The following was Compiled by Haleh Nassiri, Opportunities Incorporated, Pakesh, Ursia, 2482. You will find more about the Western Outlands in Outland Politics.
My thanks to the School of Wizardry, Pakesh University, Ankle University, and to the Ursian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for their cooperation and use of their libraries. Because I speak only Latin, Greek, and Ursian, I restricted myself to essays written in one of these three languages, and I have translated them all into the Latin you see below.
This piece is by Ms. Anitominy Fisilade, Department of Political Science, Ankle University, 2438 AE. Ms. Fisilade wrote here essay in Latin, so below you find her own words.
Orcs have only eight years of childhood to acquire their culture, compared to the sapien sixteen. They do not have much emotional control. But they are brave, tough, practical, and cunning. Black-orcs keep them inline. An idea that has proved itself successful in strengthening orc societies is that the orcs need the black-orcs to keep them disciplined, or else their communities will collapse into lawlessness. No exceptions to this belief exist: no orc nations prospering without black-orcs. One of the most common forms of orc government is a hierarchical representation of the people to their lord. Elected orc chiefs, called centurions, represent a hundred fighting men to a black-orc. Typically, a black-orc leader will meet with a council of ten such centurions once a month, and hear their complaints and advice. But the black-orc, called a "lord" if he commands such a council, has absolute power over his centurions' people. It is common, however, for orcs to rebel against an unfit lord, and put another in his place.
Orcs do not incarcerate or kill their criminals. A black-orc can kill any orc if he sees fit, but he traditionally does so only for treason, repeated crimes by an exile, or desertion of duty in a time of war. Punishments include torture, castration, and exile. The lord or one of his appointed executors, usually a black-orc as well, presides over trials at which any such major punishment is to be meted out. At these trials there are rarely such refinements as legal representation or appeal. Judgment is swift and punishment immediate.
Exile may be temporary, in which the orc is banished from his tribe for a year or more, or it may be permanent exile from the entire Outlands. When the exile is permanent, the orc is branded with the tribe's mark of exile upon the center of his forehead. Tribes tend to agree, even if they are at war, to honor one another's acts of exile, so that the unfortunate carrier of such a brand will be driven from any tribe he encounters, unless they be outside the local law, or living in the borderlands.
We add that it is forbidden for any orc to go about in public with the center of his or her forehead concealed. Even a war helmet, if it should come down to the eyes, must have a hole through which a brand of exile, should it be present, can be seen. Covering this area is sufficient reason to be treated as an exile. We learned these facts from exiles we interviewed in the borderlands. Several of them expressed an ambition to redeem themselves to their tribe by some act of heroism, and so have their brand removed by divine order. We assume that the divine order takes the form of a medical operation assisted by serums provided by their gods, the Princes of Hell. Thus, for the orc criminal, redemption, if it is to be gained at all, must be granted by Hell.
This piece is by Mr. Thrack Bunion, Retired Colonel, Varay Armed Forces, 2397 AE. The colonel wrote in Varayan, but the copy I found in the Pakesh University Library was a Latin translation, and I reproduce it below.
Orcs of the Western Outlands do not like to kill, nor do they like swords and the sight of blood. But they will kill if ordered to do so by their lord, and are free to do so, according to their own laws, if attacked by a bladed weapon. Orcs do not intend to kill one another in their endless battles, they use clubs and staffs.
It appears to me that an orc soldier, once armed with a sword, is worth two well-trained sapien soldiers in any campaign. First, orcs will stand firm for up to thirty percent casualties, while sapiens will stand only ten percent. A wounded orc is typically fighting fit again in four days, while a wounded sapien requires two weeks to recover. An orc can march one hundred kilometers every day, sapiens only fifty. Orcs will go without pay with less complaint, because it appears there is nothing they like more than to make war. They will go without food for a week and without water for two days before deserting.
Most deadly of all their strengths, however, is their ability to see well enough at night to fight with confidence. I hardly need tell you how difficult this would make fighting a campaign against orcs. They can attack us when we are blind. We would have to keep lights handy at all times. During the day, orcs have trouble seeing in the bright light of the sun, but with the invention of sun-blocking goggles, the orcs of the Western Outlands appear to be able to operate just as well day and night.
