Five models, and three Grots to carry the spare guns. That’s the detail from Monday’s reveal of the new Ork Nobz that I’ve now gone back to about six times. The box they’re replacing came with one Grot ammo runt, singular, tucked in among the bits alongside the cybork upgrade parts.
Warhammer Community put the kit up on the 10th with the usual short lore preamble. Nobz are “vicious, gnarled veterans who have survived years in a culture where fightin’ is the primary concern,” bigger and tougher and meaner than your average Boy. Five of them per box, kustom krumpas as standard, a skorcha in the options, assorted specialist gubbinz. Warbikes went up in the same article, a pair of dual dakkaguns per bike, rokkits available on the Biker Nob. The Warbikers arrive alongside Codex: Orks and the Nobz follow later.
What a Nob can’t carry by himself
Ork money is teeth. The ones in their heads, which fall out and grow back and get passed around as currency. White Dwarf #436’s Bad Moons writeup lays out the economics in about four sentences: the Bad Moons are the richest clan because their teef grow faster than everyone else’s, and the other clans have never once complained about the unfairness of that, because if you’re a bit skint you can simply give a Bad Moon a kicking and take his teef off him. That’s from the 2018 clan feature, and near-identical wording turns up in White Dwarfs going back at least to 2008.
So an Ork with money buys gear. That’s the only thing to spend it on. White Dwarf #349 has a photo caption I’ve always liked, describing a Bad Moon Nob as “well on his way to having a cybork body, with a reconstructed skull and a buzz saw in place of his arm,” which is what happens when the shopping list runs out of guns and moves on to limbs. And the Sanctus Reach book says Mogrok’s Nobz are so rich they’re always in the best armour teef can buy, gear so complicated that they’ve had to learn to fix the wossnames and reset the gubbins themselves in the middle of a fight.
That last bit is the one that gets me. It’s every bloke who buys a boat and then finds out that owning a boat is mostly a scraping-barnacles hobby, except the Nob’s version of that involves resetting a wossname while somebody shoots at him.
Which is where the Grots come in. Look at the studio shots and each little lad is paired off to a specific gun. One is buckled into ammo belts with a rokkit slung over his shoulder and a spare drum in his hands. One is hauling a fuel canister for the skorcha. Gretchin have always been the Ork army’s put-upon underclass, and the ammo runt job sits slightly to the side of that. The kit is specific about which Nob owns which runt.
Where the Nobz sit in the mob
Right, so the way it goes, and I’ve banged on about the growth thing before so I’ll keep it short. Ork wins fight. Ork gets bigger. Bigger Ork wins more fights, gets bigger again. Somewhere on that ladder he stops being a Boy and starts being a Nob, and there’s no ceremony attached, nobody hands him stripes, he’s just visibly too big to be shoved around any more. Keep going long enough and you’re a Warboss. Nobody writes any of it down.
The interesting consequence of that, the one the codices tend to gloss over, is what a Warboss’s bodyguard is actually made of. It’s made of the Orks who are next in the queue.
There’s a two-page spread in White Dwarf #390 from 2012 on Waaagh! Skullkrumpa that spells this out better than any codex sidebar I’ve read. It runs through the warband unit by unit. Nagrut’s Big Nobz get described as the hardest bunch in the tribe, bullies who keep everyone in line by thumping any greenskin who doesn’t get stuck in or who looks at them funny, and Nagrut himself has left dozens of Boyz dead or bleeding over the years. He’s called the Warboss’s left fist. Two entries down there’s Thugruk, another brute, and the writeup says plainly that he dreams of leading a Waaagh! of his own, and that he isn’t the only Ork in the mob with ambitions in that direction. There’s also a biker called Magrot who once picked a fight with Nagrut, an error that ended with his arm getting ripped off.
And then the punchline, which is in Skullkrumpa’s own entry: he used to be the favoured Ork of a bigger Warboss called Grax, and he’s currently in the process of peeling off to carve out his own realm while Waaagh! Grax rolls through the Ryza system. The boss of this warband is himself a runaway Nob. His own left fist has a body count among his own side and his own third-in-command is openly planning the same move.
