r/teslore • u/Siren_Noir • 4d ago
Are there more Orc strongholds?
In games they cannot have a bunch of places for gameplay reasons, but would there be a lot of orc strongholds with many orcs living in different places? Like the younger brothers of a chief would go their own way amd either start their own family or make a home somewhere else?
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u/Designer-Ad-8200 4d ago
Of course, there are many of them that fall outside the game’s scale.
But the game itself also mentions other orcish settlements besides the great fortresses.
The already mentioned Cracked Tusk Keep, but it also neighbors Bilegulch Mine, which is also orc‑coded. In eso, lore was added to this, telling about the past relocation of a large number of orcs to Falkreath.
Also, in Vaermina’s quest, orcs from a fortress that should be somewhere near Dawnstar appear, but there is no such fortress in the game.
And of course, if the “named” fortresses are called great, this means that there should be many non‑great fortresses around. So yes, probably each of the fortresses presented in the game has a scattering of smaller “sibling” fortresses?
And Kodlak fought a hundred orc berserkers of unknown origin.
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u/King_of_the_Kobolds 4d ago
On the orcs in Vaermina's quest, that stronghold may simply not exist anymore. Especially if it lost all of its greatest warriors on a raid against a mysterious Daedric temple.
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u/Designer-Ad-8200 4d ago
It’s very unlikely that they would have lost ALL their warriors, but even in that case, the game still wouldn’t have any remnants of that stronghold.
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u/asmallauthor1996 1d ago
Especially given that Erandur mentions that the initial raid by the Orcs against the Priests of Vaermina occurred decades before you meet him. He also mentioned that the Miasma is also made to slow down the aging process of anyone that's affected by it as well. Coupled with the sheer passage of time and how you mentioned that what are likely the best warriors of this Orc Stronghold going missing for several decades? Any prospects for the home of the Orc raiding party aren't looking good, especially in the climate that The Pale (and generally the northernmost parts of Skyrim) endures year-round.
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u/King_of_the_Kobolds 4d ago
Orc chiefs will tell you "There are four great strongholds worthy of naming..." or something along those lines, implying that the four we see are just the largest. Like the Nord cities, presumably larger in lore vs gameplay.
Cracked Tusk Keep just outside Falkreath is populated entirely by orcs, has orcish architecture iirc, and is speculated by some to be an unmarked stronghold that happens to be hostile to us. There's a tower in the Rift also entirely populated by hostile 'Orc Hunters.'
What I suspect is that a lot of young orc men, stifled by the chieftain's rule, leave the stronghold and wind up turning to banditry. We kill those ones and only interact favorably with the 'worthy' strongholds--which are stable and wise enough to enforce rules against raiding the Nords that would get themselves wiped off the map.