“Grot” started as an insult. Bigger Orks use it for any greenskin that’s small, sneaky, or cowardly — anyone who fails to live up to the proper Orky standards of being loud, big, and reasonably stupid. Then GW promoted it from slang into a species name, gave it a unit entry, and now there are entire armies of Gretchin shuffling around objectives at fifteen points a head. Grot Week is mid-cycle as I’m writing this, three reveals in and three more to go, and the new Armageddon launch box is going to be heavy on the little gits. Day three was a Stabby Grot. The model is holding a knife the size of its head.
GW doesn’t tend to spend much time in the reveal posts explaining that Gretchin are a related Orkoid species with their own biology, their own culture, their own tiny criminal economy, and at least one celebrated revolutionary movement. You can play an Ork army for years, treat the Grots like screening tokens (which is what they’re for mechanically), and never notice the parallel society shuffling along underneath the Waaagh!. Most of that lore is buried in 4th and 9th edition codex sidebars.
What Grots actually are
Physically: smaller, weedier, green-skinned, with overlarge heads and tattered ears that flatten when they’re scared. The fangs are sharp. The fingers are good at grabbing things that aren’t theirs. They have excellent low-light vision and a sense of smell the lore likes to hint at being supernatural. Some Grots have what the codex calls “a sixth sense.” In practice it just means raw luck.
That last bit does a lot of work. The most famous Grot in 40K, Makari, served nine years as standard-bearer to Ghazghkull Thraka — roughly nine years longer than that job description has any right to last. He was eventually sat on by Ghazghkull. He’s also functionally immortal, because his soul reincarnates into any Grot that Ghazghkull touches. Read that sentence again. The lore has Makari as a kind of ambient presence around the Beast of Armageddon, a continuous luck demon possessing successive runts. The 9th edition codex still names him in the Goff entry.
That texture, I think, gets missed when people write Grots off as objective-fillers. Tactical articles treat them as joke units, and then the Black Library writers slip in genuinely strange things about them every couple of years.
They run a black market under their masters’ boots
Most Gretchin are owned. They’re personal servants to whichever Ork happened to grab them at the time: ammo runts, oilers, painboy assistants, mek gofers, the kid who chases after Flash Gits with a spare slugga magazine. Wazdakka Gutsmek has a Grot called Fixit whose entire job is keeping his warbike clean.
Individual Grots can do quite well for themselves. The lore is full of side hustles: fungus-beer brewers, squig-on-a-stick vendors, fight bookmakers, professional corpse-looters. Where Ork culture is loud and built on consensus-by-shouting, Grot culture is quiet, lateral, and opportunistic. They’re the ones working out who owes who what, organising the gambling, running the back-alley trade in scavenged bullets. The 4th edition Codex actually uses the phrase “enterprise culture” for this. The sidebar runs three paragraphs and is mostly about who runs the betting on squig fights.
Some Grots crew Big Gunz, the looted artillery the Orks aren’t disciplined enough to operate themselves. Mek Gunz are a separate unit on the table, but the crews are Gretchin, and the lore is consistent that this is one of the most dangerous jobs available to a runt. Recoil flattens them. The breech sometimes explodes. The kannons aren’t designed for any specific calibre, so what comes out at the muzzle is partly a function of what got jammed in. Most game systems just abstract this as “one wound, then dead.”
Other roles: turret gunners on Trukks and Battlewagons, mascots for Flash Gits, Killa Kan pilots. Killa Kans are walking Dreadnought-shaped frames with a Grot wired into the cockpit, half-conscious and terrified, given just enough autonomy to point the gun forward and shamble.
The bit about Da Red Gobbo
Grots have had at least one major revolutionary movement. It started on the Orky moon of Angelis, where the Mekboyz running Mektown introduced a tag system that determined who got to ride out when the next Waaagh! launched. Grots, naturally, didn’t get tags. They went on strike. There were demonstrations. Slogans like “Tags For All!” and “Equal Rides!” and “Meks are Skum!” got painted on walls. The whole thing is, I think, funnier than it has any right to be, because GW wrote it absolutely straight in 1997 in the Gorkamorka rules and have basically never walked it back.
The Orks won the initial fight by being bigger. The surviving Grots retreated to a place called Skid Row, organised into Da Kommittee under the leadership of Da Red Gobbo, and have been raiding Ork mobs from the shadows ever since, festooned in red, the colour of Da Revolushun. Da Red Gobbo is now functionally a Christmas mascot in 40K. GW releases a new Red Gobbo model every few years for the holiday season, and the joke at this point is that he keeps sneaking back to deliver “presents” to good Grots and reprisals to bad Orks.
I’ve never bought a Red Gobbo. Came close in 2022 when Kiran was talking up the Christmas one as a Kill Team operative, but I had a Death Guard order in the cart and couldn’t justify both.
The Grot Week miniatures
The three reveals so far are very GW. Day one is a Grot in a leather cap with a small spike on top, braced and aiming a blasta. Day two is a Grot caught mid-skulk, eyeing up some unattended objective marker. Day three is the Stabby Grot, holding a cleaver in one hand and a slugga in the other. The poses are individuated, and the sculpts have personality you don’t always see on rank-and-file Ork infantry.
That’s the gateway-model thing. Grots are usually the cheapest entry point into an Ork army. Ten of them in a starter box, often cheap-built sprues, easy paints. Base coat green, drybrush, wash, dot the eyes red, done. People who’ve never painted a 40K model before paint Grots first. Some of those people stay. The Armageddon box is going to launch with however many Grots are in the Ork half. Twenty would be normal. Forty would be a callback to the original 2nd Edition starter, and a meaningful number of next year’s new Ork players will start by sitting down with a Grot sprue and a citadel skin tone they bought at the shop with the kit.
Why GW keeps them
So yeah, Grots. Little green guys. Been around since, what, Rogue Trader? Earlier? Point is, they keep coming back. Every Ork edition redesigns them slightly. They get new poses, new sprues, new little side-units like the Grot Tekkies or Da Red Gobbo’s mob, and then they slot back into the same role.
I think the reason is that they fill a slot nothing else does. They’re the cheap screen. They’re the model that holds an objective in turn one and dies in turn two and you don’t care. They’re the comic relief that lets the rest of the Ork army be properly menacing. Put a unit of Mega Armoured Nobz next to a unit of Grots and the Nobz look bigger. Put Ghazghkull next to Makari and Ghazghkull looks more imposing. The Grots make the rest of the faction work. The Brainboyz origin lore hints at the same dynamic on a longer scale, with Orks being the diminished version of something older. Grots are even further down the chain.
There’s an argument that you could remove Grots from the army entirely and not lose much. Cheap troops, sure, but the Boyz already do that job. Comic relief? Orks are already comic. The Red Gobbo lore? Niche. I sat with that argument for a paragraph and I can see why someone could make it. I don’t fully buy it.
The reason I don’t is the same reason Grot Week exists. The marketing team at GW knows perfectly well that Wazdakka and Yarrick get top billing on the Armageddon box. They ran a whole week of teasers on the runts anyway. Grots are part of why people love Orks. The Christmas Red Gobbo sells out every year, even when the model is functionally a re-pose.
Friday’s unboxing will tell us the actual count. My guess is twenty Grots in the box, including the three reveals so far and three more the marketing team is dribbling out tomorrow and Thursday. If anyone’s starting Orks with the new launch box, do me a favour and paint the Grots first. Test your skin tone on them. The ones in my Tyranid army still aren’t done.
