GW Specialist Games: it'll be a little annoying to track until you get used to it

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > GW Specialist Games: it'll be a little annoying to track until you get used to it

Moola: Aug 16, 2006

Atlas Hugged posted:

Gorkamorka

History

In 1997, Warhammer 40,000 was going strong in its second edition. At the time, Games Workshop was going through something of an experimental phase with its approach to marketing and IP. They were licensing 40k and Epic out for video games, White Dwarf regularly had free games printed in it, and the Black Library was about to kickoff in a major way. At the same time, someone must have really loving liked Mad Max because out of nowhere, Andy Chambers was directed to throw together another skirmish game for the 40k universe to compliment Necromunda. This came as a complete shock to Andy because he was under the impression that he would be working on Epic Fantasy next. However, 3rd Edition Epic 40,000 was basically dead on arrival and GW developed serious cold feet on producing anything else outside of their 28mm scale.

Gorkamorka's development time, according to Chambers, was notoriously fast. In a retrospective, he went through all of the areas where he felt he had to compromise just to get the box out by Christmas. This included the quality of sculpts (especially the trukks), the coherency of the rules, the factions available at launch, and just the overall state of the product in general. One area where it was not lacking, however, was theme.

Setting

Thematically, Gorkamorka gets everything right, and may be the single most entertaining game that GW has ever produced. In Gorkamorka, you play a gang of orks flying around in dune buggies in a wasteland hunting down the scrap of a crashed space hulk and battling it out with other gangs looking to do the same. The name "Gorkamorka" refers to whatever the heck it is the mekboyz are building back in Mektown. Is it a gargant? A teleportation pad? A ship? No one knows, but everyone wants their space on it secured when the mekboyz turn it on.

Gorkamorka is set on the planet of Angelis. Angelis was a backwater world with a small imperial outpost whose mission was to explore some weird ruins, but wasn't otherwise of note. One day, an ork space hulk dropped out of the warp while on its way to the Waaaagh (they're not really sure which one) and smashed into Angelis, wiping out all life on the planet and reducing the once temperate world to a desert wasteland. It's possible some orks survived the initial crash, but ultimately it's irrelevant. Gorkamorka is basically where the modern lore of the orks, including their biology, originates and one thing the game established is that orks are fungus and even if no living orks made it to the surface of Angelis, their spores survived the crash and began to grow in the badlands.

Soon, the planet was teeming with orks and orks are going to ork, in this case very literally as ork spores contain the DNA of the entire ork ecosystem, from the lowly squig up to much more complex beasts of burden. The new crop of boyz got together and started sorting out the wreckage and from the scrap came Mektown. Everyone wanted to get back to the Waaagh, so the mekboyz got to tinkering and building... something. No one is quite sure what it was they were building and the Mekboyz who started it are long dead. All that was known is that one day, someone realized that the thing looked an awful lot like the ork god Gork. This was immediately corrected by another ork because clearly it looked like the other ork god Mork. This difference of opinion led to Mektown being burned to the ground.

The orks realized that arguing over what the thing was wasn't very productive, though it was a good scrap. So they agreed to refer to it as "Gorkamorka" and to keep the fighting outside of Mektown to prevent any future accidents. Now, orks spend their time battling in the wasteland finding more chunks of the space hulk to bring back to the mekboyz to be incorporated into Gorkamorka. The most successful boyz are then awarded their tags and are guaranteed a spot on Gorkamorka on the faithful day when the mekboyz decide that it's finished.

Digganob

An expansion to Gorkamorka was released called Digganob. As it turns out, the orks weren't alone on Angelis. When the hulk came down, there were survivors, two different factions of them in fact. A group of fairly advanced humanoids, utilizing laser based technology, survived the apocalypse in the wasteland, but were exposed to significant amounts of radiation and over the years degenerated into conscious horrors, called "Muties" by the orks. The Muties stand apart from the other gangs because they ride mutated beasts instead of vehicles. Potentially weirder than the Muties are the Diggas. The Diggas are another group of humans, but unlike the Muties, they survived by being deep underground, literally "diggers", and tend to live in settlements in the shadow of the ruins, which seem to offer them some sort of protection. The Diggas are likely survivors of the Imperial outpost, or maybe they were indigenous to Angelis to begin with, but now they're an ork cargo-cult. They paint themselves green, speak in an ork dialect, and refer to their leaders as "nobs" (hence "Digganob"). The orks find this amusing and tolerate their presence in Mektown when they come to trade, but have no desire to let them on Gorkamorka proper. They also have no mercy for them in the wasteland, but will not go near the Digga settlements.

