Orkses

The basics as they stand at the moment (let's take the "I propose that..." and "I had it pictured that..." qualifications as read so I don't need to keep typing them out):

• the Cruciatine Sector lies adjacent to the Anargo sector. The exact nature of the shared bprder is undecided - I was thinking of a sort of corner-to-corner fit, or at least a short stretch of space;
• In the first half of the thirty-eighth millennium the Cruciatine sector was devastated by massive ork incursions centring around the rampage of Waaagh!-Tuskragga, whose warhorde beat a great curving path from the bottom of the sector to the top and back again;
• The subsectors bordering Anargo were initially invaded by breakaway warbands that peeled off from the main Waaagh! as it passed through the heart of the sector;
• After the Waaagh! was finally broken, these breakaways were reinforced by splinter warbands spreading out from the site of Overboss Tuskragga's destruction at Aliabor Secundus - with no ork powerful enough to provide a new focal point for the Waaagh!, the surviving horde fragmented and regrouped around more junior bosses;
• the so-called Pendulum Tide (see the original Castellan sub thread) made it easy for the orks to flood into Castellan, causing great initial damage, but ultimately they were not able to control anything more than about a half of Castellan, with isolated raids and incursions able to reach deeper into the Sector on rare occasions; and
• after a few centuries of bitter warfare and two stalled crusades the Anargo authorities gave away hope of retaking the ork-held worlds immediately, and simply worked to contain the orks in the outer half of the Castellan sub.

So rather than being a little pocket of green hemmed in by the Imperium, the ork empire is more a sort of promotory sticking out of the still badly run-down and infested Cruciatine Sector. Because any warfare in the enclave will draw excited orks from over the border to fight against the Imperials, a crusade to retake these worlds would be tremendously difficult and would take up a lot of Anargo's resources - more than the current sector rulership is prepared to risk, especially given that the Pendulum Tide adds an extra element of risk to the campaign.

Current Imperial activities against the orks are mainly keeping the fortification line across Castellan beefed up, keeping the orkish worlds under as much surveillance as the Lord Militant Protector can manage, and the occasional pre-emptive raid to wreck things like shipbuilding projects or Rok swarms that look like they're heading the wrong way.

One strand of thought at Anargo is that by trying to restart the mopping-up and reconstruction process in the border subsectors of Cruciatine (which has slowed to imperceptibility over the past few centuries) Anargo helps itself by trapping the little enclave between two Imperial sectors - occasionally the Lord Militant Protector has to find resources to send shipping convoys to surviving Imperial centres over the border. These ventures are more popular in the capitol than in Castellan, where the military authorities suspect that the fortunes of the trade xartels are the issue rather than the building of a bulwark against the greenskins.

So how does all this sound?

This would allow for the 'ork empire' to expand over a number of sectors while only having a minimal impact upon the Anargo sector. So that sounds like a reasonable idea given the suggested size of the 'ork empire'. It also gives the 'wily ork empire' the sense of the the provincial and can explain differential activity. In this case the 'wily ork warlord' would be a sub-Warlord of something larger... That smacks of more interest to me.


To obvious questions. Do you mean 'sectors' instead of 'subsectors' in the first? And do you mean the Cruciatine or the Anargo sector in the last?


Okay, so no ultimate authority but actually distinct 'ork empires' squabbling for power. Again, reasonable...


The 'Pendulum Tide' has always been in search of an explanatory mechanism and IIRC none was found. This must be found before continuing with this concept.


The use of 'Lord Militant Protector' reminds me that we have very little structure with regards to the adeptus terra at this point, and this is something else that I feel should be consistently address. We need published guidelines in the appropriate boards.


A good feature which shows the interesting interplay between politics, economics and warfare...

Kage

This would allow for the 'ork empire' to expand over a number of sectors while only having a minimal impact upon the Anargo sector. So that sounds like a reasonable idea given the suggested size of the 'ork empire'. It also gives the 'wily ork empire' the sense of the the provincial and can explain differential activity. In this case the 'wily ork warlord' would be a sub-Warlord of something larger... That smacks of more interest to me.

Hmm. What I had in mind was more that the pocket in the Anargo sector does indeed represent a spillover from a larger greenskin presence in another sector, but it's not one province of a larger, coherent "ork empire" as such. In fact, it may well be one of the largest ork enclaves in the region. Cruciatine is still heavily infested, but there's no stability or pattern to it: it's marked by constant offensives, counter-offensives, guerilla wars, suppressions and skirmishing by both sides, with pockets of both humans and greenskins holding out against one another. The Imperium will eventually get back on top, I suspect, but that goal won't even be in sight for the next few hundred years.

What I suppose I'm saying is that I'd like the orks to wander across the border into the "empire" as part of semi-random migrations into the territory of an independent warlord, rather than as reinforcements to one province of a larger, coherent ork empire.

To obvious questions. Do you mean 'sectors' instead of 'subsectors' in the first? And do you mean the Cruciatine or the Anargo sector in the last?

