Who Doesn't Love Orcs?

I don't. I don't love orcs. I know it is probably against protocol or something. The gaming community is going to send a nasty letter to my boss and demand I lose my job over this I am sure.

I just never found them interesting. Not when Tolkien wrote them. Not when they showed up in Dungeons & Dragons adventures. Not as a part of the Horde in World of Warcraft (I played a Tauren). Not even in that clever video game where you played a big one and a little one doing nasty deeds.

When I run games, I rarely, if ever, pull on the Orc tab. I'm very much an undead guy. It is probably the Eastern European cultural heritage in me.

I love me the romance and the horror of the living dead.

That said, it got me thinking, what would Orcs need to be like for me to want to draw on them in a game? Maybe if I answered that question, I could create some monsters for Torchbearer and B/X/BECMI Dungeons & Dragons (there has to be a shorter way for me to write that).

So, I am going to try and do just that...

What is an Orc?

Instead of jumping to the urtext of the professor, I cheated and grabbed my copy of Burning Wheel Gold. Luke has a way with words sometimes, and I figured he would have something for me to key off of.

Twisted, tortured and fulgent with hate, these cousins of the Elves exist in a culture that is a cruel mockery of civilization–one of fear and brutality, a society of the whip.

That is pretty great. I mean, who uses fulgent in a sentence anymore? Evocative. An inverse of the Elves.

And there is my problem...

They make sense in the context of the Elves, but not without them. Perfect for Tolkien. Perfect for The Burning Wheel RPG, the unofficial best game to play the Silmarillion (sorry One Ring, you ain't it). Not perfect for me because I rarely have Elves in my game (or the professor's Elves at the very least).

Let's see what Thor and Luke have to say about Orcs in Torchbearer? That game is pulling from Thor's personal Norwegian roots, so maybe there is something else to key off of.

They possess volatile tempers born from a culture of endless violence... Orcs live as bandits. They lurk at the edges of other civilizations, raiding at the margins for food, weapons and riches.

No Elves, but also no meat for me to bite into here. No hook. The closest thing is a mechanical thing. Across almost all games they suck at doing their thing when the sun is out in the sky. That is kind of interesting.

A Design Exercise

So let's assume I am going to design some Orcs for an issue of Yggdrasil MGZ. All Orcs, all the time. They need to be cross confessional, meaning they work for Torchbearer and Dungeons & Dragons. They need to fit into my creative space of Yggdrasil, which is a weird sci-fantasy-horror socio-political commentary on the human condition through the lens of myth.

Yeah, that is a mouthful... and a lot. But 'dems the rules, so time for me to finally figure out how to like Orcs.

The Hook

I always start with a hook when introducing something new to my creative playground. As I said about, Yggdrasil serves a specific purpose, so I am always intentional. It has to fit into the fabric.

So let's take that issue with the sun as the hook. It is a natural starting place. Yggdrasil has lots of sunlight. It has two suns. That makes them an underground dwelling people. That means three interesting things (to me at least).

1. The Wildlings already exist and live in the Gloom, which is underground. Orcs could be some version of those people. Wildlings are detailed in my poem, Testament and in the first issue of Yggdrasil MGZ for those who are curious.
2. Weirdly, gravity underground actually decreases the deeper you go. It isn't linear, but Orc's being strong if they come from places way deep down doesn't make a ton of sense. There is something to work with there.
3. If Orcs are an underground people, their diet would be mostly fungus, cave fish, troglobites, and the occasional bat. That brings to mind square teeth for grinding rather than fangs to tearing.

None of this has to make total sense, mind you. It is just my starting point, which gives me this description...

In the time of Segnom, when Reise forced the Wildlings into the deep shadows of the Gloom, they found the twisted mirror world already occupied. A tall, lean, pale-skinned people with great luminescent eyes moved through the inky dark. The Wildling's called them Orcs, meaning "shadowed ones" and sought to cast them out as they lit their great candles to illuminate the Gloom. Forced to the borderlands between the deeps of their former home and the surface world, they blame both mortal and Wildling for their plight.

