Orc & Goblin Tribes

No scholar of the Old World can say where the greenskins came from, and no army has ever found a way to be rid of them. They infest every wild place on the map: orcs squatting in the Badlands and the mountain passes, goblins riddling the deep tunnels and the black forests, and a menagerie of wolves, squigs, trolls, and worse wherever the two overlap. Burn out a tribe and two more will be squabbling over the ashes within a generation. Greenskins return the way weeds return, and the Old World has never gone a lifetime without learning it again.

Left alone, the tribes fight each other — over caves, over loot, over insults no one can remember issuing. But now and then a warboss rises big enough to crack the other bosses' heads together, and all that violence turns outward at once. The tribes mass, the drums begin, and the horde starts to move as one vast migration of destruction the greenskins call the Waaagh! — part war, part pilgrimage, part natural disaster. It rolls over kingdoms the way an avalanche rolls over fences, gathering every tribe in its path, and it stops only when something finally proves hard enough to break it. To the greenskins this is holy work: their twin gods Gork and Mork — one brutal but cunning, the other cunning but brutal — demand nothing of their children but a good fight, and a Waaagh! is the loudest prayer there is.

The green tide runs in two currents. Orcs are brutality given flesh — slabs of scarred muscle who live for the clash itself and grow visibly bigger with every battle won, until the greatest of them can wrestle trolls and shrug off cannon fire. Goblins are the other current: smaller, weaker, and infinitely nastier, making up the difference with poison, numbers, treachery, and an artist's love of cruelty. An orc will spend all day breaking down a city gate; a goblin will already be inside, having sold the gatekeeper a false map, stolen his keys, and set fire to the granary out of simple enthusiasm. Neither half of the race trusts the other, and both are right not to.

Every civilized people of the Old World counts its history in wars against the greenskins. The dwarfs have fought them hold by hold for thousands of years and filled their books of grudges with the cost; the Empire's borders have been drawn and redrawn by the passage of one great Waaagh! after another; the Badlands are a graveyard of realms that stood where greenskins now squat. They cannot be bargained with, colonized, or exterminated, because they are not a nation — they are a condition of the world, like winter. Men build walls, dwarfs cut deeper vaults, elves sail away, and out beyond the watchfires the drums, sooner or later, always start again.