Beorg Volk, The Barrow Folk, Orcneas, Orcen
“Beorg Volk — the Barrow-Folk.”
For those who call Earth home, the names Orcneas and Orcen read like marginal notes in Beowulf and old British lore. Later tellings mislabeled them “sons of Cain” or stray giant-kin—both wrong. The names themselves come closer to truth. Orcneas, a court-elf coinage, loosely means “underworld corpse”; Orcen is the word the fey of Albion, Alba, and Cymru use for a monster come up from the seas. They wear both with grim amusement—badges earned through fear and violence. In the modern era most shorten it to orc, but among their own, the oldest name endures: Beorg Volk, the Barrow-Folk.
Nature & Kin-Relations
The Orcen are a strain of Goblinkind, called Barrow-goblins by their smaller kin. Like many goblins they are creatures of malice, greed, and midnight appetites, but their contempt is selective. They dismiss Hobgoblins, Kobolds, Bluecaps, and Knockers as insipidly naïve; they tolerate Market Goblins as useful but soft; and they regard their Redcap, Bugbear, and Gobline cousins as properly ruthless—if badly aimed. The Orcen are not tricksters like the Gobline. They are warriors and reavers. They venerate death and violence as the only proofs that matter, and they see themselves as the hands that deliver those proofs to a world too weak to accept truth without force.
Creed of the Barrow-Folk
Imagine the worst, most cold-iron aspects of early Saxon raiding culture—oath-breaking at feasts, wolf-law on the shore, blood-price reckoned in skulls—then dial every cruelty to eleven. That is baseline Orcen ethos. Might makes right. Oaths bind until broken—then vengeance becomes liturgy. Mercy is a lie told by the feeble to sleep at night. Honor is measured in scars, trophies, and the weight of the enemies you’ve put under the hill. They pride themselves on plain dealing that begins with a threat and ends with a corpse. When they call the living “hall-meat,” it is not metaphor.
Barrow-Craft & Witch-War
They sanctify death, war, and violation as sacred acts. Their magic is barrow-craft: blood-cut runes carved with seax and nail; grave-iron fetters hammered in the dark; bone totems stained with rendered fat. They speak to cairns and hear them answer. Wight-binding is a high art—coaxing or dragging angry dead up from ancient mounds to swell a shield wall of the unquiet. On the march, their war-priests score sigils into their own flesh to “sharpen” the spirit, then anoint helms with barrow-smoke that carries the stink of old kings. Their Voice of Command is not metaphor either: a battle-shout that cracks discipline, curdles courage, and drives allies into a killing rhythm.
Cruelty, to them, is not excess but evidence—pain as proof, terror as pedagogy. Tribute is taken in blades and blood; surrender buys only a shorter death. Their rites teach that the world was born from a wound and will end as one, and that every raid—every razing of a hall, every cairn raised over butchered foes—helps pry that wound back open. In such work they are tireless, and terribly sincere.
Physiology
The Orcen are the largest and most physically imposing of Goblinkind. They stand tall, though their habitual stoop can make them seem shorter—broad of shoulder, stocky and dense, with thick bones and slabs of muscle under a hide that feels closer to rawhide than skin. Their coloration runs corpse-grey, usually toward ashen or stone hues. Hair skews dark: almost black-green through muck-brown to blood-red. To a human eye they look like a Neanderthal mashed with Cro-Magnon and then made bestial: heavy brow ridges, deep-set eyes that often gleam ember-red, and a jaw strong enough to crack shank bones. When they smile, tusk-like lower canines and ragged fangs show—dentition built for meat and marrow more than vegetable. They are omnivores, but they skew hard toward the kill.
Like all beings of Otherworld, they are supernatural—and not to be taken lightly. An adult Orcen warrior can lift on the order of a small car, making peak human strength and endurance look decorative. Their blood runs tar-dark and oxygen-rich; exposed to air it thickens fast, sealing wounds in heartbeats. Pain does not slow them—it primes them. The more they bleed, the more the old war-curse answers, dumping heat and power into the muscle like a forge bellows.
Their senses are tuned for the hunt. Eyes drink the dark; bright daylight needles them and frays the temper. Hearing is sharp, but smell is sharper—wolf-keen—able to sift panic from sweat and follow a blood spoor over wet stone. Scar tissue grows into keloid ridges that they carve and ink into blood-cut runes, both record and weapon. Bones are mineral-heavy and hard to break; hide is thick enough to turn poor cuts and blunt a spear thrust. They shrug off cold bogs and long marches the way men endure a bad night’s sleep.
They are a night-shaped people: barrow-bred, meat-hungry, and—whether by design or doom—made as living instruments of violence, death, and dread.
Cold Iron’s Bite
It is worth noting that, like their Redcap kin, the Orcen have developed a hard immunity to most iron and steel. They grip iron blades, wear chain, and hammer grave-iron fetters without the usual fey recoil, and their barrow-craft does not sputter in the presence of common alloys. The Orcen themselves claim they became hard by force of will—“we bit the iron and learned to live with the burn.”
That boast is more than metaphor. Initiates are made to bite forged nails until the gums bleed; iron filings are stirred into warrior-gruel; tongues and palms are branded and ringed with grave-iron piercings. Scars from these ordeals are called bite-marks, proof that the bearer is ironfast. War-smiths “season” their gear in bog acids and barrow-smoke, then quench blades in blood to bind the metal to the clan—alchemy as sacrament.
There are limits. True cold iron—bog iron wrought without alloy and hallowed in moonless rites—or star-iron from the meteors will still bite deep, and saint-forged iron (hammered under old oath-light) can scorch their sorcery. Such metals don’t turn their magic off, but they antagonize it: runes misfire, wight-binding grows erratic, and the Voice of Command frays at the edges. The Orcen hate these irons, but they do not fear them; they answer in kind with iron nets, caltrops, and seax-blades built to break lesser fae.
Sexual Dimorphism & Gender Law
Sexual dimorphism is less pronounced among the Orcen than among humans; in full war-gear most would struggle to tell a woman from a man. Rank and role aren’t sex-bound, though Orcen women bear the honor—and burden—of breeding strong stock. Their child-law is brutal: any perceived frailty is grounds for exposure, a practice the modern Orcen have not abandoned. This has led to several dangerous incidents of feral Orcen—barrow-mad cast-outs whose raids have spilled into Otherworld and the Earth-realm alike.
History
The Orcen hail from Otherworld, from a region roughly analogous to Saxony. Most lore holds that they diverged from the Gobline long ago, hardening into a culture that made violence and death its law.
The record is muddy on why they left their heartland, but the likeliest weave is this: prolonged wars with the Alflar, followed by aggressive Troll and Jotun migration cycles, squeezed them out. In the turmoil, the Orcen took to the North-Sea Verge and crossed into Albion. By most reckonings this landfall came in the fifth century. There they carved a brutal barrow-realm among warring fey and giants, their raids spilling into Cymru and Alba, even striking Eire. It was the island’s elven folk—the Aelfe—who named them Orcen, “the monsters who came from the sea.”
For centuries the Orcen Kingdom rose and reaved. The Alflar, Giants, and Trolls raided them; the Orcen answered by falling on the native Aelfe to vent sea-borne fury, torching halls and piling cairns as if each raid were an offering. Orcen skalds still sing of those “storm-winters” when the barrow banners never fully dried.
The tide turned when the Aelfe unified Albion under the Four Seasons of Sovereignty. Elven knights on fey warhorses met the Orcen shield walls blade-for-blade and began to press them back across their borders. What followed was a long grind of counter-raid and siege, a rare age when Aelfe discipline blunted Orcen ferocity and ended the Orcen’s near-total domination of Aelfe forces in open war.
The Orcen hatred of the Aelfe runs marrow-deep—older feuds with the Alflar and Alben peoples poured into a single, burning prejudice. They respect the Aelfe’s strength even as they loathe their grace. By contrast, Giants and Trolls draw wary admiration: beings of raw power and ancient craft who give good deaths and worthy fights. The Orcen see no dishonor in serving a giant-king, and they treat trolls with a mercenary’s respect—well aware that a troll who wants you dead will make it so, and eat you for good measure.
