2 6-year-old fighters who can sometimes ignore armour is not to be sniffed at.

But wait, doesn’t that mean my male orc PC has to be stupid?

Well, yes and no.

I mean, the game itself is very clear that male orcs “have very poor judgment because they regularly lose their tempers”. Chances are that if you play a male orc, you’re probably playing a fighter, or maybe a hunter, rogue or even a rider. You’re not playing a druid or a sorcerer, because orcs fear and mistrust magic, and pedlars and minstrels similarly feel off-brand. So you’re talking about putting your points into Strength and Agility, and the rest of the party can pick up the slack with Wits and Empathy (unless your party are all murder hobos, of course).

But then again, one of the things about PCs in Forbidden Lands is that they’re special. (The game says very early on - Player’s Handbook, p. 14 - “You are no hero” but that’s to emphasise “Your fate isn’t determined for you by someone else. You choose your own path. You are an adventurer.” i.e. you’ve decided to hexcrawl your way towards death and glory, rather than wandering to the nearby tavern and asking “who’s hiring people to go to a dungeon where there’s a 10ftx10ft room with four goblins playing cards?”) They have a drive (mechanically simulated by Willpower, Pride and Dark Secret) that lets them look forward to things that most people fear, and they’re the protagonists of the story your table is telling.

So while the answer to the question “can a male orc be a cunning and charismatic minstrel, or a wise and soothing druid, or a terrifying sorcerer versed in ancient lore?” for most people is “hahahahahaha no”, your character could be an exception.

More on this later.

What this means for orc society

Female orcs should obviously rule

Male orcs have testosterone poisoning, fight with each other constantly, and can’t even pronounce many words. Female orcs can pass for humans with some minor disguises, and sort-of secretly rule over the males, we are told: “Since male orcs have very poor judgment because they regularly lose their tempers the clans are run by the females, who also choose their partners. This is completely natural and uncontroversial to the orcs, but it’s nothing they advertise to the outside world.” (GM’s Handbook, p.62)

Sorry, what? Male orcs have poor judgment, but they nonetheless always agree that the women should be in charge? Even though the men outnumber and are bigger and stronger than the women? Yes, pillow-talk is completely a thing, and one of the ways that the women sway the men; and if a male is deposed in an orderly manner, and the new King takes control of the previous King’s harem, the women can soon sway him to their will. Or if the King isn’t as powerful as the old one, and needs to gift women to his supporters, the women will in turn persuade his lieutenants that they should do what the women wanted to do all long.

But what about violent revolutions? Male orcs never get drunk and decide that the reason why their life sucks is that the frigid bitches in charge don’t respect them, and it’s the time to teach them a lesson? If female orcs are physically less-imposing than the males, and normally rule by persuasion and cunning, this leaves them vulnerable to a sufficient number of unhappy males deciding to violently assert control. This is obviously bad for the females; but it’s also bad for the orcs in general, when the males surface from a glorious hangover and realise that there’s nobody left who knows how to make stuff.

Also: why should males be relied upon to shut the hell up when people from other Kin are around? Even if there would be mileage in embarassing the King, by shouting out “haha, stupid humans am talk to Grogar thinking he am in charge, but everyone here know it am Grogar’s wife who am rule over all orcs”? (This is not a particularly good plan; but, again, see “male orcs have very poor judgment”.) You cannot simultaneously say “orc society is unruly and terrible” and “…but they hide it well”.

No, if you want to say that the female orcs effectively rule, you have to make them at least as big and powerful as the males, so stupid males don’t think “I am kill her: she am puny and weak!”. And the Queen needs to be known to be the one in charge.

Most orc women cannot pass as human

“Female orcs are similar to humans in size and appearance and some can even pass for human women even though their eyes tend to be yellowish or golden in colour. … Their top pair of breasts are bigger than the others, which helps orc females pass for human if they lace their clothes right.” (GM’s Guide, p. 62.)

