The End of the Road

After some intense competition, our Gorkamorka campaign has finally come to an end.  Sadly, we were all a bit rushed for this one, so not all the mobs are fully painted and a few big chunks of scenery were also not quite finished when we played.  Still, it was a day filled with twists and turns and a dramatic (if not unexpected) finish.

Our first game took place at a Mektown Brewhouse, where our nobs were up to their usual drinking and brawling, unaware that an ambush was about to take place.

As the four mobs began to coalesce around the brewhouse in an effort to double-cross each other (or double-cross the double-crossers), my nob, Grizwoad was hurled out a rear window.  Fortunately, Deezo, his big trakk was parked nearby, so he went to rouse the driver and start gettin' da boyz together.

Meanwhile, Chad was casually (and somewhat suspiciously) walking out the front door of the brewhouse, where Urzig's trukk was parked. 

Whie Urzig was still inside brawling, Chad made a dash for the trukk, hoping to take out the unsuspecting driver before he knew what hit him.

One of Chad's boyz also made a move on Marvolork's mob, using the jump pack he'd won in the first race to get the drop on them

Unfortunately, Chad's careful strategic maneuvers were no match for Urzig's brute strength, and soon both he and Marvolork were fleeing for their lives, leaving Urzig and Grizwoad to rule the streets of Mektown.

Thus far, Grizwoad and his gang had been doing quite well.  Apart from one spanner that got ambushed by Urzig's boyz, the rest of the gang had made it to the trukk and piled in.  They still had all their scrap and had mostly avoided any fighting apart from a few of Chad's boys, whom they had run off with relative ease.

In retrospect, the gang should have driven off the table with their winnings right then, but at the time, that seemed rather un-Orky.  Instead I decided to plow through Urzig's scattered forces and get a few more shots off before the game ended.

The outcome of the ensuing fight wasn't bad per se.  My mob's shooting (not to mention my lovely spikes) kept Urzig at bay and everyone in the mob got out unscratched.  Unfortunately, Urzig's mob decided to shoot out my trakks, reducing my movement to five, then four, until by the end of the game my big trakk was only moving three inches on its gas engines and two for each thrust.  I offered to simply concede, but my opponent insisted on dragging the game out another half hour until my trakk finally was able to limp off the table.

The second round found my mob facing off once more against their old foes, Chad and his Ork bros.  They were by far the leaders in the campaign, while my mob was battling for third with Marvolork's.  This time, however, I had my whole mob and they were looking forward to avenging Abby Sr's untimely demise.

Deployment was a little bit tricky, as we'd each placed a large unexploded bomb in the other's deployment zone.  I ended up with my forces split along two flanks, while Chad and his mob were mostly grouped around his heavily armed trukk,which had won a Kustom Force Field in the previous race.  He'd also acquired a number of bikes, and since he was rollin' in teef, he'd made them all 'eavier.  It was quite an imposing force for my tiny mob.

My big trakk rolled forward to contest a few pieces of scrap near a rickety lookout tower.  Chad's trukk took up position in the center arch while two bikes and his jump pack boy raced around to flank me.  Fortunately, the crew were able to lay down enough dakka to stop most of his vehicles in their tracks, and we ended up with a fairly stationary battle line for the rest of the game.

On the other side, one of his bikers rammed Abby Jr. and Shifty head-on, immobilizing both vehicles. Since both vehicles were 'eavy, their wrecks were all but impervious to fire from a standard shoota.  As such, neither side dared leave the safety of their smoking debris and instead proceeded to have a lengthy shootout at just out of arm's reach.

A second bike tried to race across no man's land to break the stalemate but was deftly felled by a single shot from Grizwoad's gun.

While all this was going on, Toast managed to get his brand new flamecar all the way around Chad and his boyz and came up behind the whole mob.

