Orcs

The orcs were created by the Dark Lords, a cabal of thirteen Young Gods, with the goal of creating the perfect race; not to rule, but to serve. They are powerful and hardy, able to live where others would die, and were made specifically to follow. They were formed into the Legion, sent forth to conquer, and in the early part of The Mortal Age they gained a dark reputation for savagery and ruthlessness.
In the midst of their conflict with the Regime, however, the orcs turned on their creators and destroyed them. In the ensuing confusion the bulk of the orcs withdrew into the Darklands, while others remained in former colonial holdings in the mountains in Caino, where they recovered and returned as a proud and independent people. The Darklanders later set forth in a series of Diasporas which spread their culture outwards, most notably establishing an alliance of diarchies in the Auroran Wastes.
The culture of the orcs is animist, and built around the tribe and reverence for the ancestors. Each tribe fosters its own traditions, incorporating elements from the folk customs of the original Legions, but the one constant is that each tribe has a totem, an icon built up over generations and representing the soul of the tribe, which recalls the time when the Legion was an orc’s life and the Legion standard bore the record of their deeds. In a similar fashion, individual orcs collect tokens from those that they meet, sewing them to their clothing. These traditions, and the importance of the tribe, have persisted even when and where the orcs have developed a more complex social structure.
Orc language evolved from the Dark Speech handed down to them by their fallen gods. Lacking a written language before the Uprising, they developed a script using lectograms, which mix a number of ideograms for significant terms and concepts with phonemic and numeric characters.
The tribes of northern Yethera, for example, maintained tribal banners, even as their society developed into statehood, each chief adding a new panel so that they grew from simple pennants to great tapestries telling the tale of the tribe to those who could understand. Many of these were lost when the orcs were pushed south from their lands by the descent of the Giants, to the anger and sorrow of the tribes, but some are still passed down in families within the Sacred Republic.
Orcs revere their ancestors, instead of gods. Having killed their creators they have never sought to replace them, although in the Republic they pay lip service to the Church, as the traditional practices of the tribes touch on druidism or forms of arcane practice, and are suppressed by the church. Some continue the old ways in secret, while others have abandoned their communities for the ways of the Church, usually finding positions as enforcers. The spiritual leaders of the tribes are the speakers for the ancestors, who commune with the spirits of those who went before through a form of ecstatic frenzy. The temporal leaders of the tribes are most often called the speakers for the living.
While the northern orc states fell, the orcs of the Darklands and Caino remain more organised, their tribes allied into diarchies. The emergent post-Legion administrative model, diarchy is a governmental form with two elected heads of state: a king, responsible for domestic affairs, and a queen, who attends to foreign and military matters. While each orc diarchy has their own traditions, they maintain strong ties, especially those fostered by the Lorespeakers, the priests of the ancestor cults, who serve the same roles as the tribal speakers, but as part of a more regimented organisation. The spiritual centre of the Darklands in the great hub of Empty Tomb is dominated by the Heart of All, a great monolith of black stone, carved with the deeds of the millions of individual orcs, tribes, warbands and other groups who have contributed in great or small part to the growth of post-Legion orcish culture. It is said by some that when all of the space on the monolith is filled, the memory of the Dark Lords will be utterly expunged, and every trace of them banished to the Void.

Orcs and identity

Orc society is strongly gendered, a legacy of both their functions within the Legion. Uruks – male orcs – were hunters, while oroks were warriors. In the modern population, many orcs break from this mould, not merely uruk fighters and orok hunters, but the farmers, crafters, builders, scholars and others necessary for the orcs to function as a self-sufficient society, instead of the dependent Legion of the Dark Lords, their needs supplied by faceless slave populations.
Gender is typically determined by physical sex, but this is not entirely prescribed and an individual is free to choose their own gender as part of finding their own identity. While is has no real socially determinative role anymore, gender is still formally declared by a pendant styled with a curve – usually a crescent moon, a bow or a sickle – for a hunter, or a point – a spear, straight sword or arrow – for a warrior, and this token supersedes any physical characteristics. These same shapes also appear on tribal and personal totems to denote individual uruks and oroks.
Orcs have strong sex drives and very little concept of limited sexuality. Attraction is a purely personal matter. Attachment is rarely exclusive, but due to their past enslavement, orcs have a very strong concept of consent.
Orcs do not bear a grudge like Dwarfs do, but they maintain a powerful devotion to alliances. Originally born from honour codes, in the absence of gods and oaths, orcs have learned to value trust, giving it rarely and treating itd breach as one of the highest of crimes.
Orcs maintain a marked division between public and private ‘face’. Strangers see only a carefully erected blank, fierce and proud, while everything underneath is reserved for friends and family. Some younger orcs, living in mixed populations, do not learn to maintain this public face, or simply don’t use it.
Much of orc art and architecture is built around the number three. Buildings and public spaces with spiritual significance, are three-sided, representing the past, present and future, and more specifically the ancestors, living orcs, and those generations yet to come. Public buildings with temporal significance are usually four-sided, representing the cardinal points, while the relatively infrequent arcane establishments favour a four-pointed star layout, signifying variously the elements, the worldly directions, and the planar divisions of above, below, without and within.