Vivisecting the Orcs of Warhammer (Part One)

Immediately, I know vivisecting sounds kind of bad right? I don’t intend to slice open a living, breathing, WAAAAAAAGH-ing orc right in front of you. Instead I want to reach back in time and have a look at how orcs have developed as a flexible and evolving concept, particularly through three distinct lenses. These are the models, the rules, and the fluff.

The plan is that this will be a multi-part series going from pre-Warhammer days up into the Age of Sigmar, with this first part being on Warhammer Fantasy's first edition.

Prehammer & First Edition

Orcs have the dubious honour of predating the notion of Warhammer (the game not the weapon), with their first range being the Citadel fantasy tribes orcs in the very early 1980s. As per the 1982 dragon catalogue most of these guys would set you back the hefty sum of D. No that’s not one single pre-decimal penny, the catalogue used a letter-grade pricing system for questionable simplicity. A price of D is of course 45p, the equivalent then of a lakeside manor. Kidding. Though if we compare say FTO3 Orc Advancing with Sword, Spear, and Shield to his great-great-great-grandson the Age of Sigmar orruk ‘ardboy and adjust for inflation, each 1982 orc would set you back £1.62 versus a single orruk costing £4. The comparison is even worse for the FTO11 Orc Chief who would cost the same £1.62 compared to a mighty £29.50 for a Megaboss orruk. This comparison does not take into account the fact every orruk is about four-times larger than a tribes orc, and that they no longer carry the risk of heavy metal poisoning if licked like a lollipop.

The fantasy tribe orcs are a good baseline to understand
how the race developed over the decade. They are human-sized and broadly human-proportioned besides their heads. The teeth are tusklike and often huge, with the general head-shape being quite elongated. Their equipment is ragged, with some almost tribal in appearance (despite the range name, fantasy tribes models were almost never tribal). Overall, they are clearly orcs but definitely not the same style as anything released in decades. This particular strain of design I like to think of as the ‘lanky orcs’ because of their longer and thinner builds. Before we get to the rules, I should note that prior to Warhammer’s debut the C series lines would be released. Untangling the exact order of releases is rather hard so instead we will mostly ignore it for now. Do note that much of the fantasy tribes range would be ported to C series orc ranges and stay there for a few more years.

Warhammer: The Mass Combat Fantasy Role-Playing Game, or WTMCFRPG for short, was beamed out of the gestalt consciousness of Bryan Ansell, Richard Halliwell, and Rick Priestley in mid-1983. The game had mixed reviews overall, surprising considering the financial powerhouse the Warhammer brand would morph into over the next 40+ years. Regardless, the game includes rules as one might expect and some of these rules are for orcs. The basic orc stats are almost identical to humans, besides their toughness of C compared to a toughness of B in exchange for initiative 2 rather than the humans initiative 3. Tough but sluggish, a characterisation that will stick with orcs for decades. That's nearly all the rules they got though, first edition is a very lean beast. Besides the generic options for armour and weapons, orcs could ride vicious wyverns which again have stuck for many years as part of their faction identity. It is clear however that orcs were a popular race given that volume one of the rules contains six depictions out of thirty-two illustrations total. This is not the end of orc rules in this edition as the Forces of Fantasy supplement brought a more recognisable system for army building. Here we see the first points-values, with orcs and men being similarly priced (at least for their 'basic' troops) with seven points per orc warrior and seven points per Western human man-at-arms. The orc army list is expanded beyond just wargear and wyverns with wolf-riders, chariots, more-elite guards, wizards and leaders, as well as iconic war machines with the bolt and stone throwers. Besides the wolf-riders who would fade back into being goblin-exclusives this army list is clearly recognisable to anyone who has played the army in any edition.

If the rules seem sparce, then the fluff of first edition is practically microscopic. The main rules describe them as "largish" cave-dwelling brutes who bully their goblin cousins and capture wyverns to ride. No fungi space-fugitive collectivist-soul-magicians here. This is ever so slightly expanded upon in Forces of Fantasy with references to goblin-orc hybrids who squabble with their diminutive relatives regularly and whose shamans battle the spirits of wyverns in the soul-realm to claim dominance? Strangely that concept never took off. Today Warhammer orcs are particularly iconic for their green skin, only reinforced by the folding of all goblinoids into a single greenskins army. But in first edition skin colour is never mentioned. Orcs can be presumed to follow the trend of varied skin-tones in other fantasy games and literature at the time i.e. various olives, browns, greys, purples, greens, etc.

So to conclude, orcs circa 1983 are sluggish but tough humanoids with lanky builds and big fangs, who love to be utter gits and bully goblins, riding wyverns into battle and employing basic forms of artillery supported by soul-battling shamans and wolf-mounted cavalry. The foundations for the modern Warhammer orc have been laid sans several core ideas, but only time will tell how these boyz change...