Ork command has no succession mechanism because the murder is the succession mechanism. Every Nob standing in a ring around the boss is a partial answer to the question of who runs this if he dies, and the fastest way to move up the shortlist is to be the one who makes the vacancy. The bodyguard and the threat are the same six lads. It’s the single most efficient bit of world-building in the faction and GW has never once had to explain it, because it just falls out of “biggest is boss” if you follow the rule for more than five seconds.
Although, and I’ll be honest, I’ve talked myself into and out of this a few times while writing it. There’s a decent case that I’ve built a theory of greenskin politics on top of a rules requirement. Elite retinue units need bodyguard rules, bodyguard rules need a unit of tough models standing near a character, and the fluff gets written to fit the datasheet afterwards. Ghazghkull’s order of battle in Waaagh! Ghazghkull lists five named Warbosses under him plus three Nobz mobs and three Meganobz mobs, and it’s completely possible GW wrote “five Warbosses” because five Warbosses is a good number of models, and I’ve done the rest myself. But then Ghazghkull’s entire career only works because those five haven’t jumped him yet, and the tension of that is in every piece of fiction he’s ever appeared in. So no, I think I’m right. Mostly.
The argument I lost about this
Kiran and I spent, conservatively, forty minutes on this in a car park outside a tournament venue in 2023, and I was wrong for about thirty-eight of them. My position was that a Nob who kills his Warboss becomes a Warboss on the spot, that the title transfers with the killing. Kiran’s position was that he becomes a Nob who’s won a fight, and that the size comes later, over months, as the mob decides whether to keep listening to him. He kept pointing out that Orks physically grow into the role and that you can’t grow six inches in an afternoon. I kept saying that’s exactly what the Waaagh energy is for.
I was arguing it in the way you argue when you’ve realised you’re losing and you’re now defending the position out of pure stubbornness. He’d packed his army back into the car. I was still going. Somewhere in there I said the phrase “well, the Orks think he’s the boss, and Ork belief is functionally real,” which is the kind of thing that sounds devastating at ten at night in a car park and looks quite silly written down. He was right. The lore is consistent about this and I’d just never actually checked…
Anyway. The three Grots interest me more than the kustom krumpas do. Kit is the visible score in an Ork mob, and a Nob who needs a Grot to carry his spare gun is hauling round more firepower than he has hands for, which means more teef than the git standing next to him, who will have noticed.
The kit going in the bin
The box these are replacing is a 104-piece set from 2008, which is eight years older than my entire time in the hobby, and it’s been an absolute workhorse. Ten heads, five torso fronts, five bodies, big choppas, power klaws, kombi-weapons, cybork upgrade parts, one Grot ammo runt. That kit is where half the kitbashed Ork characters on the internet came from. My local store still has one on the shelf, back row, price sticker faded to a sort of pale salmon colour, and I’d bet actual money it’s been sitting in that exact spot since before the pandemic.
I don’t play Orks. I’ve never played Orks. I own three of them, bought at a bring-and-buy for a Kill Team idea I abandoned inside a fortnight, and they’re in a drawer with the Snakebite-looking one missing a hand. So take my enthusiasm with the appropriate salt. But Ork releases keep doing a thing I don’t think the other ranges manage. A Grot on a 25mm base holding a spare drum magazine is a joke and a status report on his owner at the same time, and a small piece of evidence about how a Waaagh assembles itself out of a few thousand Orks all doing sums about their own position. The Drukhari get near it in a nastier register, I suppose, though nobody’s ever laughed at one of my Wyches.
One practical note if you’re planning to buy these. The Nobz are the later of the two releases, with the Warbikers going up alongside Codex: Orks itself, so the codex-week spend is bikes-and-book and the Nobz money comes out of a different month’s budget. GW said more codex details were coming this week, which presumably means the detachments, and I’d expect at least one of them to want a full mob of these with a boss glued to the middle of it.
