Our Orcs Are Different

Hey Veeky Forums, help! I need a quick idea for a one-off short campaign.

How would you go about making orcs more "alien" than they're usually portrayed?

In fact, let's say that you were going to run a game where the bad guys are Space Orcs™ (but no 40K allowed). How would you make them alien or weird? I want something unsettling, eerie, off-putting, uncanny, disturbing

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>Orcs don't understand the concept of death. It's merely the highest form of incapacitation.
>Orcs will fight until their enemy is disabled, then quite possibly just leave them to die, if they don't die in the process of being disabled.
>Orcs practice practical cannibalism, they have no moral compunctions about eating others, their own race, or even parts of their own body that have been blown off.
>Orcs, while a very aggressive race, do not emote anger in the same way as others, in battle they seem to be intensely staring at their enemies, their faces otherwise blank.

>Orcs do not have eyelids, they don't need them. They can merely ignore the sensory information from their eyes, rather than having to close them. A resting Orc is hard to distinguish from an Orc who's merely sitting down.
>Orcs don't see any use in taking other races as slaves, prisoners, or really using them in any manner whatsoever. If they need more bodies, they'll just breed more Orcs.
>Orcs have a sense of taste, but no emotional response to it. They can tell something is horrendously decayed, but won't feel bad about eating it. They also eat meat straight off the bones, tearing at it with their vicious teeth.

Their eyes are always fully open. Staring. Their faces emotionless.
You are walking meat to them, not an "enemy". A moving meal they merely need to stop from moving.

Wtf dude

That last one is fucking terrifying. I like it.

You wanna make scary as fuck things? Why were people like the Cimbri and Teutons so scary to the big bad Romans?

1) This idea that we have a map of the known world is so hard to shake. Every campaign setting has a map. You know what an actual map should look like? It's got your known kingdoms/cities/states, maybe some borderland wilderness then.... nothing. "forests past here" or pretty much whatever the eye can see. Nobody has explored that far and survived to return yet.

Guess where the orcs are from? Far the fuck away. And you know what? A whole lot of them just showed up on your doorstep.

2) Once you know about them, you know they are coming.

The Cimbri show up near northern italy and there's just a fuckload of them. They act weird, they talk weird, there are more features to be scared of but we'll get to them. Then they start killing people. They go to the village and they take all that stuff. They eat all the stuff, fuck all the women, kill everyone and keep coming. But it takes time for people to get places. Your kingdom knows they are coming and they'll be at the capitol in 2 months by their current pace.

3. They are better than you. The cimbri were huge and terrifying. You can use fantasy hyperbole to mess with this trope. One orc? He's enough of a master of combat to kill a dozen men by himself. And there's thousands of them. There's no way to stop them. What the fuck are you going to do?

4. Every attempt to barter or interact with them is thrown off. Your emissaries horses are sent decorated with the entrails of the diplomat you asked to treat with the Orcs.

5. Things that hurt you don't hurt them. They can walk on fire. They show no pain and fight on despite grievous injury.

If you really want an antagonist, user. Make a fucking *antagonist*.

>>Orcs, while a very aggressive race, do not emote anger in the same way as others, in battle they seem to be intensely staring at their enemies, their faces otherwise blank.
Sounds familiar

>>Orcs do not have eyelids, they don't need them. They can merely ignore the sensory information from their eyes, rather than having to close them. A resting Orc is hard to distinguish from an Orc who's merely sitting down.
The dryness must be unbearable

holy shit, i'd love to run something that put the PCs in the shoes of generals up against this kind of shit. how are you going to stop them? what are acceptable losses? can it even be done?

This is exactly the scenario I'm running in my Bronze age game.

Seriously, you guys are making koloss. Look them up.

Pure monster, barely any civilization other than being able to hold a sword. Give em a spooky way of breeding or something. An absolute blight on the world.

Fuck yeah Koloss.

Human did nothing wrong

fucking Boat People

The orks are literally from another planet. Nobody knows how they got here, they just appeared one day on someone's border and started fucking shit up. They have sulfur based blood-oxygen binding.

