if you want to live to die in a different battle then you have to stay clean
This also suggests that orcs have some of the best healers and physicians in the world, and they will even make any resulting scars look badass as hell, free of charge.
yes!! I was actually gonna do a continuation of this post regarding that
Somewhat tangential brainstorm since this tag stood out to me:
#how are u supposed to fight if youre very dead
Necromancy, obviously, but there are at least two ways of looking at it:
1) Necromancy is great because you can keep fighting after you die, and thus would be encouraged among orcish society.
2) Necromancy is not good enough because you’re literally a brain-dead zombie, and where’s the fun in that?
A possible middle route would be reanimating shamed and disgraced orcs, since they never did anything worthwhile in life so maybe they can do something worthwhile in death and freeing up other able-bodied orcs for war. Obviously, such undead orcs would be used very carefully or limited to fully-scrubbed skeletons because of the disease risks.
If necromancy was acceptable, then orcs would have some of the best necromancers in the world, and if retaining enough self-awareness to continue being an honorable warrior was a concern, then orcish necromancy would have a lot of useful techniques for creating intelligent or semi-sapient undead. Even unintelligent orcish-made undead would some measure of innate understanding of martial honor.
I imagine that this would be a topic of considerable debate and controversy among orcs and really would depend on which orcish society you ask.
you are so right
1) This SERIOUSLY reminds me of Vikings.
2) Orcs who died dishonorably being burned instead of buried, to kill whatever germs killed them. Reanimated skeletons are charred black. They are used for harvesting crops, which doesn’t require too much ability to think (if it looks like this pick it if it looks like that leave it there). As they walk the fields, their blackened bones flake and leave behind black bone dust, fertilizing the crops. Their job is done when the skeleton disintegrates. They have fed the clan, and regained their honor.
no but seriously I still get chills thinking about turning off my headlamp in the cave and The Hand That I Did Not Actually See, and it’s been twelve years since it happened
it’s such an unreal experience
like
you turn off your light in a cave and wave your hand in front of your face
and
you can see this shadowy thing moving in the black space where your hand is
it looks like the same shadowy thing you would see in your room at night if you waved your hand in front of your face, it’s there and vaguely hand-shaped, and your brain recognizes it as your hand because your brain is aware of where your hand is and what it is doing
But You Are Not Seeing Anything
Inside a cave, there is No Light. No matter how far your pupils spread, there is no light for them to draw in, no light to put an image on your retina.
But your brain just Fucking Assumes that because it knows where your hand is and what it is doing, clearly it can see it.
So it creates a shadowy thing for your eyes to be seeing.
Brain is like “there’s a hand there”
Eyes are like “yup sure thing brain I can totally see it”
Brain is like “nice”
but there is no hand, you cannot see the hand, you are seeing a literal actual hallucination in the cave because your brain thinks it knows best
Caves are awesome, but also terrifying. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
we once went spelunking, and a our guide said that once he was in a cave with a stream, so he could hear running water, and his brain was like ‘oh, running water? that means there must be Ducks out there’. and he saw like…low light shadows of ducks. that his brain just Put There.
As a cave guide: we call that ‘cave blindness’! True darkness absolutely wigs your brain out – we’re such visual creatures that after a while our brain throws a hissy after not seeing anything. Sensory deprivation is a very real kind of torture. We have a huge, deep cave system at work and there are a lot of places where you’re hundreds of meters in solid rock in this tiny, dark, still space.
I like to turn my torch off, sit down with my back against the wall, and wait to see how long it takes before I start seeing things or feeling like the ground is moving, or hearing things. Because I know I’m not – I’m in complete darkness, utter silence, sitting in rock that hasn’t moved in hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Proof that brains are Ridiculous and over-react to a lot of stuff!
I want to add to this that people who lose their hearing as adults have reported hearing music “being played loudly from somewhere”, and other auditory hallucinations, bc the brain will just panic and put your brain’s ipod on *fucking shuffle* if it’s not getting any input
