Building a Picture

The notion is to begin with a single orc, or any humanoid, and see its place in the world.  The party encounters this one orc while afield in the wilderness; it flees, and before the party can take hold of it, the orc rejoins the war party of which it's a part.  This group of "braves," to borrow the Native American term, is an advanced group that is scouting out an area ahead of their clan, a group of 20-50 orcs living as hunter gatherers or perhaps herders.

It's hard to see numbers larger than this; for example, we might have a vast territory that has comparable numbers to various human kingdoms, say 200,000.  How we get our minds around this relates to how we organize this number.  For example, we can easily grasp the clan described above.  Suppose we imagine 3-6 such clans, which would be somewhere between 60 and 300 people.  That is not such a large number; most of us have gone to school with populations larger than this.  We can give this number a name: let's call it a tribe.  That cognomen is often given to much larger groups, but in lieu of another label, for the present the name is a convenience.

The tribe would be led by a chieftain, who would have several sub-chiefs in his or her counsel.  Each tribe would have a number of war parties, each made of different clans, who would work in unison when the tribe was gathered together -- which might only be a certain times of the year.  Usually, when the tribe did meet, it would stay in one place; perhaps to winter the coldest season or to take advantage of a yearly food supply, like thousands of birds returning to roost near the seashore or a salmon run.  In such cases, there would be so much food that the tribe might spend a month gathering and feasting, before breaking apart into its separate clans again.

More rarely, 3-18 tribes would gather together in "chiefdoms."  This might happen yearly or it might happen only when a new senior chief needed to be chosen from the lesser chiefs of the tribe.  A chiefdom may be tiny -- conceivably only 180 persons -- yet it might be huge, as many as 5,400 persons, enough to launch a small military force out of its combined war parties.  Such meetings would be significant moments in a single orc's memory; they would remember each one and who was named the chieftain; the calendar would be drawn upon such meetings, described as the year when so-and-so fight that guy to become the great chieftain of our 12 tribes.  That sort of thing.  The reader can see how this helps a lone orc find his or her place in the world.

This is still far short of a really vast number of orcs.  For that, we have to imagine each chiefdom occupying a wide territory; the hundreds of miles along a particular river, or a single wide plain around a body of water dozens of miles across.  What we need do is assemble 2-12 chiefdoms together into a "nation" - a group with between 360 and 64,800.  That former number seems far too small; but I rush to point out that the odds against rolling so many 1s to determine the size of a nation is as tiny as the nation itself.  Also, there were many nations like this throughout the Americas before the Europeans; a nation is not necessarily determined by number, but by the land it occupies and how much food that land yields.  9 clans, 6 tribes and 2 chiefdoms might very well comprise a single entity.  Each of the terms used here are mutable, intentionally so.  Just as it is intended that the same title -- "chief" -- can be used to describe the leader of a tribe, a chiefdom or a whole nation.  To such peoples, organized in a culture that is more fundamentally "of the land," the title of the leader is less important than who the leader actually is.

I feel that by dividing up a kingdom of 200,000 this way, we can easily imagine it as "the fourteen nations" comprising one "people."  On a map, we can arbitrarily draw lines along the geographical features of our choosing, deciding that this nation occupies these forests, and that shore, and this river basin.  Then, if we want to go further, we can zoom in to create a map of chiefdoms -- and give each the characteristics we like.  This one is warlike, that is not; this is agricultural, these others are herders; this chiefdom has an arrangement with the nearby humans; this one doesn't.

By parcelling out the organization, we are dealing with much smaller numbers; and yet we are still able to envision a single orc, or a small group, and see how they fit into the much larger picture.