The Greenskins and the Waaagh!

There is a sound that empties border villages faster than any plague bell: a distant, rising roar of thousands of throats, drums, and clashing blades, resolving as it nears into a single bellowed word: Waaagh! It means the greenskins are coming, and it means far too many of them. The Orc and Goblin Tribes are the most numerous and irrepressible menace in the Old World, a race that lives to fight and fights to live, and no matter how many are slain, there are always, always more.

What the Greenskins Are[edit]

Orcs and goblins are not born as other creatures are. They are a fungal folk, propagating through spores that drift on the wind and take root in the dark, so that a single warband passing through a valley can seed the next generation without ever knowing it. This is why the greenskins can never truly be exterminated: burn a tribe to ash and its spores are already sprouting in caves and cellars miles away. They come in many breeds, from the towering, brutal orcs to the small and vicious goblins, but all share the same crude vigour, the same love of a scrap, and the same cheerful indifference to their own appalling casualties.

Orcs and the Ladder of Strength[edit]

Orc society, such as it is, runs on one law: the strongest is in charge, until someone stronger comes along. An orc respects only muscle and victory, and a boss holds his place exactly as long as he can beat down every challenger. The biggest and meanest swell into hulking warbosses, and the greatest of these can bully, batter, and bellow whole tribes into following them. There is no politics here, no diplomacy, no grand design: only a rough, violent meritocracy of the fist, endlessly reshuffled, that occasionally throws up a leader strong enough to point the entire green tide in one direction.

Goblins, Night Goblins, and Worse[edit]

Where the orcs are big and bold, the goblins are small, sly, and staggeringly numerous. Too cowardly to face a fair fight, they make up for it with cunning, cruelty, and sheer weight of bodies, swarming their foes and stabbing at ankles. The Night Goblins skulk in the deep tunnels beneath the mountains, shunning the sun, herding venomous cave squigs and brewing madness-inducing fungus. Goblins ride giant wolves and worse, crew ramshackle contraptions as likely to kill their operators as the enemy, and generally supply the horde with its bottomless reserve of expendable, treacherous, weirdly inventive foot soldiers.

The Waaagh![edit]

The true terror of the greenskins is not any single tribe but the phenomenon they call the Waaagh! When enough of them gather under a strong enough warboss, their collective aggression builds into a psychic and almost physical force, a tide of raw belligerence that draws in every greenskin for miles and whips them to a frenzy. A Waaagh! feeds on itself: the more that join, the mightier it grows, and the mightier it grows, the more it draws. At its height it becomes an unstoppable migration of violence that can flatten border kingdoms, overrun mountain passes, and redraw the map before it finally burns itself out in infighting and exhaustion.

Gork and Mork[edit]

The greenskins worship two gods, and cannot entirely agree on which is which. Gork is brutal but cunning, and Mork is cunning but brutal, and the fine distinction has started more than one theological brawl. Together they embody everything a greenskin admires (strength, ferocity, and low animal craft), and their followers serve them not with prayer but with battle, believing a good fight to be the highest form of worship. Goblin shamans and orc weirdboyz channel the crackling energy the Waaagh! throws off, hurling raw green power at the enemy, though it is anyone's guess whether the spell or the caster explodes first.

Everyone's Problem[edit]

No one is spared the greenskins. They gnaw endlessly at the Dwarfen Mountain Holds, whose collapsed tunnels they infest and whose grudge-books they fill; they spill from the hills to raid the Empire of Man and hurl themselves against the lances of the Kingdom of Bretonnia. They battle the undead, the beasts, and the servants of Chaos with equal enthusiasm, and when no proper enemy presents itself they simply fight one another, which suits them nearly as well. To a greenskin, peace is just the boring bit between battles.

The Tide That Always Returns[edit]

And that is why they endure. The civilised realms can win a hundred victories, break a hundred Waaaghs, and pile the green dead in heaps, and it buys them a generation at most, because the spores are already in the soil and the next warboss is already growing mean. The greenskins are less a nation to be conquered than a weather system to be survived: a recurring storm of tusks, choppas, and joyful violence the Old World has never defeated and never will. To see the wastelands they call home, walk our tour of the Old World.