Before they knew what hit them, Toast's skorcha had engulfed half their mob in flames.  Chad's boyz bottled out, leaving nearly all the scrap for Grizwoad.  With the bonuses for taking out a mob that was well over a hundred points ahead of me, this was easily my best game of the campaign.

Unfortunately, my fellow Morker Mob was not faring so well.  On the other table, Urzig had finally managed to take out Marvolork, leaving his mob nobless.

Going into the final race, the stakes were as high as ever.  Chad was within a few points of winning the campaign, but after taking a beating in the first two games, his victory wasn't yet certain.  Marvolork was dead and I had no chance of passing them in one game, but if our boys managed to shut out the Gorkers (or if Urzig and Chad didn't survive the battle) we might keep the game going.

The race began and I was off to a great start.  My two trakks raced forward while the other trukks and buggies spun and crashed.  Chad and Urzig each had a biker that was keeping pace, but neither had the firepower to slow me down.

Marvolork's racers, as had become their signature, got off to a rocky start.  Barely a car-length down the track, they were already stuck in a pileup.

Urzig had his own signature move at this point, and, as usual, jumped out of his trukk to start causing chaos.  He leapt aboard Marvolork's big trakk to try to take out the mob that was already firmly in last place.  Unfortunately for Urzig, his first target was Grokkenstern, who had recently been given a pair of De-Lux Kicking Legs while visiting the Docs for a completely unrelated issue.  Grokkenstern was flung from the vehicle, but Urzig was laid out by a well-placed boot to the head.  Seeing a chance to take out his rival once and for all, Chad rushed in to finish off the downed Urzig.

Unfortunately for Chad, Urzig had become a nigh unkillable combat machine, and the dastardly nob got a taste of his own medicine as he was beat unconscious by Urzig for the third straight race in a row.

Quite used to watching their boss get beat up at this point, Chad's mob pressed on, weaving through the jumble of vehicles while also avoiding their own land mines which they had strewn about the track.

At the end of the first curve, Chad's biker, Michael, had pulled out in front, with the rest of the drivers in close pursuit.  In fact, at this point, everyone still had a shot.  Even Marvolork's two vehicles managed to catch up to the pack.

As the racers passed the big arch, however, things went awry once again.

Urzig's trukk crashed on the inside lane, forcing the other racers to swerve around the rock spire, to varying degrees of success.  Soon there was yet another pileup, and the larger vehicles found victory slipping away from them once again.

And so Chad's biker, Michael, won our third and final race, placing their mob firmly in first place and ending the campaign.  Chad recovered from his wounds, robbing Urzig of a the satisfaction of killing his long-time rival.

Despite placing a distant third, my mob actually performed quite well.  Looking purely at win-lose ratios, I did even better than Urzig's mob (and better than Chad if you don't count the races), though because we were tweaking some of the rules along the way, my early losses put me at a disadvantage that I was never able to recover from.

Our current plan is to do a mini-campaign in about a month or so to hopefully rebalance a few of the rules that were causing us problems.  That also means that unless I want to run another mob that's 50 percent Spanner Boyz, I need to start converting some more mobsters.

And here's my not-last-place Morker Mob in all its glory!

Gorkamorka Firecar

After months of planning, slow progress, and more than a few missteps, my second trakk is finally finished.  As you can probably see, this trakk is armed with a skorcha, which has been outfitted with some gubbinz to have Loadsa Ammo (my mob doesn't do anything halfway). 

Since I already had one trakk that was only slightly modified from the standard Ork Wartrakk, I wanted this one to be unique, while still being easily identifiable as a trakk.  The plan was to change the front to have two wheels instead of one, giving it a cab more like a buggy.  I wanted it to be wider and boxier, like the Warbuggy, but I didn't want to make it any longer than the standard Wartrakk or it would basically just be a second big trakk.  Also, since I had decided that I wanted to add a skorcha to the mob, I decided to base the design on one of my favorite cars from Mad Max: Fury Road, Firecar No. 3.

Obviously there wouldn't be any Volkswagens to modify on Gorkamorka, but I liked the idea of the car being a fairly sparse frame around a bunch of oil drums and a supercharged engine.

Although I've had most of the parts for this trakk sitting around since last fall, the hardest part was figuring out how to attach the barrels.  After tearing apart a wartrakk I bought on eBay, I didn't really have much of a frame to attach them to.  In the end, I ended up building a sort of scaffolding around the upright barrels and then pinning the angled barrels directly to the other two.

The downside of using all four barrels in a bunch, as opposed to cutting them in half and gluing them to flat surfaces, is that they took up much more space than I had originally planned for.  I didn't want to stretch the trakk any longer, so I ended up just pushing it up higher (and a little bit wider).  I also ended up scrapping the engine block, which was a shame, but it probably would have ended up stretching the length to almost as long as my big trakk.

Once I finally had everything mostly assembled, I had two main sub-assemblies, the front and the back, as well as a number of smaller bits to glue together after painting.

The two I-beams on the cab fit snugly around the two front barrels and extended most of the way through the interior of the rear section, making the finished vehicle fairly solid once it was glued together.  I'm sure I carefully measured the width of the cab at some point during its construction, but since the project was stretched out over the course of months, I was actually quite surprised at how perfectly it all fit together when the two halves were finally completed.

The other tricky bit for this vehicle was modeling the skorcha.  I had originally planned on building something sufficiently orky out of a pair of Imperial Guard flamers stuck together.  They ended up looking a bit small for a mounted weapon, so I ended up going with the flamer from the Sentinel kit and attaching it to the Wartrakk's shoota along with some other bits from the Guardsmen flamers.

Although the wartrakk parts came from the same assembled kit that I'd bought off eBay, I had already ripped and chopped the entire thing apart, including the weapon mount.  When I reassembled everything, I left both the mount and the shootas unglued, which means that the skorcha is essentially gimbal-mounted on the model, allowing it to tilt up and down and rotate, which is kind of fun.  It also means that I could easily swap it out for another weapon if I really wanted to.

I'm quite pleased with the finished model.  It was a bit taller and wider than I had originally intended, but I managed to keep its length within about five millimeters of the standard wartrakk, which isn't bad for the amount of scratch-building I ended up doing.

The skorcha turned out especially well.  When I zoomed in this much, I noticed that the muzzle burn on the end of the gun ends rather abruptly, but it still doesn't look half bad.  Finally Toast, our intrepid spanner and resident pyromaniac, has something appropriately burny to take into battle.

The only thing that was really disappointing about the paint job was the timing.  Unfortunately, it was only basecoated by the time of the last big battle of the campaign, which was the first time I couldn't boast of having a fully painted mob, but I'll get to that in another post.

Ork Runtherd Conversion

The next member of my Morker Mob is finally finished.  After months of being hopelessly understaffed, Grizwoad has finally hired a Slaver to help him with his organizational development.  He comes highly recommended, with extensive experience in boosting productivity in the scrap mines, maximizing performance on the battlefield, and positively impacting a mob's bottom line.  Hopefully, he should be able to "recruit" a couple of grots by the next time we head out into the skid.

This conversion has been in the works for quite a while.  As I mentioned before, I based a lot of my conversions off of Paul Bonner's artwork.  This guy in particular was based on the Mek with the top hat from the old Rogue Trader Ork book.  I thought he had an appropriate sense of style that would fit in with my band of crazy spanner boyz and gearheaded yoofs.

As you might expect, project turned into quite an eclectic bit of kitbashing.  I ended up using bits from the Ork Boyz sprue, the Runtherd, Warbiker Mob, Crypt Ghouls, and, of course, the head from the Painboy.  I'm surprised I don't see more conversions with that head, since it's got so much character.  It's one of the few smiling Ork figures left in the range, and it's also got a much less boxy face than most of the current models.  It made a good fit for my dapper Rogue Trader Ork.

