Before Gorkamorka Orks were still green but their appearance was much less brutish. The new savageness was brought to life by a particular sculptor – Brian Nelson, or at least that’s who this White Dwarf attributes it to.
Orks went from this sort of thing:
To this:
Originally published in White Dwarf 216 (December 1997) this four page article isn’t just about GoMo but it’s a solid read nonetheless.
You may have noticed assorted non-Ork critters mentioned in various pieces of Gorkamorka background. Casually mentioned in many a box-out, these creatures raise all sorts of questions. Just what is a Whip Scorpion, and why is it so terrifying? Why do Rebel Grots seem to have a monopoly on Buzzer Squigs? What do Steel Gulpers eat?
So today we present some rules written by tUGS’ own Depiff (Ross Graham). Sumfink In Da Sand has all the details needed for incorporating the terrifying beasts of the desert into your games of Gorkamorka. These can be added as “environmental hazards” to any scenario, and come complete with behavioural rules, so you can even run a mob against them solo, should you choose.
Venturing into the desert is not for the faint-hearted, and we make no guarantees about the safety of your Boyz when encountering these horrific beasties!
This document was written by Ross Graham and includes artwork created by Clayton Tait. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike license.
MaxMini just updated their site and I was having a browse through their catalogue to see what was new. This may have been out a while or could be brand new, either way, it looks nifty:
They’re MaxMini Steam Rifles and by the looks of things would be ideal armaments for Muties. At the moment a pack of ten will set you back just over a fiver.
There’s another UK Gorkamorka meetup on the cards, folks. As per usual it’ll be at Warhammer World, GW’s HQ in Nottingham.
From the Facebook event:
Two days of general of Orky Mayhem exclusively dedicated to Gorkamorka.
Saturday 30th November 10.00am – 8.00pm and Sunday 1st December 10.00am – 6.00pm.
Another topic on The Waaagh has been repurposed for the subject if that’s your thing, for anyone else there’s an event on the Gorkamorka Facebook group:
https://www.facebook.com/events/555137321206770/
Map:
When it comes to Gorkamorka there’s something that’s often overlooked – it wasn’t only released in English. We’re not sure how many languages were supported but so far the list runs to French, German (Thanks, Morx!), Italian, and Spanish. Flamekebab even has a copy of “Skavanob” kicking around apparently!
We’re not much help if you don’t speak English but we’ve recently found a blog publishing scans of lots of the old Gorkamorka content in French. From what we can tell it doesn’t have a fancy name but then again, we don’t speak French! Find it here:
http://gorkamorka.overblog.com
There’s also a Google Drive archive of their uploads here:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0ByJiMxq7gEvmOVQ3MGRpVWQzblE
(Thanks to CrucibleOfWords for pointing out that we forgot the other sources link!)
A question that comes up time and again when wargamers are looking to get into Gorkamorka is this one:
Do I need to use the original trukk model or is the new “Ork Wartrukk” model okay?
The answer is really simple:
All models are fine.
It doesn’t matter if it’s the old trukk, the new one, or a piece of toast with a wheel at each corner. Smaller vehicles are easier to manoeuvre around the board and big ones offer more space for passengers.
In fact, on pages 46 and 47 of Da Uvver Book this picture can be seen:
“Some of the Games Workshop staff’s Gorkamorka mobs in all their glory. If you look closely at the models in this photo, you’ll notice many vehicle conversions and wacky paint schemes which might give you inspiration when you build your own mob.”
They’re all perfectly legal for play, whatever they’re made of.
As you’ve probably guessed by now – GoMo is not a very prescriptive game. It’s a WYSIWYG game (“What You See Is What You Get”) – warriors have to be modelled with their weapons and equipment, the same with vehicles. As long as the vehicle looks about right you’re good to go!
(It might be worth noting that movement speed doesn’t scale. A big trukk still moves six inches on gas engines just like a small one. As a result small vehicles will seem faster.)