Their blood is a different color and poisonous, but so is yours to them. Your food sources are mutually incompatible and they find your flora as disturbing as you find theirs, so they're quite fond of fire. They'll burn all the land they can find, field or forest, to charred and blackened dirt and sow their strange seeds.

The wind that comes out of those lands smells wrong, because their plants use different chemical reactions and thus produce a different gas mix than what you're used to. Because it's what they're used to.

To them, it smells like home.

And on that topic, either they don't have a way to get home, or they're an invasion. Either way, they appear to be wanting to make this place their new home. They aren't really interested in your infrastructure or your food stores or your valuables, because they have a bartering system that makes about as much sense as the village idiot. Thus, they are difficult to fight because some will bother with strategic assets like buildings and others won't.

It is a total war, and a on many fronts - the intelligent life is warring, but the ecosystems themselves are fighting a battle of complete annihilation. If they find out a way to coexist, it's only going to be after hundreds of years of violence all the way down to the cellular level.

It might be cool if up until meeting the Space Orcs, no sign of other intelligent life was found. But add in little details like some of the ships the Orcs fly look way different than their normal ones, and also pretty old and beaten up but still powerful. Or have their warriors stereotypically decorate themselves with skulls, but maybe some of their more prominent leaders and accomplished warriors will have the odd skull that doesn't look like any species you know about, either from Earth or the Orc worlds from what you know about them.

Basically imply that the Orcs caused the Fermi Paradox by wiping out most other intelligent life they came across.

Can't you just the Reavers from Firefly? I mean, it's a straight up ripoff, but if no one at the table if familiar then it's a solid idea for space savages that could be more disturbing space orcs imo.

Or something like it. The orcs a Mandalorian like warrior race that actually takes all comers so long as they are dedicated to their ethos of war. Or are found young enough to be raised in the culture. But no one really understands how the orcs actually think because they don't talk about it, and orcs kill themselves when caught. When forced contradictory information is given with strange allusion to mystical concepts of figures.

In essence it seems like a cult gone out of control. Or maybe a brainwashing project? A secret hivemind? No one knows, except some are attracted to and swear by the orc lifestyle of the warrior, marauding spaceships, and fighting in the great crusade.

>We will kill you all, live in your cities and then we will be human.
Creepy as fuck

TES

Our orcs actually look like humans.

And the dwarves look like orcs.

And the precursors look like dwarves.

And the elves look like raptors.

It's pretty different.

Is that Jasmine as an orc?

Give them like a total of like 4 or 5 eyes, jet black. Almost like an insect

Shit I kind of like this, it feels almost machine-like, what I'd imagine AI killbots would be, not Orks. Looks like killbot orks is the next thing for me to shoehorn into my setting.

I mean more HFY in fantasy can't hurt.

Do they must have the ability to go to different planets?

I quite like this one and I think it fits your needs:
philipsibbering.com/whf/03-02-orcs.shtml
>This is a reworking/ reimage of the Orcs for Warhammer Fantasy.
>The Orks see themselves as an expression of Gork’s will to overcome these binds and reassert the natural chaos of nature.
>This ability also explains why Orks are good at integrating machine parts, because the symbiont is so pro-active it can even grab and attach treated metallic objects.
>As for reproduction, I think the ‘earth womb’ is a good concept (similar to the Uruk-hai in LotR movie)
>In fleshing out the Orcs, I wish to explore an inhuman mind set
>Where humans grow food, Orcs grow to. So Orcs are literally fighting for ‘breeding ground’, the earth is their ‘mate’ (Mother Nature ). This drive is very strong, and therefore Orcs will not retreat, they will fight until they die and are happy to do so.
>Humans armed with swords and armour are quite tough and they bring the greatest gift of all to Orcs, the gift of pain. The Orcs are overjoyed at this, and are more than happy to give as good as they get. The Orcs play with their new friends until the friends stop moving, then they devour the corpses as such good friends shouldn’t go to waste!
>Orcs really don’t understand that violent humans aren’t Orcs, they have a simple view of ‘if it runs it’s food’, ‘if it fights it Orc’ or has Orc like tendencies.
>each sword wound makes their physiology react into reinforcing their hides until they are tougher than any plate mail.