Victory Pointless

One of the suns was rising in the North. The sickly yellow fog took on a fresh glow, granting each melted ruin a murky halo.  As the sun climbed higher the glow spread over the cracked ground, trickling around fragmented bones, overspilling the rims of craters and roiling off of the pools of toxic sludge that collected within.

To the Imperium this was an irradiated hellscape, created generations ago by orbital bombardment in a last-ditch attempt to end a xenos invasion.  Now fit only as a dumping ground for dangerous waste.  No human could survive in this desert without heavy rad protection.  They had thought that nothing else could, either.

To Uzblitz Gogbusta, it was beautiful.  It was home.  He would miss it.

Far off on the horizon, dimly visible even through the morning glow-haze, the pinnacle of the human hive city was a dark spike stabbed up at the sky.  There was an occasional flicker of light as something struck the void shields and was deflected.  Some of the other tribes were laying siege to the city, but that was a fool’s errand in Uzblitz’s view.  So long as the Imperials continued to be supplied from orbit they could hold out almost indefinitely.  Even if the Orks did breach the defenses, the humans had bombed this planet to radioactive dust once before, just to convince themselves they’d won. They’d no doubt do it again.  Uzblitz salivated at the thought of the fiery holocaust that would unleash, but all things considered he’d rather be on the other end of it.

“Uh, boss?” It was Tok, his gretchin minordomo.  “Mek Wurzag sez it’s almost time.  Wants’ta know if you wanna be da one to press da button?”

Uzblitz sighed in irritation.  “‘Course I wanna press da button.  I’s the boss, so’s I get to press da button.  Dat’s wot bein’ boss is all about.”

He stood up, hefted his great Rokkit-Choppa onto one shoulder and made his way back into the Ork fort.  It was a ragged settlement, even more so now that a lot of it had been cannibalised to build the enormous Kannon at its centre.  A crew of Burna Boyz were frantically welding on a few last-minute additions.

The closest an Ork tribe could come to awed silence fell as Uzblitz strode through the assembled boyz and climbed up into the gunner’s seat.  The edifice groaned at his weight.  He sighted through the scope, trained on the far-off hive city, and waited.

There- a black speck rising out of the city.  Right on schedule.  A black speck that gradually got larger as the Imperial supply ship turned towards them, climbing steadily on its standard escape route out of the atmosphere.  Uzblitz waited until it was almost overhead.

He pressed the button.

There was a sound like a brass band falling down an elevator shaft.  Then the Kannon fired.  A huge missile blazed out of the barrel and thrust itself upwards to meet the ship.  For a moment it looked as though it would miss, but then the onboard snotling guidance system kicked in and its path shifted, flinging the missile directly into the belly of the craft.  The flash whited out the sky.  By the time the soundwave reached the ground the freighter was aflame, a huge chunk of its rear section sloughing off and breaking apart into fiery streaks.  The craft struggled to stay aloft on its remaining engines but then stage 2 of the Kannon engaged; a Traktor beam ensnared the ship and pulled, starting to drag it out of the air.  Slowly, inexorably, it was forced down, closer and closer.

And closer.

“Oh zog.” Said Uzblitz.  “Leg it, Ladz!”

The prow of the ship hit the Kannon end-on and obliterated it utterly.  The rest of the vessel followed a nanosecond later, completely flattening the Ork settlement and gouging a furrow half a mile long in the desert.

Uzblitz got to his feet.  “In ‘indsight,” he said, prising a small piece of metal out of the side of his head, “we shoulda given dat parta da plan more fort.” He raised his voice. “Orlright!  Any of you Mek gitz who dint get squished; you start pickin up deze bitz an’ puttin’ em back togevva!  I wanna fly dis fing!”

I’m playing in a new slow-grow crusade starting tomorrow (500 point start using Boarding Actions & Combat Patrol rules, then +500 point supply limit each month up to 2k).  Rather than doing the sane thing and using any of the three perfectly good 40k armies I already own, I’m starting a new Ork force, named Da Mushrum Kloudz.  Here’s the first 500 points.

The idea behind the paint scheme is to pay tribute to the period in the early 90s where not only was I first introduced to Orks and Warhammer in general but also it was seemingly obligatory for every children’s toy and cartoon to be themed around toxic waste and the superpowers it would almost definitely give you if you got some on you.

So, these Orks come from a radioactive toxic wasteland and have (being fungus) adapted to become radiotrophic.  They love radiation, toxic waste, atom bombs etc. and are clad in various bits and pieces acquired from the toxic waste dump that they come from.

