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Orcs

The Orcs are perhaps the most poorly understood of the modern races. Owing to the ramshackle villages they now live in, their stooped posture, and their unwillingness to conquer and exploit the world around them as other races do, they are generally considered to be feral beasts who live in a sad pantomime of civilized culture. The Orcs now have little left to them to refute those claims.

At the height of Orcish culture, they lived in the immense castle city of Bloodwater, with its towering fortress with stained glass windows that seemed to reach the sky, and its sprawling array of sturdy houses carved of a hard gray stone. Bloodwater was among the largest cities of the known world, exceeded only by the other great captiols of Parian and Solodon. Bloodwater Castle, built of imposing coal-black stone, surpassed the glittering crystal Palace of Ethera and the imposing gray stone walls of Lotor's Castle in sheer magnitude, housing almost a city unto itself, separate from the one outside its three huge gates. Legend held that the castle was so imposing that the royal families rarely left its walls because they were too overwhelmed by the great black towers to reenter.

A second city, called Roctra, lay some distance southeast of Bloodwater. It's ruins are now inhabited by a horde of kobolds, who seem to keep it in little worse shape than it's builders. The Orcs of Roctra, while fundamentally no different than those of Bloodwater, lived in shabby houses built of unmilled wood. These were a more tradition-bound people than their city brothers. The orcs of Roctra were less warlike, and held their race's ancient communion with nature dear at heart. While perfectly able to build the magnificent luxery of Bloodwater, they considered their ramshackle little city mearly a neccessary inconvenience to hold roving monsters at bay.

The Orcs maintained a cordial, if distant, friendship with Parian, and subsisted heavily on crops from Welderant. The King of Ethera, however, made no secret that he despised the Orcs. During those times when Ethera and Parian's constant jostling for control of Parian's vassal towns disrupted control of Welderant, Ethera cut off food shipments to Bloodwater, causing widespread starvation.

When the Rune Wars came to the mainland, the people of Bloodwater massed an immense army to answer the cries of help from Parian. Ethera set aside their long fued, and together they smashed the Rune armies into disarray.

The Orcish success in battle is greatly aided by a bizzare quirk of Orcish biology. Orcish males occasionally grow to a size matching the towering Tundrians, although their stooped posture makes them seem somewhat smaller. Still, they can, under the correct conditions, grow much larger.

Under a diet of raw meat, physical strain, hard labor, and magics known only to the elites of the Orcish shamans, some Orcs possess the ability to grow thrice their natural size. These giant Orcs are usually called Ogres. They stand fifteen feet tall, and weild uprooted trees as weapons. They are immensely powerful, but the transformation comes at great cost. The Ogre looses all sense of self, and indeed become the half-animal many belive Orcs to be.

Because of the cost to the Ogre, no Orc in mainstream society has undergone this transformation since the Rune Wars.

While the legions of Bloodwater were still returning from the wars, the Rune Warriors, capable of ungodly speed when they needed it, fled far ahead of them to Driskal's Domain, where the gathered new allies. They assaulted Bloodwater mere days before the Orcish army returned under banners of victory. Very little remains of Bloodwater except a few knee-high bits of it's once towering walls. The ruins are infested with undead creatres, wailing mindlessly at atrocities they cannot remember.

The Shamans of Roctra, however, bowed to the might of the Rune Armies. They were defenseless in the face of such enemies, their weak nature-magic useless in the very presence of Rune Artifacts. They were enslaved by Talazar, fought bloody and hopeless fights as the advance waves, their blood wasted to prepare the way for the Rune Warriors to follow.

The remainder of the Orcish armies returned home to find a scorched waste. In a rage of hate and despair, they tracked the Rune Warriors as far as they dared, destroying Driskal's Domain, and raging through the already devastated lands of Welderant and Lyrina, burning anything that may have escaped the Rune Warriors.

Finally, their rage expended and fearing the return of the Rune Warriors, they fled into the wilderness, where they huddled into a tiny village cowering under the mountains bordering their homeland. They called their new home Krog, and hoped to someday rebuild the glory of Bloodwater.

Most of the Orc's knowledge was lost, however. They were once famous for their beautiful weapons. Great battle axes, with double-bladed heads at each end, the Kar'chi, with two gracefully curved blades from a balanced hilt, and the famous Axe of the Four Winds, enchanted with the Orcs' weak nature-magic. Those that remained knew only of these weapons' uses, not their make.

Today, they've relearned the crafts from Humans, but their town is still little more than mud brick huts with thatch roofs. Most doubt that Krog will ever be even a shadow of Bloodwater, and many have lost faith in their own past, falling prey to the predjudices of other races.

The Orcs of Krog have, however, reaffirmed their unmatched engineering prowess in one area, however. Bloodwater had the only sewer system in the world at the time - a network of underground chambers and passages with openings into each building which carried garbage and waste out of the city. Because of this sewer, Bloodwater was the only city on the mainland to escape the periodic plagues that periodically swept the land. Krog now has a simmilar sewer, although less efficient, and very tempermental. It stops flowing regularly, and when it does, an overpoweringly offensive stench backs up into Krog. When it's working properly, the waste is dumped into the Vorda Swamp, where the same stench can be conveniently blamed on the undead or lizard men that inhabit the area.

The Orcs of Roctra, or rather, the scant few who remaind, were discarded by the Rune Warriors after their failure to assault the Astari capitol of Solodon. Talazar is said to have put a powerful curse over them, destroying their minds. They live as animals now, little more than vermin. They make nothing of their own, taking what little they can from unwary adventurers. They clumsily flail their stolen weapons in a pathetic immitation of their warrior ancestors. Their harsh life and poor diet means that most of those that survive to adulthood are doomed to loose control fall even deeper into their madness as Ogres.

One of the more powerful shamans, named Grell managed to protect himself from the curse. He gathered what few of his bretheren he could save from their madness and fled back to their homeland. Ashamed of their crimes, they settled in the destroyed remains of Driskal's Domain. Talazar's curse still lays on them, and many still fall into madness in old age. The shamans kill many of those who do so, but a few suitable and docile Ogres are kept as slaves to defend the city.

Although its founders hid in caves in shame and pennance, Grell's current generation has a distorted view of its past. They believe they were right in what they did, and that their land dwelling cousins had unjustly exiled them. The lingering tinge of their feral madness has turned them ever towards evil, and now few good hearted people dare to enter their caves.