We all know about the hillbilly "Hills have Eyes" kind of depravity that ogre are. We also know that orcs like to rape, raid, and pillage though not necessarily in that order.
My question is how depraved are the orcs and do they equal or fall short of the level ogres?
I ask because I have a half-orc character raised by her orc kin and I was thinking about how she should react to the house of the Grauls in RotRL.
Orcs, I think, vary a lot. Some of them are Proud Warrior Savages. Some of them are Horrible Green Men. A smart Orc can be a lot more heinous than any ogre.
Depends on what sort of villan you want. My general take on things, for what it's worth, is that most orcs usually aren't as bad as most ogres. Orcs might well torture you to death and find it amusing, but ogres would find it amusing to make you participate in your own torture, or that of your companions. They'd probably more gruesome about it, too.
I think the difference is that the ORC savagery basically follows along much more 'mainstream' lines. In other words it is the Savagery or depravity of strength and power when no one has the ability to stop them from doing it. So much more like medieval warlord raider sort.
Where is as you said the ogres are much more the hills have eyes hillbilly sort.
fall short, imo.
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Orcs seem to have a good bit more range built in, so you could have been raised in a completely monstrously brutal Rovagugi tribe or raised by one of those less-monstrous still-quite-brutal Gorumite tribes that the Lastwall Gorumites actual have a grudging respect for.
So far with ogres they seem to be presented as Deliverence 24/7.
Orcs might leave the heads of their enemies on spikes to use as border markers or war banners, but ogres...
Orcs are smart enough to recognize the fact that they are torturing someone to begin with, Ogres are not. There's probably a reason an orc is torturing somebody, even if its simply for the sake of cruelty and racism. That said, the torture by an orc probably has an end, whether or not said Orc lets that end be death or something else. An Ogre might "torture" somebody past the point of death, not realizing that they've already killed their intended victim. The fact that Ogres are too stupid to even understand the pain that they're inflicting on others IMO makes them a bit scarier. They're kind of like big, dumb children. (And to quote Cowboy bebop, "Nothing is as pure and cruel as the mind of a child")
Or rather, An Orc Warlord might be willing to allow a captive to submit to some sort of, "If I'm going to die, I challenge your bravest warrior to fight me bare-handed", or some sort of other reasonable way out. Ogres have all the reason of a child, and talking to one might just get you something like: "Listen to the noise it makes. Little thing make scream noise when I pull off arm. Louder scream with next arm! What noise it make when I pull head??" or something equally horribly unreasonable.
Orcs seem to have a good bit more range built in, so you could have been raised in a completely monstrously brutal Rovagugi tribe or raised by one of those less-monstrous still-quite-brutal Gorumite tribes that the Lastwall Gorumites actual have a grudging respect for.
So far with ogres they seem to be presented as Deliverence 24/7.
Orcs might leave the heads of their enemies on spikes to use as border markers or war banners, but ogres...
She is a Blood God Disciple who venerates Gorum. So probably one of the Gorumite tribes that frequently clash with the Kellids.
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She is a Blood God Disciple who venerates Gorum. So probably one of the Gorumite tribes that frequently clash with the Kellids.
Then brutality is likely something she's very familiar with (along with the sexism that seems almost universal in Orc culture), but not prolonged torture for personal amusement, necrophilia, incest, or some of the other atrocities involved in, well, Ogres' daily lives.
Orcs hate, and act upon their hatred.
Ogres get bored and start pulling the wings off of flies.
Therefore, I'd say the depravity is different, and some of what the Grauls and Kreegs do would definitely sit wrong with even the most warlike half-orc. After all, torture, murder, and the odd bit of "sport" with a prisoner are something both species, as the OP noted, engage in...
But I think the sheer indiscriminate pointlessness of ogre savagery might be what bothers the PC in this case.
"Yes, yes, you torture and eat your prisoners, I get that. But what's this asinine business with banjos and the skull jig? You guys are big, crazy, dangerous idiots."