How do we make orcs interesting

It's like superheroes. The superpower isn't interesting, it's exciting but that is short lived. What keeps you interested in a superhero isn't their power, it's their character itself, it's what they do with their power, how they use it, and the story they're involved in.

If you can't take away a superheroes super power and still have an interesting piece of work then the character is garbage. It's the same with fantasy races, if it wouldn't be interesting as a human it doesn't suddenly become interesting because it's got feathers, or scales, or it's eight feet tall and lives only partially within the dimension.

Fucking Tolkien you mong.

I just decided to embrace their loot pinata nature and bake that idea into the setting. I was getting rather sick of the constant attempts to make monster races more neutral and grey and,cosmopolitan, and I like having cannon fodder the players can mow down without having to feel sad after.

I stole parts of the idea from a thread that cropped up long ago. The good news is that it does avoid them being primitive dumb tribals, to a degree.

>Orcish Mongols
God damn, if those bastards were in my game my group would hate them. Except my character, who would love to fight them. Elvish winged hussars for the win, my friend

What idea is that?

In my setting, there are many Orc tribes in the northern mountains, but they're semi-nomadic, know the ins and outs of metalworking, and tend to be peaceful unless they're a band of youth males trying to collect skulls and treasure to prove themselves. I built Orc society around my magical realm, and I feel it's fairly interesting. Tell me what you think.

> In Orc society, only the strongest males are considered worthy to reproduce, and the chieftain is invariably the strongest and/or most experienced male Orc in the tribe. The chieftain mates with every female in the tribe, usually keeping a dozen or so mates, in larger tribes, the chieftain's lieutenants and the most useful commoners have the privelege of keeping a single mate for themselves.
> The chieftain rules with an iron fist, both as the defacto ruler and father of the tribe. Every newborn Orc is the direct descendent of the chieftain of the tribe, one of his lieutenants, or one of the tribe's most skilled commoners. It is considered blasphemous for an Orc to mate with any male, or with a female born of his tribe.
> To prevent inbreeding, once every decade, the Orc tribes congregate in one of a few sacred isolated mountain glades, where the mutually hostile tribes have a ceasefire, trade with one another, and have a month-long festival. During the festival, young female Orcs leave their family to find a strong mate and become part of another tribe.
> Under some circumstances, chieftains will attempt to outbid one another for the privilege of taking an exceptionally beautiful female as their mate, with the bid going to the Orc female's father as a reverse-dowry of sorts. During the festival, young male Orcs compete for the honor and prizes, including new weapons, mounts, and the recognition of another tribe's chieftain.
> (1/2)

> The mightiest and most impressively skilled male competitors are selected by chieftains of other tribes to leave their tribe, join theirs as a low-ranking lieutenant, and take a mate for themselves, which is considered a high honor.
> Males that fail to achieve recognition have three options, they can return to their tribe, living chaste unless they can earn a mate through skill, they can challenge the lietenenant of another tribe for his position in a duel to the death if their mate consents, or, if they are mighty enough, and two-thirds the tribe consent, they can challenge the chieftain himself of another tribe in a duel to the death for his position. Dueling a chieftain is usually reserved for their own lieutenants, but occasionally a youth is deemed worthy.
> The third and most common course of action for a young male seeking a mate is to join a warband of other youths, and strike out to raid the southlands for slaves, treasure, and the skulls of worthy foes. These raiders are exiled from their tribe until the next festival. If they survive, gather many skulls, slaves, and plunder, they are considered worthy of competing again or, more rarely, dueling a lietenant for his place. The most successful raider captains are able to impress enough females to gather their own harem, achieve recognition as a chieftain, and start their own tribe with their mates and the remains of their warband.
> Orcs don't hold one sex to be superior to another, they simply uphold the beliefs of their ancestors. Males are seen as warriors, it is their duty to protect their tribesfolk, hunt and gather enough to feed their kin and offspring, and in time of need, slay the foes of their tribe. Females are seen as civilization-builders, it is their duty to raise strong sons and daughters for their tribe, herd the animals of the tribe, and shape useful tools, weapons, and armors from the wealth of the earth.
> (2/2)

Was it the Elemental Plane of Dungeon idea, or the Goblins Evolve Into Orcs Like Pokemon idea?

Etymologically, pre tolkien, Orcs or 'orcneas' (if we're borrowing from Beowulf as Tolkien almost certainly did) are actually a kind of evil spirit, not a physical creature!

If we wanted a physical beasty, it would be more proper to talk about eotenas - ettins, or Ogres.