In short: to the Orcen, elves are the hated “pretty things” who must be taught the ugly truths of death and iron. Giants and trolls are worthy kin-enemies—hard as winter, honest as a hammer.
Earth-Facing Orcen
The Orcen have never maintained a large presence on Earth—hence the thin, contradictory lore. Poorly suited to natural crossings, they cannot simply step through leyline doors or dance a mushroom ring into our realm. Other fae mock them (quietly) that their ironfast nature has “grounded” them more tightly than most beings of Otherworld. Thresholds do run thinner in places of death and violence—barrows, killing grounds, prisons, slaughterhouses, disaster sites—but even there the Orcen typically need a summons or heavier barrow-craft to walk between worlds. The result is a small, persistent trickle rather than a flood.
When called, it is usually by mages or warlocks who mistake them for demons. The Orcen rarely care so long as the weregild is paid. They serve as supernatural enforcers with no qualms about the work: debt broken into bones, messages spelled in ruin, rivals reduced to examples. Payment is taken in blood-price, grave-iron, bound names, or the right to raise cairns on the fallen. They keep contracts the way they keep oaths—to the letter, with relish.
Those few who operate on Earth hide behind the same Glamours used by Goblins and Fey, favoring fronts that smell of iron, oil, and old fear: scrapyards, abattoirs, demolition crews, waterfront warehouses, bare-knuckle “security.” They move as mercenaries and enforcers, knitting themselves into tight raid-rings rather than sprawling syndicates. Daylight frays their temper and their Glamours; most work the no-sun hours, when senses are keen and courage runs thin.
The Orcen and “Orc” Fantasy
Like most beings of Otherworld, the Orcen regard human pop-fantasy as a costume chest—bright, noisy, and almost entirely wrong. The pig-faced, green-skinned halfwit that shambles through tabletop manuals and juvenile epics both amuses and vexes them. It amuses because the caricature is safe: a papier-mâché monster you can be brave against. It vexes because it breeds complacency. People who expect buffoons die to Barrow-Folk who plan like generals, scent fear like wolves, and carve victory into their own bones.
Human art keeps circling three mistakes: color, face, and mind. Color: Orcen are corpse-grey—ash to stone—not olive cartoon villains. The “green” comes from funeral paints and marsh-rot that cling to their hides after a barrow raid; witnesses saw the smear and drew skin. Face: the boar-snout is a helmed mask—jawbone trophies wired to a helm, or tusk-plates grown from scarified lip and chin—not natural anatomy. Mind: dull wits are a comfort myth. Orcen cunning is tactical, predatory, and ritualized; they speak a War-Tongue that can stampede lesser wills and unpick formation like a seam.
Common lies vs. barrow-truths
“They’re green.”
Grave-paint and bog stain. The flesh beneath is ash-grey, sometimes veined like old marble.
“They’re pig-faced.”
Helm work: boar tusks, jawbones, and plate masks. Off come the trophies; on shows the barrow-jaw.
“They’re stupid.”
They play stupid when it profits. In council they count food, fear, and exits as fast as any captain.
“They’re just angry humans.”
No. They are Otherworld predators wearing a culture like armor. Do not rehabilitate what exists to reap. And do not fool yourself into the idea they think like humans they are supernatural beings of a mind and physiology that is as alien as any fey entity.
Why the stories bent
Clerics sanded off the worst parts to make sermons about “Cain’s sons.” Court poets prettied elves and needed uglier foils. Victorian collectors bowdlerized raids into “romance” and colored the rest for the nursery. Modern gamewrights filed down edges for play. Each layer drifted farther from the barrow—less corpse-smoke, more toy.
What the Orcen make of it
They weaponize the lie. Glamours tuned to “storybook orc” let them pass as masked brawlers, cosplay muscle, or themed security. They grunt and thump until the door closes, then speak in clear, cutting orders. They’ll answer to “orc” if the gold is good, but among their own they spit the word and say Orcen, Orcneas, or Beorg Volk. Fools who paint them green in their tales are sometimes left alive—marked, so their next ballad travels farther.
