Warhammer 40k: The Cave

I was given the role of Level lead, which in this case means that it's my team's role to come up with the various battle scenarios that we'll be testing.  My first idea was play with the terrain of a map, what could I do in a level that hasn't been done before.  I added 3 rock columns that couldn't be fired over, but they could be toppled.  If destroyed, they could fall and flatten an entire unit, if the scatter die was lucky.  Below is the map for the cave.

Warhammer 40k: G'mork and his Army

My first task was to write out the lore of how G'mork obtained an army.  It was agreed upon that G'mork received his power from Warp, an alternate reality that allows FTL travel but is also infested with demons.  While traveling too close to a Warp storm, G'mork was captured by a demon, tortured, and infected with a rot.  However, this rot mutates him, allowing him to infect others via spores.  He escapes on a demonic ship (like the one pictured below), and goes on to try and obtain an army.  You can read my contributions to G'mork's story below.

G’mork had successfully escaped the Eye of Terror, with new found abilities and a small army in tow.  However, he was quickly intercepted by an Ork ship that had wandered too close to the Warp rift.  The Orks were drawn to it, seeing it as a relief to their boredom rather than a trap waiting to be sprung.  Nurgle’s ship looked more like a decaying corpse of some giant animal than something that was space worthy, so the Orks thought of it as an easy victory.  

Boarding the ship was no easy task, as most of the hatches seemed to be grown over by some greenish, rotting material.  A pungent, swamp-like odor hung in the silent air as the orks explored the corridors; with the only light coming from luminescent mushroom bulbs that glowed a dim, sickly yellow.  Undeterred by this, the Ork pushed forward, delving deeper, and deeper into the ship.  At the back of the party, one Ork peered into a small crevasse, and noticed a body shoved awkwardly in the crack.  He tapped the corpse with an axe, to make sure it was dead.  But at the slightest touch, the body burst open and sprayed him with bloody mist.  He stumbled back, but quickly found his footing.  After burying his axe in the corpse for spraying him, he rejoined the party.  

A thought began to take form at the back of this ork’s mind, an insistent, irritating thought.  A name began to surface, G’mork.  All at once, the holy spirit of Gork and Mork came upon him; and a grand vision of a Great Waaagh! flooded his head.  If orks could cry, he would certainly have been brought to tears.  It was at this moment that he knew what his purpose was, now he just needed to share it.  He grabbed the ork nearest to him, and took a deep breath in.

Warhammer 40k: G'mork

Unfortunately, my pitched race wasn't chosen, but we did choose an equally good race.  The whole idea is that orks developed an evolutionary trait where fungus would link them all together, allowing them better coordination and and sharing psyker abilities.

With more iteration, we developed the idea of a super ork, the very incarnation of the ork gods, that would lead this race.  This ork was meant be the ork that united all orks everywhere, the Emperor of Man kind of ork.  But then we remembered that these were the orks, and everything about them is over the top, so we decided to make this super ork a gretchen.

A gretchen is basically a space goblin, a subspecies of ork that is much smaller.  Gretchens function as meanial workers and are the lowest rung of ork society.  We figured that it would be hilarious if the ultimate Emperor of Orkkind was this little put-upon goblin.  His name was a fusion of Gork and Mork, the ork gods.  He is G'mork, avatar of Gork and Mork, both brutal and cunning.

Warhammer 40k: SPACE RATS

Last semester's Warhammer 40k class took a race that existed in regular, fantasy Warhammer, and brought it into the 41st millennium.  The reasoning behind this was to use many of the preexisting units, and just upgrade them, i.e., half the work is already done.  So I decided to take a similar approach.

The Skaven are a race of verminous rats that spread out and take over urban areas, basically, smart rats.  So the bulk of the idea was to just bring this race into Warhammer 40k.  Though, since I'm not to keen on every race being grimdark, I'm changing the Skaven to a more peaceful race, or at least peaceful by Warhammer 40k standards.  Before humanity descended into ultra religious dogma, they roamed the galaxy as explorers, so the lore of my Skaven are that rats stowed away on board, and gradually evolved alongside humans.  Now, they're a heavily expansionist race that see themselves as the proper successors to mankind.

Warhammer 40k: The Tau

Our enemy for this week were the Space Marines.  Ultimately, when we design a race, we have to test it against them, because they're the most balanced.  We introduced flying mechanics, but we still lost, because orks always lose, but I still had fun.  I'm looking forward to next week when we actually pitch our races next week.  For my race, I'd like to pitch something like the Tau.

The Tau are a race of xenos(aliens) that specialize in mech warfare, that is, they use giant robot exoskeletons to fight.  But the most interesting part of them is that they're probably the most morally superior faction in the entire Warhammer 40k canon.  They believe in a concept called the Greater Good, which means that they will take any action to make sure that the greatest number of people survive.  They're not xenophobic or ultra religious like the humans, nor violent or capricious like the orks and eldar.  The catch is that you might be killed if you don't agree with the greater good.
I'd like to design a race that is more morally gray and non-monolithic than the other Warhammer races.  It's almost a personal rule, that I will not design a race with a single good or evil alignment.  There's just to many interesting stories you can tell with a morally gray race.

Warhammer 40k: St. Mork's 'Eelin Center of Death

This week, as I was reading more ork lore, I quickly realized that orks are the most ridiculous faction in the Warhammer 40k universe.  They consistently misspell words, like leaving of the "H" at the start of Hard Case, making it read like heavy cockney accents.  They literally believe that colors have an effect on their weaponry, red to make things faster, and yellow for larger blasts.  I've been told that ork technology doesn't work, but since they're the most powerful psykers in existence, simply believing that it works, makes it work.

I admire the designers who came up with the space orks, as their lore is so different from other races.  I can almost imagine that orks were created to be ridiculous to alleviate the dark and gritty tone of the rest of the game.  If Games Workshop were sectioned off, the Orks department would certainly be the most fun to work in.

Having realized that Orks do almost nothing seriously, I let my mind run really wild with the possibilities.  Our Ork army had a hospital theme, because I thought it would be funny to juxtapose these ultra violent aliens with a healing center.  We also drove our trucks straight into the enemy, and when that truck crashed, we crashed another truck in that truck.

Warhammer 40k: The Orks

We'd started the Warhammer 40k design class by picking the race we'd like to play.  I wasn't very familiar with Warhammer 40k; I know that the universe is incredibly grimdark, that is, a setting so dour that most people are racist, genocidal, violent, lunatics.  I was informed that Orks were considered "fun mode", so not knowing the game, I choose them.  If the point of any game is to have fun, then why not choose the "fun" option.
The other factions we could've chosen were the Space Marines, the xenophobic humans who worship the Emperor of Man, who I personally think is a unrealistically perfect character.  The Eldar, who are more or less space elves, and the Tryanids, which is a hive of space bugs.
Learning the actual game was difficult, as there are so many phases, dice, and units to keep track of, but playing as the orks simplified it a bit.  Our first opponent was the Eldar, to which we lost to.  Apparently, orks don't win a lot, but at least it was fun to WAAAGH!