So, was writing my characters background, all the way back to the original goblinization.

For simplicity, I'll reduce names to titles.

Human A is in love with Human B. Human B turns into an Orc. Human A says screw it, and they have kids anyway. 4 kids.

Orcs mature twice as fast as humans. That would put them sexually able around 6.

So in 2022, the first orclets are born.
In 33, Each of the orclets has an average of 8 kids of their own
In 42, after going through the Night of Rage, the orcs are encouraged to have more children, and do, having an average of 16 children each.
in 53, the same trend continues, with an average of 20 children each.
In 63 the trend cools down, and averages 12 each
in 72 it settles around 10 children each.

Human A is around 70 years old in 72, and the proud father of around 1.2 million descendants.

Figure 20 percent go off and travel, 25 percent die, and 5 percent turn out human or other meta.

Still leaves 600k orcs sending him birthday cards.

What is with orks choosing not to multiply like insane? Not because i CAN have children doesn't mean i will have. Sure humans can have children at.. what 12-16 (for female) and every year one-two of them. Does that mean they have 40 children until it is all done?

Orks grow up in a slow world. All their elf/human counterparts are much less mature (at least with their bodies) and they are still forced to keep that same pace (school for example). Sure... a lot of poor kids and sinless just go out to fuck around when they are ten or so... But after they have their first children, bound to a crappy wife and trying to get enough money so they won't starve... the next pregnancy will be resolve with a kick to the stomach.

(Yeah sorry for being so gloomy... but it is damn dystopia shadowrun)

I do believe that's why its called an average.

It just scares me that the society got so bad that families feel they can be the next octo-mom at 11.

Besides, something happened with the Ork population that made their "litters" dwindle. The reason/source of this is currently unknown.

That "cure" from the novel. Yea! No thinking required, haha.

Probably one of the devs got hold of a calculator but you could rationalize it with some set of odd circumstances.

The numbers in the original post are way way off. Orks don't start kicking out 'litters' at age 6.

That's taking something to extreme insane .... well extremes. I think technically a few human females have had children at age 9 but the entire world population doesn't have a kid at age nine, then every 10 months afterwords for the rest of their sexually mature lives.

If you crunch humanity numbers in this nature the numbers get stupid as well. It's a misrepresentation of the setting.

And in the new Runner's companion it does state that the orcs are down to one or two kids, and that the slowdown and change is unknown and not natural. It's artificially caused, but no one knows why/how yet.

Do we have an idea what the SRverse counts as artificial? Or what counts as natural, since that would be a shorter list.

I assumed that they *could* at 6. Much in the same way a girl can give birth at 12 now. Just... really uncommon. Thats why I went with the base age of 10, as that would be equivalent to a human 20.




That part I didn't know. Does it say when this started happening?

Transport 599,970 of them on to the Klingon ship and have a good laugh at their expense.
Problem solved?

If you look at most mammal species which have large numbers of young the average number to live long enough to reproduce tends to be about 2 for 2, by this I mean the odds of any given young surviving to maturity is balanced against the number of young born giving you a net population which varys little based on the provided resources / dangers.

There was alot of orks being born but most of them were dying before they reached maturity.

Given the distopia style of culture for most people in shadowrun the implication of welfare and such would limit any uplift in the maturity rates meaning the average would be nearer to balance but with a pronounced uplift over time possibly with a 4 for 2 in the low to middle classes with a 2 for 2 in the sinless classes.

Population growth would be above human but nothing to silly. we see similar figures when you look at the difference in culture between westen and easten parents most westen or first world populations are actually dropping below the 2 for 2 level into population decline where as it has been seen in some easten parents that the rate is more 4-5 for 2 meaning a net population growth (this growth is only noticable when in a first world setting normally)

There's something to prevent SINner Orks from starting to have a family at 6: Statutory Rape Laws.

That's right, folks! They haven't changed. Just because they're physically mature and have the feelings of your average teenager... It's still Squick for the average SINner. Especially the overly religious types, even if they aren't racist (There are a few.).

SINless Orks, on the other hand... Well, still probably Squick, but they're less likely to have to worry about such things as Law...

Scotty, where are the orks?
"Oh, I took care of them."
Scotty... space? You didn't!
"No, of course not!"

lol

Mesh

Of course you have to factor in, that Orks only live about 30 to 40 years either . .

What cure and which novel are these you are talking about?

