The Unnamed Gorkamorka Site

Whiskey Delta 4 vs. Da Cuttas Ov Da Jibb
Scenario: We Woz ‘Ere Furst (Da Uvver Book, scenario 2) 

We’ve been working on a new mob for GoMo as part of ‘Ere Be Stuff, as you may have read. The rules aren’t quite finished yet, but they’re together enough to playtest, so here’s a battle report from the first playtest. Sorry about the delay!

On the bottom edge of the board we’ve got the Dust Rats, a mob known as Whiskey Delta 4. On the top edge we’ve got the Freebooter mob, Da Cuttas Ov Da Jibb. The scenario is We Wuz Ere Furst and there’s a full six scrap counters on the board, marked in this image to give an idea where they are (sorry for the blurriness!). The objective is of course to grab as much as possible and try to make sure the other mob bottles out empty-handed.

A new feature we’re trying out for battle reports is “Da Plan” – players give a quick run-down of their plan for the scenario (in secret) so we can see how badly things go wrong:

Da Plan – Whiskey Delta 4

Okay, here’s the plan..
There’s scrap spread about the board so I’m going to try to move as fast as I can and pick them up and then get the hell out of there, because I don’t think my guys are going to be able to stand up to such a pounding. His lads, well, they’re already half bionik, so I’ve got to be careful.

I’ve also split my guys into their two Light Recon Vehicles, or Recce vehicles, so I’ve got one that’s mostly ranged and one that’s mostly hand-to-hand combat. So we’ll see how it goes – hopefully that’ll work best, playing to their strengths rather than trying to get a mixed bag/jack-of-all-trades.

Da Plan – Da Cuttas Ov Da Jibb

Get very careful note of this – in true orky fashion, I have no plan!

I’m going to shoot them, I’m going to fight them, I’m going to bite them..
..and then I’m going to try to get the scrap!

So, let’s get started!

Whiskey Delta 4 get the first turn and send one of their grunts, Howe, to grab some scrap lurking in some difficult terrain. With a man on the ground the two LRVs thrust forward to close the gap between the scrap and themselves. The commanding officer, Togan, takes his hand-to-hand guys up the left side of the board whilst the veteran, Daggat, tries to take the right flank. In doing so he ends up with a clear shot at the Freebooter Kaptin, Grob.

This is the first instance of the increased range of the Dust Rats coming into play, although in this case the bumpiness of the vehicle makes the shot miss by a hefty margin. The orks are up, with Steerrraaagh! at the helm they cruise forward, planning to make a turn and ram the oncoming LRV perhaps, but the vehicle won’t budge from its course, resulting in a stall. Amazingly the nearby rocks were avoided!

Luckily for Da Cuttas Ov Da Jibb, the crazed Dok who hacked off the legs of two of the crew (whether they needed it or not..) saw fit to give them transport in the form of tracks and a gyro-stabilised monowheel. This did have the unfortunate side effect of getting the old Kaptin the nickname “Captain Hula-hoop”, but the less said about our stand-in monowheel the better.

Grob, current freebooter kaptin, fires up his traks’ thrusters and heads over to the scrap hiding behind the rocky outcrop. Meanwhile the old Kaptin, Carrudders, trundles over to the large dune to see if he can find a way up to the juicy scrap.

Contrary to the original rules, we play ammo rolls on 1s, rather than sixes. This does mean that occasionally a weapon jams immediately, but that’s just part of the chaos of GoMo.

Why does this matter? Well, Wabdash, the dead-eye of Da Cuttas Ov Da Jibb, was planning on putting a nice big hole in the engine block of the Dust Rats’ LRV, only to find he’d actually forgotten to reload his weapon!

WHICH WUN OV YOO ZOGGERZ NICKED ME SHELLZ?!
-Wabdash

Back to the Dust Rats, Whiskey Delta 4:

Howe can’t really go anywhere fast carrying the scrap he’s dug up, but he also doesn’t want the orks getting it either. All he’s got his his carbine and some cover, so he gets himself in position and goes on overwatch.

(We’ve not actually had anyone go on overwatch before – the last warrior that tried to get a good shot lined up ended up getting splattered by a speeding trukk before he could declare overwatch!)

Before the brown LRV heads further forward, Daggat jumps off and heads towards the watchtower, hoping to get a good vantage point for his long rifle.

The mob’s CO, Togan, also opts to get his feet dirty and hops off the speeding jeep, easily passing the required initiative test. Once on the ground he runs up the dune, getting close to the scrap.

Time for the freebooters to fight back!

Steerrraaagh! guides Da Jolly Squig around the LRV, dropping off the two of the crew to deal with it. Unfortunately, Da Banga and Wabdash are not having a good day and both end up with a gob full of sand when they try to storm the vehicle.

Steerrraaagh! isn’t actually having much luck either – the Bad Mek jumps off to try to claim the scrap only to have the lurking Dust Rat, Howe, take a potshot at him (he missed) and then have the driver stall the trukk on top of the prize. Well done, that ork..

Lastly, the orks try to take a shot with their harpoon gun only to jam the damn thing, or maybe they’re just out of ammo there too? (I believe they fired it previously but didn’t scratch the LRV, which is surprising given how weak the armour on an LRV is!)

The Dust Rats are on the move again, trying to hold onto their advantage. Howe starts moving towards the edge of the board with his scrap, keeping an eye on the trukk in the distance.

CO Togan grabs the scrap atop the dune whilst the LRV below performs slow speed manoeuvres to turn the vehicle around (represented here by a very distorted arrow). The other LRV starts heading towards the other board edge, getting near Grob, the freebooter kaptin.

Veteran Daggat begins his ascension of the watchtower, getting to the first level where there’s a reasonable amount of cover. Rolko fires his machine pistol at the ork taking cover within the barricades, but doesn’t hit him. He’s also not got any ammo left, ah well!

The orks are up again and this time they’re not messing about – Steerrraaagh! rams the brown LRV, taking out its thrusters, effectively hobbling it.

To follow up, the trukk pulls up alongside the LRV and the crew try to jump aboard, with marginally more success. Wabdash faceplants once again and the kabin boy, the now redundant harpoon gunner, gets minced between the two vehicles, putting himself out of action. Nice one.

Not to be put off by this, Da Banga grabs a firm handhold and prepares to furnish Feddick with a few fresh orifices.

Remarkably, the grunt puts up a good fight, holding the burly freebooter at bay and drawing combat. Impressive, but it’s probably only a matter of time before he takes a beating.

Reacting to the unexpected passenger, the plank driving the brown LRV pushes the vehicle’s gas engines to their limit as he tries to get to the edge of the board, only just falling short.

Meanwhile, Togan scrambles down the dune bank onto the waiting LRV, which starts on its way to the other table edge, planning on picking up the sniper later. He’s a veteran, he knows what he’s doing!

As it happens, he does, and once he’s on the second level of the watchtower with some scrap at his feet, he makes it known. A single shot rings out and the freebooter bad mek’s day is ruined, as he’s out of action. Good night, gracie.

With that, it’s the freebootaz turn, although it doesn’t really begin, as they’ve had enough. Well done, Dust Rats!

Result: Victory to Whiskey Delta 4.

We made a few notes along the way, as this was a playtest, but I think they would be more appropriate in a separate post.

As always, any comments can go in the comments below.

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).