HOW TO JUSTIFY A HALF-ORC CHARACTER IN A ORC-HATING SETTING
I recently started out with a new Character, a Half-Orc fighter, after playing a campaing in a different group where Orcs and humans managed to cohabite. This was not the case in this group and so my character was dismissed, since its backstory was severey lacking. NOW i have taken on the challenge again and wrote this. Enjoy.
First meeting of the character and the group (Backstory further down)
It was early in the afternoon and your group of adventurers was tired. After last nights encounter none of you got enough sleep, you lost your mule and had been walking since dawn. Despide your gut feeling the group had decided to rest in a tavern and that is where you're headed.
It was after you passed the 'only-two-miles-to-the-city' sign that you spottet IT. Standing broad and muskular a figure was walking infront of you, collecting wood to place in an already half-full handwaggon. If you had to guess the figure was male, since it showes nothing that pointed at boobs, but aside from a loose tunic, the figure was bandaged up and wearing a hood. Only the bells were missing for it to be a leper. Either way you choose to stay away from it.
Exept that flimsy little halfling shit, a rogue, always getting into trouble and the group with him. He had stolen away while you were still watching the figure and stealthy as he is, managed to spy under the hood. Or so he told you, when he came running back. "He saw me, he saw me" he screamed and hid behind the legs of the Barbarian. And indeed, the figure tool notice of you, studied you for a moment before resuming its task of collecting fire wood. Apparently, in your exhausted state, you don't seem to be a danger to him. And it is a him, the halfling reported. A burn victim. Or so he thought from the scars littering the figures face.
The healer of our group, a female half-elf cleric, then decides to do a good deed. While, after last night, she is not in the power to do big healing events, a small scar retreating should be within her capabilities and would most likely ease the poor souls life as an outcast.
While it seemed to be harmless, you, as the experienced fighter and somewhat group leader, decide to acompany the female healer, while she proposes her services to the outcast. With your hand on your sword, ready to react and draw it, you approche the outcast. The nearer you come, the more the sheer size of the person astonishes you. Muskular and at least a foot taller than you, it made a weary and stooped impression. It is the healer that is the first to notice the amulet, a sloppily stilized closed eye, depicting him as a ward of the religious cult around the deity of The Blind Io. You relax further, for the blinded monks of The Blind Io are a peaceful lot, seeking enlightment in meditation and the sense of hearing. And while this person still has their eyesight, they surely must be peaceful to be part of the cult.
Meanwhile the female healer has started to talk to him and offer her services. When he answers his voice is ruth and hoarse as if he hasn't spoken for a long time or spoke a different language before. Such indicates also the pattern os speech. When he talks it is fluent but between sentences he pauses as if to assembly the sentence in his head before speaking it out loud.
It is only when he refuses the help, that your healer becomes agitated. Yes, while the monks of The Blind Io do not care how one looks, as they simply can't see, such disfigurements surely must strain any contact to normal peasants. Still he refuses citing personal reasons. You can see in the healers face what she must think and resign yourself to an evening spent helping this poor soul. You can understand, that as a survivor one can feel guilty, just as you felt when you left your village behind. And as a burn victim even more so when you were perhaps unable to save a loved one.
And so the healer pesters on and charmes the man to tell her his story so she can help. And while he refuses each help, for him can not be helped, as he says, even he underleagues her charm eventually.
He looks around, shakes his head and says: Not here. I can't tell you here. It is not safe.
It is this sentence that lets you hear up and scan your surroundings, then after last nigth you are still on edge, not quite feeling safe yet.
Meanwhile your healer, after talking some more to the man, has turned back to you and the rest of the group that has caught uo with you after the original aproach has resultes in no action. 'He has invited us to the retreat of his religious group' she says with her eyes clearly set on helping him. You contemplate it. It might be safer than a spooky tavern and if it comes to the worst, the monks are blind and no opponents in a real fight. So if the goup agrees you are willing to go.
And so you follow this man down a side road to a stone building that is very symetricaly build. The wind has picked up and the sky darked and you are greatfull to soon be inside to escape the rain. Suddenly the dwarven maid startles. Only shortly and than continues to walk again, but you, as group leader notice. You walk slower, to side with her and ask. 'He smells funny, like something i know that is dangerous and rageinducing' she says before she shakes her head and continues on. 'It's nothing i'm sure, only the leftover unrest from last night'.