Kommandos: Sgt. Nargrub’s Mob

These Kommandos honed their skills hunting human toxic disposal crews, from whom they acquired their hazmat gear.  It doesn’t fit properly and they only wear odd bits and pieces, but every little helps.

This was the first squad I painted.  I’ve had this kill team sitting around for ages and I thought I’d paint them to see if I enjoyed painting Orks – if so I could expand to a full army and if not at least I’d have a team to play Kill Team with.  See the rest of the article for how that went.

Nobs: Da Nobmob

Shouta, Gulgoth, Surlz, Klanka & Dred are the elder Orks of the tribe and are constantly vying with one another to prove which is the best.  They all think they’re the leader of the Nobmob.

This is an old kit and the sculpt shows its age a little, but is really flexible and characterful – its very easy to give each Nob an individual personality which is very fun.

Boyz: Grubgrob’s Ladz

Unusually sensitive for an Ork, Grubgob considers himself a great Orkish poet.  His retinue of boyz consider him bigger than them, so they don’t make fun of him for it to his face.

These are nice modern sculpts (I prefer the look of them to the older ‘butt out’ boyz) with an appropriate level of detail that makes them easy to put together and paint.  But they have a couple of major downsides.  First, they’re monopose.  I like to make every model unique if I can so this is a bummer, but not a major one.  I’m (spoiler alert) building a second box of these for phase 2 and it’s pretty easy to chop them up and swap around arms and heads.  More annoyingly, they’re fixed loadout and with a very weird mix; you get 1 nob, 1 special weapon but 5 choppa + slugga and only 3 shoota boys.  So if you wanted to – for example – buy two boxes and have one melee squad and one ranged, fuck you you can’t.  It’s just such a weird design decision and especially jarring next to the endlessly-flexible older Ork kits.

Gretchin: Urdgit’s Runtz

These gretchin all have fascinating backstories and inner lives, but unfortunately nobody cares because they’re only gretchin.  Especially not Urdgit, who really only wants to be left alone in peace but has instead been put in charge of a horde of annoying yammering grots.

Gretchin are always fun to paint.  I think it’s also obligatory to include one or two of the old 2nd edition starter set Gretchin – the first Warhammer box I ever owned – so painting those up was a blast from the past.  I’m also quite pleased with how the electricity effect on the runtherd’s prodder turned out.

Flash Gitz: Professa Krakdakka’s Klass

Not a real professor, nor even a proper Mek, Krakdakka makes up for it with an irrepressible enthusiasm for bolting random junk together to resemble – and in rare cases, function as – guns.  His loyal band of ‘students’ are happy to sit through the occasional incomprehensible lecture if it grants them access to the biggest snazziest weapons around.

This is a really great, really fun kit that I absolutely do not recommend attempting to put together under any kind of time pressure (as I was).  There are 10-12 small pieces needed just to make *one gun*.  I’ve built whole tanks in less time than it took me to build just one of these guys.  One advantage of the high degree of customisability of this kit is that you don’t have to lean into the pirate theme if you don’t want to.  I do like the pirate theme, but it seemed an odd fit with the rest of my force so instead of a pirate Kaptin this squad is lead by a wannabe mad scientist.

Warboss: Uzblitz Gogbusta

Uzblitz is accompanied by his gretchin servants Tok and Sik and his attack squig Nasha.  He wields an enormous choppa to which a thermonuclear missile has been welded to give it a little more kick.

This is a conversion of an Ironjawz Megaboss from Age of Sigmar and it’s probably the most ambitious kitbash I’ve done so far, incorporating bits from 12 different kits and a bit of greenstuff sculpting to give him a manly (orkly?) bare chest.  I also had to do a fair bit of carving to reshape the armour – Ironjawz have a quite pointy aesthetic that didn’t really fit the 40k Ork look so I blunted it down and rounded it off quite a bit.  The radiation trefoil on top of his boss stick is the symbol of this army and was scratchbuilt out of plasticard and acrylic rod.

The process was not without its setbacks.  I managed to:

• Accidentally dump a blob of sprue-goo onto his original face, melting his eyes.
• Drop the mostly-built model on the floor, breaking his leg into three pieces.
• When I’d finally finished painting and was happy with him, I brushed away a bit of stray paint dust a bit too hard, popped him off the holder and broke off the muzzle flash, which I then had to remake from scratch.

Let’s hope the rest of the campaign goes a bit better…