Ogre Kingdoms

An ogre is an appetite wrapped in a mountain of muscle and bone, and everything else about him is detail. He stands twice the height of a man and weighs as much as several, carries his god before him in the form of his own vast gut, and reckons his worth by what he can cram into it. He is not stupid so much as uninterested in anything he cannot eat, wear, or hit, and he has grown enormous by treating the whole of creation as a larder only briefly out of reach. Where other races raise cities and pen histories, the ogres raise their bellies and remember only their greatest meals.

They were not always so. Long ago the ogres kept a settled kingdom in the far east, until a burning star fell from heaven and struck their heartland, gouging a wound in the earth so vast and so deep that no living creature has ever found its bottom. Half the race was swallowed in an instant; the rest, starving amid the ruin, ate whatever remained to them (beasts, then the dead, then one another), and in that first terrible famine they heard the crater speak. It hungered as they hungered, endlessly and without pity, and they knew it at once for a god. They named it the Great Maw, and they have fed it ever since.

The Faith of the Great Maw

The ogres worship a hole in the world. The Great Maw is a god of pure appetite, and its single commandment is written plainly in every empty stomach: eat, or be eaten. There is no mercy in this creed and no hypocrisy in it either. An ogre prays by feasting, blasphemes by leaving good food, and understands his own death cleanly, as the moment he stops being the diner and becomes the meal. When the tribes gather they cast tribute into lesser maws, the sinkholes and bottomless chasms they hold sacred, and read the tremors of the earth as scripture. The god is always hungry. So, always, are its children.

Tyrants and Butchers

Ogre society is a simple pyramid with the largest ogre sitting on top of it. A Tyrant rules by being bigger, richer, and hungrier than any who might challenge him, his authority measured in the gut-plate of gold and enemy skulls strapped across his belly; beneath him march his Bulls, and above all the tribes looms the Overtyrant in the high halls of the Mountains of Mourn. Set apart from this order are the Butchers, the fat and filthy priests of the Maw, who work gut-magic by swallowing warpstone, live beasts, and worse, then vomiting the god's raw power back upon the foe. A Butcher is feared even by Tyrants, for he alone speaks with the god's own indigestion.

The Way of War

The ogres make war for the oldest reason there is: they are hungry, and someone else has food. Whole tribes hire themselves out as mercenaries across the world, selling their terrible strength to any paymaster who can keep their bellies full, and no wall or shield-line yet built enjoys the sight of an ogre charge. They come at a ground-shaking run, gut-plates lowered, great iron clubs and cleavers swinging, and simply bowl over whatever stands before them, trampling, goring, and swallowing as they go. There is little subtlety in it and no need for any. An ogre army does not besiege a kingdom so much as sit down to eat one, and it rises from the table only when nothing edible is left.