Colorful Orcs

Human skin tone varies a lot. It's not just one-dimensional, from light to dark. There's shades and there's undertones, making it a little more accurate to map skin tone two-dimensionally (though that's still not perfect). Fantasy races should be at least as varied, if not more - why should all Orcs be green? This can be used as part of DCC's philosophy around keeping things mysterious - skin color is even a part of the table on p. 380. Players will know the big buff green dude is an Orc, but they might not be so sure about a blue or yellow dude.

There are environmental factors that appear to affect the skin tone of a population. We know, for instance, that darker skin protects from the sun and lighter skin helps to produce vitamin D. Humans are adaptable and awesome. Below is a map that uses environmental factors to predict the distribution of skin colors of native populations across the globe - it's not always accurate when you start zooming in to specific places, but the general trend is close enough to actual data be interesting.

The obvious conclusion to draw is that skin tone tends darker near the equator and tends lighter near the poles. In Orcs, we are going to represent this as a gradient from green to red. Orcs in the cooler climates away from the equator will tend toward green, and Orcs in the warmer climates will tend toward red. Humans who are ignorant of biology (i.e. nearly everybody in a pseudo-medieval fantasy setting) will call these populations things like "Woods Orcs", "Plains Orcs" and "Desert Orcs".

As the chart tends downward, we see the Orcish equivalent to undertone. This is a bit more complex in humans than the overtones but it has something to do with the structure of our skin and blood vessels - we don't need to get too noodly with that here. What I'm going to roughly correlate this axis to is altitude, which lets us have populations in mountain ranges and mesa that vary from blue "Snow Orcs", to grey "Stone Orcs", to light reddish "Clay Orcs".

These colors often match relatively well with the colors of their biomes (some exceptions), so we can say that camouflage is an additional environmental pressure that could contribute to these colorings. Orcs are hunters, so camouflage is a useful tool.

While humans (and indeed, players) may assume these different varieties of Orc come with special abilities, any difference between populations is more significantly a cultural one than a biological one. This is up to and including their magic, which would come from different Patrons. The environment a population is found in should absolutely be considered when developing their culture, which will likely fuel stereotypes about the differences between Snow Orcs and Sands Orcs. Travelling bands of Orcs should have one or two that stand out from the rest, maybe with an item of cultural significance on them, hinting at faraway lands.

Similar charts can be built for species like Elves which often have variations (High Elves, Dark Elves, Wood Elves) rather than putting each Elf into a clear, discrete category. Goblins, however, don't have this kind of variation due to their less naturalistic origins.