Zodgrod Wortsnagga

Zodgrod Wortsnagga is the most famous Runtherd in the whole blood-soaked history of the Orks, and by some way the most peculiar. Runtherds are the Orks charged with driving, breeding, and disciplining the gretchin and snotlings that the rest of greenskin society treats as expendable labour and living ammunition. Zodgrod began his career in exactly this mould among a Snakebite-drawn tribe, tasked with raising the snotlings destined to be fired, screaming, from a Mek's shokk attack gun.

What set Zodgrod apart, and eventually scandalised his entire race, was that he came to actually care about his charges. He proved uncannily good at training gretchin to obey orders and fight with real aggression, and grew so protective of the simple-minded creatures that when a Mek mistreated the grots serving as his ammunition, Zodgrod's answer was to load the offending Ork into the shokk attack gun and fire him through it. To most Orks, the very idea of a Runtherd who defends his runts rather than spends them is close to unthinkable.

Zodgrod's true legacy is the Super-Runt. Digging up the theories of an obscure Runtherd-philosopher named Narflung, who had experimented with conditioning gretchin using bells and the reward of a fat, juicy squig, Zodgrod refined the work with serums of his own devising. The result was a new breed of gretchin, fearless, cunning, aggressive, and competent, that outperformed their wretched cousins on the battlefield to a degree traditionalist Orks find not just baffling but genuinely alarming.

To many greenskins, competent and courageous grots represent a threat to the natural order of Ork society itself, an unsettling glimpse of a world in which the smallest and most despised creatures might not know their place. Yet results are results, and desperate Ork leaders across the galaxy have learned to swallow their misgivings and hire Zodgrod and his elite runts, who have turned the tide of many a battle and proved, to the lasting discomfort of proper Orks everywhere, exactly what a grot can do when somebody bothers to believe in it.