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Tell me about these orc things. Is it an idealism type of world where people agreeing on belief manifests reality mechanics?
In Warhammer 40k, there are two planes of existence: the material plane, and the Warp. Formerly known as the Realm of Souls, tens of millennia of war and death and suffering have transformed it into a nightmare world akin to Hell. The Warp reflects the collective unconscious of nearby conscious beings. For example, the warp near modern day earth would be a heavenly stock market run by Supply Side Jesus, because that’s what most modern humans believe in. Our fundamental beliefs about the world, either religious or otherwise, manifest in the Warp as spirits. The Warp also has the ability to influence the material plane through basically magic. Powerful individuals called Psykers have the ability to manifest their will directly in the Warp instead of unconsciously, and cause that will to affect material things and thereby cast spells. Everyone has some level of psychic potential, but usually it takes a lot of people believing in something as strongly as a religion.
Orks are a genetically engineered bioweapon that has decayed over tens of thousands of years from the ultimate soldiers, to a bunch of murderous football hooligans with cockney accents. Orks have stronger median psychic abilities than humans, but they don’t have exceptional psykers who can do fancy things on their own. Instead, the collective will of all the Orks in an area forms a WAAGH field which enforces their collective beliefs upon reality. This is what makes their crude technology work. There are also Ork shamans, who can’t use psychic powers on their own, but who can direct the WAAGH field to cast spells like a human psyker. A shaman is only as powerful as the ambient level of WAAGH nearby. No Ork army, no magic powers.
Note that humans are capable of the same thing, their abilities are just much weaker per human. The reason everything always sucks in 40K, the reason suffering and death are so normalised, is because trillions of humans believe in suffering and death at a fundamental level. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. Humans created three of the four Chaos Gods. Humans are the ones choosing, on a subconscious level, for everything to keep getting worse and more miserable. Orks, on the other hand, are actually having a great time. Orks are genetically programmed to love fighting, so the human belief in endless war has created a great environment for the Orks, who are happy to do their part to keep the party going.
Quick correction. The warp was turned from a calm reflection of reality into hell not by the modern galaxy but the war in heaven which took place at some starting point up to around 68 million years ago. The Aeldari certaintly did not help the warp by birthing Slaanesh but the vast damage done to the warp was done by a conflict so vast it makes the modern fighting look like a water gun fight.
And this is the conflict the Orks were created to fight in. The galaxy was once home to a species now known only as the Old Ones. They controlled a little over half the galaxy. The rest belonged to an empire called the Necrontyr. The Necrontyr came from a planet with horrible radiation, and they had evolved to live short lives to compensate for their inevitable death due to super cancer. The Old Ones were masters of genetic engineering, and the Necrontyr pleaded with them to share the secret of long life. But the Old Ones refused. In their envy, the Necrontyr declared war on the Old Ones, and sought to eradicate them. This galaxy-spanning conflict was called the War In Heaven. The Old Ones created the Krorks, perfect super soldiers programmed with instinctual knowledge of weaponsmithing and arcane might, to fight as footsoldiers. A fungal infection that could bloom from a single spore into a ready-made army, infinitely loyal and eternally bloodthirsty.
The Necrontyr couldn’t stand up to the might of the Krorks, the Eldar, and the Old Ones’ other armies. So they struck a deal with the gods of their kind, stellar parasites called the C’tan, or Star Gods. The C’tan created immortal bodies of living steel for the Necrontyr to inhabit. Ageless and indestructible. The peasant class were furnished with artificial brains powerful enough to understand only simple orders to destroy. The opulent rulers were allowed to keep their memories and personalities, to live eternally. However, they were deceived, for in the bargain, the Necrontyr lost their souls. In Warhammer, the soul is a real thing. It is the connection between a person’s mind in the material plane, and the Realm of Souls. Without it, one is cursed to live a half life. Never to truly change or grow. The Necrons, for that is what they were now called, had become forever stagnant. Their souls consumed by the C’tan. In vengeance, the Necrons slew their own gods. Fractured their divine essence into shards and imprisoned the shards in war engines that drained their infinite power for use in battle. And then they finished off the Old Ones. The galaxy was left devastated and essentially barren after the war. So the Necrons went beneath the surface of their billions of worlds and slept, waiting for a galaxy worth ruling to re-grow. While the Krorks devolved into Orks from lack of fighting, and the Eldar became the dominant force in the galaxy.
