What Kind of Environment Would Give Rise to Orcs?

When you imagine orcs, you no doubt picture the ferocious hordes emerging from Mordor in Lord of the Rings, or their variants from any other blasted location which would not appear to be able to support life of any kind. Is there a connection between these environments and orcish nature? Could we begin to understand orc nature as dictated by these circumstances, could we stop thinking of them as inherently evil by nature, and instead simply martial due to their homelands?

If we look to other martial societies that have occurred in our own worlds, we can turn to the Mongolians and the Apache for similar outlooks. These were tribes or bands of people who were forced to subsist on lands that made living hard. These environments were such that they were not able to settle down in great numbers and form large cities, but rather were forced to move constantly in order to keep up with the herds from which they derived their nutrition and wealth. Forced to always move, living precariously between starvation and war, they became warlike so as to be able to raid each other for wealth, to be able to protect themselves from the raiding of others.

If you think about it, there are few warlike societies that come from verdant, rich lands, where the food is easily collected and wealth is abundant. People who grow in these lands turn their minds instead to culture and family, to amassing wealth through work and industry, to trade and civilization. They don't need to risk their lives at war if they can simply work hard and live a good life. It is these societies that the other more warlike ones target.

Thus, when looking at orcs, it makes complete sense to stipulate that their traditional homeland would be mountains or steppes, places where they could not amass great numbers, could not easily acquire wealth, where they would have to be fractious and violent, until, finally united by a leader, they would be able to turn all their violence and energy outward, and destroy the civilized world before them in one great battle.

The Biology of An Orc

Orcs have a very distinct appearance, one that is bestial and frightful, inhuman to be sure yet still bipedal, creatures of nightmare that seem to typify our greatest fears. What kind of biology and details of anatomy might best exemplify these traits? Are there any models in our real world that could give us information that would help us design and create more accurate goblins and orcs?

While bipedal, orcs are clearly not human. They appear to be more related our simian cousins, with greater strength, different morphologies and such. Which great ape would an orc most likely resemble? Perhaps they are a mixture of the human and the gorilla, with greater jaws, massive shoulders and backs, smaller legs and deep chests. I like the idea that as an orc grows in power his skin changes color, much as the alpha gorilla would turn silver. Perhaps orcs are light green at birth, and their color ever darkens until they are pitch black upon their ultimate supremacy and size.

It would make sense then that goblins are born more like gibbons, and as they grow more powerful they increase in size and strength so that they appear to be more like chimpanzees, small, wiry, disproportionately powerful. They would have less jaw strength, greater motion and flexibility, greater speed even, trading the power and strength of an orc for the nimble agility of a chimpanzee.

This would also accord well with their new life spans, which is postulated to explain their violence and lack of culture. Gorillas live from thirty five years to fifty, depending on whether they're in captivity or not, which means that it accords well with orcs as well.

So an orc could be born little larger than a chimpanzee, light green, feckless and weak, and only with experience, with age, with the accumulation of power would they grow in size, until they became chieftains or leaders who would be the size of fully grown gorillas, weighing hundreds of pounds and with dark, charcoal skin, matt black and stretched over their great musculature. Possible!

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.

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.

The Pub Quiz

The Pub Quiz is a huge pastime in the UK and I reckon that if done in an entertaining and fun way the fun pub quiz could be huge in other countries like the USA too.

What this article sets out to explain is what a pub quiz is all about and maybe inspire some people to start a quiz of their own.

Some take it seriously and some do not but what ever type of quiz a pub hosts it is fast becoming a very popular event.

Personally, I go for the latter, I think a fun pub quiz is so much better than a serious pub quiz for many reasons.

To start with a fun pub quiz should be easy and when I say easy I mean that anybody should be able to answer about 70% of the questions correctly. Why do you think that The Weakest Link is so popular? It's for everybody, your every day Joe. Apply this to a pub quiz and you can easily see why a fun quiz will be so popular.

I've been a quiz master for 10 years and last Christmas I was gifted a quiz trivia book, called "The biggest trivia quiz book in the world", containing over 14,000 pub quiz questions. I could easily take any of the questions from that book and put together a tough quiz in a matter of minutes, but to make a fun quiz is a different story.