For those who call Earth home, the names Orcneas and Orcen read like marginal notes in Beowulf and old British lore. Later tellings mislabeled them “sons of Cain” or stray giant-kin—both wrong. The names themselves come closer to truth. Orcneas, a court-elf coinage, loosely means “underworld corpse”; Orcen is the word the fey of Albion, Alba, and Cymru use for a monster come up from the seas. They wear both with grim amusement—badges earned through fear and violence. In the modern era most shorten it to orc, but among their own, the oldest name endures: Beorg Volk, the Barrow-Folk.
Nature & Kin-Relations
The Orcen are a strain of Goblinkind, called Barrow-goblins by their smaller kin. Like many goblins they are creatures of malice, greed, and midnight appetites, but their contempt is selective. They dismiss Hobgoblins, Kobolds, Bluecaps, and Knockers as insipidly naïve; they tolerate Market Goblins as useful but soft; and they regard their Redcap, Bugbear, and Gobline cousins as properly ruthless—if badly aimed. The Orcen are not tricksters like the Gobline. They are warriors and reavers. They venerate death and violence as the only proofs that matter, and they see themselves as the hands that deliver those proofs to a world too weak to accept truth without force.
Creed of the Barrow-Folk
Imagine the worst, most cold-iron aspects of early Saxon raiding culture—oath-breaking at feasts, wolf-law on the shore, blood-price reckoned in skulls—then dial every cruelty to eleven. That is baseline Orcen ethos. Might makes right. Oaths bind until broken—then vengeance becomes liturgy. Mercy is a lie told by the feeble to sleep at night. Honor is measured in scars, trophies, and the weight of the enemies you’ve put under the hill. They pride themselves on plain dealing that begins with a threat and ends with a corpse. When they call the living “hall-meat,” it is not metaphor.
Barrow-Craft & Witch-War
They sanctify death, war, and violation as sacred acts. Their magic is barrow-craft: blood-cut runes carved with seax and nail; grave-iron fetters hammered in the dark; bone totems stained with rendered fat. They speak to cairns and hear them answer. Wight-binding is a high art—coaxing or dragging angry dead up from ancient mounds to swell a shield wall of the unquiet. On the march, their war-priests score sigils into their own flesh to “sharpen” the spirit, then anoint helms with barrow-smoke that carries the stink of old kings. Their Voice of Command is not metaphor either: a battle-shout that cracks discipline, curdles courage, and drives allies into a killing rhythm.
Cruelty, to them, is not excess but evidence—pain as proof, terror as pedagogy. Tribute is taken in blades and blood; surrender buys only a shorter death. Their rites teach that the world was born from a wound and will end as one, and that every raid—every razing of a hall, every cairn raised over butchered foes—helps pry that wound back open. In such work they are tireless, and terribly sincere.
Physiology
The Orcen are the largest and most physically imposing of Goblinkind. They stand tall, though their habitual stoop can make them seem shorter—broad of shoulder, stocky and dense, with thick bones and slabs of muscle under a hide that feels closer to rawhide than skin. Their coloration runs corpse-grey, usually toward ashen or stone hues. Hair skews dark: almost black-green through muck-brown to blood-red. To a human eye they look like a Neanderthal mashed with Cro-Magnon and then made bestial: heavy brow ridges, deep-set eyes that often gleam ember-red, and a jaw strong enough to crack shank bones. When they smile, tusk-like lower canines and ragged fangs show—dentition built for meat and marrow more than vegetable. They are omnivores, but they skew hard toward the kill.
Like all beings of Otherworld, they are supernatural—and not to be taken lightly. An adult Orcen warrior can lift on the order of a small car, making peak human strength and endurance look decorative. Their blood runs tar-dark and oxygen-rich; exposed to air it thickens fast, sealing wounds in heartbeats. Pain does not slow them—it primes them. The more they bleed, the more the old war-curse answers, dumping heat and power into the muscle like a forge bellows.
