The Unnamed Gorkamorka Site

GCE is a community-driven reimplementation of Games Workshop’s 1997 skirmish game, Gorkamorka. The books are free and can be shared and remixed according to their licences (usually Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International – check the documents for details). In other words they’re safe to share without worry.

There’s two ways to get the rules – PDF releases and the development documents.

• The PDF releases are complete and ready to be printed off, shared, and so on.
• The dev documents are where we do the work – they may be incomplete, unfinished, or even a battleground of comments!

 

Download Links for Releases

If there’s no PDF it’s because we’ve not got that far yet – see “Do I need the old books?” (below) for what to do.

• GCE Core Rules v. 1.31 – The rules for playing battles (broadly equivalent to Gorkamorka’s Da Roolz)
• GCE Campaign Rules v. 1.0 – The rules for between battles (~the campaign section of Gorkamorka’s Da Uvver Book)
• GCE Scenario Book v. 1.0 – Scenarios to play
• GCE Gorker & Morker Faction Pack v. 1.0 – The rules for fielding a mob of Gorkers (or Morkers) in GCE
• GCE Rebel Grot Faction Pack v. 1.0 – The rules for Rebel Grots in GCE

 

Development Files

These are worked on using Google Docs as a collaborative tool. Editing is limited to the team but comments can be added by anyone.

• GCE Core Rules
• GCE Campaign Rules
• GCE Faction packs folder (includes packs in development)
• GCE Scenario folder (each scenario is a separate document)
• GCE Glossary

Each faction gets its own faction pack – if your faction doesn’t have one just use the existing ones.

• Gorker/Morker
• Rebel Grots
• Diggas

 

Questions!

What’s changed?

Each book has its own changelog at the bottom of this page but mostly the difference between the original rulebooks (ORBs) is the restructuring. Our version lays out the rules differently from the ORBs in a way that we feel makes more sense.

Other than that there’s a few minor things like the elimination of the Artillery Dice. In the ORBs it is literally never used at face value – every time the value is halved. A standard D6 can do the same job!

Another thing is the change to capitalising game concepts. You’ll see things like “Charge” (rather than “charge”) to refer to a charge move, for example. There’s even a glossary for those terms!

The places with the biggest changes are faction packs – generally that’s where the rule interactions get messy and so we’ve put in work to try to make things a bit more consistent (rather than having to have a lot of “Reroll the following results” exceptions). It’s also where things are the most experimental. The original faction rules remain compatible with GCE so there’s no particular reason you need to use the GCE ones – you can use the GCE game rules but the Morker rules from ’97 Gorkamorka, for example.

 

Do I need the old books?

That depends. We’ve done our best to split up GCE in such a way that we retain compatibility with existing Gorkamorka-compatible content. Lots of it we plan on reimplementing but we all have our own lives and commitments so that’s not an instantaneous process. Each faction is to receive its own “faction pack” which provides the GCE version of their rules. If your faction doesn’t yet have rules then you can use existing rules.

Similarly if your faction does have rules but you’re not a fan of the GCE version then your old faction rules still work. Use those instead!

So the answer there is basically – no, but it depends on whether we’ve got as far as writing the rules you need.

 

Can I use my old mobs?

Mostly yes. There’s a few changes to the generic skill tables but your existing warriors could simply use the original rulebook skills.

If you want to use the faction’s GCE faction pack you might run into a few changes, dependant on faction. Converting the roster would be one option – using the original faction rules would be another (yep, GCE works with Gorkamorka’s rules).

 

Why not just copy and paste stuff?

The answer lies in how intellectual property law works (which varies by jurisdiction but quite a few things are commonly true in most countries). The text, layout, and illustrations found in Games Workshop publications belong to them. They hold the copyright. That gives them various exclusive rights – for example distribution rights. Copyright also covers derivative works – which is what a copy-pasted job would be. Anything like that would remain their property and they’d be well within their rights to take legal action.

However game mechanics and ideas aren’t covered by copyright. No one owns the concept of rolling a D6 and consulting a table, for example. The authors know how Gorkamorka works and have created a ruleset based on those mechanics from the ground up. Things haven’t just been fed through a thesaurus – the entire game’s mechanics have been rewritten. The whole text is licenced under a permissive Creative Commons licence specifically to enable people to distribute, remix, and otherwise use the ruleset as a basis for their own creations. Fill yer boots!

 

But they gave away the rulebooks didn’t they? That’s public domain!

No, it’s not. A copyright holder can distribute their IP however they like – paid, free, whatever. They can also change their mind at any time. Things enter the public domain if they’re deliberately released into it, such as by using a CC0 licence, or if their copyright has expired (e.g. H. G. Wells’ work). Unfortunately copyright lasts a really, really long time these days – it might as well be infinite in terms of our likely lifespans (the authors).

 

Why do you always call it “GCE” and not -?

Trade marks. Names like “Warmachine” are trade marks – that is to say their owners have the exclusive legal right to use the name, logo, and related branding (in the case of Warmachine – Privateer Press). It’s a different part of intellectual property law and that’s an important distinction here. The owner of a trade mark is required to take legal action if another party is using it against their wishes. Otherwise they risk losing that trade mark. The same is not true of copyright infringement.

We’ve also no interest in using their trade mark – it’s theirs. We did toy with making a silly acronym like Genericised Ork & Related Kits Asynchronous Multiplayer Offshoot Ruleset with a Kludgy Acronym (inspired by TWAIN) but ultimately it makes more sense to just stick with the fairly generic “GCE”. The system is mostly compatible with Games Workshop’s Gorkamorka and related rulesets but it’s its own thing. It’s setting agnostic, model agnostic, and designed for the community to build upon without having to rely on an out of print legacy ruleset. If you like it stands for .

 

…and it’s free? What’s the catch?

No catch, but maybe it’ll help if you understand the motivation. As massive fans of Gorkamorka we would very much like a ruleset like it to be easily accessible forever. The way to accomplish that is to provide our work under a licence that means it can be shared freely. Eventually our work will pass into the public domain but that will hopefully be a long time from now (on account of it being based on a certain duration after our deaths!). In the meantime it will hopefully mean that anyone that wants to play can do so without having to deal with the murky world of IP law and all the content-scanning stuff that comes with it.

Also if we charged for it that’d introduce any number of complications – it would be far more work than what little we could expect to make. If charging for something doesn’t make sense, why bother? The licence is non-commercial to also avoid that coming up as a potential sore spot – by making it something we can’t sell there can’t be the issue of money changing hands and all the baggage that would come with it.

 

I’d like to contribute some artwork – what do you need?

Amazing! We’ve got a dedicated page to answer the questions you might have.

 

Are the ODT documents used for generating the PDFs available somewhere?

Yep! They’re stored in a Git repo here.

 

I don’t like the changes you’ve made and want to make a more “pure” version of the rules.

If you’d like to remix our work to strip out changes you disagree with then that is completely fine. Seriously, that’s one of the reasons we’ve done things the way we have – so that there would be a set of rules that anyone can use as a basis for their own ruleset. Grab the source ODTs from the repo link above and make the changes you want. You’ll need to abide by the licence of the documents (read the licence box at the end of each one for details) but other than that, have at it.

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Changelogs

GCE Rebel Grot Faction Pack:

• Lying to the GRC patched
• Slight buff to income
• Cutta movement modified slightly