Waaagh! Da Orks: An Introduction

Well, now is most likely a good time to return to the Orks. This is something I have been planning as part of a wider plot for some time, but I figure now is as good a time as any to get into it, before Warhammer 40,000 under the helm of Captain Matthew "Pugwash" Ward steers the whole ship into a reef the size of a continent.

Waaagh! Da Orks is a series of articles, designed to encourage discussion and debate about the subject of the Orks in Warhammer 40,000. Hopefully it will be informative, in some instances amusing or at least give some interesting food for thought that might help you get more out of the Ork background aspect of the hobby. Although they are certainly not the last word on the Orks, they are intended to argue and debate concepts, some of which are not wholly agreed in the Warhammer 40,000 community.

Particularly for that reason, the first part of this series will look at common misconceptions about the Orks. Some of it is limited to those viewing Orks from the outside, but it is also something subject to the Ork players themselves, particularly if they have not read all of the background resources that feature the Orks.

Part 1: Orkish Misconceptions

Chapter 1: The Orks - Stupid, Crude or Misunderstood?

“The Orks are the pinnacle of creation. For them, the great struggle is won. They have evolved a society which knows no stress or angst. Who are we to judge them? We Eldar who have failed, or the Humans, on the road to ruin in their turn. And why? Because we sought answers to questions that an Ork wouldn’t even bother to ask! We see a culture that is strong and despise it as crude.” Uthan the Perverse

There are many misconceptions about the Orks. Some are because the Orks aren’t as straightforward as they look, and some because we’re even convinced that they’re straightforward at all. This particular subject is mostly limited to (but not exclusively) Non-Ork players. It goes without saying that if most of the people who only have a passing notice of them call them stupid, green, crude, and talk like Sloth from The Goonies on Ritalin, there’s bound to be a few inaccuracies.

Let’s face it, if you’ve spent any amount of time in this hobby as an Ork player, you’ve encountered players who say Orks are stupid, and shouldn’t be so utterly awesome. Perhaps they say they are out of place in this GrimDark Univer… sorry, Universe that was until recently called GrimDark. Usually said people tend to have just recently watched their shiny Beakies, Pansee or other Unproppa army get a severe kicking from some Orks: probably yours.

Unfortunately a decent segment of the fluff doesn’t help. Particularly the Ork way of speaking, which doesn’t come across too well. Partly however that is because you force a race to speak in a tongue that not only isn’t theirs, but also uses a completely different system of language. There are real life parallels. Do we call the North American Indian depiction in Hollywood films as they speak English “Him over there…” as stupid?

It is itself a fictional writing device (a trope), which itself is partly the point. The struggle to use a language we understand is supposed to be jarring. Perhaps we people who consume this are the ones who are stupid and crude? After all we don’t go to the effort of learning all the languages of the world (or can’t be bothered to read subtitles) of modernity and antiquity, nor to we go to the effort of learning fictional languages (well, 99% of us don’t). So, you have a choice. Either you understand what is said, or like the vast majority of Rammstein’s Non-German fanbase, you enjoy the sound of it and make a guess as to what it means (and with Rammstein, I doubt your guess will be anywhere near).

Of course the Orks themselves are rather uncomplicated. But, as the quote at the start of this article states, they don’t need to be. Orks certainly aren’t stupid though, that is based on factors we attribute to ourselves, or at least the outward values we expect to see. An intellectual usually has a advanced diction (although trust me, no grasp of grammar whatsoever), uses long words, conveys complex meanings and such. But an Ork doesn’t really need that. Orks are warriors, and in that regard they are devastatingly efficient. Every battle is a victory in some way. They don’t angst, they fight viciously and confidently, they don’t particularly fear death, and they have a philosophy that wholly supports their outlook.

If you contrast it with the fictional representation of humans (i.e. the Imperium) in 40k, you have humans blindly accepting a religious dictatorial theocracy that outright insists on deliberate ignorance of anything that doesn’t support their religious views. Orks do deliberately ignore things too, but only those things that don’t actually matter. Orks clearly have the ability to use tactics, and are depicted as the ultimate survivor, adapting to any situation in order to survive. Whereas we have fluff of the Imperial Higher Ups dismissing and punishing soldiers for suggesting that the Orks are anything other than stupid green berserkers.

Sure you have the likes of Pansee and such who seem more sophisticated, but they did create a Chaos God during certain events, which most likely made Roman Emperor Caligula blush in his grave. You do however have the above quote, Uthan is a Pansee, leading to either the conclusion that the Pansee know how efficient the Orks are, or that Uthan is in the minority, which is often argued by the Pro Orks=dumb argument.

