Wherever humanity has gone in the galaxy, the Orks were already there, waiting to start a fight. This race of greenskinned brutes lives only to make war, and the unending battles of the 41st millennium are their idea of paradise. Here’s what you need to know about the Warhammer 40,000 Orks.
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To call the Orks ‘warlike’ is to grossly underestimate the danger they pose to the Imperium of Man. The Orks live only to fight – every aspect of their culture, their technology, and their ramshackle empires exists to support their wars. When left to their own devices, Orks will happily fight one another – gleefully, in fact, for an Ork is only truly happy when it is at war.
Orks know that might makes right. Mobs of Orks band together under the largest of their number, the hulking Nobs, which are then beaten into line by a fearsome Warboss. These towering brutes are the size of an Ogryn but far faster, stronger, and more cunning, and their combination of ego, ambition, and brute strength can mould the otherwise chaotic greenskins into an irregular but dangerously lethal fighting force.
While lone Ork warbands pose a serious danger for an unprepared planetary defense force, it is when they mass into a Waaagh! that they become truly apocalyptic. A Waaagh! is similar to a holy war, pilgrimage, or mass migration, and occurs only when a sufficiently mighty and ambitious Ork Warlord can batter all his rivals into submission for long enough to direct their forces towards a worthy target – usually the most heavily defended star system their erratic void ships are capable of reaching.
This massed invasion from multiple Ork hordes can conquer whole subsectors. Once a Waaagh! has started it is almost impossible to stop. As the Orks achieve victory after victory, so does the Waaagh!’s reputation spreads among other warbands. More Orks join the fight, drawn by the promise of a truly great fight: the harder their opponents resist them, the more fun the fight becomes. The ongoing conflict for the world of Armageddon is one such eternal battle, and numberless Orks flock to it every day in search of the scrap to end all scraps.
Ork biology
Orks are heavily muscled, layered with thick bone, and have an extremely dull pain response. They are capable of surviving catastrophic injury, and are particularly receptive to transplantation and cybernetic augmentation. The more an Ork fights the larger they become, and it’s easy to judge the most experienced Ork in a battlefield simply by looking for the biggest. In their violent society, this will also almost certainly be the leader.
Orks breed by releasing spores, particularly at the moment of their death. The Ork genome is incredibly dense, packed with multiple strands of DNA, and an Ork spore could grow into any of a number of Orkoid species, from simple fungus to colossal Squiggoths. A lone Ork cadaver could infest an entire world with an Ork ecosystem, making them almost impossible to eliminate once established.
Orks gestate in the earth and emerge as young adults, already the size of an adult Imperial guardsman. They have innate instincts to use and maintain their crude weapons, and even a sense of basic military tactics, though this usually starts as little more than “follow the biggest Ork towards the biggest fight”.
Orks are asexual and genderless – calling them ‘boyz’ is an Imperial convention – but they find the concept in other races quite amusing. They do have a concept similar to love, called ‘grod’, which translates loosely as “favorite enemy”. An Ork’s grod is someone who has deeply impressed them (usually by beating them half to death), and who has such a hold over their thoughts that they will make stupid decisions in pursuit of them.
Ork klans
Ork warbands and empires are idiosyncratic, molded according to the personality of their overlord, but there are some cultural tendencies that can be found in Ork populations all across the galaxy. These ‘klans’ are more like ideologies than political groupings, and a warband is just likely to contain warriors from multiple klans as it is to be made up of a single klan.
- Goffs are belligerent hand to hand fighters, in many ways the archetypical Ork that the Imperium expects – they tend towards massed full frontal assaults. Their black armor with occasional motifs in white is a suitably no-nonsense representation of their attitude.
- Bloodaxes are sneaky gits, capable of distinctly un-Orky thinking like ‘delayed gratification’, ‘tactics’, and ‘stealth’. Bloodaxes sometimes serve as mercenaries for other species, and many of their number become specialist Kommandos.
- Deffskullz are prolific thieves with a deserved reputation for stealing guns, vehicles, and assorted loot from other unsuspecting Orks. They also make use of looted Imperial vehicles, and are deeply superstitious, favoring lucky blue as their klan color.
- Evil Sunz love to go fast, and there’s a huge overlap between the klan and the Kult of Speed. They paint their vehicles red because, as any Ork knows, “Red wunz go fasta”.
- Bad Moonz are the richest of the Orks, and are only too willing to flaunt it. The Ork currency is teeth, and Bad Moons are blessed with especially toothsome jaws. Other Orks aren’t too bitter about this natural advantage, since it can easily be remedied by punching a Bad Moon in the gob. Their klan color is a rich, golden yellow.
- Snakebites are traditionalists, who would rather ride a good old fashioned Squighog than a warbike any day. Populations of ‘feral Orks’ – a recurring problem for any world that has ever fought off an Ork invasion – are often Snakebites.
Ork kults
Orks are prone to obsessive behaviour, honing in on a particular way of doing things and following it well beyond its logical extreme. This manifests in a number of subcultures, or ‘kults’.
- Beastsnaggas are hunters who seek out the largest prey, whether that’s the native megafauna of a feral world, colossal Squigosaurs to tame, or enemy vehicles.
- Speedfreeks, aka the Kult of Speed, are obsessed with going fast. Almost all Ork pilots, and many Ork land vehicle drivers, are Speedfreeks.
