The Unnamed Gorkamorka Site

It’s a fact of life in Gorkamorka: Mobsters get hurt. Sometimes quite badly. It’s not entirely unexpected in a world where everyone has guns, knives and ammo hanging off them pretty much twenty four seven. Hell, with that amount of weaponry going around, I’m surprised people don’t need trips to the hospital every time they sit down and accidentally blow their own legs off from the grenades in their pockets. When we designed the Dust Rats we looked at them from the perspective of the Muties versus the Diggas. The Diggas fight like Orks but with some puny weaknesses that hold them back. They even go to Da Dok and get all manner of weird bioniks attached to them, something a normal human torso just cannot cope with. On the flip side we’ve got the Muties who indulge in humanity’s desire for superior firepower and are depicted as being sneaky, underhanded and just downright scary at times. They also didn’t have a method of healing themselves, something I hope to remedy soon. You’ve probably seen the original preview of the Mutie healing rules and formed your opinions about them. But it’s not that I want to talk about.

No, I want to discuss serjery on squishy ‘oomans, by other squishy ‘oomans. The Dust Rats dok table, affectionately dubbed the “Field Hospital” rules is nearing completion and release as well and I hope that they provide what the other healing rules provide as well: making your mobsters harder, better, faster and stronger (on average) than they were before they went in.

To try and portray a reasonable view of effective human surgery in a society much more advanced technologically than our own, I’ve taken some licence. I assume its possible for high quality prosthetics to be made, though not necessarily in bulk or cheaply, which can interface with human nerves and act just like a real limb. I’ve assumed that they have things to worry about like infection by ork spores or that the human mind is a much more fragile thing than the Orkoid view that “Walkin’ towards da bullets meanz I’s closa to ‘ittin ‘im!” philosophy of being under fire. I’ve also assumed this is a proper sci-fi universe and weird special tech does exist Though again, it can be rare. Also you’ll notice the none-too-subtle references to several movies that are made in the list.  I can never resist an in-joke, especially when it comes to naming. You should see some of the names we have for the upcoming Tagz system, debuting in reputable (and several disreputable) forums as we speak. Once community critique is collected, those are going up too.

On the plus side, it still works exactly as a normal trip to Da Dok, except generally speaking, the mobster wakes up with all his teeth still in his mouth. After all, who’d accept those weedy little teef as currency?

Some possible key differences should be noted here then. There are less weapon based abilities in here and they focus more on boosting the power of weapons already in your mob and the individual soldiers themselves. The head wounds results table has polar opposites of making pinning more and less likely.

“Mecha Body” result was discarded. Too anime.

There’s also no “Cybork” skill, something I tried to replicate correctly in the Mutie healing rules because Muties are likely to engage an ork, no matter how tricked out her is. The Dust Rats however know the appropriate response is to fall back, take up position and focus fire on it until it blows up or goes away. This has been replaced by the Super Soldier result which stacks on a set of bonuses but also does not give any way to override the stated maximums. That means a soldier the top of the table won’t benefit greatly from it at all but on the other side, it can turn a plank into a reliable killing machine for a maximum of six teef.

Battlefield medicine also makes an appearance here with the addition of the Stimm-Injector which gives you a nice beefy power boost for your current turn and the enemies next one and the Chem-Inhaler which adds a reliable way to remove flesh wounds during a game, something no other mob has.

A full version of the Dust Rat Healing Table will be released alongside the complete Dust Rats mob listings.

Around the 8th August the new Games Workshop plastic Seekers of Slaanesh were released heralding a simpler life for Mutie players. I ordered a set over at Maelstrom games (£13.50), giving me five of these multi-part beauties.

I’ve scanned them in so you can get a detailed look at what’s in the new box. A word of warning, each of the images is about 4MB, irrelevant to many, but could be annoying if your connection is a bit slow.

I don’t thing there are any legal problems with me posting images of these unboxed, but if there are I am quite willing to take them down.

As you can see, they’re pretty detailed. They’re also virtually dead-on the size of the old Muties. They’re not perfect for the job as you’ll probably need do swap some heads and some torsos, but the basis is good, particularly if you’re a dab hand with greenstuff.

I’m not going to assemble them just yet as I’ve got quite a lot of other stuff on the modelling table at the moment, notably the Dust Rat’s heavy vehicle, the SSV.

I think I’m going to try to get hold of some Kroot pieces to combine with this set, using some of the ideas from this forum thread.

Anyway, anyone looking to start a Mutie mob, your quest just got easier!

One of the tUGS crew has painted up a few of her models to sell on eBay and has just put up the first two items – a Killa Kan, and an Ork warbike. Our apologies if we sound like shills here, we’re just trying to help out one of our friends who has contributed a lot of time and support to the site.

Killa Kan auction

She’s got a mob of Gretchin (with a Slaver) that I think is going to go up in the next few days and possibly a few more Kanz and bikes.

Ork Warbiker auction

Of the two my favourite is probably the Killa Kan, although the warbike is pretty awesome looking too. Anyway, that’s all for now and with any luck we’ll have some fancy material to go on the site soon (most of the work we’ve been doing lately has been for Ere Be Stuff which has been keeping us busy).