It does however overlook one important fact about the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. The smart ones are either dead, about to be (probably self-inflicted) or running very quickly away from pretty much anything they come across. Either way, being smart in the Warhammer 40,000 Universe isn’t a good idea, something that has been explored to marvellous effect in the Ciaphas Cain novels.

Orks are ultimately deeply misunderstood, and what makes them so interesting is either overlooked or underplayed. Unfortunately a great deal of 40k geeks don’t seem to be able to understand the difference between canon and personal taste, which leads to a great deal of dismissive comments based mostly on the fact that people don’t like and/or get what the Orks are about.

It’s certainly true that to an extent, Orks have been dumbed down for a younger audience. However if you look close enough, Orks are still as deep and interesting as they always have been, and there is a wonderful simplicity to the Orks that is actually astonishingly interesting, and excellent fiction. Over the course of this part of the series, I hope to address a few of these misconceptions, and I encourage debate over what the Orks are, what (little there is) lies in the future for Orkdom. Hopefully by the end of it, Orks will be a lot more interesting.

The next chapter in this series will be about Ork Physiology.

Wargaming Aesthetics: Or Why Companies Think Gamers Buy Books By Scanning The Covers

There are a number of phrases in the English language that run the full gamut of one's life, whereas there are others that you will hear and you'll never find a use for again. A phrase that should stick with you is the adage: "Never Judge A Book By Its Cover". It is invariably true and of considerable wisdom, yet it seems in the modern world as if we never bother heeding it.

Ironically the nature of the phrase has changed. In the old days it was about not being put off by a crummy, boring cover with no special design. A book that was of artistic worth was not one that could necessarily fork out for a grand and fancy cover. But these days the methods to make one are very accessible. Go into your nearest bookstore, and look to the bestselling paperbacks. You can tell the genre just by the design on the book. Lesser known writers who write for a popular genre (in order to cash in) will often use similar designs on their books, so "Dark Fantasy" will look not entirely unlike Twilight; A Historical Mystery novel will look disturbingly similar to the cover of the De Vinci Code, etc.

The aesthetic is something modern society finds very easy to produce. It's cheap, anyone with Photoshop and 4 hours spare time can do it, and you don't actually require an awful lot of talent to produce it. Obviously, when people are preparing to buy things, they are likely to look at it for a matter of seconds, or perhaps minutes, before handing money over. So the moral of the story there is to make sure they like what they see, or at least like what they see for the amount of time it takes for them to hand their money over; even if they don't actually understand why it looks that way...

This leads me aimlessly to Games Workshop. I'm not going to deny that without Games Workshop, we probably still wouldn't have a wargaming industry, let alone one that looks so impressive, but it seems the biggest wargaming company in the history of the universe is now so big and arrogant that the aesthetic is the only thing they actually bother to get right.

The above picture shows this particular effort rather well, and we've already discussed it previously, alongside "Finecast", and GW's propensity for Gimmicks, which also appeal to that aesthetic. Even the writing is about maintaining a very simple (but quite rubbish) aesthetic. What it spawns from is something very simple. GW want to get as much money out of you as possible, for the bare minimum effort required, but costed at a premium price that suggests the opposite. Essentially they want you to think they are artisans, when really they're something significantly less than that.

Hard-backing army books is completely unnecessary. Its singular purpose is to increase the "value" that they attach to their own produce. In other words, they want it to be more expensive. Will it last longer? It might do, but it only has to last 5 years at most, and if you manage to mangle a paperback in that amount of time, you'll mangle a hard-back just as quickly.

Marketing resin as a quality product, rather than a cheap alternative to metal is similarly an effort of saving money on their part. An awful lot, as it turns out. Made doubly worse by the fact that they're trying to save said money on a new material, based on the possibility that the previous material might get more expensive. Not only are they saving money, they decided to fool the gaming community into concluding it offers better detail and thus can charge you even more for a material that is incredibly brittle and fragile.

There's then to consider that GW hire the likes of Matthew Ward to do their writing. The guy who writes like how a staffer is trained to sell you things. It certainly isn't artistic, or even good. But it doesn't need to be. It is GW's aesthetic for 40k which is best summed up by the phrase "OMG OMG! ZOMG THIS IS AWESOMES! HOW CAN YOU NOT LIKE THE AWESOMES! ITS AWESOMES!"

The point is that ultimately it is easier for GW (and more profitable) for them to sell you something that is fundamentally flawed, but appealing enough that you are willing to put up with it, than it is to try and make a very high quality product. I might be inclined to say "good luck to them" if they did anything other than charge a premium price for a mediocre service, but that is precisely what they do.

Still, there must be something about the aesthetic, right? Something about it surely matters? Well of course it does. It's actually more important than the gaming companies even realise. It is also a bit more temperamental than they realise. Some gimmicks actually fail, not because they are ugly, but because they try to oversell the aesthetic.

I've already discussed how Rackham did this previously, with Confrontation: Age of Ragnarok, that took completely aesthetic changes that alienated its customers. Charging people more for something they will do anyway (i.e. assemble and paint their miniatures) is a particularly bad move, and the move was so bad that Rackham, a company with some promise, ultimately folded.

Still, before they did, Rackham made some of the most beautiful miniatures in the entire industry. My Top 16 Wargaming Miniatures sports 3 examples from one system. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that the majority of gamers are in it for the pretty miniatures. I'm not going to call them toy soldiers. They fundamentally are, in the same way that the Mona Lisa is a college art project.

Aesthetics are wonderful things. They are the visuals that attract. But a hobby needs to be far more than that, because it encompasses the talent and hard work of the people who support it, so you need to keep up with those people. No matter how big you think your company is, you ignore them at your peril. Because they're going to make your job more rewarding, but considerably harder:

Every release you work on, they will expand in the time that you work on other things. Every story you write, they will fold out into a saga. Every miniature you make, they will make it look better. Every rule you write, will be analysed, re-written and stream-lined. Every faction you create, they will develop them a hundred-fold. If you think they need your help to remotely be creative, you might find you've blinked and found yourself out of your depth.

Chaos: Or why you shouldn't bother converting

Sigh. I keep neglecting this blog. But not to worry, I'm going to keep going. So I thought it would be nice to start with a controversial one, whilst I'm still in a suitably irritated mood.

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that Chaos players are living in a dream world. Not that this is a bad thing, considering that if you didn't, you'd be like me, an Ex-Chaos player. Because if you work hard enough, you can convince not only yourself, but also other people that Chaos are a really cool faction in 40k.

This is what gets me, because if you read the current Codex, you'd be forgiven for wondering why.

It isn't just as the demotivator above says; the Chaos Codex isn't just outdated, it was pretty terrible when it was first released. It had a few competitive things within it, such as the Lash, Daemon Princes remain fairly nasty, and some units got much needed improved stats (Plague Marines and Berzerkers to name two). But ultimately what is missing from the Chaos Codex is the whole, umm, Chaos bit.

It was particularly obvious back then, when the new Codex came out, replacing the previous one that offered tonnes of options in the way that 4th Edition Codexes did at the time. 4th Ed Chaos may well have been the best Codex of that edition; offering tonnes of options, themes and at the same time, making a lot of the myriad legions of chaos possible and attractive as an army choice.

The previous Codex had a section devoted purely to God Specific wargear, god-specific army builds (that rewarded you for being true to your favourite god) and also legion specific rules, allowing you to build the likes of Iron Warriors, Word Bearers, etc. Considering the fluff has always stated that the Chaos Gods are supposed to hate each other, one-god forces are supposed to be fairly practical, you'd think.

The wargear was considerable and varied. They were noticeably Chaotic, setting themselves aside from other factions (such as marines) to a considerable extent. It was possibly too good, because it offered such potential, in spite of having a pretty mediocre existing miniatures range, that much like the Old Orks, it really encouraged the modelling and converting that Chaos soon became famous for.

It was also around this time that pretty much every Chaos player rocked an absolutely awesome Chaos lord, with their own character and abilities. When the new Chaos Codex rolled along, Chaos players found their options drastically reduced, the loss of Daemons (anyone telling you that page of generic "Summoned Daemons" are actually Daemons are lying) and an extreme overuse of Special Characters and gimmicks throughout the codex, and space marines.

Space Marines are to be expected, sure, but the problem is that's all the current Codex actually is. This is 5th Edition after all. We have grown to expect the gimmicks, because that's what 5th is all about, the same goes for the over-prominence of Special Characters. But you have to try very, very hard to make bland Space Marines. Which was proven when every other power armoured Codex that has rolled along since has made Chaos' "Marked Units" look so utterly quaint and pointless.

Marked Units were essentially GW's way of adding "Chaos" to the Codex, aside of the Lash and Special Characters. Take away those and you pretty much have a very generic and unimaginative Space Marines Codex. But although Chaos Space Marines are Space Marines, they used to be so much more than that. For a start, you could actually tell the difference, you could manifest the fruits of that schism on the tabletop.

