Orcs are driven by love

Orcs are driven by love.

Orcs love the entire world. That is why they kill.

Let me start over.

Wild orcs, tribal orcs. Yellow glowing eyes, dark scaly skin, ape-like fangs, black bristly hair everywhere. Stone-orcs, true orcs, whatever you wanna call them; the greenskins, the barbarians, killers - these are the true orcs who live as they have for thousands of years. The chosen people.

Being an orc lies not in your toughness, black bristles, or your tusks, these orcs will tell you (before they kill you). Being an orc lies in honouring the Creator. This faith needs no name, since all orcs follow it, and those who do not follow it are not really orcs. It is the Orc Way. Orcness is more religion than species.

The orcish faith is built on love. Love for the entire world and everything that's in it.

But, you tell me, orcs kill everything that's in the world?

They kill because orcs, more than anyone, understand that love, true love, is a terrifying force. True love is sacrifice.

The creative act of the honoured Creator was a sacrifice. He died doing it. The world is the Divine corpse. His blood became the spirits and the world of spirits and the few spirits that follow the Orc Way that the orcs call smallgods.

Orcs love life, and they love the world, which is the corpse of the beloved Creator, and they live in constant fear of what they call the Great Rot. The world is in freefall towards total putrification, the rotting away of everything good and beautiful. Orcs know this. Their wise women have seen it.

Only death can pay for life. Orcs know this too.

For life to continue existing, bloody sacrifices are necessary. The teeming of life must be kept in bounds lest it become the teeming of the Great Rot. And the orcs, strong as they are, are called to be these grim custodians. To keep at bay the Great Rot. They trim the world, that it may flourish.

This is is why adult orcs, male and female, kill something at least once a day, be it person, animal, plant. Why their bands leave mindless destruction in their wake. They kill so that life does not overstep its own bounds, implodes in on itself. Population control for all of creation. The life force of their victims feeds the Dead Creator. It prolongs the advent of the Great Rot. Orcs don't find pleasure in the killing. It is a thankless job. They know they are reviled and damned. It is part of the sacrifice.

Orcs prefer to kill by one decapatory blow. The goodness of a kill lies in fitting intent and ruthless efficiency; they see pain as useless, and a symptom of the Great Rot. When the Great Rot comes, there will be only pain.

If you find a slaughtered caravan and all bodies are headless, you have found the work of orcs. The heads are removed and placed in their shrines to the Creator, where they receive ritual mournings and apologies, and thanks for their sacrifice. Orcs cry for every life they end.

Of course, there *are* what the clans call Bent Orcs. These actually enjoy slaughter and murder and don't really care about the Great Rot. They are a minority, but despised by True Orcs.

Nothing is more horrible to an orc than the idea of a natural death. It is the ultimate selfishness, a murder of the world. This is why orcs (almost) never run from a fight. If their victims die, the life goes to the world. If they themselves die, their own life goes to the world. Either outcome is good for an orc.

Orcs must kill once a day or suffer nightmares and after a while become human or goblin.

Orcish Racial Traits

Kill For God: Kill once a day. Plant, bug, human. If you don't, you suffer nightmares and lose the blessing on your First Head. If you don't for a week, you become goblin or human.

The First Head: Every orc carries the head of their first kill with them wrapped in linen. It is revived by orcish magic and the blessing of the creator. This head knows everything, can only speak in whispers, and can answer a question once a day. However, there is a 50/50 chance that the head will lie and lure you to your death.

The Bloody Lands of Circassa

First off, this blog is mainly an attempt to get some dnd personal worldbuilding organized. I was inspired to do this after finding Goblin Punch, which is amazing. I have tons of half-baked ideas lying around and some friends who'd like to play dnd if only someone was willing to DM, so I guess this is my foray into actually producing some sort of homebrew settings. If anyone ever actually reads this and likes it, that is a win for me.

Let's away!

