How do you spice up your orcs?

[Celebrim]

Many of the suggestions above already have inspired me to have a few distinct orcish factions that have different mounts, favored weapons, feats, cultural values, etc. Now I'm moving on to think about what else might provide us with some variety. What other monsters ally well with orcs to beef them up, either thematically or from a crunch-related perspective?

The biggest limitation you are going to run into is that to feel 'orcish' and fit the sterotype and not trample on the schtick of other races, your orcs are going to have to be very direct opponnents. Orcs like to close and beat things down. They are an assault/bash/stomp sort of race. I model my orcs tactically as ancient Gauls or other 'warband' type foes. They want to attack from cover, close to range, disarray their foes and hack them apart.

They are going to go into alot of intimidation style tactics, body paint, body art, screaming, frothing, and throwing themselves at their foes with abandon.

Unfortunately, this doesn't give you alot of tactical variaty. You just iterate through bigger and more numerous brutes. It does however make a nice contrast between the 'Welsh' elves with their mobility and massed archery centered tactics, and the orcs with their charge and bash centric tactics. There is a nice natural tactical tension there at least at the large scale.

To give some variaty, anything you can pair them with that provides ranged attacks and battlefield control is going to be interesting. Traditionally, orcs employ goblin or kobold archers to handle archery and skirmisher duties, however throwing axes or javelins as part of a massed charge ought to be de rigueur. If you are using 4e as your system, you can pretty easily do things like having axes/javelins stick into shields on a miss and hindering the target as exceptional attacks without having to write it into the system. (You can do the same in 3e, it just takes more work.) Huge ogres and boulder throwing giants make good mobile artillery.

On the battlefield control perspective, vs. PC's the thing that orcs will most want to do is freeze them in place and provide cover for their charge from ranged attacks. So you might have orcs reutinely employ nets, tanglers, lassos, and the like. For providing cover, giants might hurl smoke bombs to screen the orcish advance.

From the perspective of filling out the schtick, anything that charges is good choice for an ally. Horses never really felt right to me. That's more of a human schtick or even hobgoblin. I'd personally mount orcs on aurocks, buffalo, giant boars, yaks, rhinos or elephants to really emphasis that 'we hit you hard' aspect. Heck, you could mount high level orcs on triceratops if you really wanted to get over the top with it.

What mastermind-type monsters or villains might the orcs follow?

Balrogs are traditional, but really anything could work here. Personally, I'd rather have a 20th level Orc as the top villain if you were going orc centric.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Removed

 

[S'mon]

...the OP asked for help making orcs into effective and non-redundant high level villains....

Personally I go in the Monster Buider and click on the level-up button. Seriously, WoTC puts out a huge amount of crunch on this kind of thing; Dragon/Dungeon are full of it.

If levelling up doesn't work, you just take a different, high level stat block and tweak it to be more orc-y, like this: New DM’s: Have fun reskinning and playing with keywords « www. Newbie DM .com

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

Orc is lean meat that should be cooked at lower temperatures than other meats. Avoid overcooking.
Orc, raised like beef, is range fed and therefore can be served on the rare side.
.
.
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Yeah, RC, now yer creepin' me out a little.





As for powerful orcs...

Imho, a powerful orc is more compelling than the orcs being in servitude to a more powerful entity.

As they've settled in a formerly elven forest, perhaps an uber-orc shaman has tapped into some fey powersource. He's therefore in command of great warped animals, evil treants, fomorians or the like. Lots of "me smash things good!" potential.

Alternatively, an orc controlling/allied with demons (rather than the other way around) could be quite frightening, and well within the orkish m.o. of chaos & destruction everywhere.

What gives me pause is justifying a spellcaster as an orkish leader. So consider something unusual for an orc: make him crippled/impotent. Now he's a very angry and frustrated orc-- a bbeg that is p.o'ed at the world, and quite willing to stomp (by proxy) on anything that threatens the power he so ruthlessly amassed despite his counter-orkish limitations. A stereotypical ork, in a non-stereotypical shell.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Removed

 

[Celebrim]

What gives me pause is justifying a spellcaster as an orkish leader. So consider something unusual for an orc: make him crippled/impotent. Now he's a very angry and frustrated orc-- a bbeg that is p.o'ed at the world, and quite willing to stomp (by proxy) on anything that threatens the power he so ruthlessly amassed despite his counter-orkish limitations. A stereotypical ork, in a non-stereotypical shell.

I find that campaigns/encounters/adventures play out better if there isn't one single big bad. If you have one single big bad, and he goes down earlier than you expected him to in the campaign/encounter/adventure it can leave you in a lurch. And, solitary NPC's are very much prone to getting beat down by targetted PC fury.

