[h2][centre][colour=peru]The Hogtusk Tribe - Turn 1[/colour][/centre][/h2]

Rog-mohog sat next to a heap of broken sticks open which laid a sad, mouldy cowhide. His unibrow hung low with annoyance over his small eyes and between his underbitten jaws his molars were making quick work of a dry, old slab of yesterday’s pork tah-tah. His teeth struck a particularly stubborn stretch of sinew and the ogre made a dry “pfft” with his lips before collecting the string in a ball of phlegm and spitting it out on the scalp of the knocked-out-cold Oogor lying bloody face down on the ground beside him.

“Y’know,” Rog-mohog mumbled to the unconscious, in-desperate-need-of-medical-aid Oogor, “you make for a terribull bloomin’, wossname, builda’. Don’t botha’ askin’ for your reward, ye git.” He got to his feet, planted an additional kick in the side of Oogor’s bruised rib cage and strolled down towards the village below. He had smelt it in the air: The fires of sacrifice had been lit at the foot of Big Rock. Rog-mohog had an offering to attend to.

The crude altar to the great Boar Spirit already had amassed a great gathering. All three clans were represented - wait, no, only two were. The chieftain stopped midway through the crowd, confusing the others in front of him who were very much used to the familiar sensation of Rog-mohog trampling down the unfortunate in his path. The chieftain squinted his eyes, staring hard out over the crowd and causing several sketchy-looking individuals to dive for cover behind their comrades.

“OI!” the chieftain suddenly boomed, inciting some fearful squeals. “Where’s the bloomin’ Ox clan at?!”

There was a collective shrug. From the altar came a frail voice, “whot he say?!” Rog-mohog turned to look upon the decrepit, feeble form of shaman Wololo whose torso seemed to inch closer to his feet with every passing day. The message was passed on through the crowd towards the elder, then repeated four times next to the elder’s ear before it finally reached its intended audience.

“Ooooooh, the Ox clan!” the shaman Wololo finally said and the crowd sighed in relief. “They’s out lookin’ for more, wossname, oxen.”

Chatter spread through the crowd like wildfire. The chieftain sent it running for the hills with a loud “HUUUUHN?!” followed by: “Why’s they goin’ out [b]now[/b]?! Roight before a bloomin’ offerin’?!”

Wololo did his best to shrug. “They boss said they found some cows up norf. Wanted to get’um before they went off.”

Rog-mohog growled a groan and continued through the crowd towards the altar, satisfying the unfortunate before him by ending the uncanny pause in their suffering. Once at the altar, the chieftain beckoned in no particular direction and desperate pig squeals soon drowned out all other sounds. Rog-mohog’s wife, Porky, carried the boar-to-be-offered by one hind leg and handed it to her husband, offering him an airborne ‘mwah~~’ with her free hand. The chieftain took the pig, ignored the kiss and slammed the pig down on the altar with such force that the beast was knocked out cold, and probably severely broken. He then deposited it on the altar and nodded at the shaman. Wololo feebly nodded back and turned towards the altar with the revolution speed of the galaxy. He grabbed the shard sacrificial stone and raised it to the sky, shouting:

“OH, GREAT BOAR SPIRIT! We offa’ you this here piggy so that you can eat nice ‘n proppa’ and make sure we do it too. That a deal?!”

Wololo then poked feebly at the boarskin before an assistant came over and helped him cut into the heart. There was a pause, one in which most of the ogres liked to believe the spirit was answering the shaman in his mind or something similar. Statistically speaking, however, there was always those among them that was convinced the whole spirit shebang was just a scam to get them to give up a hog once a month. However, ever since Ub-lub the Herritik had invited the chieftains of old to a civilised debate about the flaws in their religion (chief among which was that they offered boar meat to a boar god), and subsequently met the convincing counter-argument known as “fyst, club ‘n deff”, few dared speak up about the matter. After enough time had passed, the shaman took another afternoon to turn back to the chieftain and offer him a toothless smile.

“The Boar Spirit’s happy to help,” the shaman Wololo assured. The chieftain nodded.

“Roight, what’s it told to do?”

The shaman tugged at the boar’s bloody heart inside the bloody carcass, and the assistant once more dutifully helped the elder out by ripping the heart out, cutting it into neat little pieces and offering them to Wololo. The elder took one and put it in his mouth. It was not as dramatic as the method of his youth, where every offering had been a tutorial in how to butcher one’s enemies in the most brutal of ways, but modern problems required modern solutions. He did his best to chew the meat to get all of that sweet spiritual knowledge out of it, but his dry gums would have more luck piercing stone than to chew apart raw, gooey boar meat. Eventually, he just swallowed and hummed fraily. 

“I fhink…” he started. The ogres leaned in to listen. “I fhink the Boar Spirit wants us to build better pens for ‘um.”

