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My son and I have been on a journey over the last nine months to play a campaign of Gorkamorka. Why so long you ask? Well, we decided that we really wanted to do it right and build terrain and mobs and vehicles from scratch. Sure we could have just played with some of the terrain I already had and lord knows I have enough orks to play a game, or thirty, of gomo but we wanted something to do together. We started by building a massive amount of terrain, WAY more than we could ever use on even four tables of gomo but we wanted variety and versatility. That thread can be found here, very pic heavy. After that was finished we started building mobs and playing games to get the rules down before we really start our campaign with our gaming group. I have been starting project logs for a few of them, here are the Diggas where I built their trukk and the mob itself. I have started painting them here but had to briefly put them on hold to build another mob for a test game coming up soon. That trukk and mob build can be found here, they are the Goffs and they are proud of it. This is probably our twelfth game or so, we are really starting to get the rules down and games are much quicker than our first couple. It had been a solid twelve or more years since I had played a game but once we started most of the rules came right back. This game took us less than an hour total, that was from table set up to post game book keeping. Granted this was a very quick and non bloody game so that helped quite a bit. Alright, here we go...3...2...1.... The dessert spread out far and wide before Gorbad and crew as they hurtled across the sand in their brand new trukk, it had only been crashed once before the meks sold it to him for only twenty teef. Pretty good deal since the mek had originally said he couldn't sell it for less than twenty-two. Gorbad smiled to himself, he had some hagglin' skills to rival a Deathskull, that was for sure. Sweat rolled into his eyes causing him to snap back to the moment as he wiped the sting from his eyes and the sand from his face. Overhead the sun beat down as relentlessly as ever, it was early day but the temp was already climbing to almost unbearable even for an ork such as himself. There was never a moment of respite on this world he thought. All the hardship,fighting and scraping was good for his lads though, gave them something to do and kept the yoofs out of trouble. Gorbad was snapped back to reality again as Grimgut, the new spanner and driver of the new trukk, was screaming something that he couldn't hear over the roar of the centrally mounted engine. Grimgut was now frantically pointing in the direction they were headed. Before Gorbad could turn to see what was out there Snazbad, the new yoof of the mob, was frantically tugging on his arm. "Wat!?!" bellowed Gorbad at the light green yoof. "Boss, I seez somethin'!", Snazbad was also pointing in the direction they were headed. Sneering at the yoof but holding off from smackin' him across the back of his skull for fear of finding a soft spot Gorbad was finally able to turn his attention to the desert in front of them. A large ramp down into the skid could be seen and right at the bottom of it, some no good stinkin' Freebootas! A smile crept onto Gorbad's face, "Hit the Red Button! he screamed at Grimgut. The trukk bounced across the rough desert ground and all the boyz roared in their excitement. (Here are a couple shots of the terrain we are playing over before anything was deployed.) (Here are the forces deployed.) (The freebootas) (The Goffs) Those git Freebootas was caught out in da desert diggin' scrap like a bunch a grots thought Gorbad, his smile gettin' bigger, and more full of sand by the second. The thunderous roar of his new trukk and boyz musta scared them no good Freebootas, before Gorbad and 'is boyz could get to 'em and give 'em a good whoopin' they was in they trukk and tryin' ta get away. Their good for nothin' bad mek was behind the controls of the vehicle and hittin' the Big Red Button before he even had the gas engine started! Their vehicle lurched ahead straight toward The Last Rock forcing their mek to slam on the breaks. Gorbad was yellin' for Grimgut to t-bone them but somehow over the roar of the engine his message was lost and the new spanner skid stopped the trukk sideways, headed straight for the side of the cliff. Both mobs crammed to the sides of their trukks facing the other mob and let loose with every ranged weapon they could bring to bare. The bad mek, still without his gas engine started, was smooshing the Big Red Button nonstop! In an amazing turn of luck all this accomplished was that the low ridin' git wagon spun 'round and faced almost straight at the center of a large dune of soft sand. Gorbad saw that this was the moment he needed and once again he yelled for Grimgut to ram the stinkin' Freebootas while they were in a bad position. The spanner must have heard this time as he skillfully turned the new trukk 'round the right way and Gorbad could hear the thrusters begin to whine up, the vehicle lurched forward and then stopped. Gorbad, once again, whirled to see what the new spanner was doin' only to see him pulling out a hammer and beatin' on the Red Button....he must not be strong enough to push it he thought. He ducked just in time as he saw Zogstruk, the new gunner of the new trukk, fire the harpoon gun at the enemy. He wrenched his head around just in time to see the massive harpoon glance off the engine and stick in the sand. Then the roar of weapon fire was deafening as once more both mobs opened fire with everything they could. Gorbad's heart jumped in his chest as he saw the Kaptin' fall face first from their low