So that ain't a bad start. I established motivation, relationships, a location, and a physical description while leaving enough space open for further exploration. Everything a good potential antagonist needs to start, whether it is used for a game or for creating art (rhyme!).

What Are They Like?

Orcs historically are some sort of bruiser when it comes to games and fiction. They are big and brash. They seem to often be modeled on berserkers without the cultural underpinnings, which I always found weird. That won't work for my Orcs.

My Orcs are clearly born of the near darkness. They are lean and endure, with nothing wasted. Limbs are long and rangy. Their fingers long and nimble, but strong to more easily climb through caves. Their skin is pale and gray from lack of sunlight.

They rely upon all of their senses, which are wildly acute. The silence of the Gloom and the near dark means their eyes are huge to capture what little light there is. Their sense of touch is attuned to every shift in the air, every temperature change. They smell and hear even the faintest disturbance in their environment.

The language of Orcs wouldn't be grunts or harsh words. They wouldn't want to make too much noise. It would be whispered and soft sounding, like the trickle of water down the surface of stone.

Their art would be tactile, not visual or vocal. Vast caverns would be filled with epic tales of their people that can only be read through touch. Their written words would follow the same pattern, being more like braille, if braille was invented independent of visual languages.

Orcs are communal by nature. Survival in a space of limited resources necessitates a deep level of cooperation. Fungus, troglobites, and fish are farmed. Wildlings and surface settlements are raided, but not violently. They are a subtle people, not an inherently violent one... though they are angry.

So angry...

Have you seen Charlie Cox's portrayal of Matt Murdock in the Daredevil TV series? Remember when Marvel TV shows were good?

Sorry, sorry. I digress...

Remember though, all that anger he carried as a character under the surface of a quiet understated person. That is a good reference point for a societal simmering of anger at the two forces that put Orcs in the position they are in.

Getting into a fight with these Orcs would be like fighting Daredevil in the dark. Fighting a dozen Daredevils in the silent dark. The only noise would be that uncomfortable sound of squelching meat, heavy breathing of the adventurers, their screams of pain, their clank of metal, their shuffling of feet, and a dreadful silence in between.

Mechanics

All of that is wonderfully evocative, but how do you bring it to life in play? I think there are a couple of items to key on from my descriptions above.

1. They are going to be vulnerable to light, so some sort of penalty has to exist.
2. However, they not going to have any penalties working in darkness either.
3. They are communal, so work in groups. These are not solo encounters. There has to be some sort of bonus for working together and a penalty when alone.
4. Orcs operate with stealth and ambush techniques. Probably something akin to the abilities Bugbears have in Torchbearer but for the underground.
5. They don't use weapons, but aren't unarmed. Some sort of specialized fighting style might be appropriate to work up mechanically.

With a little more time and effort, I think I might have created a type of Orc I would actually use in my games. Of course, at this point I have mangled them into something that looks nothing like the tropes that people are familiar with. And that is the point of this entire essay...

Breaking Conventions

One of the things I enjoy most in my writing is breaking up conventions and reimagining them. This entire exercise is a written out example of a mental process I do on autopilot. I take a commonly understood myth or idea and look at ways to reinterpret it to my own uses.

Sometimes that use is for something simple like this. People like Orcs in RPGs, for some damn reason, so Orcs they shall have. In others it is because I think that metaphor provides me an interesting vehicle to tell a different story.

Modern fiction and gaming material is filled with photocopies of the same thing done over and over again. I am so bored with it, and I think Orcs have just come to symbolize that boredom.

Sorry Orcs. Not your fault...

Testament - Swepnos

Swepnos is the final thought before sleep comes. It is the last myth told before the fire. Like those that came before it, each page was block printed, hand painted, and handwritten. Those pages were then faithfully reproduced within.

Signed Copies!