The Cure from the Novel with the WereWolf Lone Star Free Agent and the immoral Elf woman who could not remember more than some hours . .
Divided Life or something like that . .
Changeling had a Troll in it who developed his own cure for goblinization too . .

Oh common these are orks...they die by the dozens in ork raiding parties and shadowrunner shootouts.

The UCAS Surgeon General estimates 9 out of 10 Orks die a violent death before the age of 20. The other Ork is too crippled to get involved in all the mayham.

Is that the one that featured the Will O Wisp? (Which got cut in 4th ed)

The biggest thing to remember is that there is a lot more to having children than simply procreating.

The best part about the future is less welfare mothers. So there's definitely the disincentive to have babies. Orks might mature physically faster than humans but they age mentally at about the same rate (at least the fluff and novels suggests so). These aren't like kittens where the mother can just turn them loose after a year. They have to raise them. So producing litter after litter of children will only result in a lot of dead children, which even as callous as some mothers might be, has to be damaging on the psyche. Besides, I can't imagine birthing that many children at once is an event ork women would want to repeat, lol. I'd imagine the abortion rates for second time ork mothers is rather high.

My friends have triplets, and caring for them takes up their entire lives. She was a lawyer and had to give up her practice for it. They definitely don't plan on having any more. Having 19 kids is for bizarre hillbilly couples in Arkansas.

I had forgotten about that one, but good call. Actually I was talking about A Fistful of Data, where supposedly buried beneath tons of rubble and The Crypt, a shadow-community, lies the only vial of the cure of Goblinization. Which, of course, has a fatality rating that is almost off the charts. It is, also, decades old.

Unless they need the free workforce for ekeing out a living in the grubby soil of nowhere, UCAS.



Or extremists who take 'go forth and multiply' waaaaay too literally. In either case, they're generally subsized by either the government or a kooky religious group*.

*all religious groups are kooky. K is for kooky, that good enough for me.

Some are kookier than others. I mean, how many of them believe in species dysphoria?

In my "Universe" the numbers are a little different, but the theory is the same. People who are born Orks and live in Ork community start having kids at @15. The metrics I use for multiple births are 10% are singles, 60% are twins, 20% are triplets and 10% are quads or more. People who are born human and gobinilize or live in Human centric cultures tend to stay with the standard ages for settling down and starting families. They also tend to have smaller families.

To balance it out I tend to have a higher mortality rate for orks. They tend to work more dangerous jobs and are much more likely to be gangers. In my universe I tend to think of them living and working like "Undocumented Workers" in the USA now. Low paying unskilled labor that might move from place to place looking for work. Whatever people say about Hispanics I tend to just port over to Orks (especially ones that are SINless).

As for where they all live? I use them to populate the empty areas of the NAN. Huge ork kibbutz or coops are scattered throughout the land to farm or working at other manually taxing jobs. I also have caravans of migrant workers that are very similar to the Nomads in CP2020.

The long and short of it is that the Ork "breeding problem" is a HUGE reason Humanis exists. People can do the math as well and while it is not as bad as the statistics show, OrKs will still outnumber humans in a short period of time.

I guess my take on it is that race plays a much larger part in my games then most people feel comfortable with though.

Sad to see that tired conservative myth being trotted out here. I guess you think it's okay because it's a fictional minority group we're talking about here. Numerous studies all over the U.S. have failed to find any statistically significant correlation between family size and receipt of welfare benefits. The decision of whether or not to have more children is based on a lot of factors but welfare payments is near the bottom of the list.

The proposed birth rate for orks in SR has always been absurd, even for a "fantasy" game. The Runner's Companion bit about the ork birth rate mysteriously slowing is a badly implemented band-aid. I've seen the "orks are going to take over the world" threads pop up a few times over the last year or two. I propose that instead of repeating the game of "scary Latinos* Orks are going to out-breed us normal folks and take over", perhaps we should all house-rule our game worlds to say that orks are statistically more likely to have twins or triplets and have them mature 25% faster, both mentally and physically, than humans and leave it at that. That's still distinctive enough to have social consequences we can explore, if we chose, in our own Shadowrun games. That's still plenty of incentive for groups like Humanis to spout their vile racist drivel. Hell, given the hatred and vitriol spewed over the tiny phenotypical differences between actual real world ethnic groups, I'm positive that Shadowrun totally low-balls the actual amount of racism that would be directed at orks and other metatypes.

*Insert Pakistanis, Roma, North African Muslims or Turks for the xenophobes in the UK, France, Spain or Germany.