Porky peeked out from behind Rog-mohog. “Whot pens?”

“‘Xactly,” Wololo confirmed. 

Rog-mohog knew not to ignore the spirits’ commands - doing so wasn’t very smart, and it was a known truth among ogrekind that they weren’t particularly smart, or at least, they weren’t the smartest. So humble were they that they understood this - truly, they did. They were pretty high up there, naturally, but even ogres had to draw the line somewhere. Rog-mohog understood this perhaps best of all - that’s what made him the smartest. 

Naturally, therefore, the only smart thing to do was to do as the Boar Spirit said!

“We build pens, then,” the chieftain commanded to the sound of a collective groan from the crowds.

“Why’s we gotta do thaaaaat?!” came a complaint from the back.

“Worked all week on me hut, I did, ‘n now we’s gotta made pens ‘n boggers,” came another.

“We get free lunch, roight?”

Rog-mohog growled and the complaints quieted down. When it came to ruling ogres, the general rule was that strength was the key to power, and strength comes in many shapes and forms. It wasn’t that Rog-mohog was particularly mighty; plenty of ogres outsized and outweighed him. Rog-mohog wasn’t necessarily particularly wealthy, either; he had a number of boars, yes, but his herd size paled in comparison to ogres like Crunch.

No, what Rog-mohog had in terms of legitimacy was a mind like his father’s. Therefore, none dared oppose him. Most ogres knew to punch and kick, but someone titled ‘the Brainy’ was bound to know a third attack - and who could defend against such a secret technique? 

So sure, infighting was certainly common in the tribe, but only a small, teeny, tiny minority dared directly speak threats and challenge the big boss himself. Rog-mohog knew this well, and milked it for all it was worth.

“To answer all your queshuns,” the chieftain started and walked over to the first who had complained. It was a lady, from the goat clan judging from the sour stink of old milk and the horned ram skull dangling from a dry sinew necklace about her neck. She was a head taller than him, but shrunk to half the chieftain’s size as he approached. Rog-mohog stared her a few feet further down. Then, he grabbed her by the thick fur around her neck, destabilised her and used her own weight to toss her over his leg, sending her tumbling into a nearby tent, bowling down six others in the process. The chieftain kicked a cloud of dust in her direction and spat, “GET TO BLOOMIN’ WORK, YE LAZY GITS!”

None dared speak up, for the chieftain’s word formed a lid on the conversation so heavy that ‘up’ became a fictional direction. With hung heads, the ogres began to gather bone, sticks, tall grass, rocks - whatever could be used to made fences and walls. They begun to dig away at the surface of the steppe around their camp with some aid from the shovel-nosed pigs - it was necessary to keep sufficient mud for the pigs to wallow in when it got hot. Ogres went over to the nearby brooke running down the mountainside, gathered water in their hands, lost half of it on the way back, and dropped it on the exposed clay to create mud. They stomped and trampled the wet mix, and the boars rolled around in ecstacy. 

The fences themselves were of shoddy quality, however, and even blind pigs could easily escape them. As it turned out, half the workforce had abandoned the project before it even started, leaving the other half to start it alone, which subsequently caused another quarter to leave out of sheer belief that their dwindled number would never ever finish the project - ever. Now Rog-mohog was annoyed - angry, even - and rounded up all the workers again. This next time, however, he divided them into work teams and gave one on each team a club each.

“Roight,” he told the clubbers as they admired their crude weapons. “I’s gunna give you a job now, aight. When the others start workin, you-- Crumpus, [i]Crumpus[/i]! Pay attenshun!”

The ogre known as Crumpus stopped watching the neat little dung beetles on the ground and stood back up. “Sorry.”

The chieftain sighed. “Roight! When others start workin’, you keep an eye on ‘um. If they stop workin’, you smack ‘um ‘ard ‘n good. Got it?”

The ogres exchanged malicious grins and patted their palms with their clubs. The chieftain nodded in approval. “Good. You’s my taskmasters - someone do somefin’ bad at work, you smack ‘em ‘ard so they don’t do it again.”

“Roight!” the taskmasters yelled and stormed off towards the pens-in-production. Rog-mohog watched them with pride in his chest, then light disappointment as one of them already begun to hammer away at someone who actually had been doing their job, only that the job consisted of sitting still to tie sinews to the bone fences.

Oh, well, at least the work was moving along smoothly.

[hider=Actions!]
X) Offer a sacrifice to the Boar Spirit for guidance. Among other things, the spirit tells them to build pig pens.
A) Improve food: The Ox clan completely ignored the sacrifice to the Boar Spirit and went north to tame some oxen, much to the disapproval of the chieftain.
C+X) Improve infrastructure: Start building pig pens. Fail miserably because ogres are terrible at focusing on things for very long. Start over again by introducing a taskmaster force to police those who take break. ???. Profit.
[/hider]