An Empire of Orcs?

As most of you know, The World of Fletnern first began development back in the 80s.  At that time, there were very few games on the market and only one major game - and only two versions of that game.  We’re not going to restart the argument about alignments, but at that time orcs were considered to be Lawful Evil.  The way that was explained by the writers seemed to be that they came together in tribes and villages, and therefore they must be lawful and not chaotic.

OK, that made sense - after a while.  Orcish hordes, right?  But if they did come together, then there must be some manner of “law” - I always thought it was more like a code, or even something more instinctual, like the pecking order that arises among certain herds of animals.  (Yes, I’m thinking pigs here.)  You know, where everyone knows who is more important than they are, and they might fight every once in a while to protect or change that pecking order.

So the question came down to were the orcs a collection of tribes doing their own things?  Or were they actually a country, or better yet, an empire?

Too often, it always falls to money for us.  One of the main considerations was trade.  Orcs are often raiders.  They raid enemies or rivals and take what they want.  Clearly few orcish tribes are so self-sufficient that they can grow crops, raise animals, craft weapons, etc.  So either raiding was the main way that some of them survived and others didn’t, or they were forced to trade with each other.

Well, if might makes right, then this would be right within the tribes and between the tribes.  Therefore the top tribe would impose its will on the lesser tribes.  The current top tribe in Fletnern is the Crooked Sword Tribe, but they’ve only been on top for a couple of decades.

Here’s where we get into the world building more than the game mastering:  It doesn’t make sense that violent raiders would be able to survive in a mountainous region.  They wouldn’t be able to gather or grow enough crops or livestock to survive.  Plus, if they continually raided the neighbors, those neighbors would pull away until there were no neighbors for them to raid, and they would be forced to turn on each other.

And right there is where they were under the previous top tribe, the Vile Ones.  Then the Crooked Swords took over and started to force the more violent raiders to start only going after certain targets.  They took the pressure off the farmer orcs.  They gave land to the rancher orcs.  Then they did something crazy.

Immediately to the east of the orcs’ Gold Mountains, is a stretch of coast line that produces ample crops.  But this land was controlled by humans.  But the humans were between the orcs and the ocean.  They really didn’t have a lot of space to spread out.  They were growing crops, sure, but they had to import a lot of things; things like lumber, building stone, clay and ceramics.

The Crooked Sword tribe reached out to these human villages and offered to bring them into the Wembic Empire.  They would make sure no orcs raided their villages.  They would trade timber, coal and iron for the humans’ crops.

Most of the villagers agreed out of sheer fear, but several of these immediately went back on the agreements they made with the orcs.  Yeah, that worked until the next spring.  As soon as the snows cleared from the mountain passes, the orcs came rushing down.  But! and this part sank in to the various human villages!  The orcish raiders knew exactly which villages kept their word and which didn’t.  They took everything from those who went back on their word and left the faithful villages completely alone.  In fact, they often visited the faithful villages and paid for their lodgings there.

Imagine, orc raiders destroyed your neighboring village, and assumedly some of your kin folks, but then come to your village with niceties and paying for the goods they wish to purchase.  Even more - asking what else it is you need from the empire.

Yes, the point is, this is a different type of orc and a different type of empire.  If nothing else, it will keep your players guessing!

This post was written as part of the recently released The Wembic Nation of the Gold Mountains aka All About Orcs, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details everything having to do with orcs, but with a mind to making them interesting and far less predictable then they have been in far too many campaign worlds.

We hope we’re getting you interested?  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 64 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.

How Do Orcs Fight?

You know what orcs are like, right?  They are stupid, violent, smelly, and stupid.  So are goblins.  They are also weak and can be killed with a single hit.  That’s orcs, right?  If it is, your campaign sucks.  No seriously, if THE standard “monster” of all fantasy role-play is a cardboard cut-out, you should probably be playing and not game mastering.

So after that offensive intro - We’re glad you’re still here.  Either you agree with us that orcs aren’t overly simplistic, or you want to see how we make them cool, or cool again.  There are tons of ways to do this, but the most important is this:  Orcs are the horde.

Orcs are the original horde attacking enemies.  There are a huge number of them and they use these numbers to overrun those who are technologically or magically superior to them.  Here technology is often metal working as seen in armor.  But what do we mean?

Ever play Starcraft?  You know the zerg with their “zerg rush”?  Yeah - That can be your orcs.  One zerg is a joke, but dozens and dozens of them aren’t.  Anyone who doesn’t understand this either never played Starcraft or used cheat codes.

But let’s put them a little more into a fantasy era context.  Assembling a horde of orcs takes some manner of organization on the orcs’ part.  75 orcs didn’t just meet in a bar one day and all join in a mission that some strangely dressed orc in the corner booth gave them.  Nope, they had to be raised as a war band (or whatever you want to call it).  Got some time on your hands?  Watch the movie Zulu.  Zulu gives a fantastic way of showing the technologically superior British fighting against a horde of “primitive” warriors.  Spears vs. rifles.

