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...
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.
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).