This very much has to be the exception. Most orc women will glorify in their orcness, which means being big, powerful and being seen to be powerful. In particular, if a matriarch’s position is based on the fact that all of you puny men are her children (or if not, she’ll kill you and replace you by orcs who are), then she should show off, or at least not try to hide, as many of her curves as possible. Also, remember that in societies where food is expensive, being fat is a hallmark of power (e.g. Henry VIII).

And while, when talking to honoured visitors in the privacy of their own quarters, orc women can speak perfectly clearly and like ordinary Kin; and will maybe prefer to do so, if their long history of enslavement and the clear intellectual inferiority of their males has brought about a cultural cringe. But this isn’t guaranteed. Not only are orc women prepared to code-switch when speaking to male orcs – their speech becomes simpler, more guttural and more robust – but they might choose to embrace their orcish nature and retain some features of Orcish speech patterns, even when talking to outsiders. Whether this is a power play to remind their guests exactly who they’re talking to, or an expression of cultural pride, is down to you to decide.

Either way, you know how in African American English you say things like “Ain’t nobody don’t like no parfait”, deliberately piling on the negatives, even though in “proper” English pairs of negatives cancel each other out? Well, orc women, even talking in a refined accent and mixing all sorts of complicated grammatical forms, may well decide that all verbs are “am”, because that’s how orcs talk and they’re proud.

Just because women don’t kill each other doesn’t make them nice

There’s a temptation to say “orc women are smarter than the men, and they don’t kill each other pointlessly, so they must be a haven of civility compared to the savage, terrifying, pointless brutality that is life as a male orc”.

And there’s certainly some truth to that. But you should remember that orc women are still orcs.

So maybe orc women look for smarts and cunning rather than just brute strength, and they won’t kill you out of hand for being puny and weak, nor will they rip out your womb if you’re unlucky. (Maybe because that’s a lot harder than making a male orc cut off his own testicles and eat them.) But an out-of-favour orc women will find herself constantly doing the dirty jobs: fetching water, tilling the fields, mending clothes, peeling potatoes, scrubbing the latrines if they haven’t found a male orc for that particularly unpleasant job. Everybody ignores her, if she’s lucky; orc women aren’t afraid of physical violence, but somehow cutting words, social snobs, social ostracism is worse than being beaten bloody. She never gets to go to the nice dances, and certainly doesn’t get to have a husband.

Even if she gets to bake tasty cakes, she never gets to *eat *them, and even a cheeky attempt to lick the bowl will result in a savage beating.

How exactly is she better-off than an enslaved male orc?

Why would you think the King matters?

None of this matters if you’re a young male orc trying to prove himself against his peers. If the King says “today we am run after chickens!” you damn straight am run after chickens like the best of the orcs, and that’s the highlight of your day. Similarly, the constant bouts between male orcs, gauging their strength; or raids on neighbouring villages, where you can prove yourself by feats of war and cunning: these are where a male orc can prove himself, and once in a position of dominance needs to look out for challengers.

If the Queen is busy with boring stuff like making sure the crop yields are good and farms are producing well, talking nicely to neighbouring villages, or arranging the sort of breeding agreement that you’ll never be a part of because everyone knows that the system’s rigged in favour of the powerful males (but you’ve got a plan to become one of them), well, why should you care? That’s got nothing to do with you.

As for non-Orc visitors, well, if the King decides to make a big show of how he’s important and powerful, and the Queen puts on a show of being polite and demure, and the visitors don’t realise that the Queen is really the one who rules, well, that’s funny, and shows how stupid the other Kin are. The Queen probably gets all of the orcs together before the meeting and says something like “You miserable maggots am all shut up about me, and pretend that King am the one in charge! And once foreign idiots am gone, we all am have a good laugh! Anyone who spoils this joke am fed to the pigs!”

(Dwarves cohabit with bears because they respect them and there’s a useful symbiosis to be found. Orcs breed really ferocious pigs because pork is tasty, and other orcs getting killed and eaten by wild boar is hilarious.)

