Half-orc

A half-orc is the child of a human and an orc, and on the ground where most of them live they are the best-made of the three peoples there. Orcs are squat and rarely clear five feet. Humans of any size fail on long days with nothing to eat, and the large ones fail first. A half-orc can run to six feet and past it, though rarely, and can go twice as long as either parent without food or water. In the Barren Lands that is not a curiosity. It is the reason they stand tallest in the tribes.

Among the Karruk

The roaming tribes of the southeast have frightened everyone within reach of them for as long as anyone has kept count, and mostly from a distance: the Karruk keep to the Barren Lands, and the odds of meeting one were always slim until a great horde gathered, at which point they frightened kingdoms that had never seen the country. Those tribes are humans, orcs and half-orcs together. What settles a person’s standing in them is not the blood but whether they are Karruk, and half-orcs are Karruk: aggressive, carnivorous, living off the reptiles and the insects the land gives, and honoring their dead by eating them. The rites differ from tribe to tribe according to the kind of respect being paid, and half-orcs keep them like anybody else.

Set against that, and describing the same tribes, is an account of a proud people with a deep oral history, a martial style with more grace in it than any dancer, apparel of their own and fine craftsmanship in it. Both are true of the same camps. They run from bandits to cannibals and there is no one bucket to put them in.

Kijinxi and the Liltamacil

Kijinxi is the first nation the Karruk ever built, and building it went badly. Nobody in it had governed anything, nobody knew what conventional diplomacy was for, and a people whose whole history had been movement found the standing still maddening. They were displaced and angry more or less continuously.

Kruga Grujin, their first ruler, judged that what was missing was pride: something of their own worth being interested in, which would hold her Karruk in the new country better than any law could. What she did first was call in the greatest half-orc warriors she had and set them to invent a way of fighting. That was the Liltamacil.

It is built out of both halves. The slender curved blades orcs favor, carried with the practiced grace humans bring to a thing, on the argument that the perfect warrior has heavy muscle and supple movement and that neither is worth much without the other. It is fought with hook swords, paired or one of them in two hands. Nobody buys the training: it is an honor earned, and it is taught to half-orcs of Kijinxi and to nobody else.

In the West

Half-orcs are common among the Free Folk and live among them in numbers seen nowhere else in Idir. Quark is common in the same company, and means a quarter-orc rather than a half. Away from the bands they are counted in fractions: three in a thousand in Loshev, fifteen in Haudh-Gwenn, and fifteen across Peredhel.

What the west has written down of them is mostly doorways. A half-orc a little over six feet stands inside the door of the Haudh-Gwenn bank, where nobody speaks. Another opened the low Mól-built keep in the ruins for the company once a token had been bite-tested at the gate. A third, gruff and mild-featured, was the only regular user of a hidden passage across a river district, and was watched for a week by somebody learning his face well enough to wear it.

Tony of Loshev is the one who got a name, and he got it because of a brawl he was paid to be provoked into. A different half-orc of the same name runs the Silver Web’s collections and threats out in the Haudh-Gwenn ruins, and the two are regularly taken for one man. Orsugo is a half-orc as well, which is the one thing about him that everybody agrees on and the least of what is said: rumor gives him ten feet and skin of fire, and the soberer accounts a large half-orc with old burn scarring.

Names

A half-orc usually takes a name from the culture that raised them, and for most of them that is a Karruk one, from a tribe of the Barren Lands or a clan of Kijinxi. In Tanjun, men are called Akihiro, Haruto, Hyun, Jian, Jin, Jinseong, Masaru, Takeshi, Wei, Xing, Yuan, Yuki. Women are called Aiko, Haruka, Kai, Lian, Mei, Minji, Qiang, Ren, Sora, Xia, Xiu, Ying, Yuna, Zhenwei.

Traits

No Pathfinder traits have been set down for a half-orc character, and none for the Liltamacil, which in any case is open only to a half-orc raised in Kijinxi.