Ogre

Ogres are a race of horned people found in temperate and warm climates in E2. Known ogre subraces are red ogres, blue ogres and green ogres.

History
Ogres are the descendants of a failed incursion from Pandemonium by an army of proto-hiispawn of wrath. As soon as the army was out of the reach of its Dread Father - or possibly within the interference of the Akashic System - the operation descended into chaos and every last trooper went rampant. Years of interbreeding with E2's goblin population lead to a birth of a varied race whose culture combines ferocity with a lackadaisical attitude.

Appearance
Ogres are horned, strongly-built and tall humanoids with curved fangs and clawed hands and feet. Females have nubby horns and are significantly stouter and larger in size. They are also quite rare; one in six ogres is female. The most common variant is the red ogre, which have ruddy skin ranging from bright red to the muted color of congealed blood. They are also physically strongest of ogres. Blue ogres are strikingly blue-skinned and have an affinity for magic. Green ogres are typically moss-colored and somewhat lither than their cousins and boast a resistance to most toxins.

Culture
Ogres live all around Teiliwaan and Cezva. The different subraces seem to have no differences in habitats other than the green ogres favoring forested or swampy areas. Combined with the deeply-ingrained rivalry between subraces, this means that clash between ogre communities are common news.

Ogres live in loose communities centered around villages of varying size, although some blue ogres are known to inhabit Theilic ruins. The villages consist of stonemasoned huts, so called regardless of size of the dwelling, and short-term animal hide yurts. Villages have also a bathhouse, drinking-house, and a variety of outdoor services such as smithies and markets. Hunters and warriors on the move live in temporary encampments of small yurts.

The ogre society is divided into two castes. Yakwas are leaders, warriors, hunters, smiths, and hut-protectors who are each a master of a hut. Shurgas are sages, mystics, medicine men, artisans, and child-rearers who either live in a hut of a yakwa they have "hut-bonded" with, or in their individual medicine yurts. As a sign of their caste, shurgas have one of their horns cut; male yakwas see the size of horns as an indication of the strength and virility of an ogre, so shurgas and half-ogres tend to be seen as weak. Shurgas outnumber the yakwas, and many yakwas hut-bond with more than one shurgas.

Female yakwas (mayakwas) are respected for their natural strength and rarity, but they leave as much active leadership duties to the males as possible, as such matters are beneath them. Ogre society in general abhors responsibility. The yakwas of a village form a council of sorts, whose meetings are extremely informal and only attended by most because of the vigorous revelry that is an integral part of them. Any leadership decisions are made in the heat of the moment.

Ogre warbands continuously raid remote dragonblood and human settlements for food and ransom, a time-honored practice that has led the more civilized races to distrust any members of the race.

Life cycle
Huts inhabited by a female ogre are called fertile huts. The mayakwa of fertile hut may have shurgas as usual, but for reproduction, she picks a partner from the village yakwas - typically in a very informal way and often during a drunken night - and gives birth to a litter of 4-7 baby ogres. The fertile hut keeps one of the children and gives the rest to the male's hut. The children are taken care of by the hut's shurgas and trained in combat by their yakwa father.

Young ogres of 16 years go through a brutal rite of passage devised by the village yakwas. Those few who succeed become yakwas and those who fail become shurgas. Either way, the youth are then kicked out of their raising-hut. Yakwas either inherit a hut of a recently deceased yakwa or build their own. Shurgas live in individual medicine yurts until they find a yakwa with whom to hut-bond with. After that, they move to their yakwa's hut. Female ogres tend to become mayakwas due to their strength; those who become shurgas are called mashurgas and rarely choose to hut-bond due to their pride, instead choosing to become witches or hermits.

While this system may sound quite rigid, the ogre society is in practice quite lax about its rules. There is no pressure for shurgas to ever bond - other than to live in a hut. Sexual dalliances outside of the hut-bond with others of the same caste or unbound shurgas are accepted and even commonplace, although an affair between a yakwa and another hut's shurga will result in a violent dispute.

Religion
Ogres are atheistic. Their religious tradition is called (by other theologians) Hakkanism. Its founder and central figure is the legendary ogre warchief Hakka the Big, a paragon of ogrehood. The exemplary life of Hakka is shrouded in myth and spread by oral tradition via shurga sages. Its exact details are distorted, exaggerated and often blatantly added on to by shurgas who often muse on the teachings of Hakka while under the effects of rice wine or hattya leaf.

The common thread of stories about Hakka is that he raided all of E2 as well as other planets and the realm of dragon, humiliating all the gods in the process and showing them to be too weak for the ogrekind to worship. His teachings have an egoist-hedonistic slant; among other things, he taught the ogres that battle on its own was less worthy than battle for the sake of pleasure and that every ogre knows what is good for him or her better than any other. Outsider theologians are often shocked by the bawdy and blasphemous content as well as borderline surreal violence and sex in Hakka myths. This has been explained by the way the stories have been used by (often inebriated) shurgas to teach spiritual truths for yakwas with short attention spans as well as to entertain their own sexual and power fantasies.