The Unnamed Gorkamorka Site

Now that there’s quite a few battle reports on the site you may have noticed some of the terrain we use including the rather nifty rocky outcroppings. If you don’t think they’re any good, that’s fine too, but here’s how we made them.

A friend of mine made some large puppets a while ago and used large amounts of foam to make them. Afterwards he had several big blocks left over and offered them to me for a pittance. At the time I wasn’t sure what I’d use them for but then I read a tip on Ironhands.

So, a Sunday afternoon was spent making some rocks and the method goes something like this:

1. Decide on the rough size of the rocks and take a suitably large chunk out of your foam with a knife or a pair of scissors. You’re not going to need masses, but bear in mind that you’ll be stacking pieces.




2. Start tearing off large lumps of foam from the offcut, about the size of the one in the photo. They can of course be both bigger and smaller, but we found that this size worked relatively well.




3. To get the rocky texture, trim chunks off them with your fingers. The foam tears relatively easily – don’t use a knife. By tearing them you’ll end up with a decent rough texture, rather than neatly flat sides (we’ve got one column that has neat edges that we haven’t replaced – it looks ridiculous by comparison to the new ones).
   One side note – DON’T THROW AWAY THE BITS YOU REMOVE! Seriously, they’re useful later.




4. Once you’ve got your basic rocky blocks, try stacking them on top of each other until you find some you feel fit rather well. They shouldn’t fit perfectly, but some pieces seem to naturally balance on top of each other in a
   visually pleasing way. At this point you’ll also find out whether the stacks are stable enough on their own – if they aren’t, grab a bamboo kebab skewer and push it through the middle of the foam. You can then trim it so it doesn’t stick out at either end, it’ll be fine.




5. To glue them together you’ve got two options – PVA glue (white glue, presumably equivalent to Elmers in the US) or hot glue. Hot glue works relatively well if you’ve only got a small base to glue to, but in general PVA works best. Get a suitably large dollop and put it between the stacks where they contact. If you get some on the rest of the rocks, don’t worry, you’ll be giving them a coating
   of the stuff later anyway.




6. Once the stack has dried (you can speed it up with a hairdryer if you’re impatient like us) you should have something like this. Now for the lame bit – you’re going to have to coat the whole exterior in watered-down PVA. Preferably two coats, really. This may seem like pointless busy work but it’s not. If you try to spraypaint raw foam it just sucks up the paint like a sponge (I can’t imagine why..). By sealing it you save yourself paint and time later, it also makes it possible to drybrush it later.




7. So once you’ve got the columns reasonably sealed
   (once again, you can use a hairdryer to get them ready for painting more quickly) it’s time to paint.

   Get some flat black spraypaint (I suppose you could use gloss if it rocks your boat..) and give the rocks a few coats. Let them dry (hairdryer) and then examine them for bits you’ve missed. Flip them over if required and get the rest properly undercoated. Once that’s done and they’ve dried properly you can start with the more hands-on painting.




8. We used a couple of different colours to paint ours, both of them were sample packs of water-based acrylic paint for interior decoration. A small-ish house painting brush (trimmed down a little to facilitate dry-brushing) was used to semi drybrush. Don’t actually drybrush, but don’t overload the brush as it’s difficult to spread out the paint later. Each rock is pretty quick and the black undercoat looks after all the shading for you:

That’s your first rocks finished.

Closing notes – earlier I told you to save the offcuts – they were glued onto some of our other rocks and the smaller pieces were scattered on a base of foamboard to provide some difficult terrain (rather than impassable).

Also, you might want to provide some flat (ish) parts of the rocks to stand models on. That’s up to you, really.

Hopefully this’ll help you get yourselves some cheap rock spires for your boards – we love ours!
They’re great for crashing buggies into, hiding scrap behind, and using for cover if you’re a sneaky mutie!

Today we’ve got some good news and some bad.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first – if you’re using Firefox (or possibly other Gecko-based browsers), you’re probably not seeing this page quite as it’s supposed to look. For some reason, the background image doesn’t display for you, which rather breaks the theme.

