“Gork and Mork stirred and a wave of fear passed through the warp. Suicide and incidence of violent crime climbed steeply. On Icholbar an Astropath screamed and threw himself from the balcony of a skyscraper apartment, yelling that his people were doomed. On the craftworld Hope of Other Days, an Eldar philosopher stopped listening to the atonal music of his waterchimes and began composing his death-haiku. On distant Earth, a living corpse in a golden throne opened eyes that held fear for the first time in centuries.” Extract from In The Warp Something Stirred, Waaargh! The Orks, pg.71
Waaagh Energy is a potent thing in the Ork’s arsenal. I’d actually argue it is the most potent and misunderstood concept in the whole of the Ork pantheon. It has such vastly wide consequences I need to discuss it in 3 chapters, and no doubt it’ll come up as a topic numerous times over the course of the whole series.
All Orkoids are slightly psychic. Their connection to the warp is extremely strong, and their unflinching beliefs produce the immensely powerful warp reflection of Gork and Mork, the Ork gods, who unerringly romp throughout the Warp beating up every other god and always triumphing. Gork and Mork will come up again later in the series, but the issue of how the Gods were created is the key to understanding the Waaagh, and some of the potential it has.
The quote supplied above (and how awesome is it) was something I thought was merely another in a long line of “Staffer Hearsay”: cool stories that come from somewhere that is most likely the Universe of Made Up Crap. But to my surprise, I found it in the story In The Warp Something Stirred (which is possibly the best example of understatement in all of 40k) in Waaargh! The Orks. The story tells of the first Waa-Ork (which is what Waaargh! The Orks calls a Waaagh!), which creates both the psychic awakening of the whole Orkoid race, but also the two Ork Gods. What spawns this magnificent revolution? A Mek deciding, for the first time, to build a gargant. The psychic energy produced by that realisation is enough to briefly wake the Emperor from a state of quite profound death.
Waaagh Energy and an actual Waaagh! are entirely the same thing. Waaagh Energy is the psychic build-up, a melting pot of the subconscious psychic energy of a group of Orkoids. The more Orkoids there are, and the more aggressive they are, the more powerful the energy. It’s the reason Orks grow big, it’s the reason Squigs fill the societal needs they do, and it’s the reason that Ork Society works the way it does. With Waaagh Energy, there is virtually nothing the Orks cannot do.
Orks have a can-do philosophy. Orks don’t worry about their problems, or about failure, they just try something different until the difficulty is overcome. As they go about their existence, the Orkoid psychic subconscious ensures that this philosophy works. If the Ork wants to take over the Warband, he toughens up. If he wants to build something, by fiddling about and not knowing what he’s doing, he’ll build it. It isn’t completely flawless, but the Waaagh Energy will make the desired outcome at least possible, if the right conditions are in place.
What are the right conditions? Well, we’ll come back to this in part 2, but Waaagh Energy does have its limits, most of the time. The limitation is the imagination, or common perception of Orkoids, as well as reality itself. I can see some arguments about how this system can be abused, but it’s virtually impossible. If an Ork doesn’t believe something possible, it won’t happen. Remember that Waaagh Energy is wholly subconscious. So its limits are self-imposed. There are many things Orks wouldn’t bother with, and they adhere to various schools of thought that regulate their behaviour, such as Clan Affiliations, or just the Orky outlook in general. So, whilst the possibilities of Waaagh Energy are infinite, their actual potential is dependent on the outlook of the Orkoids that foster it. If an Ork, for instance, believes Blue to be a lucky colour, it is unlikely that they’d immediately conclude that pink is luckier without some significant influence upon their outlook.
Orks are probably the least imaginative of all the Orkoids, perhaps of the entire 40k universe, so Ork society has to get around to certain ideas usually by accident, tradition, or in response to stimuli from encountering other races. This regulates Waaagh Energy uses quite well, but also allows it to be scaled up, as needed. Thus Orks actually get a lot better in every way if they have a good opponent, because their expansion is based upon reacting to their stimulus, rather than relying on the basic Ork societal programming.
As a side note here, one could be led to conclude that Orks actually need war to enhance their society, and their very species. Without much of a complex history, or an overly imaginative and dynamic society, Orks need stimulus to draw from, so if the Orks find themselves a good opponent or two, they’ll learn from them how to be more successful. When your outlook and biology is purely based on survival, you will need survival to be more of a challenge to truly improve at it.