The one weakness of an orc army is that, despite their ability to fast and go without water, they do, on average, consume far more food than a sapien army. I estimate, from my time with orc soldiers in the borderlands, that an orc eats from half again to twice as much food as a sapien. There was a stretch in the winter when we had very little to eat. We shared our food equally, and all seemed well at first, but after two weeks, the orcs in our band were shivering, weak, and thin, while we sapiens were merely hungry and dreaming of a good meal. I think this experience is of particular value to our forces, because it turned out that the orcs were as surprised as I was by their greater need. It does not appear to be common knowledge among orc soldiers that sapiens need less food than they do. I can see why this would be so, because, as I have said, the orc can fast more effectively. But you should see how much he eats after he does so.
Black-orc generals, meanwhile, who lead the common orcs in any major battle, are practiced and expert commanders, aside from being inspiring fighters and sorcerers themselves. When I consider the effect of their sound leadership, and all the other strengths of orcs, and take into account their weaknesses too, I conclude that an orc army would be likely to defeat a sapien army ten times its size in a dynamic campaign. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining how, during the Dark Ages, when two hundred thousand orc soldiers took over the continent. The estimated Western-Outland conscripted army of thirty thousand orcs, if armed with swords, would defeat with ease our standing army of ten thousand, and eventually conquer our reserve army of two hundred thousand as well. We might hope that the orc army, if it ever assails us, will be equipped only with their customary staffs and sticks, but this hope would be in vain, because, through defeating our forces, they will soon enough be well-equipped.
This piece is by Mr. Charles Portise, et al, Office of Outland Affairs, In the Service of Her Majesty the Queen Caravel, 2479. I found several copies of this essay in various libraries. The original submitted to the Queen was written in Caravelli, but the authors also wrote a Latin version, which you find below. A Greek translation I found claimed that the true author of the piece was a field researcher named Jacques Martinique.
Black-orcs lead their troops on campaigns in the summer, before the harvest, and sometimes in winter. The objective of these campaigns is to take prisoners who can subsequently be ransomed, and to capture portable valuables like iron, gold, grain, and livestock. If such gains can be made one summer, they might be made the next summer as well, provided the invaders leave the conquered or pillaged population with their farms and towns intact. the objective of orc campaigns is not to destroy but to rob. They do not want to colonize, because their own population is restricted by Olympian law, and they have plenty of land for themselves. Their prosperity is not restricted so much by their resources, but by their capacity for farming and manufacturing labor. The campaigns, therefore, seek to take the fruits of such labor from others and leave the defeated population's capacity for labor intact.
We might argue that sapien campaigns should be conducted along the same lines, but when we examine sapien war, we see armies roaming the countryside, devastating the land, and massacring the people, as did the Laconians and Endans in the early years of our own nation. We see victors forcing terms of peace so severe upon the defeated that another exhausting war of rebellion is made inevitable, as with the peace enforced by Kent upon Morden in 2432 AE, which lead to the Five Years War of 2458 AE, in which we too were involved.
In short, our opening explanation of why orc campaigns are fought as they are can equally be applied to sapiens, and yet is contradicted by the evidence of sapien war. What is it about the orcs, particularly those of the Western Outlands, that tempers their campaigns to the point where they bring maximum benefit to the victor?
The orc is strong, tough, courageous, and enduring. But he is violent, passionate, and given to outburst. His fearlessness makes him careless and irresponsible. His short youth does not give his parents time to teach him a sapien's self-discipline, even if they had such discipline themselves. When orcs first arrived in Clarus, there were many instances of orc infants being raised by sapiens, and even elves, particularly in ancient Mareo. Some of these parents took the orc infant into their care to prove to the world that the apparent violence and recklessness of the orcs was merely cultural and not genetic.
The adopted children grew up, however, to be as violent and reckless as their orc-raised brethren, and in some cases more so. The parents complained that their adopted children grew up so fast, they had not time to raise them. Even when the children were small, the parents said that physical punishment severe enough to discourage a sapien child would merely make their orc children angry.
We claim, on the basis of these reports, that the character of an orc is more violent and more reckless than that of a sapien. It may be that this difference arises from an innate love of war, their physical toughness, or their short youth, but the striking contrast between orc and sapien children raised by the same parents cannot be contested. (We obtained these accounts of orc children from diaries of citizens of Mareo, copies of which exist in the Royal Library.)
