Press The Beast

Of Orcs & Ogres

(Orc recipe from Grendel's Stepdad)

Hatred ever labours in Earth's yawning bowels to build Orc: that multifarious tyrant that scourges mankind in shadowed places, and kills without thought. They eat, and ravage, and kill until they fall dead and return to the Earth.

A sorcerer of some power once made the trip to Hatred's chthonic haunt, and was taught a recipe: wolf’s teeth, pig’s blood, and iron weapons collected from the dead after battle. Stirred over days in a heavy iron cauldron creates Orcs, who will follow their maker's orders until asked to withhold violence. An Orc should never learn this recipe.

Human-made Orcs look different from the originals, which use a more potent recipe: animosity is the clay, joined by the blood of slaughter that seeps through the earth. It is a pure art, rather than a work of symbolism. A human made Orc wears a pignose and wolf fangs; one made by Hatred seems made only from twisted iron, and moves with no logic save for violence

Stories say that maneaters are doomed to become Ogres. Their bodies grow in size and their heads sprout great horns. Village outskirts are haunted by these monsters. They tower over men and subject them to their caprices before eating them whole. The worst excesses and neuroses are magnified alongside physical size when one turns Ogre: they are arbitrary to the extreme, not merely cruel. They will force a mother to choose which child to give up, and bare a wide-toothed smile all the while. Some foolish kings feed them criminals or servants to induce them to service; some foolish kings are deposed by Ogres, then forced to pickle their own wives while their kingdom falls to ruin.

ORCS
HD - 1+2
AC - Chain
Attacks - Weapon
No. Appearing - 2d20

OGRES
HD - 4+1
AC - Chain
Attacks - 1d6+2 Club
No. Appearing - 1d6