Since I had a whole pile of the standard, squatty Ork Boy legs in my bitz box, I had the grand idea of simply repositioning a pair of them for my runtherd. Not surprisingly, trying to straighten one of their legs was quite an ordeal. I chopped off the leg in question and then separated it again at the knee, pinning the two pieces back together.

It gave me the position that I wanted, but also left some pretty big gaps that I was going to have to fill with green stuff.  I was quite pleased with the end result, which blended fairly well with his original clothing.

Since I clearly hadn't made enough work for myself by chopping apart his leg, I decided to do the same thing with his arm.

Of course, after cutting a big wedge out of his arm and then evening up the two pieces, I was left with a pretty big gap that I was pinning back together.

It took three or four layers of green stuff to flesh out the arm.  I also added a wider barrel to his slugga to make it look like a more customized weapon.  The final step was sculpting some muscles back over the new arm.  I toyed with the idea of just wrapping his arm with bandages, or having some bullets, teef, or other trinkets covering up the gap, but I'm glad that I just went ahead and sculpted muscles back on.

I didn't have anything suitable for his hat and pipe, so those I had to build myself from wire and plasticard.

Despite having my carefully bent bit of wire as a base, my green stuff pipe ended up as a huge blob that resisted any attempt to be smoothed into a tube.  It took a great deal of filing after the putty had dried just to get round again, let alone pipe shaped.  Eventually I got it into the rough shape, cut off the end and added a rim, which finally made it start looking right.

Fortunately, the hat was much more straightforward than the pipe.  A straight-sided cylinder stuck to the top of his head didn't look much like a hat, so the first step was adding some green stuff to make it flair out a bit at the top.

Once that bit had dried, I added the hat band, feathers, and the bones of some small unfortunate creatures.  The final step was adding the brim of the hat.  I'd left a bit of plasticard to give it some structure, but this was still probably the most difficult part of the process.

With the hat completed, I was finished modeling.  I was left with seven different sub-assemblies, plus the base that needed to be painted before being glued together.

Attaching the Painboy head to the Nob torso was actually a bit difficult, as it's sort of a snap-together model.  I had to carve out the interlocking neck bits, pin the two parts together and then sculpt a new neck.

All together, the finished model was pinned in six different places.  There might be as many pins in his head alone than in the rest of the mob combined.

Check out that hand-crafted Ork bum...

I think I'm better at modeling than at painting, but I'm pretty happy with how he turned out.  I ended up changing my mind a few times while painting, so his shirt went from black, to red, and then back to black.  Quite a few other parts went through a similar number of superfluous paint jobs before I was finally satisfied.

I also made the head of his staff interchangeable, so it's easy to switch between a Grabba Stik and a Grot Prod, depending on whether the runtherd is focusing on "recruitment" or on "boosting productivity."

Next thing to do will be getting some runts together so that our runtherd has something to herd.

Bodged Job

Work has commenced on a new vehicle for my Morkers.  It's another Trakk based off the standard Ork Wartrakk, but this one will be much more heavily converted than my last one.  I'm basically tearing it apart (I bought it fully assembled on eBay) and then putting it back together with plasticard and green stuff.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of starting with nothing more than a single sheet of plasticard as the main structural element, which ended up breaking on three different occasions.

After finally admitting the error of my ways, I decided to reinforce my flimsy joints with a few good, solid chunks of sprue.  I also cut off the three little boxes on the top of the tracks in preparation for another sheet of plasticard, which ended up being a much more difficult task than I had anticipated (I broke two hobby knives trying to remove them carefully).

Finally, I added a crossbeam to connect the two halves, as well as a bunch more structural supports that will hold the top and bottom together and help to spread out the weight a bit.

Hopefully this will result in a fairly sturdy vehicle once I add the platform for the gunner.  After that, I just need the driver's seat and some finishing touches and this one should be ready for a test drive.