The Orruks are the most common and powerful of the greenskin species who serve the forces of Destruction as the mortal servants of Gorkamorka, the greenskin god of destruction.
The orruks, also called the orruk warclans, once known on the World-That-Was as the Orcs, are one of the savage humanoid species that comprise the bestial collective of related species known as the greenskins. They are the chosen people of Gorkamorka, the god of destruction. They are well known for their sheer physical strength and brutality, though not necessarily their intelligence. The orruks and their various factions are the species who comprise the majority of the Grand Alliance of Destruction.
The various greenskin races of the Mortal Realms are many and varied, ranging from diminutive snotlings the size of weasels all the way up to megabosses that are ten feet tall and nearly as wide. The most famous of all the greenskins is the orruk. To say orruks are warlike creatures is like saying the infernos of Aqshy's outer rim can be somewhat warm.
These thuggish creatures are obsessed with battle; they are heavily muscled devotees of brute force and ignorance, feared across the Mortal Realms for their raw savagery and unrelenting thirst for violence of all kinds. Not a single land or continent, not even those of celestial Azyr, has remained unscarred by their destructive rampages.
The roar of the orruk race at war is loud enough to shake the Mortal Realms to their foundations. These hulking, green-skinned warriors live to fight. To them, war is the only entire reason for their existence. They will punch, smash, gouge, slash and headbutt everything that stands before them until only the mightiest warriors are left standing, and they love every moment of it.
With every act of violence they commit, the orruks worship the great god Gorkamorka, the two-headed god of destruction. It was he who slaughtered the mightiest monsters of the realms in the Age of Myth, and it is he who invigorates the orruk hordes with strength and manic energy through the raw primal power of the Waaagh! When the orruks gather in great number, when they raise their voices together in a ground-shaking bellow of battle lust, the pulsing green magic of Gorkamorka turns them from an argumentative rabble into a crashing tide of muscle and armour that sweeps all before it.
Stomping forward at the head of the greenskin hordes come the Ironjawz, hulking armoured orruks that are brutality made flesh. Howling and bellowing alongside them come the Bonesplitterz, frenzied orruks who have warlike energy thrumming through their addled brains. Stamping and shouting as their shamans bring the wrath of the greenskin god upon the foe, the orruks are constantly on the warpath. They know nothing of fear and never tire in their endless quest for carnage.
In the face of such reckless aggression, no mortal civilisation can stand for long. It is all but certain that one day the realms will belong to the orruks.
Orruks are quick to anger and even quicker to escalate. When they are fighting, they feel a sense of savage joy that thrills through them and drives them to even greater acts of violence. Orruks thrive on conflict, growing physically bigger and stronger the more of it they have. Their "kultur" is robust and strong, a crude and primal meritocracy that all orruks instinctively understand. If one orruk feels like he is a better candidate for rulership than another, he can simply challenge his boss to a fight -- and if he wins convincingly enough, he becomes the leader instead.
Of course, this rough-and-ready political system carries with it a definite risk, which stops the entire race from self-destructing: an orruk that launches a leadership challenge had better be sure he can win, because if he doesn't have the might to back it up, he has a short lifespan indeed.
Originally, the orruks were allied to the forces of Order, though Sigmar always kept a close eye on them, well-aquainted with their appetite for unrestrained and purposeless destruction. During the wars with the forces of Chaos at the end of the Age of Myth, the greenskin god of destruction, Gorkamorka, grew tired of the battles he waged on behalf of the God-King's Pantheon of Order and led the orruks into the first Great Waaagh!. During the Age of Chaos, orruks rampaged through the Mortal Realms, warring with the other intelligent species and each other.
One of the first acts of the Stormcast Eternals after their creation was to purge the existing populations of orruks from the Realm of Azyr.
Anatomy and Physiology
A mob of savage orruks lay low a band of Seraphon. When the forces of Destruction and Order meet, the carnage that follows is total. Roaring their barbarous praises to the Great Green God Gorkamorka, the warclans overpower their foes through a mixture of brutal might and sheer savagery. Even the celestial power of the cosmos wielded by the Seraphon can do little to stymie this onslaught of violence.
In appearance, an orruk makes for a daunting sight. His bucket jaw juts out, filled with jagged yellow fangs perfect for tearing meat. His skin ranges from olive green to a dark emerald hue, depending on realm and region or origin, but it is always tough and leathery, infested with ticks and with scars much in evidence. His stance is squat and his spine bent, lending a low centre of gravity that makes orruks stable and hard to fell. Porcine, red eyes gleam from under a heavy brow, and the stench of rotten food wafts from his mouth when he shouts, swears and bellows in the rough and utilitarian language of his kind.
Orruks often wear armour of metal or bone that is bound with tough leather and sinew onto their muscular frames. Trophies are common and are worn to boast of their superiority over past kills, particularly of large monsters or powerful foes. All orruks like to show off and most prize "shiny stuff" much as a magpie does, even if they don't really understand how it works. Though they despise mortal civilisation and learning, it would be wrong to say they place no value on books, scrolls and libraries. After all, they always make excellent kindling when burning down cities.
The tumult of violence that typifies an orruk invasion gives rise to a great din of bellowing, screaming, crashing and thundering. This can attract even more orruks to the same location so they can join in the fun. Like a cast stone triggering an avalanche, the first spark of violence grows into a ramshackle crusade that can tear down an entire empire. Whole civilisations have been ended by a Waaagh! that may have originated with an orruk stealing another's lunch, misunderstanding a perfectly good insult, or seeing a strangely shaped cloud in the sky.