So I would suggested modifying your otherwise excellent idea so that the actual power behind the orcs is essentially an orcish adventuring party. The most power is vested in a crippled high level orc spellcaster (I'm thinking palaquin as part of the image), as you suggest, but he's (or she!) forced to rule through a more traditional Orcish brute over whom he has some sort of influence (spouse, offspring, orcish brute has high wisdom but low intelligence and recognizes need for advisor, whatever). As far as most of the orcs are concerned, the real power behind the throne is just a subservient advisor who their real leader bosses around and tolerates for reasons of his own. They are joined by a high level priest of Luthic or Shagras (or favorite orc diety) and perhaps a high level goblin assassin who actually understand the real power structure.

This opens up the oppurtunity for hostile internal factions. For example, perhaps some ambitious priest of Grumash understands that the real leader is a feeble cripple and is secretly manuevering his own more typical champion into place to dethrone the current chieftain.

 

[Haltherrion]

When I began to outline some adventure hooks for the new campaign, however, I had some problems coming up with ideas that would keep the players interested for several levels of play.

There seem to be two basic paths you can take here. One is to stick with the orcs as the foe and figure our ways to make them the power at all levels of engagement but possibly supplmented with other creatures to provide some variety. That is, there is a hierarchy of orc leaders that the party has to battle, they draw on orcs as well as non-orcs (wargs as someone suggested, maybe spiders, evil dragons or some other creature found in this once fey area that might align with darker forces; or simply just neutral fey who have some grudge against the elves).

You could can certainly work up orc NPCs with standard classes for key roles, level up standard orcs or define your own higher level orcs. This has the virtue of keeping the foes the orcs and not replacing the orcs with some other bad guy who was merely using the orcs.

The other path is to put some other power behind the foes as you mentioned. I think that is pretty wide open but it might be a nice twist to make sure that power is someone who is also tied in directly with elves/eladrin the party is helping. Maybe its an elf gone bad- just a bad person or maybe a vampire or undead of some sort. I've found the more "closed" you keep the relationships the more they support and build on each other. Or maybe the elves wronged some fey power that is now using the orcs for revenge.

 

[arscott]

A half-orc might also make a good BBEG--With a human's insight and ambition and an orc's brutality, he presents a greater threat than any orc or human alone ever could.

 

[Rechan]

The "orog" is a traditional orc-related monster, the byproduct of an Orc and an Ogre. So, ogres make sense. As does anything big and nasty and aggressive. An ape, a bulette. The most fancy thing you'd likely see is a manticore.

A spellcaster Orc is going to fall into (I think) 4 categories:

1) Evoker. Raw, unadulterated force. Gouts of flame, earthquakes. Dropping rocks on your head.
2) Shapeshifter/buffer, again just making themselves stronger and tougher so they can beat down on you. Magic is a supplement to the "beat it to death" school of orc thinking. This likely also means making allies bigger and nastier too.
3) Hexer. Cursing you, making you physically weaker (maybe even stealing your strength), ripping your heart out from across the battlefield, and other subtle but still very direct methods of magic.
4) Demonologist. This is less a separate type, and more a flavor; an Orc who dabbles with demons is likely channeling/making deals with the demon to fuel his powers to do one of the above 3 (or summoning demons to do the above 3 directly).

So making orcs that facilitate a few higher levels of use would be Orcs that are "empowered". Such as bred/possessed/binded with fiends, blessed by their blood god, paragons of orciness, etc.

If the PCs sweep in to kick the Orc nation, then they are likely going to get the attention of the biggest, baddest orcs. Not just their leaders, but their champions, their war heroes (the Achilles and Hectors of the Orc nation). These heroes would want to stomp the PCs purely because they are the baddest orcs on the block, and believe the PCs attacking the Orc nation is an attack on THEIR own pride and reputation!

 

[Celebrim]

A half-orc might also make a good BBEG--With a human's insight and ambition and an orc's brutality, he presents a greater threat than any orc or human alone ever could.

A half-goblin is the BBEG of my goblin centric campaign.

Of course, since his non-human father is rumored to be Maglubiyet, he's also probably a demigod. In 1e (the only time I stated him up), he was a 14+14HD Barghest with 25 STR, maximum hit points, and his 1/day powers upgraded to 3/day, and he commanded a bodygaurd of 12 lesser Barghest. In 1e terms, that was seriously 'high level' challenge.

Half-orcs are even more thematic than half-goblins though. The tension involved in having a halfbreed in a leadership position is another element you can use to create internal conflict in the bad guys for the heroes to exploit.