RPGaDay 2023 #15 Favourite Con MODULE / ONE-SHOT

When I was a regular con-goer (a state of affairs I dearly miss), I ran games and played games and I've discussed just about everything on this blog.

I think the thing I want to talk about this time was the session that Kris Newton ran of The Great Ork Gods. It didn't happen at a con, which means that I haven't written about it here, so this is a new story whether you're just joining us or not.

Kris, my future wife, and our friends David and Jordan were a pretty regular gaming group for a while. I kept trying to run Exalted, and we had some fun with short campaigns, but if I didn't have anything to run that week, Kris often had stuff that he wanted to try and we would play lots of little one-shots here and there.

One of the games was The Great Ork Gods. The mechanics are based on the idea that the Gods that rule every aspect of Ork life hate the Orks. The game's stats are based on how much each Ork God hates each individual Ork and players will also take on the role of the Ork Gods, setting difficulties for various tasks.

This session opened with a fairly standard "Orks raid human village" scenario and we had some fin being Orky for a while.

Then the tarrasque appeared. For those not in the know, the tarrasque was a D&D monster that is supposed to be the most powerful, scary and mythic monster in the whole Monster Manual. Sort of a D&D version of Godzilla.

At one point in this conflict, an elf shows up to face the monster. But it's not just any elf. It bears the trademark halo of a Player Character! (We had something of a running joke about the "Halo of PC-ness" that lets other PCs identify who is a fellow PC and therefore implicitly trustworthy, even on first meeting.)

While even the might of a Player Character and a couple of Orks couldn't truly defeat the terrasque, we did manage to drive it off. Though David's Ork had a spoon as a signature weapon and he managed to use it to scoop out the creature's enormous testicles.

I've thought about running a game of it recently, but with all of the discussions in the time in-between now and then about the presentation of orcs in gaming, I would want to do some rethinking. One idea would be to have the Orks want and try to be nice, but since the Great Ork Gods hate them, every effort at niceness is thwarted.