"And the eldar said, ‘Fuck it.’ Literally. And they repopulated the entire galaxy, and fucked so much that they broke their reproductive process, and birthed Slannesh sometime around the year 30,000
Yooo, I love everything about that! Where do I sign away my free time?
Edit: also what’s waagh?
“WAAAAAAAAAGGH!” is what the 10-foot monster yells while charging at you.
WAAGH! is what Orks like to scream while they’re fighting. It also means an army of Orks (A WAAGH!, lead by a WAAGH leader), or the spiritual energy of a WAAGH!
https://github.com/Overcharged-Plasma/warhammer-pdfs/blob/main/tenth-edition/formatted-pdfs/orks.pdf
Games Workshop releases a Codex for each faction in the game, which has the lore for that faction and the rules needed to play them. There’s a different set of codices for each edition of the game, and we’re currently on 10th edition, so there are 10 Orks codices. The more recent ones have the more up to date lore, but are more annoying to pirate. And not all the lore is in the codices. The codices are more an introduction to that faction’s lore. The deep stuff is in the novels. Drag doesn’t know which novels have Orks in them, most of the novels are about the Imperium (humans).
If you want to learn about the other factions in the game, like the humans, you could do worse than watching Astartes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7hgjuFfn3A
Is this a ttrpg like D&D?
No, Warhammer is something older than RPGs: a wargame. Instead of controlling one little warrior, you control an army of little warriors. You have troops and cavalry and war machines and generals, and you roll buckets full of dice for every action. You fight against a friend’s army.
Like Risk? I can’t even get anyone to ever play that with me.
Warhammer doesn’t have any diplomacy or unit creation mechanics. You start with an army of a certain size, and you can hold part of your army in reserve, but that’s it. When they die, they’re dead. Each of your little guys was also hand assembled and painted by you, and you might have invented backstory for your army and generals. For example, your WAAGH! could be the Rippin’ Roughboyz, who prefer to get up close and personal with lots of melee units and giant mechs. Your WAAGHboss is the legendary Ironskin Thunka, an ork who has had so much of his body replaced with scrap metal prosthetics that some doubt there’s even flesh beneath all that steel and slag.
Here’s the most legendary and well-known game of Warhammer in wargaming history: https://imgur.com/a/cant-cheese-cheeser-warhammer-V0gND
It’s also a great way to sign away all your money too!
Fortunately I’m getting a promotion that’ll let me pay my monthly rent the times every week and still have a hundo for avocado toast left over!
Oof.
How much should it cost to hit the ground running?
No idea. I steer clear of the game out of self-preservation. I did read dozens of novels though, a lot of them twice, so the time investment is there.
A quick search looks like between $100-$200 for most starter sets. Custodes are kinda expensive, as are most of the named heroes.
War with a footballer hooligan Cockney accent
Just to warn you there is a lot of lore and it’s changed and been retconned over the last 40 years. That leads to some odd stuff like Leman Russ having a tank named after him.
It’s also had some major tone shifts from silly (Inquisitor Obiwan Sherlock Cluseau ) to so Grim Dark it becomes Grim Derp. It’s in a sort of midpoint now.
So look into what you find interesting and if you don’t like it switch sources or topic. Expect things to be contradictory depending on when it was written.
Here is a good but silly video background to the origin of the orks. It’s still mostly accurate. In 30k the Emperor got hurt and was put on a life support chair. He’s been there for 10k years unable to communicate.