Later on...
>'orke'/'ogre' came into English via continental fairy-tales, especially from the 17th-century French writer Charles Perrault, who borrowed most of his stories and developed his "ogre" from the 16th-century Italian writers Giambattista Basile, Giovanni Francesco Straparola (who has been credited with introducing the literary form of the fairy tale) and Basile, who wrote in the Naples dialect and claimed simply to be passing on oral folktales from his region that he had collected. In at least a dozen or more tales, Basile used huorco, huerco or uerco, the Neapolitan form of orco [Italian] "giant", "monster", to describe a large, hairy, tusked, mannish beast who could speak, that lived away in a dark forest or garden and that might capture and eat humans, or be indifferent or even benevolent—all depending on the tale.

Orcs wuz kangs

Neither of those.

For my setting, Orcs rise up from the ocean. Nobody is quite sure of their early life cycles, but it's expected they breed en masse and have a tadpoles stages like frogs. Once out of the sea, fully grown, theyll quickly surge forth and establish a camp, and begin gearing for war with other nearby orc settlements. While individually they don't seem very intelligent or responsive, squad leaders are often scarily competent, and their tactics are often surprisingly complex and well coordinated. They aren't observed to eat, but they do sometimes toss food and other sacrafices into the ocean.

As they war against together tribes, they eventually build forges and start making steel, coalescing in power. Sometimes this brings them into conflict with human forts and settlements, which they also attack. They are incredibly warlike though, and lay waste to much land in their constant drive of conquest.

The original idea I saw was that the term Orc was derived from Orca,
the Orcs themselves being mere psionic projections from killer whales dwelling in the ocean. I decided to take it a step further, and have them telepathically puppetting large numbers of them at a time, waging war against each others armies to settle disagreements, or occasionally for sport.

>Sentient whale gods using proxy armies
>disregarding the surface dwellers completely as mere annoyances at best

Pretty fucking cool desu senpai. Dishonored vives (potential spoiler)

Killing machines created by a fallen Empire.

I like this take on the Warhammer Orcs:
philipsibbering.com/whf/03-02-orcs.shtml
>I really like the idea of Orcs as a force of nature. It moves them away from pantomime villain, being evil for the sake of being evil, towards a creature with alien motivations that result in far worse evil (in human eyes). It makes them seem like a natural disaster, an act of god, like a tornado or tsunami. They become a personification of Mother Nature's vengeance, the ultimate eco-warrior (and they’re green like plants so it just seems to fit). This can be linked into the legends old, like the Orc-néas, adapting the Undead angle to fit. The Orcs are like super tough rage-zombies (from 28 days later), except smarter, faster, and stronger. They could be highly resistant to arrows and bullets!

>Orcs do not have to be just another generic bad guy. They do not have to be an evil 'human' wearing a scary mask.

Thanks. I wasn't considering dishonored too much with it, though I do feel like it give a neat reason for orcs to exist and be so warlike, without it being a singular thing that people know how to fix.

And since people can't agree what causes orcs, theyre just a constant problem for the people living near many coasts.

it's tangentially related to my own settings idea of Orcs, where they're fish/man halfbreeds created by the serpent like dwellers in the deep to act as their agents on land, created by 'adjusting' pregnant women.

The snake men actually pay large sums of money for babies they can corrupt, making it something of a black market

In one of my settings Orcs were originally created/summoned as a race of warriors for some long dead sorceror-king (the truth being this was a 'dying earth' type setting in the far future and they were actually originally bioroid soldiers).

Over time some bloodlines began to degenerate and become feral. So in an ironic twist,what people called 'half-orcs' were really a purer strain of orc than the monstrous ones.

Not the most original idea, I know, but the players liked the reveal when they stumbled upon an ancient orcish ruin which was an ancient orc cloning facility

That's pretty neat. I actually was considering something similar with mine, where occasionally an orca might contact a human and bargain with them if they grow curious, though more rarely. Sometimes just give them a maddening droplet of psychic energy to see what happens, or a less maddening one if they want an agent to gather knowledge for them

I was thinking of making orcs pseudo-Japanese since it seems like they'd take to honor-based culture well, but makes way more sense.

My orcs are called Cauldron-Born, because they are made by witches and mad alchemists using formulas and recipes from a forgotten era in which they served as foot soldiers for the high elves.

>how do we make orcs more interesting then just violent tribals and mindless loot pinatas.

Make them more like niggers during the Xhosa wars in SA.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_Wars#Background

>Dutch decide to make a small trading post in territory deemed inhospitable by nogs
>small trading post becomes bigger
>attracts frontier cattle farmers who turn most of the terrains into farmland
>town flourishes for decades
>encounter nogs
>nogs start stealing cattle and raiding farmsteads because they decide that this land that was inhospitable for generations is suddenly theirs
>every few years the nog population swells up again and they start a war, amburshing and raiding farmers and every few years the farmers organize themselves into militias and murder them by the thousands followed by a peace treaty

Give Orcs:
>no sense of right and wrong
>complete inability to plan further than the next day understand the consequences of their actions
>remove any moral inhibitions
>weird superstitions about shamans being able to turn bullets into water

>The MUH NOBLE SAVAGES trope

i just made them samurai, the military/explorer caste of a greater society.

