Gorbad Ironclaw is the standard against which every orc warboss measures himself and falls short. Where later greenskin invasions were tides to be endured, Gorbad's was a scythe laid to the throat of the whole Empire. Uniting the tribes by will and brute mastery, he led his Waaagh! out of the mountains and tore the young human realm apart province by province. He sacked the land of Solland and wrenched its Elector's Runefang from a dying count, shattered army after army sent to stop him, slew an Emperor upon the field, and carried fire and ruin to the very walls of Altdorf itself.
Only the accumulated blood of a generation turned him back, and the Empire took a century to recover from the wounds he dealt in a single campaign. Gorbad was cunning as well as monstrous, patient where other orcs were rash, and he understood a truth his kind usually forget: that a Waaagh! aimed like a spear cuts far deeper than one that merely rolls. Had he not fallen when he did, there might be no Empire left to remember him, and that is a thought the men of the Old World do not care to dwell upon.