In the Blood or in the Culture

[Paka]

In our orc game over skype, one of the PC's sons is being given to a dwarven high king for hostage. The kid is ten years old.

This leads me to wonder, is Hatred in the blood or is it in the culture?

I'm not exactly asking. I think it is in the culture. Orcs, to my mind, are caught in a cycle of Hated, just as Elves are caught in Grief, Dwarves in Greed, etc. But orc blood and saliva is poison, as in it is poisonous.

At ten years old, the foundations for Hatred might already be laid down.

I'm just thinking out loud, not wanting to get into the biology of orcs, so much as bullshit about emotional attributes, what they mean and what they represent to us.

[Saphim]

I think generalizations about the various emotional attributes are hard to make as they are so vastly different.
Grief for example is a product of elves living very very long. Their culture even developed traditions to counter it, like going west or soothers.
While orcs on the other side have a culture bent on bringing out the hatred... everything about their culture has nuances that enhances it.
Greed I haven't done a lot with yet, but it seems to come from being in a straightjacket of oaths on one side and having ambitions on the other side. Dwarfen culture is so regulated that greed is the vile slime under the crust of oaths that developed because no fresh air or natural way for huge ambitions was built into the culture.

[luke]

If you look at the canon traits, it's in the culture. Grief and Greed are in the blood!