Game designers should read their book before writing additional material

Emperor Hroka the First rules the Urhur clan (ibid., p. 64); General Archa rules the Roka clan, but “He knows he is a unifying presence among the orcs, and worries about the future since he is old and has many sons who are eyeing the throne, many of whom are less than suitable to rule” (ibid., p. 65); Eldag “nurtures unrealistic dreams of conquering the dwarven kingdom of Belderand for the Isir clan” (ibid., p. 66).

No! You just told us that the women rule!

(Also: “Older Rokas often have a reluctant respect for the dwarves, their former brothers in arms” is just rubbish. There have been generations since then! Nobody remembers fighting side by side with dwarves!)

There are some easy fixes. If you acknowledge that Soria is the Empress who matters, you can downgrade Hroka to a bit-player and nobody will notice. Eldag can carry on wanting to charge dwarven fortresses with a whole bunch of orc males for as long as he wants, especially as the map of Kins places the Isir clan the furthest away from Belderand of all orc clans, so chances are good he hasn’t actually tried this even once. And Archa might be gaining a glimmer of intelligence, but regardless of whether his sons will manage to inherit his throne or whether there’ll be a whole bunch of bloodly infighting when one of them announces that they’re the new King, he’s not in charge and it really doesn’t matter.

You could also decide that clans are more like political philosophies than nations, in which case there’s no reason why villages run by the same clan should be next to each other geographically. This makes inter-village competition more exciting, and lets e.g. some Isir clan villages be close to Belderand.

Regardless: you need to stat up some female leaders of major orc clans. Because they are the leaders. Not the males. It’s what they think that matters when it comes to relations between orcs and other Kin, and the politics of the Ravenlands more generally.

What does orc society look like?

Ramshackle villages in the woods

Look at the map of kins (GM’s Handbook, p. 50), and note where we find orcs: deep in the forests. Not all the forests, of course: the elves have kept the best for themselves in the Dankwood, and while orcs might be tolerated by the goblins in the Fangwoods, they have to share. But the woods feel more appropriate to orcs than open plains where Galdane Aslene can thunder past or through them, in the same way that Tolkien’s Rohirrim are perhaps the most striking and vivid of his orcs’ enemies; no way are the dwarves going to share their mountains; and the idea of orcs messing about in boats conjures up images of the Mr Toad bits of the Wind in the Willows mashed together with the peaceful river-based passages in horrifying manner.

Descriptions of orc villages surrounded by forests conjure themselves up effortlessly, to the point where you merely have to pause every few words to say “rough-hewn”, “crude” or “mud”. A small orc village will be a motley collection of mismatched huts, tents and other shelters, surrounded by a palissade of sharpened tree trunks; every day, a hunting party ventures outside in search of game.

As orc villages get larger, and surrounding game starts to get scarce, orcs will grudgingly make their slaves do some farming. This is also when they start breeding farm animals, and laughing at the puny orc children having to fight it out with the ducks and pigs for table scraps. The game that Vikings play when they grease a pig and everyone tries to catch it? They totally play that game, although often with a really fierce pig that fights back.

Large or especially foolish orc villages will try to tame really dangerous animals, for prestige and/or laughs: think Pablo Escobar’s cocaine hippos. If your world has cassowaries, a particularly brave and stupid orc has stolen a couple of eggs and tried to breed them. Once the chicks reach their adult size this will not go well for that orc village.

Orcs are insular and mistrustful of the outside world

Male orcs have a, shall we say, strong and vibrant oral history rather than anything as sophisticated as writing and culture. Think of sea shanties where the clever orc who knows the words sings the complicated bit, and the rest of the orcs join in with responses like “Kick their bleedin’ heads in!” (swearier versions are available), “Kill all magicians!” or “Never gonna be slaves again!” Or songs like the ones you hear on football terrace, like “We hate dwarves and we hate dwarves / We hate dwarves and we hate dwarves / We hate dwarves and we hate dwarves / We are the dwarf haters”. (There are also verses for elves, demons, and anything else you can think of.)