Strange things happen to orks who get too close. Every now and then, an ork boy will decide to seek his fortune and prove his courage by traveling out to the ruins, but most are never heard from again. Those that manage to come back speak of horrors untold, great tombs buried in the sand, and skeletal machines haunting the shadows. Perhaps the ruins are of an older and greater civilization than even the Imperium. Remnants of an Eldar maiden world? A webway portal to Eldar corsairs? Or perhaps something more sinister, perhaps the embodiment of death itself. We'll never know for sure! It's obviously Necrons, but there was never a second expansion or new edition to introduce them into the game proper.

Oh, and one other thing I forgot to mention is that the orks have all agreed that while grots are useful slaves, they're not really people, and of course have no business on Gorkamorka. Any grot who serves his gang well can expect payment in the form of slightly less abuse from his masters, but no more, and certainly no tags of his own. The grots aren't particularly big fans of this policy and so have started talking to one another about "organizing" and "seizing the means of producing Gorkamorka" for themselves. Enter Da Red Gobbo and his Rebel Grots.

The Rebel Grots are the final faction in Gorkamorka and they're there to fight for the little guy, literally. They ride around the wasteland on wind powered vehicles and prove that you don't have to be big to be green.

Mechanics

Mechanically, Gorkamorka is built on 40k 2e, which means a lot of charts, modifiers, and opposed melee roles. It has a lot of similarity to old Necromunda, especially in the campaign system, but it has rules for vehicles tacked on as every scenario starts with your boyz piled high on vehicles to get to the scrap. You can run down models on foot, ram other vehicles, leap from trukk to trak to strap stickbombs to the engine, and even lay siege to an ork fort that looks suspiciously like an oil refinery. The game is concentrated madness with enough orkish tomfoolery to make anyone fall in love with it. Orks can get injured, lose limbs, and even strap a pneumatic peg to their knee stump to fight another day. It's glorious.

It's also dated and the mechanics were clunky even when it was new. It does exactly what it says on the tin, but you might find yourself having to creatively interpret gaps in the rules when you run into a circumstance that isn't explicitly covered. But that's not really the point of the game.

Gorkamorka is all about crazy conversions and going wild with the theme. You can make an all biker gang or you can convert models from other games into monstrosities that would make George Miller blush or build things from scratch out of the scrap you have at your hobby table like the mekboyz would. It's up to you and it's great.

Legacy
This is the game that killed the Specialist Games studio at Games Workshop. Oops. As I said, Games Workshop was sort of all over the place with their brand and IP management at the time and didn't have a good grasp of things like "market research". I guess the executives expected this to be a way bigger hit than it was and as a result, they poured a ton of money into filling a warehouse with starter boxes. Supposedly this included a massive order of a French version that just didn't sell at all as well. Eventually, GW decided that Gorkamorka had to go so they literally gave away the $75 starter set with White Dwarf subscriptions. This was how I got my set in the late 90s. Best $50 I ever spent. The Specialist range would survive for a few more years and in different forms, but GW was terrified of any more of these self-contained games and by the mid-00s or so after lingering in web only status, Mordheim, Necromunda, BFG, Blood Bowl, Gorkamorka, and Epic Armageddon were all scrubbed from GW's website.

More importantly though, Gorkamorka completely changed how orks were presented in 40k. The ork faction in Rogue Trader and 2e were a mishmash of different design choices with a greater emphasis on ork subfactions (klans), such as savage orks and goffs. Gorkamorka was the birth of a single ork design language that persists to this day. A lot of the fluff and artwork were ported wholesale from Gorkamorka books and White Dwarf articles to modern 40k codexes. Basically every extant ork model is an evolution of something that came from Gorkamorka, and for a long time they were literally the same models. This also means that you can easily start collecting Gorkamorka today just by buying ork kits that are currently available.

Resources

While out of production, Yaktribe has most everything you need. There's also an active Facebook group where people post items for sale and trade and discuss the rules. There's also a community rulebook available, but I haven't read that myself. It's also just a fun modeling project and for that you don't really need to have any rules or official models. Just make something cool and fun and appropriately orkish.

https://yaktribe.games/community/vault/categories/gorkamorka.11/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/Gorkamorka

Random Gorkamorka Stuff of Mine