Waaagh Energy is also the likely candidate for what controls the sporing process. Orkoids form their own eco-system, wherever they go. The 3 greenskin hierarchy forms the basis of Ork society, whilst the Squigs play havoc with the local environment, as well as evolving to suit societal needs. The sporing process works like clockwork, filling in gaps, slowly building up the Orkoid Species from nothing into everything, releasing spores at the same time, regressing development to produce new Orkoids, and so on. What on earth controls all this? The Waaagh! of course.
The Orkoids’ subconscious psychic resonance is constant at any state of development , providing the impetus to biological processes. Taken as a whole, this resonance is able to cater for all the biological and social needs of Ork society as a whole. Viewed this way, it’s hard not to view Orkoid culture as a gestalt entity; acting as one uniting concept, yet being a vastly diversified culture with four separate species working towards the benefit of them all. It doesn’t always work out, but the potential for the process is always there, in every, single spore.
This psychic energy is also used in battle. We will go into more detail regarding its more subtle uses and such in Chapter 4 (when we’ll really get to the big misconceptions), but the main usage it sees in battle is the Power of Waaagh! and when in use by the Ork pskyers, namely Weirdboyz.
Before continuing, it is worth noting that there is no difference between the two different examples and how they manifest. All Orkoid psychic energy is resonance, and this resonance is itself the Waaagh!, it just varies as to how pronounced, or even aggressive it is. An Orkoid might not even be vaguely aware of its presence, but even the most minute to the most blatant application of this psychic energy comes from precisely the same source.
The Waaagh! is the most potent example of this phenomena. It is the peak of a build up of energy. Almost all Orks build up to this moment, and when the moment finally arrives all that energy and effort used to get to that moment is released simultaneously, to such a powerful extent that it can only be verbally expressed by its very words, and that expression is unlikely to be subtle.
The Waaagh! is resonance at its least subtle. An Ork will particularly feel the effects of its powers, overcome by a lust for glory and battle. It will help them toughen up; it will speed them up and even give them fortune at vital moments. It also gives the ability for a powerful Warboss to instantly unify and concentrate the attentions of hundreds, perhaps thousands or millions of Orkoids into a single objective.
This psychic energy is a virtual constant, and exists in every Orkoid. It can be tapped into specially gifted Orks called Weirdboyz, who tap into that reserve of power and manifest it in psychic attacks and energy. By rights, Ork Weirdboyz should have the most powerful psychic powers in the game, at least by nature of raw power. Because they’re tapping not only from the Warp as other psykers do, but from a race who are all psychically endowed and virtually unified by belief.
Whereas all other races and powers often run into problems because their faithful themselves have flawed and limited convictions, an Ork simply never bothers with such concerns, and their beliefs are unflinching. The Powers of Chaos, for instance, can be undermined, or enhanced, by doubt. Gretchin are a very doubtful race, or at least fatalistic by their very nature, but they generally have faith in their masters, and fully accept that Orks will win.
It should be stated, perhaps even overstated, that Psychic Energy isn’t unstoppable. It still answers to the reality of 40k as much as anything else, and Waaagh energy can only be expected to bend that reality in very narrow instances. If we use an odd analogy, Ork’s unflinching belief mixed with psychic resonance would not make Orks always roll 6s, even if there might be some slight psychic influence so that all Ork players on our planet do indeed roll more 6s than Beakie players, let’s say, it wouldn’t be all the time. There might be a small moment in time when Orks are under the muster of a particularly powerful Ork Warlord that this maxim was possible for a particular endeavour; at least now we know why Ghaz’ ‘Prophet of the Waaagh!’ rule works.
An Ork with very strong psychic abilities and an inclination for survival is still going to look woeful after his head gets hit by a bolter round; it’s just before that he may have managed to run the distance of several football pitches without slowing down, and bringing a large choppa to bear that could even possibly put an unpleasant mark on a tank. Sadly his imagination didn’t really stretch to a rocket-propelled explosive shell heading towards his face, and reality could be bothered to contradict the possibility.
In spite of this, there’s not a single thing in the Ork fluff that Orks or any Orkoid has achieved without some help from psychic resonance. It is the invisible hand that helps guide the Orkoids to their many successes, and even those inevitable failures; but it’ll still be there to pick them up afterwards (not that they’ll need it). Over the course of the next two chapters, we are going to explore this odd relationship even further. Chapter 4 (Part 2) will discuss the main misconceptions of resonance (and I promise to completely resolve one of them once and for all) and Chapter 5 (Part 3) will go into a little speculation about the biggest misconception about resonance, that resonance is somehow limited to Orks.
No comments:
Post a Comment