Orc

Orcs are a race of robust, lupine humanoids, found across Ovaicaea but most associated with the northern and eastern steppe, the Great Waste, and the Karkuz plateau. Widely perceived as barbarians by many civilized races in Western Ovaicaea, the Orcs in truth are a complex people with a rich, diverse culture and a wide variety of political and cultural structures which have greatly influenced surrounding peoples. The Orcs have their indigenous homeland in the far eastern Great Steppe, but have long been a migratory people and settled widely due to many conquests and migrations. They have ranged from the Frostfells in the north, to the mouth of the Golden River in the east, to the Karkuz plateau in the west, and the Dorei plateau in the south. Today, they predominate in the Khaganate of Odkarkuz, the Khanate of Ucral, the Khanate of Dafruca, and the northeastern provinces of the Empire of the Morning Star.

History
The region from which the Orcs sprang has been home to humanoid races and ethnic groups for thousands of years. Proto-Orc bones have been found in cave shelters, stone cairns, and hill tombs in the northern Morningland Mountains as early as 300,000 years ago, alongside ones of apparently greater size, which have been identified as ogrillon and ogre bones. At some point before 5,000 years ago, these proto-Orcs came to work with bronze and all interrelationship with ogres ceased. Other evidence has been found by Eastern archaeological societies, indicating extensive violence in this period and apparent mass graves of ogres. By all appearances, the proto-Orcs waged war with the ogres and laid them low. This has echoes in Orcish mythology, which depict a prophet leading his people out of slavery and then to war with oppressive giants. Bronze Age Orcs tended to live nomadic lives, loosely organized into tribes but without strictly-defined territory or khanates. Tribes would occasionally engage in conflict over resources, but their homeland was large enough to mostly provide for all. What is striking about Orcs of this era are the stone temples to various animistic spirits, including clan tombs and ancestor shrines, which indicates some complexity in engineering and planning beyond what would ordinarily be expected of pastoral folk.

By the 8th century Before the Empire, the Orcs had developed advanced metallurgical techniques with iron, and had begun forming small tribal confederations to rule over their nomadic herder society. Clans allied to form tribes, which grouped together to form hordes that ranged over a swathe of territory in which they freely herded sheep, cattle, and especially horses. The Orcish hordes came under significant threat in the Warring States Period, where several magocracies ruled by ruthless wizards and necromancers attempted to conquer and destroy each other, a conflict that engulfed the entire far east. Several Orc hordes fled into the Frostfells and into the Morning Desert. The Lich King Agma Khan was defeated in 200 BE, in part due to the valiant stance of the remaining Orc tribes. The new Empire of the Morning Star eked out a few northern provinces to be predominantly Orcish homelands, and allowed the formation of several tributary khanates north of the Golden River to act as buffers against incursion. The Orcs in the eastern lands are accorded a position of respect within a largely humanoid society, which accounts for the relative unremarkability of half-Orcs there.

The Orc hordes that fled west settled in the Aendrilad Steppe, forming a heartland in the Great Oasis, an inland lake that fed a whole swath of fertile farmland despite the surrounding region being bounded by high mountains that prevented rainfall. These came into conflict with the Dwarven Empire, whose easternmost frontiers relied on the Great Oasis. Existing issues of water pollution from dwarven silver mining and inadequate farming techniques that drained the soil of its nutrients were met with Orcish inexperience with settled farming, and the region became desertified around the 2nd century IA, creating the modern Transucral Desert. The Orcish tribes continued to migrate west over the centuries, which had a runaway effect; the collapse of the rich eastern farmlands led to mass famine across the adjoining Dwarven Empire, which led to massive uprisings, preventing the Dwarven army from successfully fending off Orcish raids and conquests. It is in this context that western Orcish society developed its iconic form: a federation of Khans, each ruling a horde with stratified clan leadership, championed by a Khagan or Khan of Khans, with a cultural model built upon horse mastery, warfare, religion, and wealth distribution. The Orc nomads became adept at quick, striking attacks using ranged armament, and tightly-organized battle formations, which allowed them to encircle and overwhelm most opposing armies and besiege town after town. Human tribes, long under the hegemony of the dwarves, rebelled and engaged in a mass exodus across the Ucral Mountains, forming a series of kingdoms in the frontiers of the Old Empire by the early 4th century.

In the late 4th century, the Orcs emerged from the deserts and into the Drelawin, Athua, and Sua river valleys. Fertile grasslands enabled the Orcs to graze and established a fortified position as they gathered their armies. The history of the Orcish Khaganate largely dominates the history of the Orcs as a people in this era. The Khaganate continued to engage in raids along the frontiers of the Old Empire, eventually overrunning its defensive positions and conquering it in a massive war between 401 and 412. The Khaganate relinquished much of its occupied territory as tributary states, and itself dominated a swathe of land stretching from the Transucral Desert to the Karkuz Plateau. The Orcs also brought with them a different problem: bubonic plague, carried by dying animals. The Orcs, knowing well the dangers posed by livestock suffering with the pestilence, deployed the carcasses as biological weapons and flung them over castle walls. As dwarven, elven, and human people fled westward, they carried with them this plague. The Great Plague of 405-408 would eventually kill around a third of the population of the Old Empire. The Orcs, resilient in their constitution and acutely prepared for the disease, largely survived; this gave them an almost supernatural aura of fear and terror, which enhanced their conquest as they rode roughshod over the collapsing Empire.

In the 660s, the Khaganate split into two warring factions as two brothers claimed the throne. When the war was at last settled in the year 700, the ruling Council of Khans abolished the position of Khagan, and decreed that no khan could slay another khan in the course of a feud. All matters would be be settled by diplomacy. In practice, this led to proxy wars among the khans for power as they pitted clans off one another in an attempt to destabilize rival Hordes. This led often to raids in the riverlands of the Dorei and Athua valleys, which gradually inflamed tensions with the human and dwarven tributary kingdoms.