We’ve got an idea what’s causing it (it seems to be to do with different background: css elements overriding each other) but we’re not really sure where to start in fixing it right now. We hadn’t noticed until now as we don’t use Firefox any more – we use Chrome, which we recommend to you also. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux and has excellent extension support. Enjoy.

Now, onto the good news..

Between us we speak several languages, but we’re not too good at writing in anything beyond English. As a result, this site is entirely in English, orkiness aside. We know there are GoMo fans out there who speak other languages, particularly German, but also Polish, Swedish, etc..

Well, as we now live in The Future™ it’s easy to translate stuff on the fly and relatively accurately. So much so that we simply installed a wordpress plugin to do it.

From now on you can translate content into any language offered by Google. It’s about 50 for now, which isn’t half bad. There’s a new link at the bottom left of each post that says “[Translate]”, clicking it will bring up a menu of languages. Go ahead, give it a shot – you don’t even need to reload the page!

Bonus bit of good news – the page controls have now been implemented. Back when we first built the site there wasn’t enough content for us to notice it was missing, but someone realised yesterday that there was no “older posts” button anywhere on the site. Now there is, so you can easily access older content, both on the front page and in the archives. Sorted!

Artur has been busy again. Some of you might have seen this preview torso that appeared on Kromlech at the end of February and it’s been a while since then, but new pictures are available!

The parts should hopefully be available within a week or two on the MaxMini store, but that’s just a guess.

I’ll be picking some up eventually, but not until after the other bionic legs go up. At this rate the Cuttas Ov Da Jibb will need as many of these as they can get by then!

I’m still trying to determine what they’re supposed to be though, which is a little embarrassing!

The first is a Cybork Body, I think, but the rest are a little more interchangeable. I’m guessing one is a Kustom Thruster Booster whilst a third might be a Fuel Injection Implant, but it could be an Iron Lung or even Fungus Bref Lungs.

If you know, or just want to take a guess, leave a comment!

I may seem like a shill for these guys, in which case I apologise, but that’s not the way I see it. This company have recently started producing something I’ve wanted for years – bionikz for modern-scale Orks. I own the old gubbinz and they were pretty lacklustre and of course were designed to fit the tiny GoMo Orks. Having handled these new parts, I can sincerely say they rule and they’re not expensive either.

I will say this though – if you want the parts, order a couple of weeks in advance or use their courier. I used their regular postal service and was not too happy about the shipping time.

Previously I showed off my GoMo veteran with his long rifle, today I present a CO (Commanding Officer).

He carries a laspistol and a sword, playing to his strength – hand to hand combat. He’s an excellent shot like all from his faction, but he has the advantage of thorough combat experience, unlike most of his troops.

His starting stats look like this, at least at the time of writing:

As you can see, he’s a pretty good all-rounder. His leadership rises to 8 when he manages to be victorious in a battle, just like other mob leaders.? Currently we’re undecided if he’s subject to pinning like other humans, although the normal warriors in the mob would suffer from pinning.

There’s also an idea we’re working on regarding bottle tests and extra dice or modifiers based on the number of officers still on the table, although it’s a work in progress.

His laspistol is amongst a class of weaponry available to the faction that is (at least currently) limited to warriors above a certain experience level. Higher technology such as las-based weaponry can only be used by suitably seasoned warriors, partly to limit the strength of the high ballistic skill of the faction. It’s supposed to be a unique trait, but not overkill! These days people can also buy bulk ammo online if they want to go hunting or for safety.

Anyway, feel free to add your comments (click the link in the oil splash at the top).

I’m not really sure what to make of this, it’s clearly Orky but I’m not quite sure what one would use it for..

It’s a “Wunderrocket” from MaxMini designed by Marcin Szmyt – ~€40 plus however much postage is).

It could make a good objective to capture, or maybe require its own scenario entirely. Alternatively, it could be a great basis for a mobile weapons platform or something. I just thought I’d throw it out there, I’m sure crazy ideas will appear in time, let me know what you come up with.