The orcish horde is a savage, bloodthirsty, and hateful collection of tribes. There are myths and stories that tell of the origin of their rage—a demon curse, a homeland destroyed, elven magic gone wrong—but the truth has been lost to time. Every able orc, be it man or woman, child or elder, swears fealty to the warchief and their tribe and bears the jagged blade of a bloodwarrior. Men are trained to fight and kill—orcs are born to it. Instinct: To fight

• Fight with abandon
• Revel in destruction

Every pack has its top dog. Bigger, maybe—that’d be the simplest way. Often, though, with these lank and filthy mutts, it’s not about size or sharp teeth but about cruelty. About a willingness to kill your brothers and eat them while the pack watches. Willingness to desecrate the pack in a way that cows them to you. If they’re that awful to each other—to their living kin—think about how they must view us. It’s hard to be mere meat in a land of carnivores. Instinct: To drive the pack

• Demand obedience
• Send the pack to hunt

Oh, an emissary! How nice. I suspect you didn’t know the gnolls had ambassadors, did you? Yes, even these mangy hyenas have to make nice sometimes. No, no, not with us. Nor the dwarves, neither. No, the emissary is the one, among his packmates, who trucks directly with their dripping demon lord. Frightening? Too right. Every hound has a master with his hand on the chain. This gnoll hears his master’s voice. Hears it and obeys. Instinct: To share divine insight

• Pass on demonic influence
• Drive the pack into a fervor

Once they scent your blood, you can’t escape. Not without intervention from the gods, or the duke’s rangers at least. The desert scrub is a dangerous place to go exploring on your own and if you fall and break your leg or eat the wrong cactus, well, you’ll be lucky if you die of thirst before the gnolls find you. They prefer their prey alive, see—cracking bones and the screams of the dying lend a sort of succulence to a meal. Sickening creatures, no? They’ll hunt you, slow and steady, as you die. If you hear laughter in the desert wind, well, best pray Death comes to take you before they do. Instinct: To prey on weakness

• Doggedly track prey
• Strike at a moment of weakness

At the heart of every hive, no matter its size or kind, lives a queen. As large as any giant, she sits protected by her guard, served by every drone and taskmaster with her own, singular purpose: to spread her kind and grow the hive. To birth the eggs. To nurture. We do not understand the minds of these creatures but it is known they can communicate with their children, somehow, over vast distances and that they begin to teach them the ways of earth and stone and war while still pale and wriggling larvae, without a word. To kill one is to set chaos on the hive; without their queen, the rest turn on one another in a mad, blind rage. Instinct: To spread formians

• Call every formian it spawned
• Release a half-formed larval mutation
• Organize and issue orders

Whether in the form of a legionnaire, part of the formian standing army, or as a praetorian guard to the queen, every formian hive contains a great number of these most dangerous insectoids. Darker in carapace, often scarred with furrows and the ceremonial markings that set them apart from their drones, the formian centurions are their fighting force and rightly so. Born, bred and living for the singular purpose of killing the enemies of their hive, they fight with one mind and a hundred swords. Thus far, the powers of Law have seen fit to spare mankind a great war with these creatures, but we’ve seen them in skirmish—descending sometimes on border towns with their wings flickering in the heat or spilling up from a sandy mound to wipe clean a newly-dug mine. Theirs is an orderly bloodshed, committed with no pleasure but the completion of a goal. Instinct: To fight as ordered

• Advance as one
• Summon reinforcements
• Give a life for the hive

It takes two hands to rule an empire: one to wield the scepter and one to crack the whip. These ant-folk are that whip. Lucky for them, with two extra arms, that’s a lot of whip to crack. They oversee the vast swarms of worker drones that set to build the mighty caverns and ziggurats that dot the places that formians can be found. One in a hundred, these brutes stand two or three feet taller than their pale, near-mindless kin and have a sharper, crueler wit to match. They’ll often ignore the soft races (as we’re known) if we don’t interfere in a project, but get in the way of The Great Work and expect nothing less than their full attention. You don’t want their full attention. Instinct: To command

• Order drones into battle
• Set great numbers in motion

With good cause, they say that these creatures (like all insects, really) are claimed by the powers of Law. They are order made flesh—a perfectly stratified society in which every larva, hatchling and adult knows its place in the great hive. The formian is some strange intersection of men and ants. (Though there are winged tribes that look like wasps out in the Western Desert, I’ve heard. And some with great sawtooth arms like mantids in the forests of the east.) Tall, with a hard shell and a harder mind, these particular formians are the bottom caste. They work the hills and honeycombs with single-minded joy that can be known only by such an alien mind. Instinct: To follow orders

• Raise the alarm
• Create value for the hive
• Assimilate

Dwarf-made elemental garbage muncher. Shaped like a trash bin with a radius of arms to feed excess rock and stone into its gaping maw. They eat stone and excrete light and heat. Perfect for operating a mine or digging out a quarry. Once one gets lost in the sewers below a city, though, or in the foundation of a castle? You’re in deep trouble. They’ll eat and eat until you’ve got nothing left but to collapse the place down on it and move somewhere else. Ask Burrin, Son of Fjornnvald, exile from his clan. I bet he could tell you a story about a xorn. Instinct: To eat

• Consume stone
• Give off a burst of light and heat

A very distinctive-looking creature. Something like a reddish cricket, I think. Long crickety legs, anyhow. Blind, too, as I understand it—they feel their way around with those long moth-looking tendrils. Feed that way, too. Sift through piles of metal for the choicest bits. That’s what they eat, don’t matter the type, neither. Their merest touch turns it all to rusted flakes. Magic lasts longer but under the scrutiny of a rust monster, it’s a foregone conclusion. Only the gods know where they came from, but they’re a curse if you value your belongings. Instinct: To decay

• Turn metal to rust
• Gain strength from consuming metal