It's not exactly lowballed in the setting; GM's by and large just don't bring it to the forefront of the games. This ties into the 'humans are underpowered at chargen' debate that was going on in another thread.

Why don't they bring it up? Who knows? Maybe they don't want it as part of their game. Maybe they feel uncomfortable using racist overtones, coming from a society preaching acceptance. Maybe it gets in the way of more dakka. It's certainly there, and is something I recently started trying to explore in my games by using Humanis for something other than pinkskin mooks.

The Scary White Supremacists are not the one with Swaztika tatoos on their heads.

They're the ones in business suits, without any tatoos.

Indeedy. The guys with the torches, you can turn the fire hose on them.

The guys with the checkbooks, they're a little harder to ferret out since the hose just rains back down on you from that high.

I see this is as being one of the MAJOR pillars of SR that has been "sanitized" in more recent versions of the game. In my mind the quintessential element of all cyberpunk is "Us vs. Them". And there is just not enough hate, fear and loathing in the more recent versions. It makes things come off as cartoony. Elves are dwarfs are hated because they live for so long. Orks and trolls are feared for their strength and size. Humans are feared becasue they have the political power and numbers (for now).

They have no good reason to hate corporations in the new version. The old reasons are just not good enough and we have no new good ones.

Race has washed out because the game is now PG-13 instead of R. It is not politically correct and not enough people want it in their game.

Rich vs. poor has kind of fallen out of favor for some reason. I think that it has to do with power levels. At the proper level of poverty the PCs have to much power. Money is too readily available.

I'm thinking it has to do with SR4 being the most "kid-friendly" version of the game to date. I once played a Japanese ex-Corp street sam and the players had a REAL hard time with him being an out and out bigot. (Others were playing Metas so I wasn't a full blown raciest as the game would have suffered.) I ended up having to retire him because it made the other players uncomfortable.

The last Ork I played got Rodney King'd on a traffic stop when he wasn't even driving. That was a bit before 4A came out - like I said, the racism is there but it may just be we as players and GM's are uncomfortable portraying it.

Ok ignoring the argument over conservative daydreams. This is a good point, I have a few kids at home and if the wife had a littter of 4 at a time we'd have 8 preschoolers. Now right theres your birth control, after a point it becomes impossible to parent dozens of children. Even considering a large extended family to help, your reach a point of diminishing returns.

Maybe thats why orks have a shorter lifespan its all the screaming kids and lack of sleep.

Or'zet-American rights!

And well he should..
Dirty Ork.

I'm running a Lagos street game, and the pcs are all playing humans. They live in the Z-zone surrounding Lagos, in semi-permanent shantytown style buildings. He's never even really seen other Metahumans. Orks, and trolls are known to live in their own sections, and there is active raiding into both territories. I'm playing up the African Extreme Racism, but with a twist. Because VITAS I had a 75% kill rate in Africa, and VITAS II had a 30%-40% kill rate. The old tribal rivalries have mostly died. But only to be replaced with meta-human hatred on one hand, and fear of Foreigners on the other.

Another small thing... I've read though all the editions of SR.. and I don't remember ANY of them saying an orc started breeding at 6. Now.. it's been years in some cases since I've read the earlier editions but if memory serves the orcs become 'sexually mature' around 12 or 13. And they enter 'old age" in their 30s. They surely aren't breeding out dozens of kids before they enter kindergarten.

Another point is that many if not 'most' orcs are sinless. They don't have sin's to BE on walefare so they WOULD have to foot the bill to feed all of their children on their own, and most orcs are from lower socio-economic standings as well. In short. They're poor and can't afford these geometric growing clans of mouths to feed. Much less when they're children that can't even afford to feed themselves.

If you look at it as purely a math equation it seems scary and astronomical.

but much like humans don't breed every 10 months once they hit 14 or 15, Orcs wouldn't either. Taking it all to that extreme is breakin' the common sense rule. In my games when you break the common sense rule you get hit with the rule book. TWAP!

It imply s recently as in the last 10 to 20 years I think. It's not long or detailed at all. It's like two sentences tossed out, saying that the litters are no longer being born and that there's no natural cause for it, so it must be artificial but noone knows how or why.

Poof. On to the next thing.

People are putting out a lot of possible reasons but I think Arcams' razor applies here. The writers probably got tired of hearing people bitch about it being some racist thing and 'fixed' it to shut people up.