Their senses are tuned for the hunt. Eyes drink the dark; bright daylight needles them and frays the temper. Hearing is sharp, but smell is sharper—wolf-keen—able to sift panic from sweat and follow a blood spoor over wet stone. Scar tissue grows into keloid ridges that they carve and ink into blood-cut runes, both record and weapon. Bones are mineral-heavy and hard to break; hide is thick enough to turn poor cuts and blunt a spear thrust. They shrug off cold bogs and long marches the way men endure a bad night’s sleep.
They are a night-shaped people: barrow-bred, meat-hungry, and—whether by design or doom—made as living instruments of violence, death, and dread.
Cold Iron’s Bite
It is worth noting that, like their Redcap kin, the Orcen have developed a hard immunity to most iron and steel. They grip iron blades, wear chain, and hammer grave-iron fetters without the usual fey recoil, and their barrow-craft does not sputter in the presence of common alloys. The Orcen themselves claim they became hard by force of will—“we bit the iron and learned to live with the burn.”
That boast is more than metaphor. Initiates are made to bite forged nails until the gums bleed; iron filings are stirred into warrior-gruel; tongues and palms are branded and ringed with grave-iron piercings. Scars from these ordeals are called bite-marks, proof that the bearer is ironfast. War-smiths “season” their gear in bog acids and barrow-smoke, then quench blades in blood to bind the metal to the clan—alchemy as sacrament.
There are limits. True cold iron—bog iron wrought without alloy and hallowed in moonless rites—or star-iron from the meteors will still bite deep, and saint-forged iron (hammered under old oath-light) can scorch their sorcery. Such metals don’t turn their magic off, but they antagonize it: runes misfire, wight-binding grows erratic, and the Voice of Command frays at the edges. The Orcen hate these irons, but they do not fear them; they answer in kind with iron nets, caltrops, and seax-blades built to break lesser fae.
Sexual Dimorphism & Gender Law
Sexual dimorphism is less pronounced among the Orcen than among humans; in full war-gear most would struggle to tell a woman from a man. Rank and role aren’t sex-bound, though Orcen women bear the honor—and burden—of breeding strong stock. Their child-law is brutal: any perceived frailty is grounds for exposure, a practice the modern Orcen have not abandoned. This has led to several dangerous incidents of feral Orcen—barrow-mad cast-outs whose raids have spilled into Otherworld and the Earth-realm alike.
History
The Orcen hail from Otherworld, from a region roughly analogous to Saxony. Most lore holds that they diverged from the Gobline long ago, hardening into a culture that made violence and death its law.
The record is muddy on why they left their heartland, but the likeliest weave is this: prolonged wars with the Alflar, followed by aggressive Troll and Jotun migration cycles, squeezed them out. In the turmoil, the Orcen took to the North-Sea Verge and crossed into Albion. By most reckonings this landfall came in the fifth century. There they carved a brutal barrow-realm among warring fey and giants, their raids spilling into Cymru and Alba, even striking Eire. It was the island’s elven folk—the Aelfe—who named them Orcen, “the monsters who came from the sea.”
For centuries the Orcen Kingdom rose and reaved. The Alflar, Giants, and Trolls raided them; the Orcen answered by falling on the native Aelfe to vent sea-borne fury, torching halls and piling cairns as if each raid were an offering. Orcen skalds still sing of those “storm-winters” when the barrow banners never fully dried.
The tide turned when the Aelfe unified Albion under the Four Seasons of Sovereignty. Elven knights on fey warhorses met the Orcen shield walls blade-for-blade and began to press them back across their borders. What followed was a long grind of counter-raid and siege, a rare age when Aelfe discipline blunted Orcen ferocity and ended the Orcen’s near-total domination of Aelfe forces in open war.
The Orcen hatred of the Aelfe runs marrow-deep—older feuds with the Alflar and Alben peoples poured into a single, burning prejudice. They respect the Aelfe’s strength even as they loathe their grace. By contrast, Giants and Trolls draw wary admiration: beings of raw power and ancient craft who give good deaths and worthy fights. The Orcen see no dishonor in serving a giant-king, and they treat trolls with a mercenary’s respect—well aware that a troll who wants you dead will make it so, and eat you for good measure.
