I like having different races, with their own distinct cultures, societies, and religions.
I guess that’s the question. How do you make the culture distinct. I can handle the religious part but culture m, well the orcs are fighting and dead before I can get any cultural details out.
Greetings!
Yes, Ruprecht! Making cultures distinct and interesting can be a challenge. Doing so also requires some good amount of planning, thought, and work. So, for example, I have in my Thandor world, a culture of Orcs known as the Khordron Horde. The Khordron Horde Orcs are savage and brutal, though they have also embraced advanced forms of technology, knowledge, organization, and culture. These developments, in turn, have cascade effects which have combined to make the Khordron Horde Orcs, as a nation, a kingdom, and a culture, very distinct from other Orc cultures. The Khordron Orcs have embraced advanced, industrial-scale agriculture, Institutional Slavery, organized technology, and an organized, hierarchical religion. Along with these changes, the Khordron Horde Orcs have also developed a more advanced and organized system of government and laws. Having a huge, unified, powerful Orc kingdom that is more or less High-Medieval makes for a very different kind of "Orc." Blend all of that with customs of eating humans, mass slavery, ritual sacrifice, gladiator arenas, and a society that glorifies the military, and martial, masculine values at every step, and that creates a radically different kind of Orc culture. Players encountering such NPC Khordron characters, or visiting a Khordron Orc city, are in store for a very different kind of experience.
I have another Orc culture, that is more rural based, not quite as sophisticated, that is more based upon Nordic cultures, themes, and values. Of course, these Orcs are also less organized, somewhat more tribal, and yet also highly skilled as seafarers and ship-builders. They live mostly in fortified villages and towns, as opposed to cities. They have agriculture, but it is more diffused, and not as organized. However, they are much more focused on seafaring, river trade, river travel, and fishing, than other kinds of Orcs.
A third prominent Orc culture in Thandor is a culture of Orcs that primarily live in subterranean realms, living in fortified villages and towns, though which are dug and formed from tunnels, caverns, dungeons, and chambers. These subterranean Orcs are also interbred and mixed with humanoid insects, which provides some insect-like features, insect-like mutations, and a culture which is insect-themed as a whole.
Each different culture worships a common religion, composed of a large pantheon of deities. However, each culture embraces some particular favourite deities and their corresponding cults, and emphasize them to different degrees wwithin their individual culture.
These three different Orc cultures embrace some similarities, for sure. However, there are numerous distinctions and differences, from religious spirituality, to social customs, breeding, mating rituals, government and social organization, that serves to make them considerably different from each other.
Does that help, Ruprecht?
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK