There is some controversy behind the origins of the Ogres of Maj'Eyal. A few mentions here and there of "hulking magical brutes" and "Sher'Vogr" in writings - back to the Age of Haze seem to suggest a race of magically-engineered foot soldiers, loyal flesh-and-blood golems to keep lesser races in line while the Sher'Tul tackled bigger problems, but these mostly come from small rural towns prone to belief in old-wives'-tales, and the name "ogre" is never used in documents from that era outside of children's bedtime stories. In any case, mentions of these brutes abruptly vanished right about when the Sher'Tul did; if these enforcers existed, they vanished with their masters, and if they didn't, their masters' disappearance made the horror-stories featuring them pointless.
What is known, though, is that during their war with the Conclave, the Halfling empire of Nargol turned to ever more desperate and cruel experiments. They managed to keep their yeek-based projects under control until the invasion of their main facility, but further north, other researchers dealt with more hazardous research and a higher escape rate. Chief Researcher Martolep's notes prior to establishing the facility mostly consist of complaining about the unrealistic expectations of immediate results given to him by the Nargol generals, but one particular entry ended in an interest in the old fables of Sher'Tul-made brutes used to scare children into staying well-behaved, and wishing he could make something like that to pound the Conclave into submission. This was his last entry for a week; in two weeks, the facility was established, far in the arctic wastes.
While some speculate Martolep found a process used by the Sher'Tul to create these mythical soldiers, or discovered a trove of them sealed in forgotten ruins, it seems more likely that he found some other, struggling humanoid race and used them as fodder for his experiments, like his bretheren did with the Yeeks to the south. Unlike their counterparts, this precursor race is functionally (if not technically) extinct, systematically kidnapped in Martolep's increasingly-desperate race to turn them into useful weapons. His researchers worked tirelessly, warping their subjects' bodies with overgrown muscle; many were given deformed, innately magical brains, tied into magic's weave like an artifact, with the intent of making them capable of casting spells without being smart enough to question orders. This idea never seemed to work, and escapes by empowered test subjects were both common and destructive.
Martolep found himself having to justify the enormous expense in keeping his lab running without any usable results, and had to work on a second field of study to keep his position; the enormous bodies and infused energy of the "failed" experiments, those formidable and flowing with magic but still not subservient to their Halfling masters, made a perfect canvas for exploring the then-fledgling field of rune and infusion creation. The surviving notes of these experiments suggest they would have been extraordinarily painful; crude attempts at heat-beam runes that left the victim's skin forever searing like an invisible branding iron was held to it for eternity, and healing infusions with a nasty habit of becoming infected during the inscription process, resulting in normally-ignorable postules "healing" to massive cysts. One researcher noted that the threat of being assigned to inscription research was the only thing that would keep most of the test subjects from rebelling, then added that this was unfortunately only a short-term solution, as they would eventually figure out that they'd all be sent there no matter how well they behaved.
At some point, when the war had gotten so bloody that guard details at the facility needed to be recalled to the front line, the facility was... well, "destroyed" doesn't really cover the depth of it. There was no surviving lab equipment, most of the bodies found were pulverized to pulp or torn in half by their legs, and dropping analysis from the surrounding region suggests many halflings were devoured on the spot. Martolep's body was only found months after the original excavation, covered in prototype inscriptions, his charred and bubbling skin still producing enough boiling-hot acid to eat a 50-foot-deep grave through the facility basement. The only surviving notes were those found under corpses; the test subjects tortured and maimed, but it is believed they did not spend much effort desecrating corpses, possibly out of a desire to simply forget everything and get away once their tormentors were dead. The Empire did not mourn the loss of an unproductive laboratory, though several teams of skirmishers in the north lost good men to strange beasts of inconsistent description - sometimes with four arms, sometimes with two heads, but always scarred by pulsing inscriptions, and always bearing colossal muscle-bound frames alongside blasts of uncontrolled magic.
The frigid wastes weren't a popular travel route before the old legends of the "Fists of the Sher'Tul" started popping up again, so it's unsurprising that the saner survivors of the facility managed to set up a few small tribes without much notice or interference from other civilizations. They knew how inscriptions worked better than their halfling tormentors, far too well for their own comfort in fact, but passed the knowledge on through tribal customs, adding a tradition of tattoos to mark days of great sorrow, accomplishment, or joy. Their bodies and magical minds consumed a great deal of energy, and although the remarkably clever invention of an automatic ice-fishing device built with lightning-based runes certainly helped their diets, it wasn't enough to prevent them from gradually hunting mammoths to extinction.
With farming impossible in their frozen homeland, many of the tribes simply starved to death, unable or unwilling to make contact with the outside world. Some, however, ventured south in search of fertile land or trading partners, and found both in great supply following the chaos of the Spellblaze. Stories of their brutality and devastation spread like wildfire, but few were confirmed; it is unclear whether the ogres actually attacked any of the settlements they came to occupy, or if distressed homesteaders simply saw the arrival of a giant magical monster as a sign they should look elsewhere. Some ogres managed to make connections and profit in trade with those too desperate to care who or what's giving them supplies; they eventually developed a reputation among those "in the know" as being honest to a fault. Some thought them stupid, but the more observant noted they found it abhorrent to trick or take advantage of another - and while ogres gave a lot of leeway to their trade partners and could be fooled, those who got caught trying to trick them with solid evidence tended to be found dead, their ribcages crushed and their bodies nailed to several trees. (Such acts are common among enraged ogres; one could be forgiven for thinking them sadists, but the intent seems to be more along the lines of sending a message and discouraging future behavior.)
When the Spellhunt came, ogres' runes made them a conspicuous target, and their monstrous forms made them seem like an obvious abomination to be destroyed for the good of nature. The ogres scattered and fled anywhere they could, taking refuge with the Shalore or the mages of Angolwen, working on the farms of feudal lords powerful enough to keep the torches and pitchforks at bay, or hiding in the woods as feral hunters, their voracious appetites rapidly depriving the area of edible game. Ogres survived as a race, but with only a couple of tribes scraping by in the north, and the rest of the species scattered both socially and geographically, they were dead as a society.
After the Spellhunt's end, however, the ogre diaspora found themselves excelling in a variety of fields. They found themselves volunteering for dangerous research in Angolwen, as while the memories of their abuse at the hands of halflings still ran strong, they deeply appreciated the respect and dignity their elven and human colleagues gave them compared to the halflings' treatment, and were more than happy to risk being lightly wounded by a magical misfire that would kill a Shalore. Those who became peasants were fiercely loyal to their kings, thinking of them as benefactors who saved them from the Spellhunt, and developed a reputation as steadfast knights, willing to follow even the most suicidal of orders; not long after, they became popular as mercenaries for the exact same reason, and even sought-after by the few pirate crews who came to shore often enough to stock enough food for them. Some took up the life of trading again, re-establishing their reputation for fair deals, forgiving attitude to irregularities or extenuating circumstances, and terrible wrath on the few who they caught cheating them. And, of course, some stayed in the wilds, caring more to eat people than negotiate with them, and once again became the stuff of children's nightmares.
Ogres thus enjoy a sort of uncomfortable state of acceptance in the "civilized" nations of Maj'Eyal. While hideous, brutal, and covered in runes that pulse like they're ready to blast the area apart at any minute, they're also very well-adapted to the developing economy in the Age of Ascendancy, and despite the occasional man-eating hermit ogre in the wilderness, they're much less likely on average to betray someone or otherwise cause them harm than your average Cornac. They are often thought of as dim-witted or mentally incapable, but their successes speak otherwise, despite their dopey mannerisms, slowness of speech, love of food, and disdain for high society. It's sometimes said that an ogre's mind is more like an ox than a horse, and gets through every problem at the exact same speed; developing a new rune or a complex trade strategy will take them as much time as doing a basic addition problem, just as their clubs can smash through solid plate armor as quickly/slowly as papier-mâché. It may be the case, however, that ogres find it useful to be thought of as "dumb," allowing them to avoid suspicion and tempt potential traitors into making brash moves, or simply care more about getting things done than impressing anyone.
As a somewhat speculative footnote... Full contact with Var'Eyal has not been made in ages, but it is believed that the orcs recruited a few starving ogre tribes into their army during their invasion, then brought some back to the distant continent in their retreat. The few Sunwall disciples who have wound up in Maj'Eyal due to farportal experiments were, for the most part, not educated well enough in history to be useful for any kind of research, but one mentioned that a small camp of ogres has taken residence alongside the Anorthil and Sun Paladins, and ogres may even be among those groups' numbers. The only reason he offered for their change of allegiance was that the Sunwall "had better food." While ogres' famous appetites, fueled by their high metabolism, make this a somewhat plausible explanation, their tendency towards extreme loyalty calls it into question. Perhaps the orcs treated them as expendable distractions like the trolls they created, and the ogres lacked the numbers to respond to the mistreatment like they did in the northern Nargol facility. It's also possible that the "better food" reason is entirely true, but for different reasons than our source thought. Having seen entire tribes starve to death, they could have determined that the orcs' rate of producing or consuming food was unsustainable. They've been on enough sinking ships to know one when they see one, so to speak.
For every attack or spell you perform that fails to critically hit, you gain X% critical multiplier. This can stack up to Y times, and scoring a critical hit reduces this bonus by Z.
I was going for a sort of combination of yetis and neanderthals, alongside the traditional image of ogres as dumb hungry brutes; their slow-but-thoughtful minds were inspired by the theory that neanderthals were actually smarter than humans, just less social and aggressive, leading to them losing territory (and lives) to better-organized human tribes. The only problem I have with shaggy-haired ogres is that it'd make inscriptions harder to apply and see...