You think on it. There are few races that eclict such a reaction in draves. Warg are one, but this is not wolf-creature. Trolls, of course, but they are a lot taller and can't speak, only grunt. And Orcs. The build would fit, you think, and those muscles, but Orcs don't speak common and they attack imediately, like the brutes they are. They are not intelligent enough to image such a ruse. And they are not religious, as this one seems to be.
And so you keep your thougth to yourself, for as of now, the stranger as caused no ill will.
And indeed the group is fed and watered (no wine oder beer to the disapointment of the dwarven maid) and you are shepherd in a guest room, with a few cots and straw beds and a fire blazing in the far of wall. The group, exhausted from lack of sleep and the long walk today, fall asleep quickly full of trust that you would watch over them.
Only the the healer, you and the stranger remain awake, huddeled before the fire for warmth and then, with a quiet voice (so as to not desturbe the monks in their nightly listening meditations) he begans to talk, slowly, as if building each sentence in his head first but with a clear articulation:
Actual backstory
It was during the second purging that my mother's settlement was attacked. The lord of the ( ) or green valley had sanctioned of any and all actions against the orcs, trying to drive them back into their mountain dwellings before the fall to salvage the crop and assure a peaceful winter. Snow always came fast so deep in the mountain chain. So it was on a snowy day, or so she later told me, that her village remained blissfully unaware of their fate, confident in the peaceful atmosphere and convinced that the lords troops had already slain the dangerous beasts. And so the troops had done, unaware that few orcs escaped the herding to embark in the opposite direction, away from the mountains and trough the thick forest ( ) into the arms of unsuspecting peasants. The village my mother had been born in was small, compared to the larger cities of the lord's lands but held an economic importance as contact point for merchants and traders of the ( ) Wald-dwellers, to you maybe better described as a folk composed of the offspring of a half-elf and a half-gnome, or so legend says. Either way they brought the goods of the forest, woodworks and animal hides to trade with the few dwarfen merchants that came from under the ( ) their mountain kingdom to trade weaponry, and raw ores with the humans of the Valley against food to last them the winter (not all dwarves like mushroom year in year out).
A village like this one was located at the nedelore of the Valley and the crossroad between the mountains and so was a sure point to be passed by if one was to exit the Valley, which few ever did, for beyond there was only more mountains and a vast and unhabitable region. Or so they thought.
As a place of trade that was only frequented in the fall for wood and warm clothing and in the spring for fresh goods, it was a peaceful place with only a few guards of the customs authorities to control all trading agreements.
It was a snowy day, as we have already heard, and the last merchants had left about a week ago so as to arrive in their destinations befor beeing snowed in. Life in the village had quieted down, people rarely left the warmth of their homes, unless to go outside to the barn to get more wood, or to the well on the westside, the only well that didn't freeze over in winter, who knows why. Such was also the task of my mother while her father, my grand-father, was in bed nursing a cold.
Through the snow none of the guards noticed the group of orcs approaching the village from the side. They were starved and cold, not made to be outside and on this side of the mountain chain and not equipped for the weather conditions as they were driven away from their dwellings at the beginning of fall. They were desperate and had nothing more to loose.
And so the purge came back to haunt us.
She never disclosed the details and I never dared to ask her but after that day during which the village was destroyed and the humans bleed to death fighting or starved to death in the aftermath, none reclaimed the settlement and trade between the dwarfs of this kingdom, the Wald-dwellers and the humans ceased. And during all that my mother ended up pregnant with my, unwilling but not brave enough to dispose of me before I was born.
After she abandoned the village she resettled with the help of some distant relatives in a hut near their village but outside its bounds near a abandoned path in the mountains. This enabeld her to birth me and to raise me out of the way of the common villager while feeding her paranoia. The older I grew the more mobile I was and she struggled to conceal me from the world. But how do you make a four-year-old understand that he is not to be seen by people when it is so much fun to scare the other kids playing outside the village borders. At that time the only chatter about me was thrown of by adults as a childstale which mutated to lessons adults gave their childen to be wary of strangers and to never go outside after its dark. Or so told me my mother when I grew older, old enough to understand that I am different.
I was eight I think, when a wild boar tore a few of the sheep grazing on the outskirts of the village. A manhunt began shortly after to kill the vishious beast. It was then I was detected. I was collecting wood deep in the forest for my mother was ill, again. The hunting party tore through the trees and its dogs circled me. I was captured and gaged and brought befor the major before I had the chance to defend myself or shout something, anything. The major was clever, he knew I couldn't have been the beast that tore the sheep but he was greedy and after sending the hunting party back to hunt he promised to dispose of me which he did in a way to earn the most money: he sold me. He sold me to a traveling merchant and his bodyguards and I was stuffed in their caravan waggon by water and bread. And we traveld for weeks, or so it seemed to me.