- Freebootas are Orks who could not resist the allure of more and flashier loot, even if it belonged to an Ork bigger and meaner than they are. Inevitably these ‘Flash Gits’ are driven out of their warbands for their antisocial tendencies, and band together into pirate bands that ply the space lanes in search of better stuff.
Ork oddboyz
Some Orks are just spawned different, and emerge from their gestation sacks with unique abilities and obsessions that set them apart from other Orks. These oddboyz fill behave much like trained specialists in other societies, but their expertise is entirely innate.
- Runtherds capture and corral slaves – usually other greenskins, like the scrawny gretchin and diminutive snotlings, but also prisoners of war from other races – as well as the many and varied ‘squig’ beasts, from the belligerent squighog warmounts to the tiny but very useful oil squig and hair squig.
- Weirdboyz have a connection to the warp, but unlike the Psykers of other races they draw most of their power from the sheer enthusiasm Orks around them. Weirdboyz often live outside Ork settlements or at the top of isolated towers to try and prevent their heads from exploding before the battle starts.
- Mekaniaks (or Meks) are engineers, inventors, and mad scientists. Ork technology baffles the tech priests of Mars. It is all, ultimately, directed towards war, and much of it appears crude and dangerously erratic. Yet Orks have demonstrated mastery of incredibly advanced feats, including gravity manipulation, various forms of teleportation, and weaponised forcefield projection.
- Painboyz are the Ork equivalent of doctors, though it’s very rare for Orks to suffer an injury that is debilitating without being fatal – Ghazghkull Thraka’s entire head transplanted onto a new body after losing a duel with Ragnar Blackmane. Painboyz love to experiment on their patients, and often team up with Meks to make ‘interesting’ bionik alterations – these are sometimes connected to the complaint the Boy originally came to the doc asking for treatment.
The Brainboyz and the origins of the Orks
The Orks have very little in the way of permanent culture, but they do have some very old stories, perhaps transmitted between generations of Runtherd, or perhaps carried through the Great Green psychic gestalt that unites the species. Once, there was another kind of Ork, the Brainboyz, who were created all the other Orkoid races. They’re dead now, and the Orks really don’t think about them very much.
In truth, it’s likely that the Orks are a byproduct of the War in Heaven, the first and most devastating conflict in the galaxy. The Old Ones created many other species to serve as their troops for their war against the Necrons and the C’tan Star Gods. Among these were the Krork, the colossal predecessors of the Orks, far larger and more impressive than their descendants. At least one of these beings exists in the 41st millennium, forever locked in stasis in Trazyn the Infinite’s gallery at Solemnace.
No Ork has ascended to the level of the Krork in the eons since, but it may still be possible. As Orks grow larger they become more intelligent, and as a warlord brings more of their culture into one empire, it develops greater sophistication and scientific achievement. During the War of the Beast in M32, the Orks exhibited capabilities not even seen during the Great Crusade, sending diplomats to Terra to request its surrender, and capable of teleporting entire worlds.
The Beast was a colossal Ork the size of an Imperial Knight. It was also at the center of a psychic matrix built into the Ork homeworld of Ulannor, channeling the power of Ork weirdboyz and the gestalt belief of the entire Ork population into its physical form. This makes it hard to say whether the Beast was a true reincarnation of the Krorks of old.
The Ork gods Gork and Mork
The two Ork gods are Gork, who is brutal yet cunning, and Mork, who is cunning yet brutal. These two behemoths represent the duality of Ork existence. The Orks don’t worship them explicitly, but venerate the gods in every act of violence. The greatest Ork war engines, the mighty Gargants, are walking icons of the gods – but whereas an Imperial Tech Priest would react with despair to the sight of an Imperial Titan being brought low, and Ork would be just as likely to cheer at a Gargant going up in an explosion.
Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, Prophet of the Waagh
Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka is the biggest boss, the voice of Gork and Mork, the Prophet of the Waagh! When Ghazghkull was a pale-skinned yoof his life was almost ended by a bolt shell to the brain, but Mad Dok Grotsnik was able to patch his skull back together with bioniks and gumption. Ghazghkull came back different. In the gap between life and death he had heard voices in the Great Green, and he awoke with the ambition to lead a Waaagh! the likes of which the galaxy has never seen.
Although Ghazghkull has led wars all across the Imperium, his recurring obsession is the Imperial world of Armageddon, which he has invaded three times. It’s here that he met his grod, Commissar Sebastian Yarrick, who led the Imperial forces that defeated Ghazgkhull during his first invasion. In the years and battles since then Ghazghkull has only grown mightier and more cunning, and time – and repeated run-ins with the Ork – have taken their toll on the Old Man of Armageddon.
Ghazghkull has mustered many other mighty Ork warlords and oddboyz to his banner, who know that following him is guaranteed to lead to a massive fight. Wazdakka Gutsmek and his Speedwaagh were the heralds of the third invasion of Armageddon, and their motorized forces still race between the ruins of the hive cities in search of battle. The wealthy and eccentric Nazdreg Ug Urdgrub was a pioneer of the Tellyporta technology that made it possible for the Orks to maneuver a colossal fleet into the Armageddon system in a single decisive movement.
Source: Wargamer
