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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8831364" data-attributes="member: 6670763">If the orcs spend the whole winter locked in underground, they will have to do a lot of hunting in the spring and again before the start of winter. Those hunting expedition might in fact be the primary reason for why they regularly descend into the lowlands in large numbers. While you're already there, you can also go cattle rustling. Raiding farms and villages to make off with gold, bags of flour, rolls of cloths, and barrels of wine might be more targets of opportunity.In the case of the orcs of the Spine of the World mountains, they can not only go south to hunt for deer and steal cattle, they also have the option to go north to the arctic sea and go hunting for seals and whales.I could also see orcs keeping herds of goats and yaks up in the mountains. Instead of driving them down to the lowlands for winter, they take them inside into their underground strongholds. They could even slaughter all the ones they don't need for breeding next year and keep the meat in cold, dry caves for the winter, reducing the amount of hay they need to feed the herds through winter.Human townsfolk would not really see any of that. They only see burned farms and people getting killed or taken as slaves.Another interesting thing I remembered is that in AD&D, orcs are lawful, not chaotic. And their intelligence is listed as "average (low)". So instead of being dumb savages who kill purely for their own amusement as they are believed to be by humans and dwarves, they might actually much more organized kingdoms and armies. Of the six orc gods, only one is a big dumb brute. Ilneval is a god of generals and conquest. Shargass is a god of stealth and assassination with 19 Intelligence. And as a goddess of caves, Luthic would also be a goddess of orc mountain strongholds in general.All that considered, they are still evil. But they are an evil society, not evil because they are sub-human and controlled by bestial instincts.</blockquote>

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