The women have more detailed and complicated epic poems that tell of how the dwarves and elves took control of orc society by subjugating the Queens. These tales tell of how proud and smart women were reduced to almost male-like stupidity, their minds fogged by treacherous magic; and how they later fought back by cunning and deception. To this day, each village and clan will have its own ways of speaking secretly, whether that’s via surreptitious hand signs or particular apparently-harmless words like fungus, garment, or cloud, dropped into conversation, that mean “do not trust this person”, “prepare for violence”, “I cannot speak truthfully” etc. This is also why they do not write any of this down: writing can be spied upon and stolen.

This may extend to their art styles. If you have previously been subjugated by unknown magical means, you might decide that you’re not going to make any artistic representations of other orcs, just in case it could be used against you. So maybe orcish art is limited to geometrical figures and abstract shapes, like typical Islamic art. Alternatively, stories told of living heroes, and any depictions of them, in drawings, statues or paintings, will be of grotesque caricatures of them and/or fictional characters derived from them. While the subject is alive, all orcs will swear blind that they honour some other fictional hero; only when they are dead and safe from enslavement by evil sorcerers, will orcs acknowledge who the hero was based on.

All of this means that orcs are a proud warrior race suspicious of outsiders; or, to put it another way, an insular and traumatised Kin who are still coming to terms with past abuse, and are nervous about engaging with anything they don’t understand, for fear that it will harm them.

Take the blood mist: yes, at some level it benefited them, because it meant the humans, dwarves and elves left them alone, and they could be free in their villages at last. On the other hand, it must have terrified the orcs: not only is it some weird kind of magic, which orcs fear, but it turns into invisible demons, which you can’t hit it with an axe until they’re hitting you with their claws first. Orcs can’t deal with this sort of stuff!

And OK, now the blood mist is gone; but that means other Kin may be wandering into the orcish forests plotting magical devilry. Obviously they’ll be smashed flat as soon as the orcs see them coming; but what if they have magical ways of avoiding detection? The largest orcs scream defiance, and the rest join in, but what this really means is: it might happen. A Kin truly comfortable in their own skin and confident of their place in the world wouldn’t have fears like this to reject, no matter how loudly.

The one exception to the fear of the blood mist: summer raids

If you fear the night, and stay huddled behind your village walls during much of the winter, then the arrival of summer is a moment of joyful relief. And if you’re an orc, that can mean only one thing: marching through the forest to pick a fight with one of your close neighbours and steal their stuff.

Most adventure sites on the map where orcs live, have another adventure site 3 hexes away, which is close enough that you could set off at dawn and hike most of the way there in the morning; reach the site, fight some guys and steal their stuff (unless they fight better than you and send you running back home nursing your wounds) then start heading back during the daytime, then finally do a forced march back home in the evening. Some of the weaker orcs will die fighting the bad guys, and others will fail to make it back in time and be eaten by the blood mist, but that means there’s more loot and fame for the survivors.

This feels like an Irish cattle raid, and has the same purpose of keeping the men busy, but also probing your neighbours for weakness without escalating to full-on war. The target could be actual cattle, but slaves and anything else that’s not nailed down too much are also fair game. If enemy combatants are captured and brought home mostly-alive, they can be a source of new genetic material to fend off inbreeding (they can always be gelded later once the women have had their go with them); alternatively, mysterious cloaked women can accompany the raiding party, ostensibly to scout, but actually as agreed exchanges between the villages / an unexpected new arrival who’s here to sway them to the attacking village’s point of view. Male orcs aren’t going to bother the women if they don’t have to, many of them possibly can’t tell them apart anyway, so it’s a rare male who will spot that there’s a new woman in the village now.

What are the Viraga up to?

Not all orc women are Viraga

The rulebook talks about the Urhur clan, the Roka clan, the Isir clan, and then the Viraga, which you could be excused as reading that all female orcs are Viraga; especially when it talks about how they “function as a shadow government” (ibid., p. 66). But if the orc women run the show, then there is no point talking about three clans versus the Viraga, because by necessity the women just are the government and run the three clans.