Welfare transcends racial type. You'd do well not to accuse people of being racist, since you're the only racist here tying the idea of welfare to a specific racial group. I'll avoid picking apart your amateur analysis as it is well outside the confines of this forum's subject matter and you should have kept yours to yourself in the first place.

Oh, it's amateur night all right. I'd like you to point out precisely where, in the paragraph where I was refuting your provably false claim of welfare recipients having children to receive more benefits, that I tied welfare to a particular ethnicity. What, you can't find it? That's right because I didn't mention a particular ethnic group until the entirely different paragraph where I was using Latinos as a real-world metaphor for the fear of a minority of humans in the Shadowrun world of being out-reproduced by orks. I can make this analogy because I myself have witnessed pundits on national news shows warning of the Catholic Latino masses who eschew birth control and will populate the United States with their numerous children. I'm not making that up.

You think you can get away with calling me a racist by connecting two paragraphs on two different topics? You should have kept your bullshit crack about welfare mothers to yourself in the first place. I will not stand by and let people get away with repeating false damaging stereotypes like that.

You, on the other hand, by opening your statement on rapid ork breeding with your comment about welfare mothers *did* ,by inference, tie that statement directly to a fictional racial group. I did not call you a racist and no amount of cutting sentences out of my overall post is going to show that I did.

You're not going to pick apart my analysis because you're going to lose. You want me to start linking the studies and statistics that refute your welfare mother claim? You're right, it's outside the subject matter of this forum, which is why you shouldn't have said it in the first place. Now I suggest you back off from this topic before you get yourself banned for *actually* calling people racists.

Fixed it for you. Religion isn't need for kookyness just being human works 100% of the time.

As this thread now shows, sadly.

Yeah I ran a mercanary game in Afirca I had to can it as one or two players where really uncomfterable with it. I played it as it is now but with more racial tension due to metas. Some of my player enjoyed it the moral questions and the fact we all know we where just RPing. The other where too uncomfterable even though I warmed them at start up. I mean ercs are hired for ethinic clesning now do you really thing more racal tenstion wouldn't add to it. I mean it's not liek ou can work the other side in some of those cases as they just want the cleanse the one wanting to cleanse them.

I have them more moraly sturdy merc jobs but not enough. They had to make hard choices about who to get paid by and what for. Helping a corp heavy hand some resources or helping a nation fight off another all over ethnic issues. I also played on the impact of their actions. How hopeless tryign to fix the area with violence was.

Let the moderators do the moderating, that's why we are here. While I am discussing moderation, let me quote the terms of service and highlight a few of my favorite passages.



To be quite clear, I'm sure that our members who are hillbillies, who have large families, who are from Arkansas and who are conservatives are all pretty insulted by the attacks in several of the posts.

*blink blink* ookaayy . .

Or perhaps not. In any case.... The posts were definitely getting a little heated.

Well, some posters. I was personally all about the Sesame Street pun.

I truly think the portrayal (or lack thereof) of racism by metatype in Shadowrun is a problem rooted in sociology. It's not the systems, its the people running and playing that system. We see players getting uncomfortable when its in their face (which I hope is a positive sign about equality and all that jazz) and I think that's also translating to GM's not wanting to run it until you find those who have no qualms.

It certainly evolves the arc into a hooding campaign at times.

the current focus seems to be more
Leverage, the Italian Job..
Bad people doing 'good'

or a pink mohawk MadMaxx thing going on.

I stand corrected.

Oh shit. I mean, uh, sorry?

I have an evolving subplot about Ork rights with one of my tabletop campaign players that is getting pretty deep. They are currently in Vladivostok, where the state of the rights of SINless orks resembles some of the worst examples from history for indentured servitude/slavery/lack of rights. The protagonist player in this plot is an ork runner who gets involved in the Ork underground in every city he travels.

Agreed. My group, despite being all elves, are all militantly anti-racist anti-misogynist and take every opportunity to give the purveyors of intolerance what-for. It's part of the escapism and it is explicitly tied to their personal beliefs. They can play a character in a fictional dystopia where they have the personal resources to take a stand. Not a very convincing stand, being one small group of shadowrunners, no matter how personally bad-assed. I can understand that not everyone might want to explore the racism theme in SR by having their characters fighting it. I don't claim to understand the appeal of playing an overtly racist character but I fully support it if its in the service of telling a tale of redemption or as part of a cautionary tale, or other similar archetypes.