Orc Warhorde

Orcs killing orcs is nothing new; their history is as storied as it is savage, a record of warchiefs and atrocities too long to list. But for much of their history, orcs were strictly terrestrial, for the whole of their technological achievement was based squarely on warfare. The story is much the same for bugbears, hobgoblins, gnolls, and goblins—until the development of the arcane warhead, goblinoids were all planetbound.
Things may have never changed were it not for the intervention of avia-ra missionaries, who landed on the orc homeworld of Or’n to spread the word of the Sun Above. They were not remotely successful —in fact, they were promptly butchered by orcish berserkers—but the discovery of worlds beyond their own, along with a single working Dark Matter drive, shunted the orcs onto a technological path ending in disaster. Whereas the humanoid races saw the potential of Dark Matter technology to power their worlds, travel far reaches of space, and advance technology as a whole, the orcs knew they had discovered a weapon. Within a decade, an orcish tribe scraped together a crude bomb using the technology and dropped it on a city of their enemies; to their surprise and everyone’s horror, millions died in an instant.

End of the World

The weapon was the first of its kind, but not the last. They would later come to be called arcane warheads, devices that warp the fabric of magic to its breaking point, tearing a hole and unleashing a devastating explosion. Each warhead leaves behind a permanent hole in the fabric of magic—a spherical Dead Magic Zone, normally a few dozen feet across, which drifts through space indefinitely or clings to the ground at the point of detonation. No weapon in history has proved more catastrophic or terrifying.
The arms race that followed the first arcane warhead was as precipitous as it was volatile. In addition to simply building tens of thousands of warheads, most orc factions became obsessed with gaining the high ground on their enemies. First taking to space, orcs positioned arcane warheads in orbit, then installed missile silos on their moons. Each move brought the orc war tide further out into space and inched orckind closer to doomsday.
No one knows for sure who fired the first shot, but suddenly, all at once, the missiles were launched. In a chorus of explosions, Or’n was reduced to a smoldering, lifeless rock. Hundreds of millions perished in the inferno; millions more, however, survived among the stars.

The Warhorde

The remaining orcs continued their bitter fight in other systems (bringing their arcane warheads with them), eventually cobbling together or capturing low-class Dark Matter engines to extend their territories. When they arrived in other systems, the orcish invaders conscripted, enslaved, or allied with the other goblinoids they discovered, embroiling the rest of goblinkind in their eternal war. Before long, the orcish factions were a mishmash of all goblinkind, and the orcish war evolved into an extension of tribal conflicts from a hundred different worlds.
The swarm of chaotically shifting alliances, bitter rivalries, and splintering factions are collectively called the Warhorde, for no single coalition remains dominant long before it spirals into infighting. Their conflict spans a wide swath of the galaxy, called the Orc Warzone, which is littered with dead magic pockets from the unending rain of arcane warheads, and has essentially been abandoned to the wars of goblinkind. Sometimes, the Warhorde will focus its attention on some outside threat, like the expansion of humans at Lakshay, but such distractions are as rare as they are short-lived. Most of the time, the daily bloodshed of the Warzone preoccupies the horde, and it ventures outside only to raid nearby systems for slaves and resources.