Orruks are incredibly difficult to eradicate from an area once they infest it, especially if that area has lots of caves, fissures and dark places where they could spawn young. The scholars of Hysh believe that when an orruk is slain and its corpse left to rot in the right conditions, it will deliquesce into a fungal jelly. This fungus then puts down thin, whitish strands into the earth below that can harness nutrients and the inherent magical power of the realm itself. From this greenish flesh sac comes the young of the race, glistening and pallid, gnawing their way free from the meaty jelly of their progenitor.
These gangly, fang-mawed horrors will slither into somewhere dark and wet, red eyes glinting in the gloom as they take shelter in a fissure or crevice. They eke out an existence by eating cave vermin, and occasionally punching each other, until they are big, green and muscular enough to hunt proper prey. Roaming at will, they join the first warclan they find as "yoofs." Before too long, the young orruks will have become warriors in their own right, ready to fight and die at the slightest provocation.
There is evidence that the magic of the Waaagh! accelerates this process; should a battlefield of fallen orruks be left in shadow for long enough, it may become something akin to a birthing ground that spawns a new generation of psychotic green horrors soon ready for another colossal conflict.
When a Waaagh! is in full flow, it becomes something akin to a catastrophic natural disaster. The green-skinned tides of orrukdombreak upon the cliffs of the Mortal Realms' civilisations, battering them to rubble over the course of several sustained assaults. The ground shakes as if in fear of the rumbling of iron-shod feet, the air fills thick with a thunderous din and chasms and fissures split open as the land itself is riven through by the anarchic force of magical Waaagh! energy.
The massed orruks care not at all whether they are fighting to destroy the nations of Order, Chaos or even Death itself -- they will tear down a Chaos tyrant's Dreadhold or an undead fortress raised in the wake of the Necroquake just as happily as they would sack a Stormcast Eternal Lord-Castellant's nascent city.
There are two main reasons -- if they can be seen as reason at all -- that the orruks cause destruction on such an epic scale. The first is that the orruks believe they were made to fight and win. It really doesn’t matter who, how, where, when, why or what they fight, nor even which tools of war they fight with. Just so long as someone gets a good kicking, the orruks will be content.
The second reason is that orruks despise weakness, especially that part of weakness that seeks to manufacture its own strength in ways they do not understand. Though some orruks can be quite ingenious when it comes to making new ways of bashing, clubbing or impaling their victims, they see things like blackpowder weapons, well-made castle walls and duardin flying machines as "cheatin'." They despise any methods by which those smaller and physically weaker than themselves try to rise to the top when they should really be violently put back in their place.
Theirs is a simple cultural truth, one that sees the orruks thrive most of all in Ghur, the Realm of Beasts, where that creed defines even the landscape of the realm. Orruks want nothing more than to tear down the false strength of other nations until no stone stands atop another, destroying the gimmicks, crutches and props of mortal civilisation, for they complicate that most fundamental truth of reality embodied by all greenskins -- that might makes right.
The Waaagh!
An orruk megaboss
When orruks go to war, the resultant crusade of savagery is called a Waaagh! -- a word that can only be properly pronounced at ear-splitting volume. This is also the term for the signature greenskin war cry, a communal, guttural bellow that wrenches its way out of the souls of the orruks. This is not a word so much as a death knell, for it has sounded the doom of countless mortal nations from across the Mortal Realms throughout time.
Not all Waaagh!s are created equal. One that includes thousands of greenskins roaring at the top of their lungs will be more powerful and long-lasting than the war cry of a single mob of unruly orruks. Similarly, the nature of a Waaagh! can vary depending on the orruks that give it voice. The deep bass roar of the Ironjawz lends them raw strength, and they have to be pretty strong to cart all that metal around with them in the first place. So invigorated are they that their fighting style -- which can be best summarised as that of a battering ram -- can see them punch through shieldwalls and snap limbs in their gauntleted hands as if they were no more than twigs.
The war cry of the Bonesplitter clans invigorates the orruks with a manic, almost frantic energy. This drives them onward, lending them ferocity and lasting stamina enough to hack apart the enemy in a rain of successive blows, or charge down even the colossal beasts of Ghur's primordial savannah.
Similarly, not all Waaagh!s are launched on purpose. Greenskins are creatures of instinct and emotion over careful planning and military logic. When one orruk gets it into his head to punch another, even if only in a row over a prize haunch of human meat, the resulting fist fight can grow into an outright brawl. This in turn can trigger a rising tide of aggression that sees the biggest and ugliest orruk bash his mates into something approximating a military formation and point it at the nearest non-greenskin stronghold in the search for a "proper fight." Before you know it, the hordes are on the march once more. When the clans raise their voices as one, their cultural differences are put aside, and they become a pure expression of all that is "orruky" and fierce. This is known as a Big Waaagh! A hurricane of belligerent energy, it sends Ironjawz and Bonesplitterz alike into a state of such furious battle lust they can break an enemy army in a single charge. Sometimes even the land itself comes alive, with the earth grinding, trees uprooting and skies turning lurid green in the furore.
Choosing when to unleash the Waaagh! is a major component of the orruk art of leadership, and there are none more skilled at this than Gordrakk, the Fist of Gork. Gordrakk's Great Waaagh! is the most powerful of all. It can raise a surge of raw battle lust from not only greenskins of all stripes and nations, but also ogors, gargants and even troggoths, uniting the savage hordes in a single cataclysmic assault.
Notable Orruk Warclans
- Greenskinz
- Kruleboyz
Sources
- Destruction Battletome: Orruk Warclans (2nd Edition), pp. 4-5