Talk of a shadow government is interesting, because it implies that the Viraga are a group within the ruling females, who are trying to do things that not even all orc women would agree on. But perhaps a better term would be “rangers”, “spy network”, or even “research institute”.

The Viraga appreciate that the orcs’ position is weaker than it looks

The orcs might occupy roughly one fifth of the Ravenlands, but their numbers are probably less than the humans to their south and the dwarves to their north. They have few natural allies, having understandably burned their bridges with the dwarves and elves, their ex-slave-masters: maybe they could appeal to the goblins, on the grounds of similar attitudes and outlooks, and the saurians and wolfkin in a pinch, but those aren’t the sort of allies you’d choose, all things being equal.

Compared to most other Kin, they are behind on political organisation, technology and certainly magic; if Zytera or Zertorme wanted to make a play for their (probably fairly unproductive) lands, an organised army would doubtless sweep through the forests taking out orc villages one by one. The orcs are safe for the moment because neither Zytera nor Zertorme want to wipe them out; they’ve got better things to do and/or underestimate them. But this is a humiliating position to be in for a proud warrior race!

The easiest thing to do: properly occupy the forests

With the blood mist gone, orcs can stop cowering behind their palisades and start venturing into the nearby woods. This lets individual villages expand (wider-ranging hunting, more crop fields, pasture for animals) and support more orcs. More interestingly, it’s now possible to set up a network of messengers and scouts, constantly criss-crossing the orc woods: looking for intruders, setting traps and ambushes, scouting out exploitable resources (the orcs have been cowering behind their walls for centuries and don’t actually know what’s in their woods), maybe even planning crude road networks so orc armies can be summoned to a potential battle quickly and effectively.

Some of these orc rangers might venture out into neighbouring territory from time to time and see if there’s anything worth nicking or scaring. Yeah, sure, being jumped by bandits when going through the woods is clichéd; but what if these merry men wearing green are in fact mostly green-skinned women, apart from the big guy over there with the axe and the tusks?

Also not too dificult: ramp-up metal production

The official history says “the orcs were servants of the dwarves and elves and most were raised with a slave mentality from birth. When the war against the humans required their service, many orc males were allowed to grow into dominant warriors” (p. 63). There’s only five years between the first Alder war (821 AS), which ended in a draw, and the second Alder war (826 AS), which is when we first see orcs on the battlefields. The question is: what were the dwarves doing with their enslaved orcs during this time?

Regardless of whether you think orcs were always enslaved and subjugated, or whether the dwarves and elves used hideous magics to enslave a Kin previously dismissed as crude and unimportant, one thing must be true: orcs who either weren’t allowed metal weapons and armour, or didn’t understand the concept, were now kitted out as proud new members of the dwarven armies.

Many orcs died in the final three Alder wars, and a fair few metal weapons and chainmail shirts were lost in the process; but all that means is that there are still plenty of orc-sized hand-me-downs available to an orc strong enough to demand something better than crude clubs and animal skins.

More interestingly, there must have been orcs at least peripherally involved in the processes of mining iron ore, refining it, and making iron weapons. You can be sure that that knowledge will have been passed on to subsequent generations, no matter how imperfectly; and the orcs are now looking for iron mines, and trying to work out how to smelt iron ore. Eventually they’ll crack it, at which point you’re looking at an Isengard-scale upgrade of orc weapons and armour.

More difficult: infiltrate other non-orc villages

The orcs’ best chances at gaining allies lie in the areas between Kin dominance, where a mix of Kin may potentially commingle and create new societies. There are a couple of adventure sites on the Coldwater to the West of Lake Varda that look promising, and also a few on the Wash between the Blaudwater and Lake Claye. As well as containing multiple Kin, which makes them good places for adventures, these are also likely to attract immigrants from more hidebound villages as the years go by and people realise that with the blood mist gone, they can just leave. Places like this are likely to gain economic power fairly quickly, and if they’re friendly to orcs that can be a great help, especially if it’s parlayed into political and/or military power.

