'Ere We Go! An Introduction

Well, I thought I'd begin by trumping out the Blogger cliché: Hello again, and I'm back after a brief hiatus. I'd like to continue this cliché by issuing yet another one of my already numerous thread sections. This time I'd like to centre it around my favourite gaming subject: Orks.

A recent comment in the It's a Hard Fluff Life section has caught my interest. I suppose it is fair to say that Orks are my main interest when it comes to Warhammer 40,000. I find them the most dynamic and interesting race in the entire of the 40k canon. There is just something about them, something very visceral and interesting.

Firstly, there's the over-trumped Grimdark setting in which 40k inhabits. Orks sit awkwardly to one side. I've heard arguments how Orks are a parody of themselves, but I find this is something 40k does to itself. Taking things too far, going over the top, is something that you find in 40k, and then there's the friggin' space marines. Who evidently can count to 12, which is one more than 11.

40k itself started as a parody of the Grimdark style, and at some point, both its writers and fans started playing this straight. Throughout it, the Orks have never changed their tune, and have always remained resolutely the same beast, with a crude and simplistic, but workable ethic, and a vicious, but quite affable honesty.

In a wargame, this is such a refreshing approach. In a setting of grim and twisted machinations, one can find the greatest contrast in Orks. It is actually quite funny, because for a setting that sets up not only that war is bad, but that it is also a constant, most other factions are depicted carrying out over-elaborate gambits, ploys and machinations which invariably fail.

Yet of these, the most memorable is the one the Orks created, that of the second and third Armageddon Wars. What we have discovered from this is that Ghaz is using this essentially as practice, and trying his luck against the Imperials. One can get the impression from reading the fluff that Ghazghkull hasn't quite gone all out yet. If you contrast this with Abaddon's Eye of Terror campaign, it is Ghaz who comes across as the sophisticated warlord, and Abaddon who is the redundant B-Movie super-villain.

Orks are an army one cannot completely take seriously, which is both a boon and a bust for Ork players. Generally speaking it means that Orks are often dismissed, or deeply disliked, as not fitting into the grand scale of things, and dismissed as stupid, random and crude. Yet at the same time, your average 40k player even now, despite how powerful the current codex is, deeply underestimate and dislike Orks. Which helps a lot when they think their fancy power armour can do all that much against simple brute force and sheer force of numbers.

The true irony of this as far as the background goes, is that Orks actually work in a dysfunctional universe by nature of their simplistic view. All the other factions are deeply divided by in-fighting or internal politics, yet the Orks just get those out of the way and get on with it. This idea that Orks are too silly for the setting is ridiculous, when you realise the situation IS already silly, and that the situation is a unhealthy setting, and what sets Orks apart is that they alone have the healthy attitude to the setting.

Orks are a hard race to champion. There's always some group who hate them, but then that is true of most 40k races, as invariably, a poor balanced game has an insecure fanbase. However Orks get it just for being stupid. I find this hard to swallow, because there is a big difference between crude, and stupid. You'll find the primary difference is that crude can still work. If you haven't been tabled by an Ork player yet, most likely there's no Ork player where you game. Lucky you.

I love the Orks. In a game that doesn't know what it is any more, that is consumed by power-gaming, poor balancing, horrendously overpriced models, and some of the worst reputations for poor sportsmanship, painting and modelling abilities in a vastly wide-ranging hobby, with a system so bad even the FAQs need FAQing, sometimes you just want everything to shut up for 30 minutes so you can roll some dice, and have fun.

I am yet to find a faction in any wargaming system that does that as well as Orks. Skaven used to, but then 8th Edition arrived. GW obviously don't like it when you have fun. They'll have to try very hard to drill that into Ork players. Orks makes 40k better. We give it more rivets, paint it red and say job's a gud un, and generally you'll find a lot of begrudging GW "fans" who can only endure their crap because they love their greenskins.

Over the course of the next month or so, I'm going to try and write some articles about Orks, greenskins and such. I might even put up some pictures of my models! First however, I'd like to discuss a issue close to my heart, Orks in Fluff. At the same time, I'll unveil my most recent Ork Fluff project: Wurrgitz!