But the Zulu tactics matter.  They have scouts and spotters who are watching where the British army components move.  Watch Zulu Dawn, the prequel, for how the Zulus trounced the British in open warfare.  Zulu is a much smaller engagement at a hospital with only dozens of Brits (OK like 150) instead of thousands.

OK, the tactics:  The Zulus had some of the older, more experienced officers (anyone of African descent please forgive me for not calling these folks by a more appropriate title) up on a hill counting the British guns.  Ignoring the historic accuracy of that, this is how a horde would attack - bull rush the main camp and look for strengths and weaknesses in the defenses, then direct more troops at those weaknesses.  Just rushing the main gate blindly is not the way to win with a horde.

But these “savages” act as a horde.  That doesn’t happen out of nowhere.  The orcs have a war culture.  These guys are trained from the moment they hit puberty (or earlier) for battle.  The idea of them being push overs in battle is simply silly.  Not only would they have drilled on how to kill people, but in how to attack in huge numbers without running in front of archers and other mass combat issues.  These guys know war, and they are eager for it.

But how do you get this to work?  These are role-playing games after all; having mindless drones who attack when told doesn’t seem like a race.  It seems like an ant hill, not a race of people.  There has to be some manner of “honor” that gets them to charge forward into the jaws of death.  Why?  Well, that’s up to you as the world builder.  Is it religion?  Is it family honor?  Is it winning some manner of awards for the tribe?

In our previous post, we already used the analogy of the American Indian tribes being different, and therefore we’ll stick to the Zulu scenario.  In the movie, the Zulus would sing, dance and bang their shields in order to terrorize their enemies.  We need more of this in fantasy games.  Intimidation is one of the key tactics in battle, yet when your players know the stats of every monster in the book, they just aren’t afraid of anything.  If they know they can’t be killed by the enemy’s weapon, they charge in, disregarding the physical damage done to them, expecting the healers to bring them back up to full strength.  There’s nothing role-playing about that!

The Zulus also utilize the horns of the buffalo strategy.  What’s that?  Well, honestly, it’s a full frontal assault with a full pincer movement, or a big bunch of guys running straight at you with wings or horns of guys sticking out on the far ends.  When the main group hits the main opponent, the horns then encircle the defenders.  Your game rules likely give great advantage to people attacking from behind.  Here the primitives are smart enough to use that rule to gain advantage.  The point really is that primitives aren’t so stupid or so unfamiliar with battle that they do stupid things.  Either they or their ancestors figured out some decent strategies or they would have been dead by now.  They may overuse those strategies, so you can learn to defeat them, but the first couple of times, it’s going to suck!

Do we think orcs should be portrayed as being legitimate enemies that can stand against human warriors?  Yes!  We think 16yo orcs should be the equal warrior of 21yo humans.  We think 21yo orcs should be veteran troops with the scars and trophies to show it.  But we also think that they need to have something more than just their own single strength as a warrior.  A war culture should count for something.  They should be able to do things that humans, elves and dwarves can’t or perhaps wouldn’t.  After all, those races are worried about things like building stone walls and laying good roads.  The orcs don’t waste their time with things like that.  Instead, they’re training to kill those humans, dwarves and elves.  They’re training to climb those walls, and probably later tear them down.  Battle is their nature, so they ought to be damn good at it.

This post was written as part of the recently released The Wembic Nation of the Gold Mountains aka All About Orcs, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details everything having to do with orcs, but with a mind to making them interesting and far less predictable then they have been in far too many campaign worlds.

We hope we’re getting you interested?  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 64 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.

Ten Reasons to Take a Look at The World of Fletnern

The World of Fletnern was first shown to the wider public in 1991 within various Board Enterprises products.  More and more depth has been added since that point, but that doesn’t mean all of you know about it.  So here are the ten reasons you should take a look at The World of Fletnern:
 

1.  It’s FREE!!  There is no money to check out Fletnern!

2.  It has everything a fantasy world needs to have.  It has dragons, knights, elves, dwarves, trolls, orcs, and on and on and on.  They’re all here.

3.  But all those normal things have different spins.  So it is not boring old elves stuck in a forest, but instead a dynamic society of the magical nobles and downtrodden (maybe rebellious) commoners.  Or there are the Circle Forest elves, many of which have turned to raiding viking style.  The orcs are fashioning the world’s largest empire.  The dwarves are (mostly) communists.

4.  Magic not only exists, but it is available.  Mages offer long distance teleportation.  Mentalists use telepathy to relay messages across the continents.  Hospitals have healers able to cure diseases and heal wounds.  This is high fantasy!

5.  The different cultures are different.  Not every human looks the same or acts the same.  Not every troll follows the same religion.  Every race is free to be who they want to be, even if that splits them into multiple factions.

6.  And on the subject of religions:  there are different religions.  Even the individual gods have more than one religion.  This is not a matter of “all elves worship this god and all worship him in the exact same way”.

7.  The price list makes sense.  Different products come from different places, and they are cheaper where they’re made.  But the economy doesn’t cause an apple orchard to face bankruptcy because the game designer didn’t understand math.

8.  The various factions are taking actions.  Unlike most of your computer game worlds, the rival factions and secret societies continue to plan, to prepare, and to take action.  There is constantly news in the world, because things are actually happening.