Let me tell you that the punishment of water and bread lies not withing its stale taste nor in the lack of nutrischon, it is the increasing acidity of ones stomak that slowly eats away at oneself from the inside out.
I never quite reached that dire state but whether I should be thankful for that remains to be seen.
It was in the quiet of the night that a band of orc sattacked the caravan, slayed the merchant and his apparently useless bodyguards. While they were raiding the caravan for goods thay found me and, while I was not of their clan, they still recognised me as an orcling. In my starved state I must have looked a lot younger as I actually was for the orcs took me with them to their, for better words, settlement, and gave me to a few others who apparently were female to nurse in something akin to a orc-youngling-day-care.
Over time I learned of their habits and learned their grunting language and even to replicate it enough to be accepted as one of their brood with a strange dialect. As I grew up with orc younglings a few years younger than me I was able to match them in strenght and learned to fight and survive alongside them. At about ten years old orclings undergo the 'first kill', a trial that determined ones place in the pack. Hunting and killing animals for food has long been part of the curriculum we were introduced to. 'First kill' marks the first time a orcling has to hunt enough for the pack to survive or so is the task. Only naturally born betas and really strong orclings actually manage it but the tribute one brings, its size and the finesse with which it was slain were noticed by the elders of the pack. I had about two to three years more experience to make up what I lacked in strengh so I managed to trap an old bear in a cave and use the darkness to deliver a stuning blow with a thick brach before kill him with a knife. The bear was under the bigger bearings of 'First kill' but he was not taken out by pure force as his unmangled body showed. The elders took notice of that.
With about fourteen the trial of 'secound kill'determins your permanent rank in the pack. During the years leading up to that elders had choosen which younglings to train and train they did. My, in the eyes of an orc, lacking strengh was noted and as the gap grew and grew mocking and bullying increased. And when you can not even compete a youngling what use were you for the pack.
I somehow managed to be reluctantly toleranted to participate in 'Secound kill' and I knew my life might even depend on it. During 'secound kill' a group of watchers and the aproved teens were send out on a three-day-march to an secluded farm to raid and to kill their first human. It was a group of five teens wanting to prove their worth to the pack, that decended onto the farm building. Three of us took on the farmer and his handyman, both sturly build but inexperienced in an actual fight. Me and one other took upon the only building under the watchful eyes of the watcher assigned to us. I took the basement while the other took upstairs where he encountered a child or so the cries sounded as they ended abruptly. Which left me with the wife. I found her hiding behind some barrels and prepared to strike when I hesitated. Oh how I regret that moment with my life.
It was not that she resembled my mother bare the fact that she was human, nor was it the way she screamed for help that wasn't going to come. It was the empty feeling inside me that recogniced my need for culture and conversation bexound grunting. And it was the grunting of my watcher that brought me back to reality and to my secound kill. But I hesitated and it was going to cost me.
It was after we raided the farm, and the first marching of the way back when we set up the camping site, though it barely could be described as such, that I was calledout on it puplicaly. I survived, just as my mother did, but at what cost..
True, I didn't end up pregnant, because I obviously can't be, but I was disfigured, bleeding and left behind to perish in feverish nightmares and paranoia just like my mother did.
A monk found me. And the only reason he did not kill me was that he did not see me. I had not heared of blind monks until I was thrust in their care. It was a cult of monks that was reverently devoted to the god 'The Blind Io' and followed him in their path of enlightement by blinding themselves. I was welcomed in their care though it took a long time for communication to flourish. The few words I knew still didn't leave my lips smoothly after years spent grunting for communication though the monks teached me well. They relay on mouth to mouth tales of the deity and the path to enlightment and memorised each tale in the old form of Common to recite at every opportunity. And they took their chance after I foolishly admited to not knowing about the godliness that was and is The Blind Io. And here I am today, under the disguise of a burn victim, doing the handywork for a bunch of blind guys chaceing nirvana.
quirks of the character: unable to sleep peacefully outdors, fake fear of fire, still can't read, strong but not as a full orc would be, a social outcast, a prodgy to all things religion
SO if you liked this story please like and review. And if you have a character of your own that needs a good backstory or introduction, pm me the details and i will cook something up.
Have a great day.