I had to go through hundreds of questions from this book just to get 20 for my first general knowledge round, it took me well over an hour! From this huge book I was able to use only about 5% of the questions where as with a tough pub quiz I could have used most of them.

A fun quiz needs to have not just questions but picture rounds, speed rounds, Dingbats and brain teasers to name a few things that make fun quizzes so popular.

Of course you will have to find a subject for the picture round first which you should try to vary as much as possible. Try to think of fresh subject matter each week to keep the quiz as varied as possible.

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about here are some picture round themes I have done before. Classic cars, planes, dogs, cartoon characters, logos, mystery objects and so on.. After a while it really does get more and more difficult to think of new picture round ideas, sometimes I can think one up in minutes and sometimes it can take me an hour or more.

You will find that a lot of pub quizzes always do the same subject for their picture round every week, mostly you will see them do celebrities because it's easy to get the pictures and does not require any thought process and is not time consuming. That's OK for some people but it can get boring after a short while.

Online Role Playing Options

Role playing is an act that is natural to everyone. As children we do it constantly without ever knowing it, from playing doctor, to storming an evil castle, make believe is part of the intrinsic mechanisms in our brains. By engaging in this activity you are stretching your imagination, exercising your ability to think theoretically and to envision scenarios that are beyond the ordinary. Today, one of the best places to engage in these types of role playing games is on the internet.

World of Warcraft is probably the biggest and most popular role playing game around. It is a massively multiplayer graphically based system, which is much like a video game that you would play on a home console, except that your graphical avatar exists in a perpetual world, which is shared by millions of other characters who can log on at any time of the day or night, ensuring that there is always something new to do in the game.

There are hundreds of other graphic based multiplayer RPG games including Asheron's Call, Neverwinter Nights, and Furcadia. These vary in sophistication, with some being built on advanced 3d modeling technology, while others are much simpler, resembling the 16 bit Nintendo RPG's of the early nineties.

Beyond these graphical titles, there are also a number of mixed media, and literature based role playing systems, which attempt to give you a more subtle gaming experience. Many of these are based on forum or chat software systems that allow users to interact with one another, writing parts of a story in tandem. Each player assumes the role of a character and then the story progresses by the player writing about how their character reacts to what is taking place in the virtual world.

Some advanced systems incorporate pictures, videos, and music in order to create a more immersive atmosphere. Facebook and other social networks are often used for these types of games, even though their terms of service often expressly forbid the creation of fake role playing accounts.

How to Find Video Game Companies That Are Hiring

If you're at present looking representing a career in capture on tape game development, decision a job is single of the hardest parts of the process. Sure, education was tough, and building your portfolio was annoying, but in point of fact landing a job as a programmer, designer, or even a tester is relentless. To start with, you declare to deal with minder competition in the industry, and not all job openings are publicly advertised as developers strive to keep assured projects under wraps.

However, near are amounts of ways to look representing major publishers in your genre of option past simply inspection the classified ads.

Online Ads and Postings

If a project is not secret or if a publisher is simply annoying to swell its operations, you can retrieve job postings on broadcast boards. These are the hardest to become, however, as they require you to depart up not in favor of the chief chunk of competition. Generally, you'll declare the nearly everyone providence with these listings if you live in a publisher minder area like southern California.

Duty Services

Some jobs depart straight to hiring services with the aim of will screen candidates in advance. These services will operate discretion to sort through applicants, retrieve individuals with interconnected skill sets and resolved them up representing interviews. Of track, you ought to join these job services and they can cost money by the side of time. Other time, they are selective in matching.

Cold Calls

Cold calling a developer is the smallest amount effectual way to become a job interview, but it does composition. The end it is so ineffective in broad-spectrum is with the aim of nearly everyone individuals will scarcely throw a resume and cover note and leave it by the side of with the aim of. You ought to be persistent though. Developers exist across the United States and Europe and will often declare needs with the aim of don't require a major personal ad or call representing employees. To become in place representing folks roles, you ought to arrange by hand as a persistent, highly skill vision. Main developers like Vivendi, EA, Activision Blizzard, THQ, Acclaim, and Sony are all looking representing contemporary employees evenly.