Having made our case for an incontestable difference in temperament between sapiens and orcs, it appears at first that we are farther from understanding the civility of orc wars than we were at the outset, because if orcs are more vicious than sapiens, how can their conflicts be more circumspect?
We fully appreciate the difficulty we are now faced with in our discussion, but we insist that the explanation offered by previous writers, to the effect that the civility of orc wars is testament of an underlying civility of temperament, is without merit. Instead, we propose that following explanation, and although it does not meet the standards of exacting science, we nevertheless feel that it is adequate to show that the civility of orc wars need not, in any way, be a testament to underlying civility of temperament.
If we consider the most warlike of sapien cultures, and we might consider ourselves first among this list, given our habit of dueling to settle the slightest dispute, these cultures seem to be divided into two camps. That of the outright and uncouth barbarian, such as the Northerners, and that of the upright and honor-bound gentleman of war, such as our own. Many have argued that the very willingness of a people to attack and kill one another in a society over trifling insults forces those same people to treat one another with unswerving deference and civility, lest they find themselves under constant attack, and to adhere to a strict code of honor, lest they be despised.
We conclude, therefore, that, at least in the case of sapien cultures, honor and violence can go hand in hand. We go further in fact, because undisciplined warlike societies have, over the centuries, spent more years being dominated by their disciplined and warlike enemies than they have spent in domination themselves, as is the case with Kent and their barbarian neighbors, the Northerners. The evidence suggests that violence and restraint are more forceful than violence without restraint.
If this principle were true, and again we acknowledge that our defense of it goes no farther than proving that its truth is plausible, then the fact that orcs are more violent than sapiens and even incurably warlike would imply that their conduct in war would be the more disciplined than that of sapiens.
Now let us introduce into our discussion other salient influences upon the development of orc culture. The Princes of Hell have taken upon themselves, by signing the Treaty of Reconciliation, two burdens. the first is that the orcs be constrained to the territory called the Outlands, and the second that their population be kept at or below a fixed number. To fulfill their obligations, the Princes retain the loyalty of the creatures we call Black-orcs. How they maintain the loyalty of the Black-orcs is not the subject of this essay, but retain it they do, and it is through the black-orcs that they control the orcs themselves.
Black-orcs are long-lived. They can expect to live three centuries if they are not killed in battle, while the common orc is short-lived, rarely surviving the age of fifty. A black-orc can stand up to two and a half meters tall, while orcs are rarely as tall as sapiens. Black-orcs are hairless and, of course, black. They are immensely strong, quick, intelligent, and very often sorcerers as well. We describe them thus to give you a picture of how the common orc regards them. To a common orc, his black-orc lord is invulnerable, all-knowing, and was lord to his father, his father's father, and most likely his great-grandfather as well. Some orcs have no collective memory of there ever being a black-orc lord ruling over them other than the one they now obey. In short, to the orcs, the black-orc has the stature that we assign, more correctly perhaps, to our own Gods.
Th Princes of Hell, themselves gods, although fallen from grace, control the black-orcs, who in turn constrain and guide the orcs. What form will that guidance take? The orcs are warlike. If they do not fight, they become despondent. They attack members of their own family. They abuse their wives and children. If they, as a people, are to remain strong and productive, so as to supply to their black-orc rulers the comforts that those rulers enjoy, they must both fight and yet live at peace in their homes. Left to themselves, orcs always, in all cases we know of, degenerate into banditry and poverty.
It appears that the black-orcs in the Western Outlands, the region with which we are, obviously, the most acquainted, have solved the dilemma of cultivating war and peace at one time with a religion and code of martial conduct that has become so entrenched and successful as to be indistinguishable from the temperament of the orcs themselves.
"Thou shall not kill the young" is one of their commandments. the law applies to all creatures who bleed. they will not kill or eat a lamb. To do so is as repellant to them as eating human flesh is to us. they will eat human flesh, however, when they have no choice, at which point they will also eat the flesh of their own, but they will not eat the meat of a calf or the flesh of a chick. (They will, however, eat eggs, even though this does not agree with their own law, and we beg to suggest that it is with such inconsistencies that every religion other than the true faith of our Queen and her Church is made plain.)