Premise of this series is they install a text to speech device and now big E can communicate. So they update him on the state of the Imperium and he fills in all the missing history. It’s a fan video and noncannon but lore accurate for when it was made.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FyeoBm5QFnA
If you want a more serious tone for your lore dump try luetin09 or oculus imperialis. They are to dry for me but pretty good content.
Also WAAGH is the ork war cry and WAAGH energy is the reality bending field that makes the orks group think real. So red things go faster because red is the fastest color.
I got started by reading all the books by Dan Abnett. Eisenhorn is amazing (though there are no Orks, sadly).
Not super familiar with it, but they have some sort of psychic field that turns their beliefs into reality. Pretty much all their technology only works because they believe it does
<rant> It’s not actually that powerful, but it does work like this to some extent (and of course the “official” lore is pretty vague about it and sometimes contradicts itself).
The way I see it, they can’t just pick up a stick and turn it into a rifle by believing that it is one, but they have some inherent collective knowledge of mechanics that allows them to make the technology even though their intellect should definitely be a huge hurdle, and if they collectively believe hard enough that, for example, the (hand made) barrel of their gun that should be way off tolerance is actually a proper gun barrel, it will work as intended and only blow up after emptying 20 mags instead of instantly</rant>
So basically they have … something like a collective dunning kruger effect which manifests as an abnormally high ‘dumb luck’ stat or modifier?
I wouldn’t say dumb luck - red paint really does make their vehicles go faster
…
Please …explain.
The previous commenter has left you hanging for 28 minutes so I’ll explain.
They believe red paint makes their vehicles faster, so it does.
Char is an Ork, then.
Is green more efficient?
no
In case its not clear from “football hooligans with cockney accents,” WAGH (also spelled WAH) is just the sound or an ork screaming WAR!
Don’t give wallstreet any ideas. I’d rather not have to pay for stuff in teef
Stonkboyz, the financial bosses of da WAAAGH. Throw some teefs on a map of the S&P and that’s the stock that goes up that day
Do people not understand the concept of a dividend?
The more you learn about the stock market, the more you realize it’s shit.
Well, the good news is, is that you can short it
You should definitely try shorting Tesla, nobody has ever lost money doing that.
Many companies and investors laugh at the idea of dividends, believing that stock price is the only thing that matters
Many of those companies buy back stock in order to drive the share price up, Apple is famous for this. They also pay a dividend as well.
A dividend is just a forced sale of your stock
What?
Imagine you have 10 stocks worth $10 each.
Scenario 1: There is $1 dividend per stock. You now have 10 stocks worth $9 each for a total of $90 in stocks and $10 in cash.
Scenario 2: There is no dividend but you decide to sell 1 stock, you now have 9 stocks of $10 for a total of 90$ in stocks and $10 in cash.
These scenario’s are equivalent unless the stock wasn’t priced correctly.
This is the stupidest thing I’ve read in a very long time.
Why do you think it works like that?
Because that’s how the stock market works, the price of a stock is the current value of assets (including cash) + expected earnings (with some correction factors for risk and time). If the company pays out $x of cash it’s $x worth less. You might not always see it it the stock price because expected future dividend payments are also already priced in.
How do you think it works?
Why would anyone buy a stock that will never pay a dividend? The company is worth money because they pay a dividend, not despite it.
There are plenty of companies that never pay dividends, yet people buy them.
II struggled with this as well for a while. You can look at it this way, they are worth money because they could pay dividends, but they don’t actually have to. Your bar of gold is worth a certain amount of money equal to the money you could sell it for, and your money is worth something because you could buy something with it.
(Most) stocks represent partial ownership (read: control) of a company and most of their value is derived from that.
For an extreme example: if the stock price were to drop below the amount of money that could be made by just selling off all of the assets, then someone would (in principle) just buy all the shares, sell the assets and make a profit.
Each share represents a small bit of control over the company and their assets.