Both refer to Cruciatine - probably not very well phrased on my part. Waaagh!-Tuskragga never entered Anargo space, but it passed through the border subsectors of Cruciatine and the effects washed out from there. Think of the Waaagh! as the speedboat that goes powering by out in the middle of the river and the Castellan sub as the angler on the bank who gets swamped by the wave it kicks up.

Okay, so no ultimate authority but actually distinct 'ork empires' squabbling for power. Again, reasonable...

Orks being what they are, there's going to be constant scrapping throughout this enclave no matter who is nominally in charge. If we go with seven systems, I'd like to go with probably three or four fairly tightly bound to the boss' goons and the rest balkanised between rival warbands trying to win favour with the boss by achieving glory against one another. One aspect of his orky kunnin is that he knows how to keep them scrapping to make sure none of them works up the momentum to lead a Waaagh! against him.

(I'm thinking of making him a Bad Moon, since they seem to best fit the type of ork who'd run things this way.)

Bear in mind, though, that the original fragmentation of the Waaagh! took place halfway through M38, so there will have been any number of shifts in the power balance among the greenskins since then.

The 'Pendulum Tide' has always been in search of an explanatory mechanism and IIRC none was found. This must be found before continuing with this concept.

Not sure what you mean - it's a warp current. The warp has tides, currents, shoals and rips, and this is one of them. It's the Immaterium's equivalent of phenomena like the trade winds, or El Nino, or that current pattern that creates the Sargasso.

The use of 'Lord Militant Protector' reminds me that we have very little structure with regards to the adeptus terra at this point, and this is something else that I feel should be consistently address. We need published guidelines in the appropriate boards.

The nature of the militarised zone in Castellan and the exigencies of the war effort mean the power structures are going to be a little different there to the wholly civilian subsectors. Which, the nature of power being what it is, is going to create a raft of interesting little conflicts and squabbles...

The Castellan subsector is the shield between the 'wily ork empire' and the other subsectors of the Anargo sector. It is actually elongated in one of its axes unlike the 'cuboid' subsectors thus far represented for Anargo, Proteus, Meksum, Other and Shrineworld.


By taking a look at some of the simple co-ordinates we can see that it doesn't butt against the 'border' but rather is brought back to it, towards the centre by around 5 or so parsecs.

[/b][/quote]
Subsectors... <Playfully *thunks* Sikkukkut on the forehead: Doh!>

Are you looking for a lost planetoid (either planet or gas giant)?


For some reason I had envisaged the Castellan to be a pure shield, untainted by the ork presence that the 'wily ork warlord' had thrown against it. Stupid me. The shield that has buckled has much more potential.


Not every system must by 'inhabited', I would add. With that in mind how would you invisage the relationship between the orks present in the Castellan subsector and those of the 'wily ork empire' which is crammed into the corner and which might overflow into adjacent sectors?


Yep, I think that we have the same rough concept. For me the 'wily ork empire' is rather an established 'micro-empire' which is at variance to the other 'territories' in the other sectors and, indeed, which may spill back over into Anargo. Whereas the others might be considered as volumes in which the orks are present, it is only the 'wily ork empire' which might be thought of as, well, an empire. However, there are related issues which might make this problematic at best...


Yes, exactly! It seems that we do have the same overall concept in mind. The orks of the 'wily ork empire' do have an advantage in terms of organisation (well, possibly) so it has some potential impact in the long-run.

Thus it is the Anargo end of the ork 'contamination' that is the real worry in the long term, but at the moment it is a general volume of 'orkiness'.


Agreed. The concept behind the 'wily ork warlord' is that he has the nonce - the brains - to control this system as much as it can be controlled. This is meant by means of direction, not contradiction.


That seems more than reasonable and perhaps addresses the above question with regards to the relationship between the 'wily ork empire' (and warlord) and the ork-infested worlds of Castellan.


Don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of the concept. I personally require a bit more consistency with regards to such things in the Anargo sector. Remember that there is going to be a 'warp map' of the Anargo sector and the Pendulum Tide must conform to the conventions described with this... there must be a logic to the fact that it changes direction and that it heads in one direction or the other in a cyclical nature.


Oh, I agree. But they must still integrate into a structure.


No. The 'wily ork empire' and the volume of orks represents a defined threat and concept in the Anargo sector. Orks will be present elsewhere but, at the moment, they are not defined. There must be space in the Anargo sector for introduction...

However, we do not want them cropping up everywhere and being used as an explanation for conflict all the time...


Hence my questions above.


A good question... one that could provide interesting additional information when these worlds are created. Remembering that if they are defined as part of the concept then they should be created through the use of guide.pdf.


Stategic value is a very difficult concept to weigh up when one considers the true nature of warp travel, even more so with the permeable nature of ork warp travel. I shall wait until I see more concrete information from Sikkukkut before passing out generalities.


That has yet to be decided. It will depend on the quality of concepts, the desires of others to be involved with the orks, and so on. Remember that the ork presence is not limited to one system as with the eldar, which in part results on my control of that system. (You will note that I have opened it up to discussion...)

So, we shall see what happens with the Orks... At present Sikkukkut has shown the ability and desire to post information here, more so because it relates to Castellan.

Kage