"Thou shall not be the first to strike a mortal blow" is another commandment, and it is with this law that war among orcs departs so greatly from that of sapiens. Orcs will not fight with blades unless attacked with blades, as they have done with Laconians through the centuries, and even then they prefer to prevail honorable with their staffs and clubs, as they did in a recent battle with the Laconian Yellow Guard. They think it unmanly to slay their enemy. He should be wounded, but survive to tell of your prowess. Nor should you seek to kill him to avoid his vengeance, because to act so is cowardice.
Among sapiens, a heavy club is regarded as a deadly weapon, but orcs have thick sculls and strong bones. You can knock them senseless with a club and break their joint, but to kill one would take luck and unusual strength. If wounded, they recover so quickly by the action of their own metabolisms, that for centuries sapiens believed them to be possessed of magical powers. An orc bone will set and heal in a week. A bruise will vanish overnight. A cut will seal and be nothing more than a scar in a matter of days.
Most male orcs do die in battle, but that is not because their battles are so dangerous, but because they are so frequent. Many more orcs are maimed, but they fight three or four pitched battles a year, from the age of eleven to forty, after which they age rapidly and die.
For the most part, orcs fight only other orcs, and do so as armies making war on the armies of neighboring orc nations. Despite our impression that orcs are always fighting with sapiens in the Borderlands, these skirmishes are but a tiny fraction of their military activity. We believe, in fact that if the orcs ever were to make an effort to burst from their land and challenge their sapien neighbors with their armies, that sapien efforts to restrain them would be futile. Every orc soldier is a veteran. They fight as well at night as they do by day. In fact, they prefer to fight at night: they see better at night than in the light of the sun. The only weakness orc armies may have is their assumption that their enemies will be as restrained as they are.
And so we address, at last, the issue for which this essay was commissioned: what threat do orcs present to us, and how might it be diffused? Orcs can invade and conquer us at will. If they did so we would not die, but be enslaved. They would be reluctant to kill our soldiers and loath to harm our families, but at the same time would be ruthless and unswerving in their domination of our people. They would make sure that our crops were harvested and that we were adequately fed, but they would deprive us of our liberty and our every luxury. To avoid this fate, we must ensure that the orcs never attack us. To prepare to meet the attack is futile. We must make allies of the black-orcs, and at the same time give neither them nor the Princes of Hell any excuse to break the Reconciliation.
This piece is by Mr. Jacques Martinique alone. It's the Introduction to his Doctoral Thesis from Queen's College, Caravel, 2476. One thing to note about this essay is that it does not pay lip-service to the church of the Queen of Caravel, but speaks of the gods in the plural, and groups the Princes of Hell among them. It makes no special mention of Caravel's omnipotent God. According to a librarian at the School of Wizardry, the essay is famous in Caravelli academic circles for its near-blasphemy, and was sent to the School's library by someone in the Caravelli government. The copy I obtained was in Ursian, translated for the benefit of young wizards at the school, and I have translated it back again into Latin. I tried to find the original Latin version, but failed. The text quotes financial quantities in Ursian dollar. The original translator most likely converted from Caravelli Livres. I cannot, therefore, vouch for the accuracy of the financial statements, but at the time of writing, one Ursian dollar is approximately equal to one Olympian dollar. I would like to obtain the rest of the doctoral thesis, to which this essay is an introduction, but I have not found it yet.
Black-orcs are rare. There is only one black-orc per thousand orcs in the Claran Outlands. There are perhaps one or two thousand on the planet. We might call them by the name they give to themselves, which I write down approximately as karazi, but I will adhere to the common name we give to them, with no offence to any black-orcs who might honor this essay with their attention. I would like to thank, here in the beginning, the several black-orcs who have treated me with the utmost patience and kindness, and described to me their lives in frank and open discussion. It has been my privilege to spend time with them, and despite my entry into their society as a slave, I have nothing but respect for their culture and perseverance. (Incidentally, the black-orcs have a name for common, pale-skinned orcs also: they call them keshi. So far as I can tell, the common orcs use the names keshi and karazi also.)
Even when given free reign to expand their numbers, black-orcs breed slowly. Gestation is seven years, and youth is another thirty. In an ancient treatise on black-orcs by Heraldonus Makkian of ancient Mareo, Makkian argues that the brutal and violent nature of the black-orc takes decades of youth to tame, so that shorter youth is not possible, but leads to an uncontrollable monster, much like an ogre, and certainly falling far short of the disciplined and skillful generals seen leading the black-orcs in Makkian's day, Gelden being the greatest of the all such generals.
