Orcs

As tall as elves and with similarly pointed ears, but more muscular than humans, orks often are a fearsome sight when angered – which their elongated lower canines serve to enhance. They anger quickly indeed, due to a feature known as gahad. An ork’s gahad is an individual reflex unique to each ork that can be awoken by someone else saying or doing “that one wrong thing” in the ork’s presence, and the ork can either give in to it, be driven to resolve the situation, or try to restrain himself. While inconvenient for other ancestrys, orks consider gahad as a sign of being alive, an energy from deep within that burns as the heart pounds whenever necessary.   However, Orks are passionate, freedom-loving people, often gathering in tribes or clans that travel in a nomadic fashion, living fast and intense, hoping their deaths will make a good story. After the Convergence, only few orcs have remained in the restraining walls of the Shona cities. While they remain ideological ties to these allies, many have instead chosen the lives of cavalrymen, roaming the far reaching steppes between the Shona, Thespian and Tuatha Realms. Orks are fires that burn fast; with only 40 years, their average lifespan is the shortest of all the ancestrys. As such, they reach physical maturity in their early teens.   Orks have a powerful build, averaging 6 feet 3 inches in height and 225 pounds in weight. Large lower canines protrude over their upper lip and their body hair has a coarse texture, almost always coloured black or grey.

Orks recognize only a loose concept of family, giving greatest loyalty to their tribe. Social organization within the tribe varies considerably, as orks often adopt social structures of the other ancestrys with whom they interact. Isolated tribes usually contain only two authority figures, however: the war chief and the shaman. Most ork tribes live in tents as nomads, but will willingly inhabit any kind of dwelling.