Ironjawz

Lumbering, heavy-set creatures with furrowed brows and heavy armour, orruk Brutes are unconcerned with the complex things in life. Their minds are filled with one thing only - violence. Bigger and harder than most warriors of the mortal realms, Brutes fill out the warclans in a seemingly endless tide of green skin, angry shouting and tiny-minded aggression. After all, as they say – if smashing it ain’t working, get more boys to smash it with! Brutes seek out the largest enemies – or trees, or walls – that they can find, and set about them with determination, often being joined by dozens more, all clamouring to bring down whatever enemy (or object) has the temerity to be bigger than them.

Enormous, foul-tempered porcine beasts of a strength and fury that even orruks respect, gruntas trample down all but the biggest foe, devouring the remains and noisily smashing apart everything in their path – much to the vivid delight of the Ironjawz who bounce gleefully upon their somewhat interestingly-fragranced backs. Gruntas will cheerfully and greedily eat anything, including iron (the result of devouring people wearing it, more often than not.) This undigested metal is harvested by orruks for use as weapons and armour, and called pig-iron. A well-timed charge of Gore-gruntas can easily smash apart an enemy army in a riot of stomping hooves, piercing tusks and unpleasant smells.

The biggest – and therefore the best – of the Ironjawz, the orruk Megabosses lead the Ironjaw warclans with a ramshackle unity, smashing and stomping and breaking and battering everything in reach. The more fights an orruk wins, the bigger they get; Megabosses are understandably massive, and more than happy to use their immense, muscular bulk to kick in the heads of anything and everything in their path. Covered in scraps of iron taken from bested foes, festooned with trophies of war and armed with some utterly brutal weaponry, orruk Megabosses are absolutely terrifying to even behold, let alone actually take on in battle.

Orruk Megabosses are pretty killy – it’s how they become as huge as they do, all that stompin’ causes them to grow and grow and grow until the power of the Waaagh! flows through them. But for some Megabosses, this isn’t enough! These particularly angry orruks seek out and subdue enormous Maw-krushas (often by yelling really, really loudly at them) – ill-tempered and powerful creatures who enjoy smashing stuff up almost as much as the orruks themselves. This uneasy pairing never really gets along especially well, and the Megaboss needs to constantly remind his Maw-krusha who’s in charge with the liberal application of an iron boot to the back of the head. Despite this, almost nothing on the battlefield can withstand their noisy rampage, and the immense number of kills they rack up inspires nearby orruks to fight ever harder.

Rabble-rousers of note in an entire clan of rabble-rousers, Warchanters will use anything nearby to hammer out the rhythm of war, a rhythm that thunders constantly within their tortured skulls. Chunks of iron, bits of wood, people’s faces – anything is a drum to a Warchanter, and the screams of agony from their unwilling instruments merely adds to the rising blastbeat cacophony. The effect this percussive violence has on nearby Ironjawz is as impressive as it is noisy; massive hordes of greenskins soon gather, joining in by stomping and screaming and smashing their great fists together until the whole collection of orruks is wound up and ready to hurtle into the thick of battle.

Wildly unpredictable, savage, untamed and violent, Waaagh! magic cannot be controlled by anything with even a shred of sanity. Luckily, the Ironjawz don’t have many shreds of sanity amongst them, and the least-shredded of all are the Weirdnob Shamans. Seemingly never truly in control of their own bodies, they twist and twitch and gibber as Waaagh! energy courses unstoppably through them, staring at sights only they see and talking to nothing. The larger the gathering of Ironjawz around one of these strange orruks, the bigger the fireworks display when it all kicks off – maybe a blast of Waaagh! energy will hammer into the enemy like a particularly smelly gust, or maybe a massive green foot the size of a mountain will kick the entire enemy army in the face. Nobody’s exactly sure, and that’s half the fun!