But it is the black-orcs themselves, on Clarus, who limit their reproduction, in accordance with the desires of the Princes of Hell. Black-orcs are dangerous creatures: there might come another Gelden, able to move his forces through space bridges as only the Gods can now do. The Princes of Hell wish there to be only the minimum number of black-orcs to control the orcs, and in exchange for the favor of performing such control and of limiting their numbers, the Princes reward the black-orcs with longevity drugs for themselves and their first two children, assuming those children act well. A third child is never entitled to such drugs, no matter what befalls him or her. Hence the expression used among black-orcs to describe someone who has, through no fault of their own, been stripped of his prosperity, "a third child".
The black-orc's near-infertility, frequent miscarriages, and long gestation require love between their men and women of such endurance and strength that I believe it surpasses by far the bond between man and wife in sapien societies. When their wives are threatened, black-orc males are protective of their wives to the absolute exclusion of all other concerns, even the safety of their own children. The wives protect the children with their lives, and the husbands protect the women. A black-orc woman looks for and expects a husband who will lay down his life for her own protection without any hesitation. A sapien woman expects her husband to lay down his life for her children.
Do not conclude from what I have said that the black-orc women are frail. They are not. But when they are pregnant, they do not fight, and cannot act as leaders to the orcs. The constancy of leadership is a guiding principle in the black-orc domination of the common orcs. Most orcs can say that their Lord was lord to them, their father, and his father before him. They are raised from birth to honor that particular Lord.
The Lord's wife, and his sons and daughters act with him in whatever capacity they are able, to administer the Lord's governing of his people. His wife, when she is not pregnant, may go in arms with him on his campaigns, and even carry out punishments and sorties. But she is still under his protection, even in those cases where she herself is more formidable than her husband.
Let me point out that going into battle as a black-orc female in a conflict between common orcs carries very little chance of death. No common orc will be willing to kill a black-orc woman when he knows that her husband will pay handsomely, with no questions asked, for her immediate return.
A black-orc woman, by tradition, must always have a protector. Her father is her protector until she marries, and then her husband takes on the responsibility. A wedding is a great event in which families celebrate the transfer of the woman's protection to her husband from her father. She takes an oath to obey him in matters of her own safety, and she declares that she understands that her husband can and must do whatever he deems necessary to protect her from herself and others. If she comes to harm, he is held accountable, and must prove beyond reasonable doubt to his peers that she did not come to harm through his own negligence.
Young black-orc men have a variety of positions open to them in black-orc society. they can become Lords, most often inheriting the role from their father, but sometimes taking over from a Lord ousted by his clan. The rule of a black-orc over his common orcs, who he will call his 'clan', is absolute so long as the orc centurions do not gather together and vote unanimously to replace him with another black-orc of their own choosing. It is not accurate to say that the rule of the black-orcs is rule by consent, for the common orcs can but choose another black-orc to rule them, but the black-orc knows that he must retain the favor of his clan or lose it.
A black-orc male might also enter their nobility, and become a banker, merchant, or administrator of his nation's government. I will grant you that the word "nobility" seems inappropriate to us here, but it is the word chosen in Latin by black-orcs to describe this class. Black-orcs, I should say, speak Latin among themselves, so it is no difficulty to communicate with them once you have mastered their accent and elaborate diction.
Another fate for the black-orc male, or indeed a wayward female, is exile. The exiled black-orc is doomed to live in the borderlands, and is deprived the luxury of longevity drugs.
A Lord taxes his clan, which might number ten thousand orcs, but more often four to five thousand. In the summer, when the crops are growing, he is their general in the annual campaign. At harvest time, he is their facilitator and assessor. In winter he is their protector and councilor.
A Lord who controls his orcs fairly and firmly can hope to earn a comfortable living from their taxes. A ten-percent tax appears to be standard, and when applied to ten thousand orcs yields an income of about one million dollars a year with which to fund his campaigns, administer the clan, and feed his family. The average income of an orc in the Western Outlands is one thousand dollars a year, counting women and children, and that of a black-orc is one hundred thousand dollars, a good income even by the standards of our own Caravel, and a fortune in the Outlands.