9.  The detail is there, but it’s not overwhelming.  Fletnern has many cultures that you will find interesting, possibly fascinating, and they all make sense.  But it was also developed to be run by anyone with whatever level of interest that they have.  Study it, or simply breeze through for some ideas - it doesn’t matter.  You will come to love it!

10.  But most of all, Fletnern is a world of adventure.  There are bad guys to defeat, monsters to tame, and ancient relics to recover.  The history isn’t some boring exposition, but instead written specifically to drive adventure hooks. 

Fletnern can be found for free at its wiki site:  https://fletnern.wikia.com/wiki/World_of_Fletnern_Wiki

A summary can be found at its page on our site:  http://www.boardenterprises.com/fletnern.html

And the truly in-depth write ups are contained within the Small Bites editions.  The free World Walker editions are available at:  https://www.rpgnow.com/browse/pub/376/Board-Enterprises

For anyone hoping to run Fletnern as a game world or use it for ideas on their own world, you may want to join us on Patreon and get the full sized Game Masters’ editions here:  https://www.patreon.com/boardent

The Future of the Sounding Board

So we’re thinking about how we might do certain things better, smarter in 2019.  One of the things we’re thinking of doing is delaying how we post the Sounding Board items.  The way we do this currently is as we’re finishing off the Small Bites edition, we post these to the blog.  So the Small Bites edition that comes out (theoretically) the last day of the month will have been preceded by these blog posts.  But what that means is that if a blog post caught your attention and you are a patron, you still need to wait one to four weeks for the edition to come out.  If you’re not a patron, it’s more like three to six weeks.

Attention spans being what they are in the modern day, that isn’t working for us.  In fact, the blog as a whole hasn’t been functioning all that well.  A couple years ago, we were in with a couple of blog advertising sites and they helped to direct a lot of traffic our way.  But they have both closed up, and traffic is now at a slow trickle.

We are not planning to close the blog down, mainly due to tradition.  It helped direct a lot of traffic to us and to our products for many years and simply ending it feels unfair.  But it is not serving as a great means to direct traffic to us today.  We believe that this change in timing - moving the edition’s blog posts from weeks before the World Walker edition is available to just after it has become available, might serve to direct some additional traffic to the edition.  It’s a “Did you like this?  Well there’s more at ...”

But if you’re reading this post, then you’re probably a frequent reader of the blog, and we wanted to at least explain our intentions to you.  As always, we are open to comments.  Does this change affect you?  Do you know any FRPG blog advertising sites that might help increase our exposure?  Is there a FRPG theme you’ve been dying to ask us for, but haven’t gotten around to asking just yet?  We’re here!  We listen!  Though admittedly, if you comment on a blog post from years ago, we don’t always see those, so you might want to email us at info@boardenterprises.com and let us know that you commented.

Is Being a Trope a Bad Thing?

I’ve just finished a conversation where I went on at length about how the orcs of Fletnern aren’t just tropes, but are instead a decently thought out society, that is both interesting and makes sense.  Briefly - The various orcish tribes inhabit the Wembic Empire based in the Gold Mountains.  The problem is that while called the Gold Mountains, there is no gold left in them having been mined out by the dwarves centuries ago.  The various tribes are different cultures; as different as American Indians are/were.

So, OK, these orcs aren’t mindless raiding morons who simply attack until some adventurers or other mercenaries come along and kill them.  That’s great, for those who want characters with depth and back story and some manner of goal beyond acquiring a high number of gold coins on their character sheet.  But what if you aren’t one of those?

I bad mouth “gold farmers” all the time, you know, those “role-players” who simply don’t put themselves into the minds of their characters but instead just adventure for the experience points.  But sometimes, it’s OK to be the orc killer - to just be a big, hulking warrior, who never bothers to use his brain but instead just wades through the bad guys hacking and slashing.  Why is this good?  Because it’s only a game (sacrilege, I know) and sometimes it just needs to be a release.

Most of us have been found, mouth slightly open, dead look in our eyes, focused on a screen of some sort killing dozens if not hundreds of bad guys in some rather mindless “adventure” game.  Usually we’ve lost all track of time and someone is trying to bring us back into reality.  We “zone out” because we can.  We zone out because we need it.  Lots of people have ways to check out of reality and stop thinking for a while.  Some drink, some read, some binge watch The Walking Dead.  We’re gamers; we do other things.

I am not going against everything I have ever written to say that you should go out and just slaughter-fest your way through a campaign filled with enemies and plots, but every once in a while, it’s kind of nice to just play an easy character - one without any baggage and without any drama.  You don’t have any friends outside the player characters and you just go adventuring.  The only thing you really want to find is the next dungeon, before you have to solve some riddle.  Maybe you’re the only “mindless” one in the party - that’s fine.  The rest can figure things out.  This week, you’re going to kick back and eat pretzels until one of them tells you to roll for initiative and then you get to kill things.  It’s kind of like therapy - only a lot cheaper.

During your next play session - Play a more mature character in a more mature way, but every once in a while, GMs should let the players just kind of go through the motions.  I can’t be the only one who needs to remind myself every now and again to relax and unwind.