Blood Plagues

The Blood Plagues were a supernatural weather event caused by the wrath of the orcish god Yurtrus that led to widespread disease and death in the Sword Mountains during the.

Description
Beginning on Uktar 30, red thunderclouds amassed above the Sword Mountains. For three days&mdash;Uktar 30, the Feast of the Moon, and Nightal 1&mdash;blood rained down on the mountains, leaving the slopes red and reeking of decay and rot. Once the rains ceased, diseases and plagues swept through the bloody mountains.

While many died in the following days, the hardest hit were the orcs. The survivors believed that they had proven their strength and worthiness merely by surviving the ordeal imposed upon them by their god Yurtrus.

History
Before the blood rains began, an orc shaman called Wund rose to prominence and prophesized the exact time and nature of the coming storms. When the Blood Plagues struck, every orcish chieftain in the Sword Mountains died, and Wund took advantage of this power vacuum to found the Brotherhood of the Scarlet Scourge and to unite the orcs of the Sword Mountains into a single kingdom called Uruth Ukrypt. Yurtrus's holy symbol&mdash;two white hands &mdash;was adopted as a symbol of this new kingdom.