Why not a people with a mix of cultures and history, diverse and broad?
This. Seriously. It's like the idea that any race other than human being polycultural, or any non-human-dominated culture being polyracial, is somehow impossible to imagine.
So what are Orks in your games?
Well, I spell it with a c. But orcs are one of the three primary racial groups of the arid Tarrakhuna, the other two being elves (who mostly come from the southern temperate forests) and humans. Two millennia ago, when the Genie-Rajahs departed(/were driven out of) the mortal world for Jinnistan, the nomad tribes united together as part of that effort, and orcs were quite populous among them. The majority of them chose to remain part of the nomad tribes, rather than settling the genie-built cities. As a result, orcs are more commonly found among the tribes, but plenty of city-dwellers are also orcs. (It is a
grave insult in the Tarrakhuna to refer to nomads as "barbarians"--that term is used for the horse-riders that live in the steppe on the other side of the eastern mountains, and even then, you probably shouldn't use it within earshot of them.)
Dwarves mostly live in the mountains and steppe to the east. Dragonborn are uncommon but still present, some native to the southern "elf-forests," others immigrants from Yuxia on the far side of the Sapphire Sea (which is actually a Pacific-sized ocean dotted with islands.)
One notable tribe of orcs (related to one of the on-hiatus PCs) has specifically settled down in Al-Rakkah and is striving to fully integrate into city life, because their current matriarch (hiatus PC's grandmother) thinks nomad life kinda sucks and that settling down would be better for the tribe. There are also quite a few orcs among the Safiqi priesthood, because
unlike the vast majority of cities of the Tarrakhuna, the religious capital, Kafer-Naum, was built purely by mortal hands, no genies involved. (It is, in fact, the
first city built purely by mortals in this region.)
Not gonna lie, I always liked.the Warhammer 3/World of Warcraft approach to them. So my Orcs are usually based on that with some light sprinkling of Klingon.
Yeah, I take heavy inspiration from WoW, though if there's any Klingon influence, it's purely through the lens of Worf, not the more typical Klingons (who are...shall we say, a lot less honorable than they want people to believe.)