ridin' trukk. His joy didn't last any longer than a few quick heartbeats as the tough old git crawled back into da trukk, the bad mek started his gas engine and tore off across the desert, followed by blasts from their thrusters taking them almost out of range to even think about chasing after them. Gorbad screamed at Grimgut to give her everything she had and catch up to them before they were too far away. The spanner revved the gas engine, threw it into gear, spun the vehicle around to give chase and mashed the Red Button only to loose control and skid to a stop facing the cliff and a tank trap. Gorbad watched as the no good Freebootin' gits sped off out of sight with a trukk full of scrap.... Needless to say, I(Gorbad and the goffs) did not win this one. My son did exactly what he had to do to win, get off the table with the most scrap, and win he did. It was a fun, funny, orky game, full of awesomely horrible dice rolls for both of us. However, in a game like this sometimes that will actually make for a much more entertaining game. Gorbad, his back against the side of the armored crew compartment, slid down until his bottom was on the bed of his new trukk. He began fumblin' through his cigar pouch searching for the only thing that may help him feel a little better about his life choices at the moment. At last he found it, the last stump of his last cigar. He brought it to his mouth and began searchin' for his lighter in his chest pocket. He found it, quickly pulled it out, struck it and nothing happened. Gorbad looked at the heavy, metal lighter and saw that it had caught a bullet, at least he could rely on someone in his mob he thought before he roared and threw it at Snazbad, hitting him behind his right ear. The yoof crumpled like a grot under a slavers whip. Gorbad and the other boyz roared in laughter. Hope you enjoyed it as much as we did...

About twenty years or so ago a game came out that I fell in love with, a game that touched my inner Ork and spoke to me in a nice simple language that I could easily understand. A game of Orks and vehicles, white knuckle speed and vicious combat, mutants and huge explosions all set in an arid desert wasteland. What's not to love, right!?!? That game is GORKAMORKA! Anyway, my son, who is younger than the game by a few months, recently watched a few videos of the game on the mwg youtube channel and decided "Hey Dad, we should play a Gorkamorka campaign." "We have no terrain or vehicles for the game anymore." I said calmly, trying to hide my interest and excitement thinking this would just make the subject go away because even though I love the game, this immediately raised a red flag of me building a ton of terrain and vehicles while everyone else just got to play in the end. "We would literally have to build everything we needed. So unless you are going to help with every single step along the way, its not happening." I figured that would be the end of it because he is not a big fan of the building process, just the playing process. There was a VERY brief moment of silence and then, "Okay....what would we have to do?" We sat down that night with the books, looked at game pics and desert pics on the web, watched some of the videos on youtube from the mwg guys and made a list of scenery that we would need to play the game. Flash forward about two weeks to two days ago when we find ourselves in one of the local home improvement stores and end up coming home with most of what we need as far as the main supplies go. Two 2' x 4' x 1/4" sheets of mdf and one 4' x 8' x 1" sheet of insulation foam. That night we laid out the rough ideas we had for the two cliff faces, this took quite a while actually as I kept going back and forth between depth of protrusion onto the board and playability. I wanted them to not take up too much room but still have enough space on top to maneuver small and medium vehicles while larger ones may only be able to go in a straight line. Each cliff also needed a single ramp for vehicle access. The following day we sketched out the bases for the rest of the larger terrain pieces. I had to remind him that we didn't want to waste the material so we needed to cram as much as we can onto each board. Today we were both off so we decided to spend it working on terrain. First thing we needed to do was to cut out all the bases. An extra piece of mdf from an old project was also turned into a dune. Next we laid out all the bases onto the foam and traced all the shapes, making sure we had enough space to get everything on took some rearranging but we managed it. By a very huge bit of dumb luck when I scored the sheet of foam and broke it in two, so we could get it in the van and home, I made one piece slightly larger than the other. While at the time I was a little bit upset at myself for not bringing a tape measure, this ended up working perfectly. I am not sure had it ended up in exactly half that we would have been able to get everything on the two sheets half sheets. We then cut out all the foam shapes and laid them out onto their respective bases to see what we ended up with. And the extra dune. The space shown is a 4' x 4' chunk of the game table, I think we did pretty good on not wasting the mdf. The bases without foam are not getting a full level, just a small ring around the edge and will represent the tar pits, mine and chem pool. The dunes were all attached to their bases with liquid nails, weighed down and left to dry for the night. That's where we are now, not too bad for one day really. We both had fun and he is already talking about getting a trukk and chopping it up to make it into a lower riding trukk to run over my grots...because I guess that is what I am playing again...probably, I like the little underdogs.