In short: to the Orcen, elves are the hated “pretty things” who must be taught the ugly truths of death and iron. Giants and trolls are worthy kin-enemies—hard as winter, honest as a hammer.
Earth-Facing Orcen
The Orcen have never maintained a large presence on Earth—hence the thin, contradictory lore. Poorly suited to natural crossings, they cannot simply step through leyline doors or dance a mushroom ring into our realm. Other fae mock them (quietly) that their ironfast nature has “grounded” them more tightly than most beings of Otherworld. Thresholds do run thinner in places of death and violence—barrows, killing grounds, prisons, slaughterhouses, disaster sites—but even there the Orcen typically need a summons or heavier barrow-craft to walk between worlds. The result is a small, persistent trickle rather than a flood.
When called, it is usually by mages or warlocks who mistake them for demons. The Orcen rarely care so long as the weregild is paid. They serve as supernatural enforcers with no qualms about the work: debt broken into bones, messages spelled in ruin, rivals reduced to examples. Payment is taken in blood-price, grave-iron, bound names, or the right to raise cairns on the fallen. They keep contracts the way they keep oaths—to the letter, with relish.
Those few who operate on Earth hide behind the same Glamours used by Goblins and Fey, favoring fronts that smell of iron, oil, and old fear: scrapyards, abattoirs, demolition crews, waterfront warehouses, bare-knuckle “security.” They move as mercenaries and enforcers, knitting themselves into tight raid-rings rather than sprawling syndicates. Daylight frays their temper and their Glamours; most work the no-sun hours, when senses are keen and courage runs thin.
The Orcen and “Orc” Fantasy
Like most beings of Otherworld, the Orcen regard human pop-fantasy as a costume chest—bright, noisy, and almost entirely wrong. The pig-faced, green-skinned halfwit that shambles through tabletop manuals and juvenile epics both amuses and vexes them. It amuses because the caricature is safe: a papier-mâché monster you can be brave against. It vexes because it breeds complacency. People who expect buffoons die to Barrow-Folk who plan like generals, scent fear like wolves, and carve victory into their own bones.
Human art keeps circling three mistakes: color, face, and mind. Color: Orcen are corpse-grey—ash to stone—not olive cartoon villains. The “green” comes from funeral paints and marsh-rot that cling to their hides after a barrow raid; witnesses saw the smear and drew skin. Face: the boar-snout is a helmed mask—jawbone trophies wired to a helm, or tusk-plates grown from scarified lip and chin—not natural anatomy. Mind: dull wits are a comfort myth. Orcen cunning is tactical, predatory, and ritualized; they speak a War-Tongue that can stampede lesser wills and unpick formation like a seam.
Common lies vs. barrow-truths
“They’re green.”
Grave-paint and bog stain. The flesh beneath is ash-grey, sometimes veined like old marble.
“They’re pig-faced.”
Helm work: boar tusks, jawbones, and plate masks. Off come the trophies; on shows the barrow-jaw.
“They’re stupid.”
They play stupid when it profits. In council they count food, fear, and exits as fast as any captain.
“They’re just angry humans.”
No. They are Otherworld predators wearing a culture like armor. Do not rehabilitate what exists to reap. And do not fool yourself into the idea they think like humans they are supernatural beings of a mind and physiology that is as alien as any fey entity.
Why the stories bent
Clerics sanded off the worst parts to make sermons about “Cain’s sons.” Court poets prettied elves and needed uglier foils. Victorian collectors bowdlerized raids into “romance” and colored the rest for the nursery. Modern gamewrights filed down edges for play. Each layer drifted farther from the barrow—less corpse-smoke, more toy.
What the Orcen make of it
They weaponize the lie. Glamours tuned to “storybook orc” let them pass as masked brawlers, cosplay muscle, or themed security. They grunt and thump until the door closes, then speak in clear, cutting orders. They’ll answer to “orc” if the gold is good, but among their own they spit the word and say Orcen, Orcneas, or Beorg Volk. Fools who paint them green in their tales are sometimes left alive—marked, so their next ballad travels farther.
Comments