Orcs

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Orcs are brutal and violent creatures of war carrying naught but the heaviest of weapons. They group together in massive warbands led by the biggest, loudest and most formidable of orcs. Smaller cousins of the greenskins march to war alongside the towering Orc warriors, the most fearsome of which are armed with great polearms and the heaviest armour an Orc can wear.

History
While Oskan sought to lure the Noble Races from the Shining Ones' side in the God War, Garkan the Black decided on a more direct approach. At the height of the War with Gods, Garkan the Black, the dark aspect of the God of Smiths, bethought himself that he would forge an army of man-beasts made for his armies. For 900 days and nights he toiled in his forge pits until, by the light of a blood-moon, he hauled forth in chains the first of Orckind. Not forged of metal, these warriors, for Garkan took the living bodies of purer souls, and struck with his hammer upon them, working and reshaping them with magical heat on his forge of sorrow-cursed obsidian until they were made anew; twisted into near-animals by pain and self-loathing at what they had become. He created the Orcs for one purpose, to make war on all of Mantica, and they have never faltered in this task.

Other gods, and later, other speaking creatures, took these monsters and experimented on them, much to Garkan’s annoyance, giving rise to the confusing array of Orcoids that plague the world to this day. Although the dark gods were cast down into the Abyss at the climax of the God War many millennia ago, and Winter, the last of their kind, was finally driven from the surface of the world 900 years past, their servants have prospered in the gods’ absence. After Winter’s armies were defeated, many lands were left empty and desolate, and more still were revealed by the melting ice. Orcs breed quickly, and they have spread like a disease to infest large tracts of this new earth. From deep caverns to the heights of the mountains, Orcs and their wicked kin dwell everywhere. Small bands of them can be found in the most civilised lands, while in the wild north, kingdoms of slaughter are raised and cast down by Orcs in relentless succession. Roving hordes of Orcs, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Half-Orcs and worse, accompanied by all manner of monsters and war engines, are a constant threat to the realms of finer folk.

Characteristics
Physically, Orcs are tremendously imposing. Their bodies are comparable in basic silhouette and size to a large man, though the details vastly differ. Orcs are large, muscular creatures with hugely muscled limbs and thick bones. Their hands are large and grasping, their arms long, like an ape’s. They hunch habitually, but when they stand tall they overtop most men, and their body mass is easily twice as great as a man’s. They are covered in tough green hide, akin to the leather armour of some steppes warriors. Orcs have long faces, a protruding brow, and huge, underslung jaws containing rows of sharp teeth. Their tongues are clumsy, ill-suited to speech, and their language is harsh, full of rasping and barking. Above tiny, hooked noses their red eyes glimmer in deep sockets like pits, miniature copies of the Abyss itself. They have very little sense of smell, explaining perhaps the appalling stench of their encampments.

Their capacity for pain and privation is unmatched by any other race in the world. They can march for weeks on little to no sustenance, fight for days with no sign of tiring and survive wounds that should rightly kill them. They can run without pause for day upon day, their shuffling run eating up leagues eagerly. Every aspect of their repulsive physicality is crafted to keep them alive and fighting as long as possible, from their unnaturally resilient flesh to their thick, green-black blood which flows slowly through their veins and means even the most grave of wounds will not slow them.

Orcs do not have a ‘society’ as such, operating in roaming bands from a few dozen to several thousand strong. Their inability to settle in one place derives from their very nature. Orcs must always be active and engaged, and it is this which drives them to fight amongst themselves when no other foe presents itself. Thus, it is the largest and most cunning Orcs who naturally rise to the top, and the greatest warlords of the race are terrifying brutes, their size matched only by their ferocity and cunning. Such individuals, when they arise, will grow to lead great hordes of their kin, raiding and pillaging any settlement or civilisation they come across until such time as the Warlord is inevitably killed. When this happens, the discipline within the Orc ranks will quickly crumble, leaving a disorganised and splintered mass of Orcs to squabble among themselves. This fluidity could only work for Orcs, fitting with their own natural and reflexive distaste for order and peace. There are no fixed ‘tribes’ or ‘clans’ amongst the Orc race, and an Orc warrior will often fight under many banners over the course of a long and violent life.