The Lands of Circassa

Basically, it's a volcanic swamp-plain that is really the bloodstain of an ancient murdered god.
In the northern parts of Caraxe lies a swamp that stretches away for miles and miles in the shadow of mount Berammon. The entire landscape is dominated by shades of red and black, with only bright green and blue mineral deposits around the boiling pools popping out.

In the bogs, pools bubble with steam that tastes like metal on the back of your tongue. The thin-treed forests are all shades of red, brown, and purple. In the barrens, the very rocks look like congealed blood.

According to the Circassans, that's because it is. The Red Lands were formed when the Ruling King named Diluvian was betrayed by his two companions, stabbed clean through with the Pammachon sword which burns like the heart of the earth. His gigantic body toppled from his palace on the mountain onto a fertile patch of land which his boiling blood stained. To this day, the place where Diluvian's massive corpse lay is seeped through with boiling blood -- seething with the heat of the Pammachon sword or with lust for revenge. People can't seem to agree on it.

The Red People

The Circassans -- or the Red People as some call them -- believe themselves to have been born out of the seething blood. They look like it, sure. They're hairless and slightly misshapen, their skins ranging from anywhere between blood-red, brown, and blotted purple. They enjoy spicy foods, a good fight, poetry with a distinctive depressive streak, and a hot bath in any of Circassa's hot springs (the water is slightly reddish).

Circassans revere -- and fear -- blood, or rather the power inherent in it. A person's blood is a person's soul. The religion of the Red Men centers on the ritual letting and imbibing of the blood of (usually willing) others for whatever reason (marriage, mourning, pledging fealty). The bloodspeakers of the tribes use blood magic as part of sacred, divinitory rites. Don't call it blood magic though, since other and unsanctioned uses of blood magic are seen as severe blasphemy, or as a violation of a person on par with rape. These all function within the wider worldview wherein Diluvian is honoured as the Great Ancestor, the Dead Father.

These are the old ways, the ways of the blood. The tribes (calling themselves freemen) still practice these ways in their semi-nomadic travels over the Circassan plains and bogs. However, many Circassans have abandoned the old ways and live like a settled, agrarian people, either in their city of Godsgrave, or in the many cities of the lands surrounding Circassa. Some have even lost their old religion, the way of the blood and the Dead Father. The tribes call these city people stonefolk, and it is not a compliment.

Flora

The Bloodlands are filled with all manner of choking weeds and gore-like algae filling the smoking pools.

Bloodplum is an ever popular fruit with the Circassans. It makes your eyes turn red if you eat too much of it.

Purplerice is the main agrarian crop for cities like Godsgrave. The tribes sometimes buy it, since it is useful, keeps for a long time, and it isn't hard to find a boiling pool somewhere if you can't get a fire going for cooking.

Birch grows in Circassa. Ordinary birch, though the leaves seem a little reddish. Same goes for many other "ordinary" plants and grasses.

Fauna

Everything in Circassa has adapted to the heat emanating from the bowels of the earth in places.

Hotfrogs are frogs that have an incredibly high body temperature due to their adaptation to the hotter pools in Circassa's wilderness. They are a delicacy and the Circassans hunt them with long frogspears to avoid the hot steam.

Soarers are a type of very light and thin snakes that can - if weather allows - float crazy distances on the hot air streams that arise from the red ground. Some types actually hunt birds.

Pearl Beetles are delicious (and huge) insects that are not native to Circassa, but some have escaped after being imported to Godsgrave as livestock or pack animals.

Monsters

Some bad critters are the spirits that arise from the boiling pools at certain positions of the moons. They might be fragments of Diluvian's ghost or manifestations of his betrayal. Nobody knows, but they can possess a man and makes his blood boil. When you look at them, your eyes start bleeding.

Lurkers are half-real, hateful creatures that lurk in ponds and pools to drag in any passing little girl and drown/boil her to death. An adventurer will also do. They might be born out of Diluvians blood same as the Circassans, but they are cruder, lumpier, and turn back into liquid once killed.