How to Create Fictional Orcish Leaders for Your RPG

When creating fictional leaders one needs to decide what it is about them that allowed them to assume the mantle of power to begin with. Too often orcs are just part of a nameless horde, directed by more intelligent allies to simply swarm forward and serve as cannon fodder, but a real tribe would have a real culture, real leaders, and reasons for those leaders to have control. Here we're going to create three fictional leaders so as to posit these very principles.

The first leader would be the head of a confederation of tribes that exist in the foothills of a might mountain range, arcing over the top of a wealthy human nation that they both trade with and raid on a regular basis. They number some twenty thousand individuals, and most of them are preoccupied with herding their sheep and goats and living the life herders. They are wealthy, armed with good iron and have modern saddles, and are strongly connected by blood and family. Their leader would have converted to the southern religion, and for the most part be relaxed and at ease with his power.

The second leader would rule over a wide territory, no open plains allowing cohesion but rather a mass of foothills and low mountains across whose valleys and slopes his tribe is scattered, broken more into clans and small tribes than one great entity. He would be a wily, violent orc, given to mounting deep raids into human territory and then fading back into his land, not seeking to impose order on his followers but leading them more because he brings back good loot than anything else. His tribe would number some 10,000, and barely hold together as one tribe.

The third leader would be a powerful, mean individual, one of several brothers who keep hold of their tribes by means of violence and intimidation. His curse is that the northern side of the mountain has few humans to raid on, forcing them to live off the land and be more impoverished then their southern neighbors. As such as spends much of his time trying to find a way south to crush the southern leader, and actively courts the highland orcs.

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The Creation of Fictional Orcish Tribes

If one were to attempt to create a fictional world wherein Orcs were an actual race, a people with a culture, society and existence of their own, not just a band of monsters who seem to exist only to go to war, then how would one go about creating just such a concept? One would posit certain truths: that they would be a tribal society, that they would exist in areas of poor resources in order to justify their martial nature, and that they would be fractious and given to internecine warfare. How can one take this concept and make it real?

First, let's posit that they reside in a mountain range about the size of the Alps, large enough and infested with enough orcs that the humans wouldn't be able to cleanse them with a few sweeps of their army. Second, let's posit that the lowland tribes are the most prosperous, deal the most with the humans, and have evolved to be smaller and less strong. Therefore we have a difference between the more primordial highland orcs and the more civilized lowland orcs. Let's also posture that the lowland orcs control most of the passes except for the largest one which is manned by a human army, and that they are also herders of sheep and goats which they use for subsistence. Let's also give the lowland orcs mountain ponies so that they have some form of mounted combat.

Now, we would have three main lowland tribes, each covering an area as large as Switzerland along the mountain's edges, while the interior of the mountain belongs to one vast and broken tribe, equivalent to the Mongols but weak and more based on clans than a single tribal identity. These three lowland tribes would be huge, numbering some 30,000 individuals each, and derive their resources from a combination of trade, herding, taking tolls from use of the passes and raiding the southern and northern kingdoms. What are the identities of these three Orcish tribes, however? That's what we need to get into in the next article, as we examine their composition.

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