Thursday 17 January 2019

Revisiting 40k: Orks

When I am back in my hometown I sometimes hang out with Patrick S, and his interest in Warhammer 40,000 has slightly revitalised mine. I haven't kept up with Games Workshop games for about 20 years, so a whole raft of developments have passed me by; I thought it might be interesting to do some posts on my observations about what has changed.

The first observation (apart from fucking hell things got expensive) is that something seems to have happened to the Orks: they haven't gone away exactly, but their role - I am judging this by the number of other factions, the number of models available in shops, and other external paraphernalia like White Dwarf and the novels and codices - seems very much diminished. When I wur a lad, Warhammer 40k was basically Space Marines, Imperial Guard, Eldar, Orks, and Chaos. Tyranids had, I think, just begun to become a "thing". Now, from what I can tell, there are three types of Eldar, three types of Chaos army (more if you include separate codices for Death Guard and Thousand Sons), all manner of different Space Marine armies, something like eight (eight!) different non-Space Marine human armies broadly conceived, new factions like the Necrons and Tau... and then, somewhere lost in the middle of all this, Orks.

I wonder if this observation is accurate. Regardless, I will idly speculate that is partly because:

a) Orks have been around for so long and the Games Workshop version of the "orc" - markedly different to that given us by Tolkien - is so influential in popular culture that they are almost now part of the furniture and hence can't escape being thought of as old hat;
b) There is too strong a humourous (at least, attempted humourous) streak in the orks for modern Games Workshop and especially modern 40k, which now gives off a vibe of being relentlessly and oppressively humourless which it never used to;
c) There was always too much of a conceptual overlap between Orks (a hostile external force which unwaveringly seeks to destroy and dominate mankind through force) and Chaos (a hostile external force which unwaveringly seeks to destroy and dominate mankind through force and other more interesting insidious means), and this may finally be causing Orks to be eclipsed: they just aren't quite as compelling as enemies as heretical and corrupted humans and grotesque daemons, and the only thing they had going for them (a sense of anarchic fun) doesn't have the traction it once did (see point b) above).

21 comments:

  1. As a younger 40k enthusiast and former Ork player (although I stopped playing sometime in college because of the prices) most of the mid- and late-20s players I know really like Orks but almost nobody plays them. I think it's more B and C than A. The player base has a lot of its own weird humor but I don't think most people want it to come from the product. It's like breaking kayfabe. In isolation people I know like that the Orks are funny, but they don't want stories or games involving orks to become silly by association. If you're invested in the grimly serious tale of your Imperial Gua- sorry, 'Astra Militarum,' heroically sacrificing themselves to Hold The Line, then the ork's slapstick Mad Max clashes with that.


    Personally, I liked them because when Games Workshop started moving away from a kit-bashing, anything goes hobbyist attitude towards its product line the orks were kind of a last bastion for that. The models are also pretty forgiving for a new player who wants to try out conversions, with their junk aesthetic and big cartoon proportions.

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    1. I do understand the breaking kayfabe thing. That's an interesting way of putting it. I think in the "old days" it was less of an issue because pretty much all of 40k was kind of funny in different ways (the Space Marines were kind of a piss-take rather than serious "Good guys", and there was something deliberately clownish about chaos too - I mean, noise marines with electric guitars?).

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    2. (I'm Anonymous from above)

      Seeing how they gradually smooth out those comedic "rough patches" like the noise marines without being allowed to out and out contradict them over the years has been interesting. I'm in kind of a weird spot where the 40k that I grew up with was already the un-ironic version of itself, but hadn't yet become overly self-serious, if that makes sense. There was definitely a turn somewhere along the line though. I think that like with Starship Troopers or Aliens a lot of kids grew up taking the piss-take version of hyper-militarized science fiction completely straight, but in 40k's case some of them were then able to grow up and become writers for the game.

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    3. I think you're probably right. I actually don't mind it becoming a bit more serious - a lot of the humour was pretty cringeworthy and unfunny to my eye.

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    4. It does get pretty up itself from time to time, but all things considered I prefer the non-ironic version as well.

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  2. My understanding is that they were victims of Plot Creep. 40K started off as a setting, not a story - but now there are a zillion novels about the Emperor and the Primarchs and the Horus Heresy, and the result has been to make the central Empire vs Chaos conflict ever-more central to the game, rather than just one of a whole bunch of things happening out there in a wide, wide universe. So factions like the Death Guard and the Thousand Sons and the Sisters of Battle and the Adeptus Mechanicus all get their own armies because they have important roles in the Big Story - which is now, definitively, the story of the Primarchs and the Emperor and the Heresy - while the orks are just kinda sitting on the sidelines, being orks, the same way they always have.

    When I was a kid, the basic 40K boxed set came with a bunch of orks and a bunch of space marines. I think the modern one is space marines vs. chaos space marines.

    At least the greenskins still seem to have a pretty strong presence in GW's fantasy line...

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    1. Yep, I had the same boxed set probably, with the orcs all having I think a bolter in one hand and a knife in the other.

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    2. They switch up that boxed set every once in a while - in 2008 or so my friend and I split one, I took the orks and he took the marines. It's been marines vs some version of chaos marines for a while now though.

      That switch from setting to narrative has been a real turn-off for me (although it's made them a ton of money so some people must like it). Simultaneously with the turn away from a hobbyist approach in favor of vigorous IP protection, there came a kind of colonization of every creative space within the game's fiction. They used to leave a lot of deliberate ambiguity within the setting that you could fill in yourself in your head or your home games, but the business model for the past 10 years or so has been to package and sell definitive answers to all of those questions.