It appears to me that close to a third of all black-orcs are able to use magic. The correct term for their type of magic is sorcery. It is similar to that practiced by elves, but distinct from that of the Ursians. I do not claim to understand the distinction, but I record it here for someone who does understand. Black-orc lords combine sorcery and personal combat with an efficiency unrivaled by any other race. Nevertheless, it is not sorcery that makes a great Lord, but tactics and leadership. Among orcs, sorcerers have the reputation of being magnificent and terrible, but the plain warrior-lord is counted on for better generalship.
Military campaigns are so much a part of black-orc life that we should discuss here the manner in which their customs administer the conduct and consequences of war. The first thing to note about orc battles is that they do not use blades, which, given the extreme robustness and regenerative powers of the orc constitution, means that fatalities in battle are rare. A prisoner is worth more to the victor than a corps, because a prisoner can be ransomed or enslaved. Ransoming is handled in the law as the sale of a slave to the rescuer, who may then free the slave if he so wishes. If the prisoner-slave ran away from the fight, he will remain a slave for a period.
The profit in campaigns is therefore ransom money, and the less damage the victor does to the defeated nation, the higher the ransom will be. Rarely to orcs fight one another for matters of policy. It is sometimes expansionism, but more often the desire for tribute and ransom. If a nation does not want to fight, it can pay tribute. But orcs like to fight, and the black-orcs know that orcs that do not have a good fight once a year will start picking on one another, or plotting rebellion. So black-orcs submit to tribute only rarely. Better to fight and pay ransom.
Even when orcs fight campaigns every summer, they still beat one another up for the rest of the year, but their lords hope to keep these fights from being fatal, so they can be referred to as "good clean fun", or "the boys are out having a fine old time", expressions I have heard used many times by black-orcs when watching a hideous brawl between their clan-members. The punishment for murder is most often death when it is assault with a blade, and torture, fines, or exile otherwise. Exile is accompanied by a symbol tattooed, or in some cases branded, on the orc's forehead. The same tattoo is applied to black-orcs thus punished. The symbol identifies the nation from which the orc is exiled. Unlike black-orcs, ordinary orcs and hellspawn do not suffer exile from the entire outlands, nor are the Princes of Hell involved or aware of their exile.
We digressed upon the subject of common orcs to illustrate the nature of a lord's responsibilities. He must make sure several thousand orcs work their farms with enough constancy to feed themselves, and in order to do so he must lead them into frequent battles, intimidate them into obedience, inspire them to self-discipline, and give them confidence in the law.
Personal stature, strength, and prowess, combined with cunning and charm, are the instruments of a black-orc lord in peace-time. In war, he calls upon calm, clarity of thought, and understanding of tactics and strategy. To all these matters, he applies his formidable intelligence and, by virtue of his three-hundred-year life-span, his formidable experience. In his spare time, he enjoys hunting, sparring, games, his family, music, fine food, and good sleep, just as we do. He is huge and black, hairless and smells of musk. His face is terrifying, with its red eyes and white tusks. Each of his hands is large enough to constrain a sapien man by wrapping his finders around his head from above, as I can attest from personal experience.
And yet, if one can look past his terrible presence, hide one's fear, and talk to him of philosophy or chess, you will find the black-orc a gentle companion. You can be sure that he does not fear you, and he will not seek to harm you for his own pleasure unless you offend him. He is a monster, but one that we can respect. There are renegade black-orcs, to be sure, and they are to be found in the Borderlands that lie between us and the Outlands, so we must not let these degraded specimens dictate to us our opinion of black-orcs any more than we must allow the sapien bandits of the same Borderlands dictate our opinion of our own race. And as we of Caravel know well, even from bandits can be born a king.
A black-orc lord told me, "Temperaments vary. Cultures take us one way and another. But the laws of cause and effect are the same for all of us, even for the gods, and these laws constitute the common ground upon which any two creatures of intellect may meet and talk."
The subject of my thesis is a philosophical one, and springs from the statement made by the black-orc lord. What type of ideas can we share with black-orcs, and perhaps all cultures? How can we determine if a belief of ours is such an idea or not? If we can answer these questions, we can guide our foreign policy with their answers. We will know in advance whether or not we have a chance of convincing a potential enemy of our case. We will know which parts of our own policy will be compelling to our foreign neighbors. I will argue that an understanding of the black-orc alone goes a long way to giving us the rules we need to answer these questions, and that further study of the human races will serve to strengthen our vision and self-knowledge.