In the Great Waste, death is not an ending but a beginning. Orcs are born from battlefields and crypts, raised by shamans, measured in deeds, and remade by the eyes of their peers. To be an orc is to live as both heir and ancestor, carrying the dead forward through your body, your scars, and the stories others will one day recite beneath the coliseum lights.

Orcs are a bizarre fusion of intelligent mammal and fungus, with gray-green skin, stooped but powerful frames, coarse dark hair, low brows, reddish eyes, and porcine faces marked by large lower canines like boar tusks. Their ears are wolf-like and sharply pointed. They look built for hardship first and comfort never. Their bodies are resilient to an almost unreasonable degree, and many can survive injuries that would fell lesser folk. Their most unsettling trait is their life cycle. They are not male or female, but a people that reproduces through spores released from a decomposing corpse, with death itself serving as the seedbed of new life.

Orc society in the Great Waste is organized around public achievement, ancestral service, and communal judgment. There is no death penalty, since death is considered a gift rather than a punishment. The harshest penalties are usually forms of public humiliation, loss of standing, or enforced service. Legal disputes are often settled through ordeals arranged by shamans, and these ordeals can take the form of duels, contests, or trials of endurance. Shamans make the laws and empower warrior societies to enforce them, while recoverers seek out the lost orcs born outside the nation and bring them home. Storytellers preserve history, hunters wage war on the undead, and slaves are used for degrading labor that would dishonor a free orc, though criminal punishment can also include temporary bondage. Art serves either self-differentiation or memorial. A living orc may wear tattoos, piercings, ritual scars, and gaudy ornaments to stand apart from the crowd, but monuments, sculptures, and painted chronicles of the famous are sacred. Damaging such works is one of the gravest crimes imaginable because it breaks the chain of memory that joins the living to the dead.

Most orcs follow the Path of the Ancestors, a faith that binds Luthic, the deity of death, birth, and community, to Gruumsh, the god of war, strength, and fame through action. Shargaas is feared and reviled as the god of undeath, oblivion, void, illusion, purposeless cruelty, and infamy, while Ilneval governs memory, remembrance, education, storytelling, and trade, and Bahgtru oversees craftsmanship, forging, fortification, and fame through crafted works. Ancestors are not merely remembered but actively consulted as bridges between the living and the gods. Orcs view necromancy that traps or defiles souls as taboo, and they believe in an original sin that severed them from Luthic and the Elysian Fields. Their eventual hope is the Great Final Battle, when the dead and living will unite against Shargaas and his allies. Orc society is meritocratic, austere, and deeply communal, often favoring lawful structures with fierce personal honor and room for righteous defiance.

Orc settlements are built around a coliseum at the heart of the community, with roads, tombs, workshops, shrines, and legal halls radiating outward like spokes. Beneath the arena lie the dead and the incubation chambers that nurture future orcs, all guarded by shamans and kept in ritual order. Their architecture favors massive stone, reinforced earthworks, open air for crowds, and carved walls that display names, victories, and laws so the living can be judged against the dead. Fortifications are practical, austere, and ceremonial, with every battlement serving both defense and remembrance.

Orcs tend to respect peoples who honor courage, candor, and public proof of worth, even when they remain rivals or enemies. They can be harsh toward those who hide behind privilege, lineage, or soft words, and they despise necromancers, soul-thieves, and anyone who mutilates the dead for convenience. Outside the Great Waste, orcs are often seen as terrifying or primitive, a reputation their own culture reinforces in some lost clans. Still, they are capable of formal alliances, hard-won loyalty, and surprisingly exacting diplomacy when memory, trade, or mutual defense is on the line.