Half-Ork

The Origin

As orkish necroscience developed and grew ever more complex, the speed with which new advances were made began to slow. Seeking a solution to this, the orks noted the way the Elanni could accumulate ancestral experience through the death/rebirth cycle in a way that orks, lacking souls, were incapable of. They began to experiment with stealing souls from the Sea of Blood and imprinting them into orkish bodies.
The early efforts were abject failures until the orks began to adjust the composition of their cloned bodies. After much trial and error, it was discovered that human Elanni possessed the strongest attractive qualities and the Grinding House output began to successfully trap the soul at mixtures above 35%, with a 51% ork, 49% human ratio showing the greatest efficiency between retaining a stolen soul and maintaining orkish qualities.
While this discovery generated great excitement among the orks, it was nothing next to the jubilation that resulted when the "half-orks" were proven to be capable of breeding. The orks believed they had finally found the key to greatness in bodies made of high-quality parts and souls whose experience could be passed from clone to clone. Their hopes were dashed, however, when it was found that the acceptable loss of physical characteristics (a slight decrease in overall strength and toughness) were accompanied by unacceptable levels of self-identity and sentimentality. The newly created half-orks were utterly ruined by an egocentric view of the world, a nearly unavoidable side-effect of soul possession.

The Extermination

Unwilling to allow dangerous ideologies to run amok in orkish philosophy, the orks hastily attempted to exterminate all existing specimens. However, the half-orks, not at all lacking in intelligence and imbued with that uniquely human form of adaptability, banded together and fought back. Though most were killed, hundreds escaped into the wilds.
For years the orks pursued their "misbegotten" children with savage intensity. So thorough was the orks' disgust at their failure that many refused to even gather the fallen half-orks for parts, preferring to leave the brutally dismembered bodies to rot, the ultimate insult an ork could imagine. Beneath the relentless campaign of ork aggression, half-orks had little chance of survival, yet it was orkish over-committal that offered hope. Stretched thin in the south from their wide ranging pursuit, the orks were ill-prepared when their long simmering territory dispute with The City-State of Excium broke into all-out war. Unable to muster sufficient defense against Excium's mechanical, fire-wielding shock troops, the orks suffered a grievous defeat with the loss of their southern Ladder. Afterwards, the orks re-focused their intentions on the Amalgam Ladder in the north, abandoning for the time being their crusade against the half-orks. Still, though it cost them their tower, the efficacy of the orks' genocidal efforts were obvious; in the south, not a single half-ork was left alive.

The Proliferation

Though the orks considered their creations failures, it was not for any physical defects. The necromachinists had poured all their insane motivation and outlandish intelligence into the creation of half-orks and had produced a perfectly functional new race. Though infant mortality rates among half-orks are high due to soul rejection, the early females were abnormally fertile and contributed to a population explosion that sustained the race during its fledgling decades. Lacking compatibility with the orks' cloning technology, all the original half-orks died naturally and subsequent generations experienced a decline in both fertility and mortality rates. In the modern era, half-ork birth rates are about 33% lower than the human average, though their natural toughness generally leads to slightly higher life expectancy, resulting in a relatively small but stable population.
Though half-orks are genetically half human and sexually compatible with humans, they are incompatible with the races with which humans may usually successfully breed with. As a result, half-ork populations outside of their major geographical concentrations are only self-sustaining when in the presence of a human majority. Everywhere else they are merely travelers or visitors.
In the aftermath of the extermination attempt by the orks, the remaining half-orks grouped together for survival. The two largest groups had been in the north and south, and with the southern population hunted to extinction, the few remaining half-orks scattered around the world made their way north. In those early days of their independent existence, they were often mistaken for orks and slain on sight. It wasn't until the Battle of Two Horns Pass when a group of half-orks swept suddenly down the cliffs to rescue the dwarven king Dorniver from an orkish ambush that the world at large finally learned the full truth of their story. The dwarves of Dorniver's kingdom and the half-orks have been committed allies ever since, and as the years passed and the half-orks' hatred of orks became legendary, they are usually treated with cautious acceptance wherever they go.
In the modern era, half-orks have established a kingdom in and around the ruined dwarven citadel of Kharren-Karsk (loosely translated as "The Hall of Useless Junk"), which was captured and inhabited by orks for 70 years before the half-orks, aided by the dwarven kingdoms, retook the structure. Content to allow the half-orks to serve as a buffer between themselves and the orks, the dwarves have supported the fledgling kingdom with mithral arms and armor. Working the mines beneath Kharren-Karsk, the dwarves mine the plentiful mithral there and pay for their subterranean occupancy with dwarven forging for their allies above. The half-orks are similarly content with their arrangement, for the citadel provides a well-defended launching point for their blood-feud with the orks, and their mithral armaments even the playing field between themselves and the necromantically talented orks.

Genetic Ancestor(s)

• Human
• Orks