I was just curious if any thought had ever been put into making the Grinning Skulls more of a cabal oriented place. Adding a item and perhaps adding some additions like allowing a few orcs to study as shamen under Tremblefist. Perhaps trolls or ogres as rarities like minotaurs or Goblin thieves to boot. Just seems like even with the new abilities given through adapts that you just don't see that many orcs. Its almost like if your not chief whats the point?

... unless you just want to play an orc.

It's been suggested many, many times and never fleshed out or supported more than with 5-sentence paragraphs. In my opinion, orcs are outdated and not worth the work to bring in line with cabals.

Usually, the first "idea" is to allow them to join cabals again. However, that then makes an orc pc have a large binary decision: try for chieftain, or join a cabal (I hope it's obvious that having both would be stupid and overpowered). That would be uninteresting and poor design, on one extreme causing players to shy away from rolling an orc if there's a current, competent Chieftain, and making the caballed orc a fire giant warrior with practically indistinguishable rp and a sillier, more unreliable skillset.

Orcs, as I view them in Thera now, are slightly broken anachronisms. They don't have a meaningful place anywhere, and their whole premise, implementation, and rp pretty much points to the trend we've been seeing for a while: Orc latches on to Scion/unaffiliated transmuter (or insert support class, really any random benefactor here) buddy and bashes people. Some call this powergaming.

Not to say orcs can't be very powerful pkers (with or without metabolic quickening), and can be compelling for a player vs. "rest of thera" experience. Extra "orc-themed" races and class selections sounds like a poor return on uniqueness and cool game design for the coding it would take.

Orcs are what they are right now: simple, no-strings-attached bash machines. I don't think they can support added roleplay or complexity that are better served anyway by an evil outlander or scion.

All stats except dex are 15. Dex is 16. Auto-progs those neat grazing attacks that the other kobolds do. Can be enslaved by PC orcs, and are generally abused by orc village npcs. I would so play one for the crack.

But would only work if we had way more players.

Could we have goblin thieves and shaman and troll warriors or berserkers for the Orc Village? That would be sooooooooooo cool! Maybe with some limitations on number, or whatever you guys thought.

I would -love- to see something like this and I think I brought the topic up about a year ago and had it shot down.

NT