Origin story of the Duranaki as told by Kieron to the group.

We were created by an orc scientist back in the elf-orc war, oh, about 1400 or so years ago.

(Note: for the story of the actual war see Ameiliee’s Stories:the End of True Elves and Their Empire).

It was towards the end of the war and the orcs were losing, a lot of the losses were due to the assassination campaign by the elves in response to the infertility the orcs caused in them.

One of the orc mages, whose name is lost to history, who had used magic to study genetics and similar topics decided that the orcs needed assassins of their own. In general the elves were better understanding on biology, genetics and similar topics, but this mage had spent a long time in studying such, the other orcs seeing him as weird in his interests. The true orcs were getting to be low in numbers by that point and none of their goblinoid vassals were suitable for the task, as had been shown by some attempts to train them for such tasks.

Not wanting to be a target for assassination and not wanting the other orcs to ridicule him, he set up a research lab in the far each forest, the place that is now called the great forest, where we Duranaki now live. He then cut off all contact to the other orcs.

For years he studied and made many hybrid races with suitable traits, but they were, as most hybrids like mules are, sterile, he was not happy with the results. Most of them also manifested many other undesirable traits.

His method was to create a possible combination and then rapidly age them to be old enough to be tested for suitability and breeding ability. He had some goblinoid helpers in the beginning but he relied more and more on the failed experiments that were almost good enough. He even sent a few out on actual test missions with some success.

After few years of experiments he managed to breed a hybrid from some tallfellow halflings and infernals that was a race that was able to breed properly and had the desired traits of stealthiness and good perception abilities.

He then started to train them to become the assassins he wanted to create, but only a couple of years later he was assassinated by one of his earlier creations that was close to being what he tried to do, mostly only missing the ability to breed. The reason for the assassination was that she was not happy with being a discarded tool.

Some of the other failed experiments then took the rapidly magically aged, but only partly trained Duranaki under care and they built the forest dwellings that the Duranaki inhabit to this day.