The Unnamed Gorkamorka Site

Today we’ve got Easy E’s Ork Klan  rules for you, but we’re going to let him do the talking:

I have been playing ork boyz since they were known as Space Ork Raiders in Rogue Traders days. At first, the orks were a pretty generic “fantasy orc”…IN SPACE! However, the release of Waaagh! Da Orks changed all of that. Suddenly Ork Kulture became relevant as the ork society was fleshed out with glyphs, brewhouses, and oddboyz. The basics of the background of Gorkamorka were seeded.

The ork background continued to expand with such hefty tomes such as Freebooterz and ‘Ere We Go. These books essentially expanded on orks as an army for Warhammer. The Klan system had originally been introduced in Waaagh! Da Orks, but had been explored in much more depth in these later books. When third edition 40K rolled out, the orks moved away from the Klan system in their codex, but Andy Chambers himself decided to tackle making some Klan specific rules for Chapter Approved.

Gorkamorka was released at the end of Warhammer 40K Second Edition when Klans were still in full swing and part of the Ork Second Edition codex. I always felt that leaving the Klans out of Gorkamorka was a huge miss, since they had been an established part of the background for so long previously. The idea of Gorkers and Morkers as the only Ork gang types within the Gorkamorka rules set always concerned me.

I was also an avid Necromunda player. I enjoyed the unique and varied background of the Hive Primus gangs. It provided a bit of flavor that Gorkamorka lacked. Again, I was surprised Gorkamorka did not use a similar system, only based on the ork Klans. The only downfall of the Necromunda system, was that starting gangs had very few differences. Again, this is something I felt was a drawback.

Therefore, when I tackled doing some additional rules for Gorkamorka, it seemed logical to focus on the two aspects of the game I felt were lacking; Klans and gang differentiation. Almost all of the rules here are based on background or rules from previous versions or imaginings of ork klans that came before. Bad Moonz teef naturally grew faster, so they were wealthier. Deathskullz were the best Lootas, painted themselves blue for luck, and made heavy use of Gretchin. Goffs were dead hard fighters, with a lot of nobs.

Whenever you make new rules, potential balance issues arise. The important thing to remember is that no game system is perfect, especially one with as many moving parts as Gorkamorka. No matter what a game designer does, players will find a way to exploit it. Fact. So, like all rules, these will need you and your game group to decide what works, what doesn’t, and where the tweaks need to be. Thankfully, Gorkamorka is a cooperative wargame not set up for tournament play. That should leave plenty of scope for you to use Klans in your games and have a good time sticking in the boot.

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If you’ve got any feedback on them, there’s a topic devoted to them on The Waaagh.

Are you in Essex? Near Thurrock? Interested in Gorkamorka?

We’re asking because Nob Rott is trying to find people to play GoMo with, and we’d like to do our best to help him out. So if you’d like to get involved, head over to his topic on The Waaagh:

Gorkamorka in Thurrock, essex, looking for games

If you’re trying to find players for your Gorkamorka campaign, it’s probably a good idea to post a topic there too. If you’d like us to mention you too just say so and we’ll leap into action. LEAP.

On November 6th Games Workshop are going to be rolling out their fancy new Dark Eldar models, which is rather timely as ScottM96 recently wrote a set of rules to let you field a mob of Dark Eldar in Gorkamorka.

Here’s what Scott has to say about them:

I wrote these rules not just on a whim, but because I was trying to entice a new player into Gorkamorka. He had just dropped quite a bit of cash on a new Dark panzee force and I didn’t want to have to make him buy Trukks and Traks (among other things) to start the game. Hopefully they are of use to some other GoMo players out there, and I look forward to adding some more to it (They are in need of Gubbinz). For those interested in more of my musings on GoMo, 40k and GW, visit my new blog: Da Slugger and Chopper.

If you’ve got any feedback on the rules, questions, or comments, you can post them in his topic on The Waaagh.

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These rules are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

Kromlech have been a bit quiet lately, but in the last few hours they posted these:

They’re not available yet, but they look pretty awesome and apparently there’s further nifty stuff to come. They were sculpted by Filin, by the way, credit where it’s due.

Welcome to user contribution week – a week off for us!

Nah, we’re working pretty hard to make sure the Dust Rats stuff will be ready for next week, so we’re recording the fuel level and checking for initial damage before handing the keys to tUGS over to you ‘orrible lot.

The first feet on the ground are Noshrok Grimskull’s, bringing us some new gubbinz to have a play with. You might remember him from his rules for fielding Squigs back in September, if not, hey, this is Noshrok Grimskull, he lives in Germany and loves Gorkamorka like the rest of us. See how much you already have in common?

Needless banterous text aside:

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Edit: A new PDF has been created using the more modern template.

These rules and artwork are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike license.