This is another mob build for our games of Gorkamorka. This one is a more traditional mob made of orks and vehicles, no grots allowed. Goffs are pretty straightforward, even for orks. They don't go for subterfuge, most of them don't even know what that means let alone understand the concept or why you would want to fight that way. They are the epitome of orkiness, believing that might is right, that the biggest and toughest should run the show and that arguing the point will just get ya a fat lip with a few less teef behind it. Now all orks view life this way to an extent but the goffs live it. Hand to hand, usually to the death, is their favorite way of settling any sort of dispute. While they understand there is a need for longer ranged combat it is viewed more as a sort of crippling or distracting tactic used to let the goffs get close enough to get stuck in. Understanding this about them I wanted their trukk to be a sort of ork delivery system. I decided that the ork crew should be right at the front of the vehicle for easy disembarkation into hand to hand. In game there will be no different rules for the trukk but will look truly proppa for goffs. I had a rough idea how I was going to make this work but as usual I just jumped in without blueprints and started the build. As per the directions the tires and frame are assembled first but this is where the standard trukk stops, I even went with a third party engine. As with most of my trukks I removed the middle suspension and cleaned up the frame. This made the perfect place for the engine to sit centrally on the frame. This made the distance between engine and rear axle super short so I had to cut down the drive shaft to almost nothing. I ended up cutting even more out of the drive shaft to finally make a fit. This set the rear axle at a strange angle but with the tires in place you can't tell. Moving to the front axle now to make sure everything sits at an angle that still makes the trukk look like a hotrod I was fairly certain I was not going to be able to use the axle as is out of the box. Setting it in place proved this to be the case as the front of the trukk was actually higher than the rear end, with the tires in place this would have made it pretty much level. Not really acceptable for this trukk. Looking at the front axle I could see that just flipping it over may work, which would be great as it would mean an easier fix than trying to rebuild a cut up axle. This had the trukk sitting pretty much level which means with the tires on would leave the rear end jacked up as I wanted. Alright, with the trukk sitting pretty much as I wanted I could move back to the engine. I needed to set the radiator somewhere and decided to just try to sit it right in front of the engine. This actually worked pretty well with just some very minor removal of some rivets off the frame and some bending of the radiator hose. I needed to attach the nitrous tank somewhere but this engine has no flat places for any sort of attachment.....what better place than to just have it dump into the fuel tank! Next up was the exhaust, the right side was perfect for the stock pipes, the left side not so much so. The problem here is that the pipe is in the way of the tire being able to sit right on the axle. I had originally thought I would be able to run it just behind and above the tire to come out the rear end like this. Which would have been cool had it worked. Now I am considering something more like this. The problem with this is that I was worried that it would be in the way of the central cockpit that I was thinking of building for the driver. In the end I went with this instead. With this settled I moved on to the construction of the cockpit. I started by cutting the front of the cockpit piece from the trukk kit up into the larger pieces, getting rid of the central connection piece and tracing the shape of the two pieces glued together onto some plasticard. I lost a pic of the front cockpit piece. It sits nicely onto the frame after cutting all the rivets and bolt heads off and adding a spacer to each of four plates on the frame to give just the slightest bit more height, mostly so the driver could see over the engine. Time to start adding some of the driver controls to the cockpit. The steering column and the floor mounted gear selector were fitted with the help of the driver. A rear panel, a windscreen and side roll bars added to get the feel of the cockpit. The driver is not glued and won't be as they need to be removable for game purposes. I realized at this point that I have no where to put a gunner, I didn't want to put him in the front crew compartment with the rest of the boyz.as he would take up enough space for two boyz that way. Giving some thought to this I decided that using the rear of the drivers cockpit was the only option at this point. More thought and some time playing with some bits I actually found a use for the mostly standard gunners turret of the trukk kit. Playing with this piece and some tubing I created a sort of rear turret that I got involved in the build deep enough to not take pictures