Orcs are often said to take pleasure only in destruction and death, but this is not entirely true. Driven as they are by internal agonies of a physical and spiritual nature, it would be truer to say that good, purity and order are actually painful to them in a very real sense, and they lash out at them as a reflex. Orcs do not know themselves why this is – self-awareness not being a particular requirement of their creator – all they know is the bone-deep need to crush everything which they see before them, to reach out and destroy and in so doing to find momentary catharsis from the agony which otherwise consumes them.

Driven by this curse, the Orcs have spread far and wide since the God War. Their tenacity means they can survive in the most hostile of environments found all across the edges of Mantica. Hating order as they do, Orcs cannot form permanent settlements, instead roaming across these hostile wastes in bands of varying size with the strongest and most cunning of Orcs in command. The warlord will pit his band against others of his kind, subsuming the survivors of these battles into his own force. Once the band attains suitable strength, the warlord will turn them on the civilised lands. The Orcs will raid, pillage, and burn, all to stave off the torment Garkan will inflict should they remain at peace. Far from the disorganised mess one would expect, an Orc army marches in lockstep, regimented and orderly, if brutish and foul. Few races know as much about war as the Orcs for it consumes every moment of their lives. In fact, some scholars theorize that the wild behaviour of orcs within the army serves to distract the enemy from the complex web of tactical manoeuvres they employ. These same sages argue that were it not for Garkan’s curse, the Orcs might even outstrip the Elves in wondrous achievements, bringing about a new golden age.

Though the God War ended centuries ago, the Orcs endured. Their unnatural resilience and propensity for violence ensured that they carved out fluid though sizeable domains on the edges of civilisation, colonising those places where no other race cared or was able to settle. Their natural drives mean that peace is an alien concept, and if confronted with no other foe, they will often fall to fighting amongst themselves. Few among their number are able to focus on anything more than the next fight, and this leads to one of the more curious paradoxes of the Orc race. Their leaders, those who exhibit enough cunning and forethought to be able to plan and conceive of ideas beyond pure, blind aggression, are often great and powerful thinkers in their crude way. It takes iron will and sharp wits as well as sheer brute force to control even a small number of Orcs, and the Warlords of some of the larger tribes in the world would rival some of the greatest generals of Men, Dwarfs and Elves in their capacity for strategy. Such individuals are thankfully rare, and once killed, their carefully welded alliances of Orcs will fall quickly into disarray and indiscipline. It is this fact alone which keeps Orcs from sweeping all civilisations before them and ruling supreme.

Humans and Elves alike (the Dwarfs know better) mistake their inability to concentrate and propensity to sudden, mindless violence as stupidity, but Orcs are far from stupid. From their father god Garkan the Black they have inherited an affinity for making; and though their creations are crude and ugly to others’ eyes, they are strong. Orcs are capable of awesome feats of smithying and engineering when inspired – the might of their war machines and weapons is surpassed only by the twisted ingenuity of their instruments of torture. For all their intelligence, however, the Orcs have a major weakness. All this organisation relies on their destructive tempers being focused completely on the enemy. If the Warlord dies, all his work will fall apart in an instant as the Orcs fight for control. Perhaps Garkan planned this fault, for otherwise the Orcs would have long since conquered Mantica. As it stands, the Orcs are a perpetual blight upon the world, an open wound seething with hatred, much like the Abyss where their creator still resides, ensuring his children can never know peace.

Wherever there are Orcs, there are their kinsfolk, the Goblins and Orklings. Lesser creatures than the Orcs, what the Goblins lack in size they make up for in viciousness. Many other sub-species of Orcoid curse the world – Greater Goblins, Hobgoblins and the vile Half-Orcs. There are many, many types of these creatures, and the scholars of the speaking peoples spend much time in categorising and describing them, but in truth they are all the same, and interbreed freely. All were forged by evil for evil intent, no matter their size or strength.