Fear and Loathing in the Middle of Nowhere

Oh wow I did not follow through with the whole 'actual posts in an actual time-span' thing. Oh well. This post was heavily inspired by Arnold K.'s ideas on orcs, which you can read here (The equally good follow up is here). And I recommend you read them, not only because this post is essentially the same ideas shoved into my setting but because his stuff is absolutely brilliant, and much more creative than anything I've ever done.

Orcs are problematic though, to say the least. Intelligent races being slotted into a single alignment has never sat well with me, and I have had multiple Orc PCs in my campaigns. It's just kind of boring to assume all Orcs and all Orc societies have the same homogeneous world view. However at the same time I understand the desire for and convenience of having a non-human Other that players can fight with relatively little moral issues, and that can be flung at 'civilized' areas for dramatic effect.

This face just screams "If you kill me you get to take my stuff without feeling bad"
(source)

However, that's a discussion for another time, and others have said it far better. Arnold's posts mostly solved that dilemma for me, giving the Orc an interesting culture with great potential for individual/group variation, while keeping their usefulness as a hostile enemy Other. The key ideas I gleaned from Arnold's posts is that orcs believe that the gods view them with disdainful apathy at best and immeasurable hatred at worst, and that the main purpose of rituals is either to appease and be ignored, or ask for the gods to ignore their enemies in battle. In my still unnamed, rather amorphous generic fantasy setting, the most obvious example of this is the relationship between the orcs and the setting's also unnamed god of conflict. Unbeknownst to most of its worshipers, this god possesses three major 'aspects' of vastly differing alignment, and the orcs have a different way of dealing with all of them.

THREE aspects, you say?????

The lawful good aspect is asked to ignore the orcs; an Orc will attempt to convince it that it is too weak to pay attention to in an attempt to avoid being cleaved in half by a paladin. Worship of the neutral aspect alternates between appeasing it with glorious victories, and asking it ignore the Orc's enemies. The destructive eye of the chaotic evil aspect is kept far away from Orc settlements by frequent bloody raids against non-Orcs. This results in no small amount of cognitive dissonance as an Orc may in the same chant declare itself a lowly, incompetent nothing unworthy of divine attention, and in the next breath promise to personally sacrifice twenty decapitated heads. Of course, this hypocrisy is so routine that it is never questioned by any Orc. Outsiders tend to focus on the violent aspects of Orc religion, confusing appeasement for reverence, resulting in the stereotype of Orcs worshiping evil deities. From the Orc's point of view, they are simply taking a reasonable course of action in a universe that actively seeks their destruction: offering the most dangerous gods what they want (pillaging, death, pain, glory, etc.) in the hope that Orc lives will be spared from excess suffering. A life free of suffering is an absurd notion, and any Orc knows this well by the time their first set of tusks erupt from between their 'baby teeth'.

This fella died of natural causes at the ripe old age of  31!

This is one of the reasons half-orcs are treated so poorly in Orc society - they lack many of the physical and mental handicaps possessed by full-blooded Orcs. Half-orcs have smaller and fewer tusks, reduced bone spurring, almost no instances of childhood arthritis and far keener minds. It is believed by many Orcs that the lack of hardship provided by their bodies will bring woe to any Orc settlement that harbours half-orcs. However their value as leaders, tacticians, bookkeepers and diplomats (yes, orcs have diplomats) makes killing them outright a poor decision, so the Orcs in a tribe simply make sure themselves that the half-orcs suffer as a proper Orc should. This is a task they perform with no small amount of zeal, as they despise the human aspects (pampered god-blessed soft skinned bastards) of their half-blood kin almost as much as their Orc aspects. No one hates an Orc like an Orc hates an Orc.