Just about everything is a trope at this point mate.

Making orcs into steppe nomads at least ties them to the primary fear of settled agricultural communities all the way from europe through soghdia for china for hundreds of years - it was slave-raiding steppe nomads who had a very matter of fact view of life and death.

"The greatest enjoyment of a man is to overcome his enemies, drive them before him, snatch what they have, to see the people to whom they are dear with their faces bathed in tears, to ride their horses, to squeeze in his arms their daughters and women." - Ghengis Khan

We had a world building thread once, where vampires were cosmic horrors, God had super-cancer, and the world was on the brink of collapse. Or something in that setting were bookworms and warrior scholars who would raid ancient catacombs, labyrinths, and tombs in order to uncover the history of the world, despite the exceedingly high-chance that they would become vampire food. Shit was glorious.

*Orcs in that setting*. Damned auto-correct.

You just made orc into niggers with green skin, don't do that.

>that greentext
So brown people?

Wizards who screwed up a powerful spell and ended up cursing themselves with bestial rage, twisted minds and deformed shapes. They could be terrifying wizards due the magic in their bodies, if not for the mind bit.

Hey I remember that thread! I was the first one's OP.

No. Not even remotely close.

Orcs are a mass produced artificial race designed for warfare
if you are an evil villain you can call 555-goons and they'll send you a dozen of orcs or something like that

Bump

Anyone got the picture of the pig orcs with the dog-bold varieties?

I know your meming, but I did this. Orcs were the first race, and they developed into a variety of advanced but brutal and utilitarian societies which conquered and settled the entire world. But they ended up all but wiping themselves out in a violent world war, leaving only scattered ruins and a few survivors who never returned to their former glory.

Nobody knows this except for a few members of the second race, the elves, who maintain the secret to give themselves the status of the first race. This is made easier by the fact that orcish society had no place for frivolous things like artwork, so there are no depictions of the ancient people who left behind these ruins.

Neat.

Best way to get rid of the traditional orc view is to completely campaign them in all aspects of the monster porn department.

Boom, image changed.

But y tho?

I liked the arcanum route, there's a few on the wood but mostly they're used as fascist laborers. Some of the nicer factory owners even pay them.

This what I all myself for each and every additional sapient race. Why is this not a race of Man?

Running a fast pirate game. The orcs in setting are Muslim equivalent.

Most of the savage greenskin with big tusks is xenophobia and propoganda.

Most orks are indistinguishable from humans. It's only as you get higher in the aristocracy that you see more inhuman features.

Descended from humans mating with djin of the deep deserts, the sultans have both strange features and stranger powers passed down thier bloodlines. Bloodlines are incredibly important to orcs. Instead of tracing thier patronage the prophet, they trace thier patronage back to the djin of the deep deserts.

This is not a solution. Making interesting characters orcs for no reason does nothing for the interest of orcs, it just is good for the story to have interesting characters. If you're going to make one of the characters anything but a human, it should to do something to the character important to the story. Unless of course the character's race is ONLY a reflection of the geographic area the story takes place in.

We're looking for a reason for orcs to exist in the first place. If all they are is green and downtrodden, just make them black and downtrodden. I think distinct physiological differences are where it's at.

What purpose do they serve in your setting? What are they trying to say? What are you trying to say through them? How will, and how should, players interact with them? What are you trying to communicate wrt Orcs as a wider concept (Orcs Are Really Cool is an acceptable answer)?

Make the answers to all of those interesting, tailor the Orcs to fit, and you'll probably have reasonably interesting Orcs.

Not them, but, yes, you retard.

Easy. Ignore all other races, and create a setting wholly focused on Orcs.

>Dark Lord rules over land enclosed by mountains (basically Mordor)
>At some point, Dark Lord withdraws into his Fortress of Doom
>All his highest lieutenants follow him
>Years pass, with no word or orders from the Fortress
>Orcs are left sitting around with their thumbs up their asses
>Eventually the Orcs get bored and start doing their own thing
>Dark Lord's empire crumbles as Orcs fight amongst themselves
>The farm-slaves rebel and the harvests fail
>The Dark Lord's more monstrous servants get loose and roam the land
>Mighty forts and bastions are abandoned, left to crumble
>The Mountain of Doom stops spewing smoke, greenery returns to the land
>Orcs spend the next century rebuilding
>Spinning tales about the Fortress of Doom and the vanished Dark Lord
>Unable to leave, as the great gates of their land can't be opened by mundane means

The PCs are adventuring tribes-orcs wandering amid the ruins of an Evil Empire, looting lost treasures, fighting monsters, and potentially uniting the Orc tribes into a single kingdom. Non-Orc people should rare to non-existent, as few outsiders dare venture into not!Mordor.