Every now and again we post a link to some new model or fun conversion bitz that have come to our attention. We’ve not been doing that lately though because in the time between tUGS’ founding and now there’s been a veritable explosion of parts. There’s still lots of gaps but in many areas you guys are spoilt for choice.
The problem is that there hasn’t been a central list of what’s out there. Not any more!
Our own Flamekebab has attempted to compile an exhaustive list on the subreddit wiki. In time we may host it on our server instead (with his permission) but for now you’ll have to head over to the page on Reddit:
It’s been a long time coming but finally we’ve got some things laid out from the Gorkamorka Heritage Project. Strictly speaking it should probably be grouped separately though as it’s never been posted online before. We reached out to its author David Cammack (brother of Tim Cammack) and he’s kindly given us permission to license it. Here it is in the new template (with new fonts and graphics) for your enjoyment:
This document was written by David Cammack and edited with permission by Liam Davenport and Benjamin Fox. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike license. The layout was made by Benjamin Fox using images created by Jenny Mathiasson and is also licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
Variety is the spice of life but Digganob only added three scenarios to Gorkamorka’s collection. Luckily for us there’s plenty more written by the community!
This scenario is another one from the Gorkamorka Heritage Project, salvaged from Archive.org’s vaults. It was written by Eren Kauptland (his nom de guerre for SEO reasons) but that’s about all the info there is. It was written at some point before 2001 but seems to have been salvaged from either a previous version of his site or an offline document.
Anyway, it’s a good opportunity to break out some fun terrain, or make some. It’s probably a wise idea to read up on the air speed velocity of small birds too.
This document was written by Eren Kauptland and edited with permission by Liam Davenport and Benjamin Fox. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike license. It also contains a diagram created by Benjamin Fox, covered under the license. The layout was made by Benjamin Fox using images created by Jenny Mathiasson and is also licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
The new shiny Mek gunz have just been released and already people in the Gorkamorka community are already converting things with them.If you’ve not heard of them there’s four variants:
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Kevin Rowland’s been at his workbench and come up with this beauty:
Pretty snazzy!
| One from the archives today – these rules originally appeared in Gubbinz #1 and were written by Dan McGann.
Ever looked at a trukk and thought “You know, it’d be a lot better if it could explode more often?” well this one’s for you! Admittedly Depiff does tend to swing between total risk aversion and reckless abandon when it comes to strategy in Gorkamorka. Putting this sort of thing in his hands might not be the best idea. Or perhaps it would truly be the best idea… All kidding aside these bunker-busting buggies are precisely the thing to introduce a bit of mayhem into a game. They might even be a fun idea to build a scenario around. On closer inspection it looks like either someone in the Fanatic Press editing room removed the price or Dan forgot to put one in. Suggestions on prices anyone? |
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David Cammack didn’t just write the one scenario – today we bring you another new one.
As before this one is from the Gorkamorka Heritage Project. It’s a bit of community archaeology effort – finding old work, getting in touch with the original authors and getting permission to gussy up the old work.
This document was written by David Cammack and edited with permission by Benjamin Fox and Ross Graham. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike license. The layout was made by Benjamin Fox using images created by Jenny Mathiasson and is also licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
The hardest part of the Gorkamorka Heritage Project has been tracking down the original authors of things. Back when lots of these things were written it was traditional to adopt orky monikors – a good bit of fun back then but a pain nowadays! Case in point this scenario was written by Grimtooth (of Grimtooth’s Gorkamorka Site) and it took a fair bit of sleuthing to track him down to get permission to relicense his work. We’re not always so lucky though and there were some extra bits written by “Bloodscent” that had to be rewritten from scratch. No one knows who they were let alone how to contact them!
Anyway, scenario time. This one harks back to an old videogame series of the era or maybe just the real thing: a load of vehicles in an arena smashing the proverbial out of each other while the crowd goes wild!
