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.