Ogres

**Common Knowledge:**

An ogre stands close to nine feet tall, but loses some of that height with a typically stooped posture.  The bloated humanoid form is all slabby muscle and sheets of accumulated fat, typically riddled with scars from a lifetime defined by violence and cruelty.  The dull, blinking eyes on an ogre's face betray a limited intellect and little creativity.  The blurt and growl threats and curses in a clipped and cobbled tongue with some of the features of common, and go to combat with either a found, improvised weapon like a thick tree branch or more likely empty hands.  Their typical fighting instinct is to strike equally sized creatures in the head, or to grab smaller creatures with one hand and twist off their limbs so they can do no mischief before they are eaten.

**Lore DC 10:**

The powerful, brutal ogres that lurk in the deep woods and mountains are known and feared as deadly and violent raiders. Though few in number, the ogres have long established small, nomadic tribes that keep out of sight of the main civilisations.  The language they have, which is a pidgin blurred between the common and giant tongues, betrays hints of their earlier history in which the exiled giants of Icefjell made efforts to adopt these thuggish cousins.  These efforts met with failure, and giants tend to see ogres as failed, bastard children; ogres do not have any cultural memory of their time with the giants, and treat them with the same cowardly, bully attitudes as they would any other species.  They are simple but savage, and in truth, cling to existence, hunted by the far more numerous and powerful armed forces of the vale. Reduced to robbers and thieves, ogres grow nothing and build nothing, instead looking for lone targets or isolated villages to raid and pillage.  They keep no history, and none nothing of their origins, but rumor speaks that long ago, they came through the Fog Gates, and in so doing were reduced to the simple, brutal creatures that are known today.  Popular imagery of ogres suggests that they gleeful, outright cruel monsters who delight in murder, rape and rampage.  Ogres do indeed take all opportunities for violence, but their natural state appears to be brooding, sullen misery; or perhaps confusion.  Lone ogres who wander off from their tribes can be encountered staring at their own reflections in puddles, trying vainly to befriend animals and then killing them when they do not immediately respond with kindness, or even starved to death, cradling the pruned trunk of a humanoid they have certainly killed but for whatever reason, have been unable to eat.

**Lore DC 20:**

Ogres are sophovores primarily and omnivores secondarily - they prefer to eat intelligent creatures, and the more intelligent the better.  Ogres who live long and dine on many sapients find their mental abilities sharper, clearer and more capable of reasoning and remembering.  Inevitably, this path of learning for the more successful ogres leads them eventually to moral quandaries, bigger questions, and difficult choices as they surge through the barrier between 'brutal raider' and 'thoughtful savage'.  Some elder ogres resolve this conflict by developing their own primitive creeds of personal or racial supremacy and becoming an organized menace to the goodly races with their subordinates.  Often enough the creatures that are fortunate enough to have caught and devoured a spellcaster possessing a spellbook, and with the intellect to puzzle out written language, will teach themselves to read and some magical craft.  Ogres whose mental growth leads their thoughts in more laudable moral directions tend to find themselves isolated and unwelcome among their own kind, and almost invariably die alone and confused in the wilderness.  Thus the best of this strange species is typically lost to the devouring maw of unwritten history, and the worst become a scourge that humanoids know only as irredeemably cretins and monsters.