Orc Week

It's Orc Week.

I had a really strong, weird dream on Sunday, which I wrote down. Now Mongoose Publishing expressed an interest in seeing how I interpret orcs in a Legend setting, though the managing editor regretfully said that it would have to be produced as a third party affair, like my other interpretations of lizard people and potion creation, among others.

Now every fantasy setting since Tolkien has painted orcs, dwarves, elves pretty much the same way. Orcs even have their own skin colour, a specific shade of vomitey, gangrenous green which is authorised for the Games Workshop line of miniatures.

But what if orcs had no precedent? What if, say, instead of Tolkien, one took Shadowrun as part inspiration? If you didn't have other settings as precedents on what orcs look and sound and think and smell like, what could you do with them? How could you interpret the brutal villains of so many roleplaying games in a way that could enable one to roleplay them as sympathetic antihero player characters?

Stay tuned. I've got a lot of interpreting to do over the course of this week, leading to the ultimate release of a product for Legend that I will release as Open Content alongside my other books Reptilians of Legend, Potion Creation for Legend and Creations.

Welcome ... to Orc Week.

Orc Week: Images of Orcs

As part of Orc Week, I thought I'd paint a further image of what my conception of orcs look like, taking into account a basic description of them from Monsters of Legend as my basis.

The usual images of orcs have the following characteristics -

- Green skin;
- Prognathous jaw;
- Tusks;
- Beetle brow;
- Sloping forehead;
- Pointy, elflike ears;
- Usually disfigured in some other way, such as a hunchback;
- Exceedingly ugly;
- Pretty much all of them are male. Like dwarfs, they don't seem to have females.

Hence, my description of what my version of orcs physically look like.

An orc is a humanoid, territorial, nocturnal and omnivorous. The species typically finds itself in conflict with most other humanoid races when their territories overlap. No more so than when their territories are invaded by humans, whose worst habits mirror the orcs' worst traits.

With dark skin covered by short, wiry black or dark fur - typically grey or brown - orcs are muscular, plantigrade and physically fast and strong. With prognathous jaws, enlarged vomeronasal cavities, large flat noses with flaring nostrils and batlike ears which fold into the head, beetle brows and sloping foreheads, both orc genders have features which humans consider "bestial," although some humans have expressed interest in, and even desire for, certain orc individuals.

Orcs have greater senses of smell and hearing than humans, and a far greater night vision capability due to pit organs either side of their nostrils which allow them to perceive heat as sight.

As nocturnal creatures, orcs suffer a -20% penalty to all skills conducted in broad daylight during the day. Direct sunlight causes them great discomfort and they will usually seek to escape underground or under cover whenever possible.

In terms of physical stance and movement, orcs' arms are disproportionately large compared to human arms; while they can run very quickly on two legs, orcs can also run very quickly on all four limbs, although they cannot carry weapons or fight while using their hands and legs for running. Orcs can stand physically upright without discomfort, but they tend to hunch in human company, particularly since hunching over is orc body language for being lost in thought.