This document was written by Tristån Erickson and with permission was edited by Benjamin Fox. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike license. The layout was made by Benjamin Fox using images created by Jenny Mathiasson and is also licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
If YakTribe is going to be supporting Gorkamorka soon we’d better get a move on clearing out the old stuff from the archives!
This one is also from Gubbinz #1 and was written by Stefan Fergus. They’re the only rules approximating stormboyz GW ever published for Gorkamorka but not the only ones out there. They look fun in concept but paying D6 teef to repair them between games seems a bit on the harsh side.
Getting one article published in the old Black Library publications was something to brag about but two, well, that’s an elite club. Sadly none of us here at tUGS can lay claim to that honour. Stefan Fergus can though! Here’s his second article, Rebel Grot Pogo Stikks. If you missed the last one it was rules for Rokkit Paks. Quite a fan of double Ks, wasn’t he?
Arguably these rules need some balancing but the idea is a fun one. In fact David Cammack sent us some photos of his pogo stikkas a little while back:
Here’s what he had to say about putting them together:
Obviously one is the easy conversion of a Bloodbowl figure as suggested I think in the pogo stikk article in Gubbinz 1. The other 2 are scratch-built pogo stikks – made of thin plastic rod with wire wrapped around the base to make a spring and a cross-piece out of square-section rod. I used some old plastic Warhammer goblins and added the odd pistol and some stikk bombs (the very old small grenades off the first plastic orks from long before Gorkamorka). Pretty easy really.
Anyway, the rules can be found below:
We’re continuing to clear out the Gubbinz backlog today with something for Rebel Grots written by Barry Thompson. They seem to basically be miniaturised versions of standard Rebel Grot cuttas.
Exodite’s Gorkamorka Index is pretty good but digging through a stack of old White Dwarfs revealed that it was missing a few things. Mostly it was just preview things (we’ll put them up in a bit for completeness sake) but there was one piece that caught our attention: Illuminations – John Wigley.
This article is a little like one we posted last year: The Life of Brian. That covered sculpting but dealt with more than just Gorkamorka and similarly this piece on John Wigley isn’t just about the art of Gorkamorka. It actually pre-dates the release of GoMo by a few months as it was published in White Dwarf 212; ostensibly the August issue but more likely released in July.
Given the nature of it the file size is a bit on the large size: 18 MB. Not much of a problem these days but might cause some problems on tablets and mobile devices.
Ah the 1990s. No, don’t look at the photos, just, don’t. Oh all right then, let’s brace ourselves and drift back to that glorious time when the Spice Girls were in the charts and yo-yos and rollerblades were the coolest things ever. It was awkward but we had a lot of fun.
In making all of the articles ever published about Gorkamorka available we were sooner or later going to have to get around to posting this one. It was reprinted in Gubbinz #1 but originally appeared in Citadel Journal 28 in towards the end of 1998. It’s outlandish enough to get mentioned several times in the final issue of Citadel Journal and even came with its own warning message:
Yep, it’s BladerZ; Orks on rollerskates, written by Pete and Chris Wood. Have at it:
Gubbinz contained a fairly mixed bag of new content but this article arguably brings the most advanced stuff to the table. It’s a bridge between Gorkamorka and Necromunda, merging Necromundan gangs into the world of Gorkamorka. It was written by Colin Stutt and by the looks of it quite a lot of thought went into it.
Arguably the most game-changing concept that carries over is the concept of Heavies. In Necromunda shooting is much more deadly and the arsenal available can be downright dastardly – not so much in Gorkamorka! Being able to bring things like lascannons to the table could well change the game dynamics substantially. It’s probably not wise to be in the open when testing the idea though – getting run over by a trukk full of Orks tends to ruin a warrior’s day!
A bit short notice on this one, sorry folks, but it’s good news!
Mark has organised another Gorkamorka meet at Warhammer World on November 1st 2014.
For details check out either the Facebook post about it or the topic on The Waaagh.