of the process. I may need to reinforce this as it just sort of hangs off the back end and is only attached by the pipe frame and the front of the turret plate. Moving on to the front of the trukk and the crew compartment made me realize that it would have to be a multi level deck with a lower central area sitting on the frame and raised areas over the wheels. I wanted the deck to be long enough and wide enough to be able to hold six to eight orks, With the 25mm bases and the wide orks this meant that the deck needed to be roughly three inches by three inches. With that in mind I cut the central piece to get a feel for how this would look on the frame. While this appears very long it actually puts the total length of the vehicle at just two inches longer than the digga trukk, which is roughly one inch longer than the standard build of the trukk. At this point I got into the build and forgot that I even had a camera nearby. Here is the final overall shape of the vehicle with some minor details started. Comparison shots with the digga trukk. Same width and just slightly longer. The big shoota/weapon connection sorted and magnetized. The gunner is not glued in place as removal may be needed during the game. A bull skull with big horns is the goff clan symbol so of course the trukk needed one. If I can find a larger one I'll switch it out in a heartbeat. That is where I left this yesterday and all it needs now is rivets and some plating here and there to look more ramshackle and proppa. The boyz and nobz will be built after I get the trukk finished. Oh yes, that is another big difference the goffs have to other mobs, they can have two additional nobz in the mob. Other ork clanz can have only a single nob to lead them into battle. Well, hope you guys enjoy my mad mek workshops as much as I do. Until next time.

Last Sept my son came to me and said, "We should play some Gorkamorka." "Not going to happen," said I, "because we have nothing except the rules and a few of the models needed. So unless you are planning to help me build all the terrain needed and buy and build mobs it isn't going to happen." I pretty much thought that was the end of it. Without missing a breath he said, "Alright, let's do it." "Shi*." was all I could get out of my mouth. For those of you that may have missed that, here is that topic. After that we needed to start building mobs, here is the build of the diggas. Gorkamorka is a game by gw from 1997, that's the same year my son was born, the game is older than him by about six months or so. It is a game of vehicular combat that pits orks against orks in a never ending struggle for dominance of a desert world under the watchful gaze of the ork Gods Gork and Mork. There are other mobs in the game, thanks to the Digganob expansion, these include muties, rebel grots and diggas. What's a digga you may ask. Well, they are humans that think the orks are the greatest thing they have ever layed eyes on. With that in mind they strive to be just like the orks in every aspect of their lives. Alright, with some backstory out of the way, let's get on to some painting. Here are all of the diggas primed black. This is WAY more than I will ever need for a single mob, in fact it is probably enough for two mobs but having this many gives me good variety for the game. I will be painting these in small-ish batches of 4-8 or so. I am aiming for just over tabletop quality with these, now that means different things to different people so here is what I mean by that, solid base colors with shading or a wash followed by bringing back the base color. Sometimes I will give a few pieces a highlight but that is usually limited to characters or center pieces. That's pretty much what I am aiming for here so nothing fancy. Here are the first batch, a yoof and five boyz, just random picks out of the pile is how this is going to go. Ignore the impetuous yoof with a layer of flesh painted, he forgot how messy it is to paint ork metal....well, at least the way that I paint it. Here is the first step of the ork metal recipe, tinbitz...well, that is what it use to be called, and still should be, but now it is, umm....warplock bronze.(I had to go look at it because I really had no idea what it was called.) It is a nice dark chocolate brown metallic color. Next step is a fairly heavy drybrush of some sort of dark metallic paint. I use to use boltgun metal but I no longer have that so I went with blackened steel. Next was a drybrush of shadowed steel. Last step for the metal, for now, is a light drybrush of polished steel. This is pretty bright for ork metal but will be brought down a little by the wash. I forgot to take pics of this step before moving on to the skin so these pics also have the first layer of the skin done with rosey skin shadow, I am hoping that in the end this will give them a slight look of too much sun. The light and natural light were giving me some weird colors, one of these is probably close to how they really look... That is where I left these for the day, the skin needs another layer before we move along to painting all the clothing and pouches.