Of course, orcs’ tendency to breed ridiculously quickly won’t make them popular with other Kin (if you let a breeding pair of orcs into your village, soon you’ll be overrun by orc children), so this probably is one of the times where smaller orc women pretending to be human should be used. If their yellowish eyes and devious, suspicious nature makes the PCs confuse them for one of Merigall’s children, all the better!

Or maybe the orcish emissaries are gelded males, who clearly pose no threat to the future of the village? They can even pretend to have escaped rather than have been sent, and their tales of what a terrible life it is to be a male orc who isn’t a towering monstrous beast will be convincing enough that people will readily believe them.

Longer-term but still not that amazingly controversial: favour different orc body types

The idea goes like this: most male orcs are, frankly, an embarassment. They’re great as shock troops, but the law of diminishing returns kicks in after a certain point, and eventually people with more cunning, friends or magic will find a way to stymie orc tactics. So while the orcs have a temporary advantage in numbers and brute physical strength, they should try to shore up their weaknesses elsewhere.

Most obviously, this means not killing or gelding orcs who could be useful, even if they don’t satisfy the standard orc stereotypes. The smaller orc women who can pass as human obviously fall into this category, as do the rangers sent out to occupy the forests. We know that modern-day humans aren’t always entirely cis male or cis female, and orc sexual dimorphism is stronger than ours, so there’s room for plenty of orcs who depart from the standard gender stereotypes. Previously they’d have been killed because they were puny and weak, or just for a laugh; but maybe these days they’ve been spotted by the Viraga and earmarked for something special? Like, maybe there’s a type of male orc that grows as slowly as humans and dwarves, and can eventually get as smart and tough as female orcs?

If you’re playing an orc and you’re anything than a Strength 6 fighter, chances are good this is why you survived.

Really hard and controversial: favour and even breed new types of orc

This is where it becomes apparent why the Viraga aren’t just the government: because many orcs would violently disagree with them if they knew what they were planning. So maybe the people thinking about this are probably merely a faction of the Viraga, even more secretive.

It goes like this: OK, orcs have perfectly good reasons for distrusting magic; but everybody else has magic, and that puts orcs at a disadvantage. So maybe orcs should try to find a way of getting magic somehow, to even things out? Maybe we could work at spotting young orcs who display blasphemous abilities at strange mystical arts and make sure they live, at least long enough to produce offspring, before they accidentally die in a raiding party accident or fall into a pig pen.

Or: orcs naturally grow really quickly, to a point where they’re as big and tough as a human in a fraction of the time, but then they stop. What if they didn’t? Obviously the square-cube law is against you to some degree, but what if you could make orcs that never stop growing? Like, if a 15-year-old orc is 2 metres tall, can we make an orc who’s 3 metres tall at age 30?

These secret Viraga are trying to breed blasphemous abilities into orcs. They’re like the Bene Gesserit, except that they’re 7 feet tall, wear metal armour and have 8 nipples.

And the dilemma is: what if Zytera were to approach them, and propose a mutually-beneficial experiment where he infuses some of the less-promising candidates with hideously-unnatural energies, the secret Viraga keep the survivors and Zytera gets to dissect the failures?

Orcish encounters for your players

These are exceptions from the usual orc villages, so unless you started off in an orc village, run a normal orc village, first, or maybe the Eye of the Rose, so the players understand what orc villages should be like. Then spring these curveballs on them.

An orc village where the women don’t rule

Maybe there are no women at all; this is most likely in a small village of about a dozen orcs where there only ever were one or two women, and a disease and/or accident happened. If you thought normal orc society was like Lord of the Flies, this is worse: not only hasn’t the boat turned up, it never will. Some older and smarter males (probably slaves) may realise that means the village is in big trouble, but the rest are happily hunting, setting pigs on fire and having the time of their lives.

