Orkhen Bruush!

The Orkhen

“Our people left the mountains when the Orkhen came out of them.”
An old orc storytellerThe Orkhen appeared a little over six centuries ago in the depths of the mountains: orcs more massive and more savage than their kin, with neither writing nor Braids (the beaded cords in which orcs record their stories), who drove the tribes from their valleys and made the orcs the nomadic people they are today. The orcs believe a sickness is to blame, but in their ancient tongue, the same word means both sickness and curse. The Orkhen pray to a god whose name appears on no Braid, and they get the black powder they carry into war from the goblins, in exchange for who knows what.

The Bruush!

At the head of their charges, the Orkhen send warriors who will never come back, and soldiers have named them after the sound their bracelets make as they catch fire. Each one runs hunched under a barrel of black powder hung with bone and feather fetishes, forearms bound in cloth bracelets soaked in oil, screaming the name of his god as he sets them alight. His only aim is to plunge into the thickest of the enemy ranks before the flame reaches the powder. The only way to stop him is to bring him down from a distance, and a flaming arrow in the barrel blows him up in the middle of his own kind.