Orcs Plus

Version Number 2.9.02 (Burn the Hive).
Released on 14/03/2026 (dd/mm/yyyy).

Orcs Plus is a major expansion to the Orc race in Shadows of Forbidden Gods, inspired by the fantastic Deep Ones Plus mod. It makes numerous changes to the base game’s code, giving orcs more opportunities to gain and spend gold, granting new armies, agents, and orc cultures (custom religions).

Orcs Plus is completely dependent on the Community Library to operate. The Community Library must be enabled, and must be before (above), Orcs Plus in the mod load order. Orcs Plus will error if the Community Library is not enabled.

The order in which a mod finishes loading is not deterministic. Later mods can finish loading before earlier ones in some cases.
To minimise the chance of Mod Load Errors for dependent mods, place them as far from the Community Library as possible (as low in the mod load order as you can).

Orcs Plus introduces two new orc agents; Orc Elders and Orcs Spirit Callers.

• Orc Elders function as Acolytes for the orc cultures, performing many roles both within their boarders, and operating as diplomats with nearby human kingdoms.
• Orc Spirit Callers are powerful necromancers, which spawn from mages camps. They seek to increase their knowledge and power, create death, and use death to raise hordes of undead, which are then unleashed on nearby settlements.

Each type of specialised orc camp now has it’s own army:

• Menageries spawn Bestial Hordes, which have special effects when joining an ongoing battle, attacking refugees, or razing settlements.
• Shipyards spawn Orc Corsairs, which are very weak naval armies that plunder trade routes and raid ports. They are a good source of gold for the horde.

The crowning feature of Orcs Plus are Orc Cultures. These operate similarly to, and use the same UI as, holy orders, but instead of gaining influence over them passively, both you and the humans only gain influence over them through your actions. Many base-game challenges that you can perform state how much influence they grant.

• Alignment – Same as for other holy orders.
• Intolerance (initial value -1) – Orc Upstarts may attack foreign agents passing through their territory, especially if the agent is performing a challenge. They will naturally ignore those who originate from within their lands, and others of their own society. When elder aligned, they will ignore elder agents. When human aligned, they will ignore good agents (elves and humans).
• Shadow Weaving – Orcs are not as easily brought under your sway as humans. When elder aligned, they will become susceptible to enshadowment, and when fully elder aligned, will celebrate and spread shadow. When human aligned, they will actively purge shadow fro their land, and lands neighbouring them.
• Industrious – When elder aligned, Orc Elders will seek to maintain and increase industry from their Seat of the Elders, and Great Halls.
• Expansionism – Due to their disorganised nature, orcs will not naturally expand above a certain size. When elder aligned, the impact that their society’s size has on their desire to expand is reduced, and eventually eliminated entirely. When fully elder aligned, orc armies will also build new camps whenever they raze enemy settlements, but only if that camp would be linked to their territory. When human aligned, the impact is doubled.
• God Specific Tenets – In addition to the tenets that listed above, which are always available to all orc cultures, each culture will have access to a tenet that is unique to the god that you are playing. This tenet is usually very powerful.

When good societies defeat orcs in battles, and raze orc settlements, they will gain influence over the orcs. This is their only means of gaining influences over orc cultures, but they also loose influence if the orcs defeat them instead.
This means that good societies need to win consistently and repeatedly in order to gather enough influence to oppose the elder’s efforts.

Orc Cultures have a Seat of the Elders as their cultural capital, and Great Halls as lesser sites of influence for them. These take the place of Holy Sites found in other holy orders, but they offer very different bonuses.

• Shops – All orc Great Halls operate as markets, offering three items at a time, with rarity dependent on the level of orcish industry. These items cycle periodically, and can be force-restocked if the camp is infiltrated.
• Purchasable Horde Banners – The Seat of the Elders always offers a horde banner for that horde, but the price is steep.
• Unique Orc Items – Orc Great Halls offer a variety of items that can be found nowhere else. Many of them have unusual and powerful effects.
• Orc Grott – A thick drink that orcs make for themselves. It has properties that will fortify the drinker, but non-orcs struggle to consume it safely.
• Per Turn influence Gain – Infiltrated orc camps with Great Halls are the only consistent way to get influence gain over time. The Seat of the Elders grants 2 per turn, and each great hall grants 1 per turn. It doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up.[/list]

  Unlike the temples of other holy orders, Great Halls are built by the elder’s agents in infiltrated, specialised camps. When an elder’s agent builds a great hall, a local Orc Champion offers to join them for free. This is the only way for the elder’s agents to recruit them.

  Great Constructions

  Under certain conditions, and if they have enough plunder available, orc hordes will now specialise their own camps by undertaking the Great Construction national action.

  AI Images

  The icons used by this mod are, where a suitable image under a free licence is not available, and my own limited skills did not allow me to make my own, initially generated using the Stable Diffusion image generation AI, and edited by myself.