More interestingly, maybe the women are somehow subservient. Whether they’re regularly beaten into submission by the males (think first about whether your players would be interested in playing through a depiction of this sort of abusive relationship!), or they’ve drugged like the Queens were when the orcs were enslaved by the dwarves and elves, they go ahead with whatever the male orcs want to do. They know that this is wrong, and will be able to surreptitiously try to get messages to the PCs, hoping they can in turn help them, or at least send word to neighbouring orc villages. While the PCs wait for an army of foreign orcs to turn up and beat the male rulers into submission, they might wonder how the males pulled this off: rare herbs that orcs didn’t know about because they were far enough away from their villages during the blood mist that nobody ever found them? Or did they luck upon some kind of magic item that the PCs could make use of themselves / needs to be destroyed in the final battle, but is a clue to something else happening in your campaign?

A village of gelded males

They’re all orcs, but they’re… quiet? And they’re not as big and tough as other orcs the players have met, nor do they have quite as huge fangs. But on the other hand, they’re not immediately confrontational, they speak with a bit more subtlety, and they appear to have a relaxed, cooperative way of running things.

This village should be off the beaten track; definitely not anywhere that anybody would choose to live. Indeed, they might be in the business of regularly upping stakes and moving to somewhere else, because the one thing they’re not into is confrontation. It’s likely that the people who are looking for them are male orcs from nearby orc villages, who resent the loss of their slaves; but if it’s been a while since the blood mist vanished, other Kin could be interested in their lands as well, and reckon that these peaceful orcs are guaranteed to be pushovers.

What’s fascinating about this community is that they’re a community of more-or-less like-minded people, but if the community is going to survive, they’re going to have to find replacement people from somewhere, because by definition they can’t breed any. Do they do their own version of cattle raids where they sneak into neighbouring villages and steal slaves / talk to slaves and convince them to sneak out? Or are they secretly fed promising candidates by the Viraga, who are interested in seeing what a more enlightened orc society could look like?

A neighbouring King might have demanded that the PCs kill these slaves to affirm their trustworthiness, but his Queen may then have strongly recommended that they find a way to placate the King without making an enemy of the Queen. This might involve waiting until the gelded males leave and then burning their village down; maybe killing a few of them so there’s a severed head that they can be brandished in front of the King in triumph. If they just unsubtly kill all of them, this might be the time to reveal that the Viraga have some scary weird orcs, maybe even orcs that can do magic. Maybe they chase these weird orcs off, or run away from them, if they don’t kill them; but one thing’s for certain: when the PCs return to the King and say “we killed those guys like you told us to”, the Queen will decide that she’s very angry with the PCs, and so are a whole bunch more of the weird orcs that the PCs encountered in the village of gelded males.

Oh hey, “gelded males”. I wonder what punishment an orc queen could mete out to adventurers who displeased her, but who could still be found to have some use? This can just be a threat at first, of course, backed up by a demonstration of an unfortunate orc having to cut off their testicles and eat them. And of course the PCs could decide that discretion is the better part of valour and decide to skip town. But that then means that there’s a small cadre of elite Viraga assassins out to get them, and you know what their plan is when they finally find and defeat the PCs…

A wilderness encounter deep within orc territory: orc navvies

Dozens or even hundreds of orcs are clearing bushes, cutting down trees, and hacking at the earth with picks and shovels, building a road. The road is part of a growing network of roads between orc villages, making it possible for orc armies to travel quickly between villages without worrying about delays from fallen trees or mud, or ambushes from bandits or wild animals.

This is hard work, and orcs will welcome any diversions from the monotony, like poking fun (or sharper objects) at the PCs.

Some nearby orc villages mutter that they can’t raid their neighbouring villages along the roads any more, because it’s too easy / the women have told them not to. What they don’t realise is that the roads are part of a nation-building exercise by the Viraga, to make the orcs exploit their resources effectively and focus their attentions outwards.

