The first time I encountered Orks in Warhammer 40,000 was through Dawn of War. The original PC game from 2004. I played the campaign as Space Marines and thought the Orks were just the comedy faction, the ones who spoke in cockney accents and built things out of scrap metal. Then I started reading the actual lore and realised that the Orks are, on paper, the single most dangerous species in the galaxy. More dangerous than the Tyranids, more dangerous than the Necrons, more dangerous than Chaos. The only reason they haven’t already won is that they spend most of their time fighting each other.
With 11th edition confirmed and the Orks headlining the launch box as the main antagonists, a lot of new players are going to be asking what these green lunatics actually are. This is that article.
They’re Fungi
I need to get this out of the way because it’s the single weirdest thing about the Orks and the thing that most people who haven’t read the lore don’t know. Orks are not animals. They’re not mammals. They’re a genetically engineered fungal organism, created by an ancient civilisation called the Old Ones sometime before recorded history. The Old Ones needed a weapon that could fight the Necrons and the C’tan, so they created a species that would reproduce rapidly, fight relentlessly, and be almost impossible to permanently eradicate.
Orks reproduce through spores. They shed microscopic spores constantly throughout their lives, and when they die, they release a massive cloud of them. These spores settle into the ground, grow underground as fungal networks, and eventually produce new Orks. And not just Orks. The spores also produce Gretchin (smaller, weaker greenskins used as slaves and cannon fodder), Snotlings (even smaller and dumber), Squigs (biological utility animals that serve as everything from food to weapons to mounts), and various fungal organisms that form the basis of the Ork ecosystem.
What this means in practice is that you can’t exterminate Orks from a planet by just killing them. You’ve killed the Orks, sure. But the planet is now saturated with billions of spores that will grow into a new Ork population within a few decades. The Imperium has “cleansed” worlds of Ork infestations only to find them re-infested a generation later because the spores survived in the soil. There are Inquisitorial reports suggesting that some level of Ork presence exists on the majority of habitable worlds in the galaxy, just waiting for conditions to be right.
The Waaagh! Field
So yeah, Orks. Fungal. Reproduce by spores. Basically space mushrooms with anger issues. But the really strange part is the psychic field.
Orks generate a collective psychic energy called the Waaagh! field. The more Orks gathered in one place, the stronger it gets. This field does several things that are hard to explain in normal terms. It makes Ork technology work. Ork machines are built from scrap, held together with welds that shouldn’t hold and wiring that shouldn’t conduct, and by any rational engineering standard, most of it shouldn’t function. But it does, because enough Orks believe it will. The gestalt psychic field fills in the gaps.
The classic example is the colour red. Orks believe red vehicles go faster. And Ork vehicles painted red do, measurably, go faster. The psychic field makes the belief real. Blue is lucky. Yellow makes bigger explosions. Purple is sneaky (have you ever seen a purple Ork? Exactly). These aren’t superstitions. They’re empirically observable effects generated by a collective psychic phenomenon that the Orks themselves don’t understand or even notice.
I spent about three hours one night on a Lexicanum rabbit hole trying to figure out the exact limits of the Ork psychic field. Do they have to consciously believe something for it to work? Can it create something from nothing or only enhance existing technology? Is there a threshold number of Orks required? I don’t think GW has ever given firm answers to any of these questions, and honestly the ambiguity is probably part of the design. The Orks work because nobody, including the Orks, understands exactly how they work.
The other thing the Waaagh! field does is attract more Orks. When a Warboss starts winning battles, the psychic energy draws greenskins from surrounding systems. They just know, on some instinctive level, that a good fight is happening somewhere. This is how Waaagh!s snowball. A small Ork warband wins a few fights, the psychic field pulses, nearby Orks start migrating toward the signal, the warband gets bigger, wins bigger fights, and the cycle accelerates until you’ve got a planet-scale invasion rolling across the sector.
The Klans
Ork society is organised into klans, which are less like military units and more like cultural identities that Orks are born with. An Ork doesn’t choose to be a Goff or an Evil Sun. It’s just what they are, probably something encoded in the spore DNA by the Old Ones.
