Dawn of the Orcs
A downloadable game
You are sages, wizards, scholars, geniuses, charlatans, and assorted other meddlers. Your nation faces destruction at the hands of an overwhelming foe. To save your homeland, you have put your occult learning, secret arts, and esoteric skills to use to build an army of new soldiers, who you call the Orcs. Each battle of the war buys you time to improve and modify your Orcs. Can you repel the invaders with a combination of sorcery and strategy? What will you have created when the fighting is over?
Dawn of the Orcs is an Ennie-nominated GMless dark fantasy worldbuilding and roleplaying game. You play as the magical technocrats who create the first Orcs as weapons of war, modify and improve them over time, and tell the story of how the Orcs become their own people. It plays in around 90-120 minutes; by the end, you will have created a unique Orc people, perhaps even one you feel like using in the setting of other roleplaying games.
Dawn of the Orcs can be played solo or with up to 8 players. Maybe even more - 8 is as far as I've tested it!
If you'd like to know more about Dawn of the Orcs before you give it a try, you can listen to actual plays by DMs After Dark, The Roleplaying Exchange, One Less Die, and Technical Difficulties Gaming Podcast, or watch a detailed video review by RedMageGM. Free additional content for Dawn of the Orcs is available here and custom name cards from Fangtastic Worlds are available here.
If you enjoy Dawn of the Orcs, you can come talk about it on the Rumors and Thoughtful Schemes Discord server, or subscribe to my mailing list for updates on similar projects.
Also available in German at Pro Indie!
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $6.99 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Comments
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I played a solo game of this in about an hour and had a lovely time imagining my shapeshifting Orcs who reproduced by eating and absorbing people (and each other), then tearing bits of flesh off themselves. They won every battle and then were oppressed by their Creators after the war in a desperate attempt to control them. And although they lost their subsequent rebellion, they didn't completely die out. The survivors turned into roving bands of mercenaries, and the other nations soon began making their own...
10 / 10, would Orc again.
I also agree that this would be an excellent way to create Orcs for a longer game. I especially enjoyed that they weren't limited to the standard fantasy trope depiction, and that although they are warlike creatures, it's because they were specifically created as living engines of war by unscrupulous sorcerers, and the actual culture of the Orcs and their relationship with the Lannians is just important as the weird gribbly bits and various distortions of their harrowed flesh.
I picked up a physical copy of this over in (appropriately) The Orc's Nest in London during a trip. And OMG do I love this game. I've run in about 4 times... the first as a two-player with a very close gamer friend and it was very collaborative as we were learning together. The next times at the Story Games LA meetup and at Strategicon Games on Demand with larger random tables. It is such a fun time, and fits very comfortably in the ~2 hour game time zone. There is lots of room to have characters with personality and a combination of collaborative and competitive goals, a little bit of back stabbing, but in a limited fashion that is perfect for a collab story game. This has quickly become one of my favorite games to keep in the "ready to go anytime" folder. High kudos!
Picked up a copy of this from Peregrine Press here in Leeds, UK and had an absolute blast running this at the weekend.
This is really well put together and I think the art is excellent throughout.
We wrote our chronicle out on a scroll of drawing paper and it created a really cool artefact of the game for us to keep as a souvenir after the game!
That's very cool to hear! I'd love to see a picture of the scroll if you feel like posting it anywhere!
Hey no problem at all. I'm not really on social media so here's a picture!
Heck yeah, that's incredible! Also really fun to see that you went with Zgol. That was a reference to Slav Borg, a Polish RPG about street-racing goblins:
https://slavdom-studio.com/en_US/p/SLAV-BORG-Goblins-choice/108
Oo nice, I'll check it out!
It was funny, we got to those prompts after the session and just rolled to see what we'd get. But it changed how I saw the story in my head after rolling them
My review (in Spanish) https://www.fangtasticworlds.es/l/dawn-of-the-orcs/
Thank you for such a wonderful review!
I have a soft spot for the kinds of games that can stand alone as easily as they could be incorporated as one small part of a larger campaign. Before we'd even finished playing, my GM gears were churning, imagining how rich & engaging it would be to bring the Orcs we'd created into a broader fantasy story. But this isn't just a game for the freaks (affectionate): super accessible & evocative rules should make it easy for anyone to pick up & play. There's very little friction to keep you from jumping in & unfolding a surprising story together.
This was an absolute blast. Very glad I checked it out!
I'm so glad to hear that! I tried to make the text feel esoteric but actually be very accessible.