Orcs
Orcs
The orcs of Edrilia are brutish and scarred, their skin marked with ash-grey or sickly green tones and tusks filed to jagged points. They live in fractured tribes that roam blasted hills, marshes, and wastelands, thriving where softer folk would starve. Strength is their only law, and cruelty is their favored tongue.
Their culture is steeped in violence and superstition. Tribes daub themselves in blood and filth, adorning their bodies with bone piercings and crude brands to mark kills and victories. Shaman-chiefs lead by fear and promise of power, binding their people with tales of dark spirits and brutal rites.
To orcs, mercy is weakness and treachery is cunning. They raid ceaselessly, burning villages and taking slaves, not for survival alone but as proof of dominance. Even among themselves, rivalries spill constantly into bloodshed, and tribes rise and fall in endless cycles of betrayal.
Though despised and feared, the orcs endure, a constant blight on the borders of civilization, feral, hateful, and bound together only by hunger, rage, and the promise of the next raid.