If it’s been long enough since the blood mist fell that trade has resumed, savvy non-orc pedlars may have paid orcs to escort them along these roads. The orc escorts should at least be e.g. boar-driven chariots, which will scare the living daylights out of the pedlars and/or their horses. Expect arguments between local strong orcs and the escorts on who gets a pick of the pedlars’ trade goods. (The local strong orcs will start from a position of “all”; how much the local women dissuade them from this maximalist position should tell you how established and legitimate the road network is here.)

An orc village that’s trying to learn crafts

The Saurians in the Gargan Marshes collect shells that you can make a purple dye from, and they’re willing to trade this to the Urhur orcs (GM’s Guide p.64). But for what? Obviously, copious amounts of raw meat would do: as unproductive as forests are, swamps are even less, and saurians are lazy, so sure, food would work. But is there anything better that orcs could produce, that could also be traded with other Kin?

This orc village is trying to acquire expertise, in a crude and tentative manner that recalls Japan in the 1960s, China in the 1980s or Vietnam in the 2000s. The saurians like windchimes, so as well as churning out swords and breastplates, the local smith is working on more delicate pieces, which the women are engraving.

Similarly, with enough slaves tending and harvesting the fields, there is a surfeit of grain, animal milk and meat that will go to waste unless it’s consumed by hungry orcs - or maybe turned into something more permanent, that could be traded with neighbouring kin.

So the orcs are experimenting, based on what they understand other Kin do with their surplus perishable goods. They’re brewing palatable beer, but spirits like whisky are beyond them at the moment, and despite their best efforts, you just cannot make good cheese out of sow milk. (If nothing else, pigs don’t like being milked.) They make good sausages, though, especially if you don’t ask how much pig went into the sausage and how much of it is unfortunate orc.

Also, if orcs can basically eat anything, you’d expect them to really like spicy food. And while it’s hilarious that the things orcs think of as “tasty thing that am make orc see pretty colours” are known to other Kin as “poisonous toadstool that will kill you if you go even near it”, the women will eventually impress on the cooks that producing food that will not kill an unwitting non-Orc is a better long-term plan.

Neighbouring villages of other Kin will be dismissive of these efforts, and they’ll be right at the moment; but the orcs are only going to get better, and a smart pedlar will realise that a source of trade goods that are cheap and good enough is invaluable. Especially if said pedlar ingratiates themselves to the local orcs and makes them promise not to trade with other, less appreciative pedlars.

Meanwhile, other orc clans will fret that these orcs are becoming like other Kin, and at risk of being tempted into becoming non-Orcs. There is an orc in this village loudly shouting things like “Grognar am whip egg whites into soft, fluffy peaks!”, and the traditionalist faction is very clear that this is bad.

What should orcs feel like?

D&D is clear that full orcs are monsters, and the only way you can be orcish is to be a half-orc, and even they are dubious. Tolkien is clear that orcs are travesties, blasphemous perversions of elves, and the only true solution is to kill them by the hundreds.

On the other hand, the standard cliché of four orcs playing cards in the first 10ft x 10ft room of the dungeon is… pretty underwhelming? Especially if you decide, as per Ork!, that orcs talk funny and are violent, yes, but maybe in the way that the Three Stooges are violent.

Forbidden Lands orcs are proper Kin, but they can neither escape their reputation as vicious savage killers, nor their image of hapless clowns. An orc woman could be a mysterious Mata Hari hiding six unexpected nipples underneath a fancy silk dress; but she could also be a terrifying armour-clad warrior demanding to know if she should beat her cook to death with a hammer because the fairy cakes aren’t to your personal taste, and that would be an insult to her honoured guests.

Most Kin know what they’re about. The dwarves continue to build mountains up from below; the halflings and goblins continue their uncertain dance around each other; the elves just straight-up continue; humans and elvenspring know that they’re the future, it’s just a matter of how.

But orcs are uncertain, and nobody else really knows what they’re going to do. That’s what makes them exciting for me.