Orcs, the lost

 Note, this is a work in progress.

                Orcs. 

                “We were the first. Where your cities stand, ours stood. Where your farms stand, we domesticated them first. All that you think of as yours. Was ours.  We will take it back.” – Thar Blacksands Orc skald.

                To the people of Davirc, orcs are savage monsters living in the wilds and in the near deeps. They attack in bands that are little more than organized mobs, killing and looting and burning and destroying.  They’re not far from the truth.

                They weren’t always that way.

                The Orcs, or Or’couri as they were originally known, were a once powerful expansionist civilization, commanding and binding spirits through their own magic.  Their magics were a fusion of arcane and occult methodology, long lost.  They were capable of binding spirits and fey into physical items using their souls to power self propelled wagons and flying citadels and other devices lost to the ages. 

                Their civilization came to an end when their armies encountered the dwarves as they expanded into the near deeps for more materials for their empire.  The dwarves unleashed their own bound spirits in the blights.  The Or’couri, for the first time in centuries, were on the defensive. They gave ground slowly, but gave ground, the blights reducing their cities to rubble, freeing and corrupting the spirits and fey bound by the Or’couri, turning their own magic against them.

                The tide turned when the first elves set foot on the continent.  While the elves were able to fight the blights and drive them back, they believed the orcs had called the corrupted nature spirits and declared a war of extension on them. With the dwarves now fighting for their survival against the monsters they had created the O’couri took shelter in the near deeps.  Their civilization destroyed, their very history lost, the shattered survivors degenerated into savagery and barbarism.  Even their name for themselves was lost. They were no longer, O’couri, the enlightened.  They were Orcs, the lost.

                Modern orcs retain little of their ancestral legacy. They are organized in loose tribal bands roaming the fringes of civilized lands.  Most have no written language, or if they do it is using a human or other race’s alphabet.  They never use elven or dwarven alphabets.  The ancient O’couri magic is lost, what practitioners exist among the orcs either follow dark druidic traditions or gain their power from the dark trinity or demons or other powers.  Tribal society is based on strength and power.  The strong dominate the weak, and the weak are culled.

Orcs of the borderlands.

                Some Orcs have found a different way.  Orc tribes on the borders of the empire have started to settle down trading with the small, neglected towns of the empire instead of raiding them.  The orcs started having little more than muscle to trade, clearing fields for food or hauling lumber and stone.  As the tribes learned the benefits of trading with the humans, they became sedentary, or at least less actively raiding.  These border communities are also the place of birth of several the half orcs that wander the empire or serve in the army as scouts or shock troops.  No matter the actual nature of the half orc, they cannot easily escape the perceptions of that heritage.