Deconstructing the Orc: Marko Djurdjevic on worldbuilding, Degenesis lessons, and launching Orken

Berlin-based creative powerhouse SIXMOREVODKA and veteran illustrator Marko Djurdjevic are preparing the first public European book launch of Orken at Lucca Comics & Games 2026. Famous across tabletop communities for the seminal roleplaying game Degenesis and throughout comics for his iconic Marvel covers, Djurdjevic first revealed the early concepts for Orken on the Lucca stage nine years ago. After a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised €250,881 to fund its core publishing line, the creator-owned transmedia IP has expanded into illustrated fiction, novels, setting volumes, artbooks, and a playable Steam PC demo.

Set on the continent of Edom, Orken abandons standard high-fantasy morality to document a brutal clash between two sophisticated civilisations: the indigenous, land-bound Khar and the expansionist, resource-hungry human empire of Elemon. Geek Native spoke directly with Djurdjevic to unpack how anthropological worldbuilding strips away half a century of tabletop clichés, the hard financial lessons learned from free-to-play publishing, and the editorial discipline required to hold an independent universe together.

How does returning to Lucca Comics & Games in 2026 alter the stakes for SIXMOREVODKA compared to when you first pitched the Orken concepts on that same stage nine years ago?

It doesn’t really alter the stakes. It feels more like a homecoming. I first announced the IP there nine years ago, and now I’m returning with actual books people can take home. One major leg of the ongoing marathon is finally behind us.

Orcs carry fifty years of established genre baggage across roleplaying games and classic fantasy; how did you deconstruct the traditional “monstrous brute” trope to build the Khar as a distinct ancient civilisation without losing what makes them recognisable?

Fantasy tends to describe entire peoples through a handful of stereotypes. Dwarfs are drunkards who make great weapons, Elves are noble and pure and fight better than everyone else, yadda yadda. I’ve always struggled with that kind of oversimplification.

The goal with Orken was to explore the Khar’s history and culture through the same anthropological lens we would apply to our own. The recognisable Orc is still there. We just don’t treat his appearance as a complete personality. You have to spend time with them, adopt their mindset and understand how they see and respond to the world. That’s how you get beyond a species description and into a civilisation, with its own spiritual, cultural and personal differences.

It’s also why I reference Apocalypto so often. It lets its Maya characters carry the story, as protagonists and antagonists, without inserting a European viewpoint to explain everyone and everything to the audience.

You have framed the conflict between the Khar and the human Elemon Empire as a clash of civilisations where neither side is a clean moral hero. How did you balance shifting points of view so the setting explores the justification of violence without flattening into cynical nihilism?

You have to give both sides room to breathe. Readers need enough perspective to reach their own moral conclusions without the author constantly telling them how to feel. Both sides make mistakes. Both are capable of grief, kindness, love, anger, prejudice and hubris. No civilization is monolithic, and our characters come from all walks of life. The narrative grows out of their accumulated experiences and the moments where those experiences collide.

Understanding why someone commits violence doesn’t mean excusing it. And moral ambiguity doesn’t require everyone to be equally awful. Kindness has to carry as much weight as cruelty, otherwise you’ve rigged the argument before the reader even arrives at their destination.

SIXMOREVODKA previously made waves in tabletop roleplaying games with Degenesis: Rebirth, famously transitioning that entire product catalogue to a “Free-to-Play” digital model. How did the financial and operational lessons learned from Degenesis shape your direct-to-consumer Kickstarter model for Orken?

Unfortunately, Free-to-Play didn’t deliver what we hoped for. Give everything away and create massive exposure. Cool idea. Less convincing as a business model, at least for us. Making something freely available doesn’t automatically make people value it. When we ended the line, demand for the remaining physical books suddenly exploded. Books that had sat in our store for years were changing hands for ten times their original price. I’ve seen copies go for up to 1,000 bucks on eBay. Apparently, being available was their main flaw.

With Orken, we returned to a more straightforward model: make the best books we can, price them as reasonably as we can, and make sure selling them pays for producing the next ones. Kickstarter gives us a clearer picture of demand before we commit to a print run. There’s still plenty to fine-tune, but it gives us a more sustainable basis for growth. What I won’t do is manufacture scarcity to drive sales. That’s a scummy way to treat your audience, and I’d rather build something that stays available.

Many studios use transmedia as a buzzword to sell merch, but you have deployed artbooks, fiction, digital demos, and setting material concurrently. What design discipline is required to keep a new intellectual property consistent across completely different media formats without diluting the core vision?

In service work, clients usually hire me for a fraction of what I can do. That makes sense for the task, but creating Orken requires pretty much every discipline I’ve picked up over thirty years in entertainment: writing, illustration, graphic design, art direction, project management, and what not. It keeps me sufficiently occupied.

The clue is in treating all of it as one world. Each medium can reveal something different, but the characters, history and underlying logic have to hold together. The books and the game need to agree even when they aren’t telling the same story. Ultimately, I’m accountable for keeping that consistent, which makes me my own worst critic, most pedantic editor and most annoying art director, all conveniently housed in one sleep-deprived body. Add self-doubt and impostor syndrome, and you have a fairly effective system for quadruple-checking everything at 3:00AM in the morning, if only to avoid that one canonical mistake that decides to haunt me for the rest of my mortal days.

Beyond commercial revenue and hitting delivery milestones, what does genuine creative success look like for the Orken universe over the next five years?

Making people read. If I can convince someone to slow down, spend time with the books and soak them up, rather than just leaf through them looking for visual spectacle, that would be the greatest success.

Beyond that, seeing Orken move into animation would be a dream come true.

Thanks, Marko!

Marko Djurdjevic demonstrates an uncompromising approach to independent production, trading the hollow metrics of digital giveaways for tangible print craft and nuanced anthropological worldbuilding. Moving away from easy fantasy archetypes demands patience from both creator and audience, establishing a foundation built on cultural depth rather than disposable spectacle.

Marko will be attending Lucca Comics & Games in October, where he will present the first public European book launch of Orken.