I’ve been a long standing (sitting?) fan of tabletop games, both those with miniatures and the more abstract RPGs where you could be represented by anything from a prepacked figure to coins to gummy sweets.  I’ve been exposed to a fair amount of homebrewed content to a variety of systems. I’ve had goes at writing campaigns for D&D, was in the process of working out a way to effectively update an old piece of GURPS homebrew to the newest edition for another campaign and in my mis-spent youth, spent an abject fortune on Yu-Gi-Oh! cards to use in new and inventive ways, with the patented “Can’t Stop the Spear Cretin” and “Delicious Dragon Destruction” decks reduced at least two people to tears. I played Fantasy Warhammer with borrowed armies with from my more affluent friends. Most recently, I’ve played MMOs and some often stubborn minded choices of character development have led to some fun counters to common problems. The unkillable druid from the pre-expansion WoW days comes to mind as the most fun.

Almost every time I sat down to play at these, at least as a player, my first thoughts were to “How can I abuse these special features?”.  My former partners in crime, one of whom is a games design student and the other an accountant, two professions that still engage these skills today, spent countless afternoons working out ways to change the way we played against the others at the gaming clubs.

So I want to first discuss a story that I’ve bored the others working on tUGS with before. It’s the story of Drew the Skeleton Hero. Back in those days of WHF, everyone liked the big flashy heroes. The vampire riding a chariot, the elf on a dragon, the frankly gigantic demons of Chaos. They routinely pounded an army into the dust without the other units doing much.  On the other hand, the undead we were using were slow but with a potent fear effect that could rout armies by causing whole units to flee from the table. The problem was getting there before being engulfed in dragon fire.  Thus a hero who could not fight to save his unlife was born. He had Boots of Teleportation and an aura effect that boosted the basic move of the regiment he stood with as long as he moved with them. Once they were within range to cause fear, we let most of them enemies scatter and the hero teleported back to avoid dying to bring in the next roving band of cannon fodder. This war of attrition was long but it usually resulted in success. However, it wasn’t enough.

There’s a spell called Danse Macabre that boosts undead movement but is often overlooked in favour of the more destructive abilities. So with a necromancer and our custom hero in place, we set out to nearly double the distance a regiment could charge. At our gaming club, this was sometimes nearly the length of a table. The results were immediate. Armies of low class soldiers keeping a single extremely powerful hero on the table scattered before us, causing instant routs and winning matches.  But as we pointed out to the disgruntled who were fielding their ludicrous heroes who’s abilities amounted to “I Win” had mocked our “puny” hero.  It was probably quite questionable what we did, but in fairness, so were their heroes. The glee in beating them at their own game was indescribable.

Can’t stop the Juggernaut!

This has lead to me to use what I describe as “The Bigger Bastard Rule”.  Given equal resources and time, you sit down and you concoct what is the most unfair, yet rules legal monstrosity you can come up with that is likely to be fielded by your opponent. Then you find the hole in the armour and build a new monstrosity that functions like a normal army but has an ace-in-the-hole to play should the first one come into play. And then if you’re like me, you build a third monstrosity that’s able to take down the second one. The objective is to always be the biggest bastard at the table. Because if you aren’t, someone is abusing the rules to the point where the players aren’t having fun any more. It becomes about Jimmy and his unstoppable army of Killer Death Bots, not everyone having fun.

Sitting down to write what amounts to brand new rules and revisions of older, outdated or unclear rules was a bit of a change for me because it puts me in the mind of “What would I do to break what I just said?” So you sit there with a piece of paper and a handful of dice rolling away until you find out that 99/100 times its not possible for this to be extremely powerful in a single area without sacrificing another area. Essentially, Rock covers paper, scissors cuts paper and paper covers rock. And something about a lizard and some guy from a sci-fi show people have apparently heard of.

I haven’t gone looking extensively for other Gorkamorka homebrew projects for two reasons. For two major reasons. The first is that this is our show in a way. This is our take on how the problems should be addressed from a group of relatively like-minded individuals. Incorporating other peoples’ long since made modifications without regard for our own is pretty pointless as it just upsets the balance even further. Secondly, from what Flamekebab has told me, a lot of the homebrew seems to amount to “Let’s add Doom Fortresses to Gorkamorka!” As a skirmish game, this just can’t be done. If any one Ork commandeered one of the larger Orky weapons from the 40k Universe at large, he would run the planet in days. So sorry, we’re stuck scraping through the sand for bits to make our guns shootier, rather than saddling up and burning the entire planet to the ground.

Perhaps you’re wondering where this all leads? Well hopefully it leads to us being the Biggest Bastards out there.  My prime objective here is to have thought of as many ways possible that people are going to try and break both the old and new material we have available without detracting from the ability to have fun while doing it. By putting everyone on an even footing to start with and letting you choose how to specialise and counter other specialisations effectively without making you unstoppable killing machines. It’s no fun if Jimmy always wins by miles. We want him to win by inches.

So that is my objective. To steal shamelessly from the Dark Knight: Hate us. Because we can take it. And hopefully people will unite in their hatred and actually have some fun with a treasured childhood toy.

Image of the Juggernaut taken from Wikipedia and displayed under Fair Use.

Gorkamorka, like most things, has its own English Wikipedia page which is reasonably good (although it could always be improved), however it also has pages in other languages (at the time of writing, French, German, and Spanish). Back in July someone created a Swedish version of the Gorkamorka Wikipedia page but it’s currently just a stub and could really do with some fleshing out.

Check out the article here.

As much as we’d like to do it ourselves, the only on of our team that speaks Swedish cannot write it with sufficient fluency to meet Wikipedia’s standards.

So, if you speak Swedish, why not head over there and make a few edits?