Putting it simply, we had the Axes of Khorne, Kai Guns, interesting Daemon Weapons, Daemonic upgrades, special powers, and actual Chaos vehicle upgrades. What do we have now? Regular Space Marine options. Power Weapons, Lightning Claws, Power Fists. For vehicles, it's Dozer Blades, Extra Armour, Smoke Launchers etc. Fine, that's cool and everything, but if I wanted just those things I could take them very easily in a loyalist Marine force. Even the 3rd Edition Dark Angels, Black Templars and Blood Angels Codexes managed to do that whilst adding in a few unique things. The current Codex offers the Lash, and the rather disappointing Daemon Weapon.

Back in 4th Ed, pretty much every other Chaos player had a Possessed Dreadnought. I had one with the Khornate vehicle upgrade (Destroyer), and it cost me an awful lot of money to make it (see the results above, cost me about £60-70 at the time). Now you can possess tanks, but not Dreadnoughts. Why? The worst of it is that Marines followed fairly swiftly after the rules change and the loyalists got 3 different types of Dreadnought, all cooler than the Chaos version.

Independent Characters also suffered. In my time as a Chaos player, I made no fewer than 10 Chaos Lord/Lieutenant models. Of those models, a pathetic two of them remained WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) when the new Codex came out, due to awkward upgrade and options placement, and the removal of any sanity with regards to allotting wargear in any Codex in the whole of 5th Edition, and as 6th Edition rears its disgusting face it shows no signs of returning.

It highlighted a fundamental problem with the new options layout: it was far too dogmatic, making some fairly logical and popular weapon options completely impossible. Being forced to take a gun of some form has caused many 40k players who remember 40k before 5th Edition to pull their hair out and chuck their lavishly built and converted models against the walls of GW "Hobby Centres".

What made that pill so difficult to swallow was that there are a few Chaos Special Characters that have two close combat weapons, or at least weapons that were impossible to even get close to with the current options. There's Abaddon of course, but the worst offender is the new Red Corsairs character Huron Blackheart. His weapon options are incredibly cool, but in contrast to the regular Chaos Lord, he's offensively cool.

The options for building Chaos Lords is barely any different to that of any Space Marine Hero. This becomes even worse when you consider that he usually ends up being more expensive for a lot less advantages. Aside of marks, the only option of difference is the Daemon Weapon, which is a problematic, occasionally useful upgrade at best. The Khorne Variation is slightly more practical than the previous Berserker Glaive, but very likely to do absolutely nothing when you need it more than ever.

What the current codex made me realise is that Chaos just isn't Chaos without oodles of interesting rules and wargear. The Chaos Codex as it stands lacks both. It has a handful of gimmicks to make up for it, such restrictive options as to be offensive to anyone who takes the effort to model unique Chaos Models for their army, and highlights a fundamental problem that GW has only exacerbated in recent years.

Warhammer 40,000 is changing in tone. There was a time, when Loyalist Space Marines were depicted as usually on the receiving end of bitter defeat. Most of their endings were bittersweet, being pyrrhic victories at best. It was common to show Space Marines facing death, bravely, but facing a ultimately (and usually subtle) futile outcome. This vision has been slowly changing, most likely as an effort by GW to simplify 40k for their rather youthful target audience (despite the fact that this target audience has loved 40k as it was for at least a decade or so anyway), and give clear messages about good guys and bad guys.

The dark and depressing future is being replaced with one where Space Marines are ridiculously awesome. Grey Knights barely registering a shrug, before easily resisting the taint of chaos and rendering it asunder as if they're a badly scripted 80s B-Movie action hero. Now personally, I'd rather have the bleak and depressing side. It is to many 40k fans (the actual fans, not those arseholes who like winning more than getting laid) its best feature.

Chaos has suffered from this for a while, usually being utilised as the designated bad guy of choice, and doing pretty much every villain cliché in the book. Abaddon takes it to the extremes, with the Black Crusade campaign being almost as disastrous as an exercise as the Warhammer Fantasy Storm of Magic campaign, for pretty much the same reasons: bad writing.

[Side Rant: You know GW hands out a lot of bad writing, when fans of 40k talk endlessly about how awesome Dan Abnett is. He is indeed a good writer, but he is being horrendously overrated. It isn't his fault, its the rest of the company that he's being compared to. With the likes of Matt Ward writing Codex fluff, Dan Abnett could be the reincarnation of Shakespeare by comparison. As it stands, he's a fairly consistent and solid writer. GW has one. Him. That's pretty much all there is to it.]

During the campaign, Abaddon managed to fit in some pretty bad Dick Dastardly-esque cackles of villain-ness, and then manage to fail rather spectacularly, being upstaged by the Deceiver, who's force of origin (Necrons) most likely played very little part in the actual campaign.

