WOW Styled Orc

Orc

In Book #4, Dragon Eye, Sig, Rick, and Grampa Thor land in the middle of an Orc/Dwarf war while traveling the Wizard Express to the Sianchen glacier on border between India and Pakistan.

The first popular appearance of Orcs was in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings series.

Tolkien's work offers up a few different explanations for where orcs came from, but the most popular one, the one featured in the live action films, explains them as a corrupted, evil version of elves. The orc race is seen as a mockery of the higher-minded races of Middle-earth, with Saruman's monstrous Uruk-Hai possibly bei ng a result of orc and human crossbreeding.

The Rings movies depicted Orcs as somewhat human sized, but with skin that appeared to be the result of a bad wall spackling paste applied to cover up their wounds, or to conceal lingering cases of acne. Poor dentition will be a recurring theme.

Orcs are also positioned rather differently from their original Dungeons & Dragons appearances. In contrast with the simian depiction seen most frequently, the earliest drawings and depictions of orcs in D&D were much more pig-like. The creatures' fully elongated snouts were eventually shed, however, though like most orcs, they maintained their porcine tusks. As for how orc society is depicted in Dungeons & Dragons—noble savages or just savages—much of that comes down to the setting, the edition, and the specific tribe.

 Orcs apparently evolved enough that they became fit to star in the World of Warcraft movie. Handsomer? That's a matter of opinion. A female Orc would have a different view than a California teenager. An orthodontist would see any, and all Orcs as a beautiful payment on his/her yacht.

When you begin to examine the etymology of the term orc, a fair amount of linguistic confusion arrives. In the 17th century, when the creatures first made their way to England by way of fairy tales from continental Europe, it was in the form "orke," which, at the time, was used synonymously with "ogre." In the decades since, ogres have been differentiated from orcs as larger creatures with more solitary social structures, but initially they were one in the same—monstrous villains that populated continental fairy tales and myths.

If you keep tracing the term's history, through the French Mother Goose tales, back to the Italian stories that heavily influenced them, you can find what is likely the first appearance of the orc/ogre creature in the work of the Italian fairy tale collector Giambattista Basile. His monster, called huorco, huerco, or uerco, was a massive, tusked beast, which, in its various appearances, ran the gamut from cannibalistic to benevolent.

The original origins of the "orc" term likely come from the Roman god of the underworld, Orcus, who started out as the Etruscan god of the dead.

With orgres and orcs as his folkloric  descendents, he must have been a really beastly looking god, right? Actually, not so much. Modern images of Orcus depict him as a wicked looking demon with horns, but the ancient images show him looking quite human

Unlike Hades, who was the ruler of the underworld, Orcus was specifically a god of death, responsible for punishing evildoers in the afterlife.