Orcs

Orcs are squat and heavy. The women rarely reach five feet and the men barely pass it, and either will weigh close to two hundred pounds. They are carnivores, and they were carnivores before they were anything else. They belong to the Barren Lands in the southeast, where they made a language, a set of tribes and a way of eating their dead, and out of all of that grew the Karruk, which is a culture rather than a people and holds humans and half-orcs alongside them. Within the last century the Karruk took ground and kept it, and orcs now claim a nation of their own in Kijinxi.

What they are is not in dispute. Where they came from is: no ancient history of Erôth records an orc at all, and for most of the continent the people simply begin, already in the desert, already eating.

The Urkonti

The account that exists puts them with the Mól, and with the same program of experiments that produced the Peren. The emperor’s chief military advisor wanted a race built to answer the human problem growing to the east. Mól commanders were brilliant and humans kept confounding them anyway, by fighting in ways no doctrine had anticipated; one general called them masters of chaos. What was wanted against that was obedient troops, in quantity.

The line of experiments was titled Urkonti, and it worked on a creature already native to the region: carnivorous, nearly hairless, apelike, standing somewhere between a goblin and a hobgoblin when upright and built like a gorilla. It was fierce and it ate its own kind. The intention was to wake its mind and keep everything else about it.

The first phase did exactly that. An awakened mind, a handful of lesser alterations, and the result was logged as Urkonti I. Then the Peren revolt began, and the empire came apart before there was ever an Urkonti II. What was left free was a half-finished thing, born in captivity, that understood almost nothing of the world it was standing in. It knew two facts: its designation, and that it wanted meat.

The name came out of the designation. Their speech was new and simple and Urkonti was more than it could carry, so they cut it to Orc and kept it. They kept the other half as well. The number one is revered among them, because to be the one is to be the one in charge.

The Barren Lands

Where they ended up grows almost nothing. A people barely a generation clear of a carnivorous ancestor could not have lived on what did grow there, so they did not try. They hunted the reptiles and the insects the country gives, and when there was not enough of that they ate each other, which their forebears had done without ever needing a reason for it.

Their language they built themselves, and not from nothing. The lizardfolk of the Barren Lands had one of their own; the orcs took the language, and then they took the lizardfolk, who are gone. Tanjun is what came of that after generations of working it over with pieces gathered from everywhere else. Those lizardfolk are not the lizardfolk of the Daelands, who are living, and who are met abroad often enough to be counted among the peoples one might share a road with.

Everything else they made in that country is Karruk now: the tribes, the khans who take the office in blood, the shamans, the rites over the dead, and the copper and bronze the shamans eventually worked out. It began with orcs, and it stopped being only theirs a long time ago.

Fighting Them

Orcs came late to everything. They were still inside their own bronze age when the rest of the continent had long since left it, and it has cost them far less than it should have. Atlan Daichi of Clan Kuchibashi, who set the argument down, puts it as will beating skill: a debate over steel against bronze is badly timed scholarship when a two-hundred-pound carnivore is coming at you for a meal, and an orc whose copper or bone blade snaps mid-swing simply hits harder with what is left in his hand.

What answers them, by the same account, is armor, and only one kind of it. Pads, leather and even mail give very little against that sort of assault. Steel plate gives a great deal, and steel plate is ruinously expensive, takes real training to fight in, and in the Barren Lands is its own enemy: through a southern summer the metal scalds the skin under it, and through the winter it carries the cold straight in and holds it there. Daichi’s own counsel was to take a boat. Kraken Bay is the kinder crossing, and he did not think it a close question.

Where an Orc Is Met

Orcs are reckoned uncommon abroad, with the gnomes, the Hafuwë, the lizardfolk and the Kurru. One met on a road has most likely come out of the Barren Lands or out of Kijinxi, and after those out of the eastern provinces of Peredhel, which are Daelaegas and Laden.

West of all that, almost nothing was written down. A stocky full-blooded orc carried scalding bathwater up to the rooms of a Haudh-Gwenn inn and was never named; Aldo called him Tony for a joke, on the grounds that Tony is an orc name to begin with and a regional one, and that he has never met a human or a Peren who carried it. On the docks of the same city the word has come loose from the people entirely, and the name turns up wherever keif is sold, which is what made the joke worth trying.

Names

An orc almost always carries a name out of the family they came from, and for very nearly all of them that means a Karruk one, in Tanjun. Men are called Akira, Hideo, Haruto, Hayato, Jiro, Kaito, Kazuki, Raiden, Renjiro, Takeshi. Women are called Akari, Asuka, Hana, Kiyoko, Kohana, Mei, Reina, Sakura, Satsuki, Yuki.

Traits

No Pathfinder traits have been set down for an orc character. The copper, bronze, stone and bone weapons an orc of the Barren Lands carries are handled with the Karruk, fragility and all.