Pyramid Review
Orkworld RPG
Published by Wicked Press
Written by John Wick
Art by Thomas Denmark
304 pages; $25.00
To paraphrase his Prelude, Wick's goal in the creation of Orkworld was to put (for lack of a better phrase) a more human face onto the two-dimensional Tolkien orc bad guy. For just about anyone who bothers to sit and really read Orkworld, he's succeeded.
Orkworld is loaded with differences from the standard gaming sourcebook. The first and most telling difference is its structure. Many sourcebooks begin with a short teaser story, then progress through the basics of character generation, combat rules, acquisition of gear and weaponry, and eventually meander their way into the real feel of the thing -- the culture, backgrounds, and "flavor text" of the world and its peoples. Not so with Orkworld. The feeling and meaning of "ork" are front-loaded: the first 175 pages are devoted solely to the kinds of information that many gamers flip past to find the rules. Everything from ork jokes to the three kinds of gangrene and how to treat them can be found in this incredible compendium of orkness. It's broken into three sections: "The Caius Journals," "Ork" (called "Culture" in the page headers -- more on that below), and "Stories." Wick uses the space to pull with ork muscles, talk with an ork tongue, and help us beat time with an ork heart.
"Culture" is the heart of Orkworld, and weighs in at seventy pages long. (I've used here the title of the section that appears on every . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: October 6, 2000
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