Honorable Orcs came from a Storytellers collaboration with Dice Will Roll, who brought me into a Pathfinder campaign built around an orc community as the main faction rather than an enemy group. That distinction was the whole brief.
Most requests that involve orc music want something aggressive and threatening — heavy percussion, low brass, that kind of thing. Dice Will Roll wanted the opposite: music that took the orcs seriously as a culture, with pride and grief and community rather than just menace. That’s a more interesting starting point.
The five tracks on the album cover the range of situations a campaign like this creates: a heroic chase and pursuit theme, a character theme built around quiet sadness that builds to something triumphant, celebratory music for villages and gatherings, a slower travel cue for the quieter parts of a session, and something darker for the undead threats that appear later in the story.
“The Noble Orc” is probably the track that says the most about the direction of the whole album. It doesn’t start strong — it starts careful, almost tentative, and the emotional weight comes later. That felt right for a character who’s had to earn respect rather than command it.
Live players were part of this recording as well, which helps the orchestral writing land with more weight than it would otherwise.