So, in order to play Gorkamorka we need some mobs. The first of these that I decided to build was the Diggas. The Diggas are humans that think the orks are the greatest thing they have seen and they strive to be just like the orks. This being the case the Diggas trade and fight with and as the orks. They use ork armor and weapons, ork vehicles are also used since the Diggas have very little in the way of technical skills, either to build or maintain such tech, vehicles or otherwise. They rely on the orks for almost all of their tech, making the orks seem even more god-like. First off here are the two Diggas that I have converted so far, a shaman on the left and a Digganob on the right. There will eventually be more of these but for now this is all I have bits for, more of what I need is on order and should be here soonish. Next up I wanted to convert the Digga trukk to not be the standard kit right out of the box. Wheels assembled. Frame straight out of the box. The standard kit is a six wheeled vehicle, for this build I will be removing the center set of wheels to make more of a standard four wheeled vehicle. This is a fairly easy process, using clippers and an x-acto I trimmed all of the support structure from the sides and bottom of the frame. It is important to note that you should leave any detail that is on the top of the frame in tact as the bed of the trukk rests on all of that tiny detail. The standard six wheeled kit has two rear axles and driveshafts, I will not need the center axle or the two short drive shafts, I will need to build my own driveshaft to make this work. I'll use just some plastic rod for the driveshaft and use the ends of one of the original driveshafts. So, with that set aside to dry I moved on to the bed of the trukk. This is the standard trukk bed build, here being held together by poster tack. I am not a big fan of this tiny trukk bed as it will only hold four or five minis, hardly enough for a real mob. I plan on widening the bed to comfortably hold six, this could easily be pushed to ten with no problem. I will use some of the original trukk bed bits to do this as well as plasticard. Simply flipping the sides of the trukk bed to the opposite sides and laying them flat creates a nice flat surface that is very easily glued together. I used plasticard to fill out the rest of the bed so that it was all roughly the same width. For the sides I decided to use sides from an ork chariot, leaving the banner poles on to use later. I used plastic rod to make matching poles in the front of the trukk bed. I needed a rail all the way around the top to hold a canopy later in the build process. I used plastic rod and some corner pieces from some of the roll bars from the trukk kit to make this. Leaving that aside to dry for a bit I moved onto the cockpit of the trukk. I forgot to take pics of all the bits that SHOULD have been used in this step but I didn't use all of them that is for sure. I also forgot to take pics of the steps to get to this point but it was pretty straightforward, just followed the directions for this step actually. I did scavenge a second wind screen out of the bits box but I am not sure it will stay as I am not entirely sure I like it. The next step is a little bit of detailing of the original kit, mostly the engine and additional cockpit details for the gunner, not used in this build because it is an ork and this is a 'umie vehicle. Here are all the bits for this step. And here is what I will be using. To make this stuff look better. Next step bits. Only bits I will use from this step. I forgot to take pics of that step or me adding bars for the drivers canopy. The next step is just about the important bits used for boarding and krumping enemy vehicles. These are all the bits to add boarding planks and a wrecking ball as well as a few bits not used for Gomo and some braggin' decorations. I will add these to this vehicle but they need to be magnetized as they are not always available. All the bits not used in this build. Here is the Digga trukk as it stands now next to a mostly standard build trukk. This was a surprisingly quick and easy build, I was able to finish the vast majority of this in about five hours. With just more detailing left on this it will probably take longer to complete it than I have already put into it. Hope someone finds this useful or entertaining.