Review: Dawn of the Orcs

It's no secret I'm into Orcs. Lyme's Why Orcs? was my favorite post in last year's Lizzies, because it dug through the history of The Orc as a metaphor for industrialized warfare instead of the generic Fantasy Tribal stuff they have going on now. To quote myself:

Orcs are clone troopers.

I love clone troopers.

And now I love orcs.

So when I realized that Lyme had released a GMless RPG about making your own orcs out of silly putty and hair, I was like "Whoa holy shit" and bought it even as Lyme offered me a review copy. That was three-hundred days ago, so I figure it's time to finally give it a review.

Cover art by Simone Tametta. Most of the book's art is in that greebly-sketchy style you associate with The New OSR hotness, but I love this piece in particular because the glowing red eyes really tie the room together.

First, a quick disclaimer: Lyme and I are in a few of the same Discord servers, and I would consider him at the bare minimum a colleague, contemporary, and someone whose work I enjoy. He did offer to send me a review PDF back in the day, I declined because I didn't know when I'd get around to reviewing it, and he was nice enough this time round to send me a physical copy as thanks for singing its praises for the past ten months. All this to say, I'm not so much a paid shill as a rewarded shill.

The Review Part

Dawn of the Orcs is a GM-less game (narrator duty is passed around between players during each chapter) where players take the role of the Council of Sages, the foremost magical minds seeking to save their kingdom from destruction by homegrowing several hundred pounds of lean, mean, fighting machine. Like every council however, there's going to be squabbling and disagreements over just what's been made, with the delightful rule that once a game, you can screw everyone else over to make the decision you want. 

The Orcs themselves are assembled through a list of prompts (how are they made, who are they loyal to, etc) that affects their four stats: Numbers, Loyalty, Brute, and Clever (you'll also be tracking how big and/or little they get). Through the various chapters of the game, the orcs will have to change, through a combination of your meddling and outside influence, because when the Orcs fight they can only use each two-stat combination once. Win the Slaughter of Shrike Forest with Numbers and Loyalty? You can never do that again, fuckos.

The Five Warps of Chapter 2. You'll never be able to get all five, but how many you get is determined  by past performance. Good luuuuuuuuck.

Each of the writing of these Warps is delightful, and you'll be seeing a bunch through both the main chapters and some Bonus Chapters if this is your second or third time around and you want some variety. As the difficulty of the checks keeps climbing higher, so do the stakes, and you're tempted to make more and more drastic decisions, until the war ends one way or the other. At which point you're left with the classic Jurassic Park situation of "We've created these things that were far more complex than we could understand. Now what do we do with them?" 

There is, hypothetically, a good way for this to turn out for everybody, but unless you've been reading ahead and actively working towards it I wouldn't exactly call it likely, which feels fitting. As the game says at the outset, it's a story of war and suffering. 

Much like any good roguelike, there's also a number of bonus chapters at the end so you can randomize future playthroughs of the game. These also come with their own warps, and the writing never dips below evocative and excellent. Finally, as someone who's a sucker for stuff interacting with physical space, there's a whole prebuilt Chronicle you can make that catalogues the journey you took each step of the way!

The size tracker for the Orcs.

As I write this, Dawn of the Orcs still has five days in its Ennies Emporium Backerkit (ending July 16th, 2026). I'd encourage you to back it to get a physical copy. You can also get it digitally on itch for seven bucks. It's easily worth three times as much. My one wish for a future version is an event where some humans get really uncomfortable about wanting orc wives if their size goes too far in either direction. I've seen what my discord posts.