Chaos used to be particularly deep, with lots of very interesting depth and disturbingness. Now they seem to be pretty much "We're mean because we are", and I'm sure one could be led to wonder why they worship those Chaos Gods, because it makes bugger all difference. Unless of course you're a Daemon. But you can thank Matt Ward for that. I still haven't forgiven him, but at least now, looking back at all those people who said I was over-reacting and that Ward would turn out to be a boon for the company, that I was mostly right. He's been a boon alright. Managed to doom the company in the long run though.

I would like to demonstrate this decay of Chaos with a singular example: Khorne. There is more to it, but Khorne shows it off far more easily, and as a long-suffering ex-servant of the Blood God, I happen to have noticed the change very distinctively.

In the game, we have lost a lot of distinctiveness. The Axe of Khorne has disappeared. It was essentially a power weapon, but it was different enough to be interesting. If it is more or less just a regular power weapon, then all your Chaos Champion or Lord is becomes little more than a palette swap of a loyalist marine. Likewise there is no God specific vehicle upgrade (the Destroyer) so all you can really do is paint it red and make it look nasty, but there are vehicles in loyalist marine books that have actual character to them and a uniqueness. The Chaos offering in the current Codex was never even remotely distinct as a "Chaos" vehicle.

This is the issue, Chaos are Chaos in name only.

In balance, I should add that Berserkers have a unique statline that is far more suitable to what they should be, but it came at the cost of a lot of interesting and unique (if obvious) wargear options. Berserkers are still a popular choice, but there became no reason to take more than a unit of them. To the cynically inclined, one can begin to wonder if the Chaos Codex (like the Daemon one after it) was an exercise in dissuading One-God forces and encouraging players to take multiple-god forces, which are usually a particularly bad looking colour scheme concept, and a good reason why Chaos of any kind is seldom seen on the gaming table.

But by far the worst affect on Khorne (and Chaos in general) was the degradation of the background fluff from deep, disturbing and interesting to simplified, trite and cliché. The best example of this is how Kharne the Destroyer managed to help shape the stereotypical representation of Khorne, through the deterioration of vocabulary.

Chaos used to have some particularly fine quotes and interesting arguments in the old days. Such as this quote from page 77 of the 2nd Edition Codex Imperialis:

"Though the gates that stand between the mortal world and the immortal Realm of Chaos are now closed to me, still I would rather die having glimpsed eternity than never to have stirred from the cold furrow of mortal life. I embrace death without regret as I embraced life without fear." Kargos Bloodspitter, Champion of Khorne

If we contrast this with those who follow Khorne in the newer books:

"UH DURR... BLOOD FOR BLOOD GOD!!!!11111" Kharne the Copycat, random Berzerker

Kharne used to be an exception. Granted, all Khorne followers (especially Berzerkers) are homicidal lunatics, but it was only really Kharne who was that batshit mental. He added to Chaos decay by making sure his epithet was doubly suitable by dooming his entire brethren to 1-sentence vocabularies. Whilst a blood-crazed loon sensing blood in a soon unfolding battle has a certain poetic charm, applying it entirely to every follower of Khorne (or at least every World Eater) is a little much, really.

Chaos used to be so interesting and diverse, before they all became clichés of themselves. The best story I ever read about Chaos is still the one from pages 78-80 of the 2nd Edition Wargear book entitled Dark Communion. The story is merely about a Chaos lord using a technique for storing his favourite memories, but it is a mix of good sci-fantasy writing and actually being incredibly interesting. It was written by one of GW's old writers called Bill King. Memories of his work is one of the main reasons why I wonder why everyone loves Abnett so much.

Ultimately, the state of Chaos makes me question why anyone but the most ardent of fans would actually bother with Chaos. It's doubly sad because people do, because Chaos are awesome simply by conception and basic aesthetic alone, so it truly highlights how poor GW's writing is that they can completely and utterly fail to do the merest of fan expectation justice. It isn't a question of how Chaos got screwed up, but more of how GW actually managed to. Given that lots of Chaos players still stick with their forces and continue to make amazing models shows that they totally deserve to get something resembling an amount of effort on the part of GW's writing team (I'm still both surprised and disappointed that this Codex was written by both Gav Thorpe and Alessio Cavatore. They really were phoning this in).

It depresses me to conclude, much in the way of the Orks when they finally received an update, that it will be something short of a miracle if it even comes close to justifying the hard work and continued determination of Chaos players, and even if it does manage to do some of this, it will massively fall short, much like the Ork Codex did, and that's your best case scenario, from a better time, and more talented writers. Considering that was 4th Ed, one can view Phil Kelly in much the same way as Abnett. You'll spot a rose in a dung pile easy enough.