The six major klans:
Goffs are the biggest, toughest, and most aggressive. They think the other klans waste too much time on things that aren’t fighting. Ghazghkull Thraka is a Goff, which should tell you everything about the klan’s priorities. Black armour, very little decoration, maximum violence.
Evil Sunz are obsessed with speed. Red paint on everything. Bikes, buggies, trukks, anything that goes fast. Wazdakka Gutsmek, the Speed Freak who wants to ride across the galaxy, is the ultimate Evil Sun. Their vehicles are genuinely faster than other Orks’ vehicles, partly because of the red paint and the psychic field, partly because they spend more time tuning engines than anyone else.
Bad Moons are the richest. Their teef (the Ork currency, literally their teeth) grow back faster than other klans’, so they always have spending money. They buy the biggest guns, the flashiest armour, and the loudest everything. Other Orks think they’re show-offs but also want their gear.
Deathskulls are looters. They scavenge everything, steal from other klans constantly, and paint things blue for luck. They’re the ones most likely to incorporate alien technology into their kit, and they have an almost superstitious attachment to lucky charms and trinkets.
Snakebites are traditionalists. They distrust technology (by Ork standards, which is a low bar) and prefer squig-riding, hunting, and living off the land. They’re the closest thing to “feral” Orks, which in a setting where the baseline is already deeply feral says something.
Blood Axes are the sneaky ones. They’ve been known to trade with humans, employ basic tactics like flanking and retreating, and even wear camouflage. Other Orks consider this deeply un-Orky behaviour. The Blood Axes don’t care, because they win.
I remember arguing about the klans with a friend at a tournament once. He was convinced the Blood Axes were the most dangerous because they could actually plan. I thought it was the Goffs because at the end of the day, the biggest Ork wins. We went back and forth for a good forty minutes during a lunch break. Neither of us played Orks. We just had opinions.
Why They’re the 11th Edition Villain
GW’s AdeptiCon reveals put Orks as the primary antagonist of the Armageddon launch box, with Ghazghkull’s Waaagh! threatening the entire planet. Yarrick leads the Imperial defence. New Ork Boyz carry choppas, sluggas, and shootas all at once. Wazdakka is getting his first-ever miniature. The Orks are getting a full spotlight for the first time since, I want to say, the 2nd edition starter box? Or maybe 3rd? It’s been a while.
Actually, I take that back. Orks were in the Assault on Black Reach starter in 5th edition. But they were sharing the spotlight with generic Space Marines, and the narrative didn’t centre on them the way the Armageddon campaign does. This time Ghazghkull is the antagonist, Wazdakka is the vanguard, and the entire story is about the Ork invasion. The greenskins are the main event.
I think GW chose Orks because they’re the faction that sells the setting to new players. Tyranids are scary. Chaos is complex. Necrons are esoteric. But Orks are immediately understandable and immediately funny. Football hooligans with spaceships. Cockney mushroom people who believe so hard that reality changes around them. The visual design is distinctive, the lore is accessible, and the models are forgiving to paint (green basecoat, brown leather, metal bits, done). For a launch box aimed at bringing new people into the hobby, Orks are the perfect choice.
Though if I’m being honest, I have a slight worry that the comedy angle might overshadow the threat. The best Ork lore balances the humour with genuine horror. A single Ork warband is funny. A Waaagh! numbering in the billions, rolling across the galaxy, fuelled by a psychic field that makes their ramshackle technology work and their population impossible to permanently reduce, is an extinction-level event. The Imperium has never found a permanent solution to the Ork problem because there isn’t one. You can win battles. You can’t win the war. The Orks will always come back.
GW seems to understand this. The Armageddon campaign is being framed as desperate. Yarrick nearly died. Operation Imperator is assembling Space Marines from a dozen Chapters. The new vehicles, the Centaur and the Hippogriff, exist because the Astra Militarum needed faster platforms to keep up with the Speedwaaagh!. This isn’t a romp. This is a war where the funniest faction in the game might actually win.
I hope GW leans into that tension. The Orks are best when they’re both hilarious and terrifying at the same time, and the Armageddon setting has historically been the place where that balance works. We’ll see when the launch box drops in June. I’m genuinely curious about the Ork half of that box, because GW has only shown the new Boy so far, and the trailer hinted at a lot more.
