Way-Out "Wednesday": ORX

Welcome to this special Thursday edition of Way-Out Wednesday! This week I'm returning to RPGs, to highlight a RPG like very little else on the market—ORX, the roleplaying-game about... orcs.

In ORX, you play a member of the most maligned, beaten-up, prejudiced-against and often-slaughtered race in all of fantasy. Your life will be—as the game's tagline puts it—"Nasty, Brutish and Short" (originally a quote from Hobbes' Leviathan, applying to human life, but more than applicable here).

The game is advertised as being able to be both humourous and nasty as well as dark and gritty—and, of course, always vulgar. Unlike most RPGs, it's very much a competition, and not just between the players and the GM. You're in it to get your fellow "man," other PCs, and backstabbing is the word of the day. It can be played as an action game, as a political satire, as a black comedy, or a dreary gothic game, depending on what you want.

Also unlike most indie RPGs, there is no effort in this game to curtail the excessive dice-rolling (think Dogs in the Vineyards' cardinal rule: "roll the dice or say yes"). There is, in fact, the exact opposite, one of the main precepts of the game being "Always Roll The Dice. No Matter What." No fudging here.

You build your character through three main stats—Brute, Nasty and Grok—as well as three "descriptors," short statements about the character that are somewhat like Aspects in Spirit of the Century but more like specialties in the Storyteller system of the World of Darkness (since they give you extra dice when they are relevant).

Another important aspect of ORX is Fate. On any roll one can borrow dice from the "Fate Pool," a side pool of dice controlled by the GM, and gets a free descriptor but also gets a Fate point. This is dangerous because at certain points of the game the GM can roll a die, and if it turns up lower than a particular orc's Fate score, that orc gets squished. The only way to lower your Fate score is by collecting Loot, which cancels it out. Nasty, Brutish and Short indeed: get the Loot as fast as you can before you die, use Fate Pool dice to better succeed at obtaining Loot, thereby increasing your chance of dying unless you can get more Loot.

There's more—totally unique dice mechanics, bizarre humour at every turn, an elaborate Stakes system—but you should really just read the thing. It's a very different kind of RPG, one that Gamerati described as "a complicated and amusing dice game with a narrative sheath wrapped around that," one in which you engage in "a little metagaming strategy in order to produce an interesting tragi-comic tale." For a game about orcs, did you really expect a long, overblown character development-focused extravaganza anyway?

The indie game whose oddities make it the perfect antidote to most other indie games—ORX, your indie game of the week!