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    3. The current one is space wolves versus genestealer cultists, which is a bit different.

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  3. The third, I think, that their role as a Big Threat has been superceded. Orks are redshirts to a degree and don't fit into the central Paradise Lost conflict of chaos vs the imperium.

    That being said, GW seems to have doubled down on the humour of orks, partially in their marketing and social media, partially in models like this: https://www.games-workshop.com/en-GB/Orks-Megatrakk-Scrapjet-2018

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    1. There was also that ork racing game - Gorka Morka or something?

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    2. Yes, more or less orks doing Mad Max. There's a sort-of-successor board game out now called Gretchinz!.

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  4. It's (b). They used to be great fun, an unashamedly comedic faction in a dark -- even if it was satiric-dark -- universe; they were the football hooligans, fighting wars not for conquest, or religion, or survival, but because fighting is fun.

    The 40K universe has lost its sense of humour to a certain extent, and the more overt comedy of the orks has been lost as a result.

    All that said, that doesn't explain why the ork clans have faded into the background over the years; even without the humour, there are differences between the clans that would be worth exploring -- Goffs are bigger and tougher, Bad Moons have more money and better gear, and so on -- but for whatever reason GW let that go fallow. With more emphasis on sub-factions and special rules in the latest edition of the game, I suspect that clans have come back into prominence, but I don't know for certain.

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    1. I remember sort of dipping my toes back into 40K a long while back and wondering where all the clans went. My personal theory is that at the time, they were cutting down on the number of specialized miniatures. It cut down on having to produce Bad Moon specific sculpts, for example. I did notice that the diversity of sculpts within the factions seemed down noticeably around 3rd edition compared to previously.

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    2. Doing a bit of reading around it seems like there's been a deliberate move towards more factions but with fewer types of model within the factions.

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  5. To my mind, neither orcs nor orks fitted in particularly well to their respective Warhammer universes as those universes developed - but I think the orcs were more glaringly out of place in the Old World than orks in the original (and very open) 40K setting.

    Now, your Harboths and Notlobs and Eeza Ugezods were all very well in the very loosely defined Old World of Warhammer 1st and 2nd edition. But once WFRP came out, they were a bit out of place. And that coincided with the miniatures becoming goofier and more comic for the wargame. Before that, in Warhammer 1st edition and 2nd edition, way back in the early 80s, orcs looked like this:

    http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=77384.msg1316519#msg1316519

    And those fit in nicely in any generic D&Dish setting - they're just "archetypal henchthings of evil", as Dragon Warriors puts it, and look appropriately callous, cruel and contemptuous of others.

    But once they became "greenskins" - and acquired full football-hooligan personae - they were much less suited to the Renaissance-meets-Moorcock-and-a-sliver-of-Lovecraft setting of The Enemy Within et al. They still worked in the *wargame* (where you don't need much or any coherence in the setting), but even their toned-down hobgoblin cousins didn't quite work in Something Rotten in Kislev: too much UK loutishness to fit in with the carefully crafted folkloric setting around them (complete with leshies and the like).

    But *orks* did fit a little better into the anything-goes mash-up that was the first edition of 40K - where deodorant bottles became grav tanks and human renegades in space-marine armour hung out in dingy bars.

    That's because orks - greenskins - work fine in a 2000ADish setting. You could imagine them confronting Johnny Alpha or visiting Mega City One. And the first edition of 40K was much more like that. As the setting developed and became less of a pick-and-mix affair (a pinch of Dune, a dash of Star Wars, lashings of Strontium Dog ...), the orks became much less appropriate - and for your three reasons too.

    Anyway, bring back *red goblins* - that's what I say:

    https://hobgoblinry.blogspot.com/2019/01/red-goblins.html

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    1. I half agree, but I also half think that they would have really fit in well in Old World Warhammer if they'd been the inhabitants of Albion....

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    2. Yup - having the Steppe-nomad hobgoblins talking in Cockney accents was startlingly incongruous, but it would work in Albion.

      I still think the *bright* green is a bit much, though; in early Warhammer, their skin is described as "a dark olive brown" or "greenish", which makes them much easier to picture as real creatures than when sporting the lurid hues of the third edition on.

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  6. One major problem with the Ork faction has to do with the "fucking hell things got expensive" thang. Regardless of the edition, if I'm trying to field a 1000 point or 2000 point army, I need twice as many ork models as space marines...and yet the actual price of a single model is the same. Economically, it makes more sense to invest in a space marine, chaos, or eldar army...it's just less out of pocket expense (and for the time-challenged, less overall painting). Even Imperial Guard can shave models out of a force by sinking points into big-ass vehicles, walkers, and various specialty figures.

    I miss the humor of "old 40K" but people are so sensitive about disrespecting the military these days. Was just reading a forum of people quitting playing Axis & Allies because the new Axis & Allies & Zombies game "disrespects the sacrifice of WWII veterans." WTF.

    No one seems to care about the ridiculousness of space elves (Eldar) let alone space Drow ("Dark" Eldar), but they're going to take umbrage with space orks? Seriously? Hell, I'd like to see them bring back the Squats.

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    1. When I was a kid you could get, I think, 24 skeleton warriors (or equivalent number of goblins) for about £5. Those were the days.

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  7. I understand that a recent Black Library series (https://www.blacklibrary.com/new-titles/warhammer-40000/the-beast-arises-omnibus-1.html) is meant to revitalise the ork concept. I have not read any of it myself, but it does indicate that the ork is not forgotten.

    Of course, I don't believe that this coincided with any new rules or models for use in actual play. Which limits its usefulness.

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