An Orcish Origin

-

 
The classic fantasy orc comes with an amount of unfortunate racist baggage, but for many they also form a core part of the type of fantasy world they like playing in. I have attempted to write an origin story for orcs that can hopefully avoid some of the bad history, while also maintaining them as a people known for martial prowess and having a certain in-world reputation. It certainly has parallels with Tolkien's orcs, but imagined after the fall of Sauron. I hope I have been successful in creating something interesting and with less unfortunate implications, but I am of course imperfect, so who knows?

Long ago when the Dark Lord and his cadre of sorcerers were plotting their wars, they needed an army. Lacking a willing population to serve as their fighting force, they would steal people away and subject them to their vile experiments, intending to mold them into powerful but servile soldiers. Using dark magic and darker alchemy, they corrupted their captives' bodies and minds until they were barely recognisable as humans. The victims of these procedures (and their descendants, for the damage was such that it would affect their progeny as well) became known as orcs.

Created with the purpose of being the ideal soldiers, they were larger, stronger, faster, and more resilient than normal men, but this came at a price. The foul violation of their bodies have left them with a constant pain, which can only be dulled by being an agitated state, such as in combat. Not necessarily a downside for the Dark Lord's slave soldiers.

A hundred years ago, when the Dark Lord and his sorcerous lieutenants were defeated, his armies were scattered. Finally free, but leaderless, the orcs had to make their own place in the world, joining societies or forming their own.

Their constant pain makes many orcs irritable and quick to anger, especially since the agitation might dull their pain, but this reputation, as well as their people's past as the Dark Lord's soldiers, makes many people distrustful of them. Some orcs still choose to integrate into human society, despite the obstacles facing them, but many opt to live in the new orcish societies springing up in wilderness areas, living off the land and trying to carve out somewhere to call home. It is common for orcs to enlist as mercenaries, their physical ability awarding them the respect of their peers, and the fighting life easing their pain. Others choose to reject this image of orcs as violent people, doing what they can to overcome their pain through meditation or quiet contemplation.

Possible quest hooks: 
  • A doctor wishes to find a cure for the orcs' pain, some factions among the orcs may oppose this, arguing that this would remove a key part of the orcish experience. 
  • An orc community leader wishes to obtain the formulae used by the Dark Lord for their creation, hoping to reverse engineer them to ease their pain. Meanwhile, opposing forces want the notes for more nefarious purposes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A method for condensed worldbuilding

-
Image
  An important part of playing role-playing games is a shared understanding of the fictional world. A common assumption is that the game master knows everything there is to know about the world, and the players know some subset of this. Of course, what the players know, and what their characters know might not always fully overlap, which can cause issues in the game. What happens when my diplomat character wants to talk about the different empires he has visited in his travels, but I, the player have forgotten, or worse, haven't been told about them? A common way of countering this problem is shared worldbuilding on the fly, having the GM share their power of "just making something up" with the players. However, this may not always be a satisfactory solution. Sometimes it is just nice to have a shared foundation to build on from the start, not having to nail it together while we are actually in the middle of some other encounter. Having a pre-existing idea of the world ca
Read more

Toppling the pillars of the OSR: against lethality

-
Image
  One of the accepted wisdoms in the OSR (as codified in e.g. the Principia Apocrypha ), as well at the NSR (as defined by Yochai Gal or Pandatheist) is that lethality is good, and a core component of OSR/NSR play, because it means that player choice has real consequence. I do not entirely disagree with this, but I also do not entirely agree. My opinion aligns more with Pandatheist's follow-up post , arguing that "consequential" would be a better term. Perhaps my brain is poisoned with modern "trad" ideology, but when playing longer campaigns rather than one-shots, I find that the characters tend to evolve beyond vehicle's for the players' problem solving, developing interesting quirks and personalities that it would be a shame to lose because of an unlucky dice-roll (because that is one OSR tenet I do still believe in - the sanctity of the dice result). A dramatic death because of calculated risk gone wrong, or a heroic last stand against an ogre whil
Read more

Rules are a Safety Tool

-
Image
  I have recently been reading Fabula Ultima (more thoughts on that in a future post), and one thing that struck me is how often the rules text emphasises to not deviate from the rules-as-written unless everybody consents. This feels like a departure from the tabletop culture of allowing the GM to override the rules whenever it suits the game, or come up with their own house rules and expect the table to accept them. However, after further deliberation, it appears to me that this can be because the rules are a safety tool. Many people with more experience and knowledge and me have written about safety tools, so I will not go into deep detail here (see e.g. the TTRPG Safety Toolkit ), but one thing that seems generally true is that they only really work when everybody engages with them in good faith. They will not stop a problem player, who can easily ignore them, abuse them, or just generally cause an uncomfortable situation. What they are good for, is preventing those who want to eng
Read more