I'm working on a Rogue Trader game using Orks as the protagonists and obviously some of the rules need to be adapted.

One such area is the rules for colonies

I just can't see all the Imperial characteristics applying to a colony of Orks

The Imperial characteristics are:

Size - Population size.

Complacency - Attitude and comfort of the population.

Order - How well behaved and law abiding the citizens are.

Productivity - How hard and efficiently the inhabitant's work.

Piety - The measure of the religious fervour of the population.

While size and productivity can be ported over fairly easily and order could perhaps be renamed something like Warlord (to represent how effectively the leader controls the populace) complacency and piety don't really seem to fit the Orkish mind-set.

I could perhaps see complacency being replaced by something like runtz to represent how many gretchin or perhaps even non-greenskin slaves are press-ganged by the colony I can't really see piety as being a big factor in an Orkish colony.

It isn't that Orks don't believe, it's that I can't see an Ork ever having a crisis of faith regarding Gork or Mork... despite that being the premise behind the game Gorkamorka I just don't see it as something that happens often enough to need a characteristic.

Any ideas?

I like the idea of complacency representing the grot/slave population, that's a neat take

Order could represent how strong a hold the current boss has on the Orky population, the lower it is, the more infighting and jockeying for position, if it's higher then its like Thraka is in charge, aint noone messing with him.

Productivity could be used to represent the tech level maybe with markers for when the colony has access to different tech, super low means its basically a savage ork colony, high results in dredds and all the other orky tech.

Replace piety with Waaagh! - The higher it is the closer they are to getting off planet and spreading out. Or just moving to another area on the planet.

That seems like a good idea. I was thinking about including Waaagh! as one of the characteristics in the same way that it was a characteristic for Dawn of War. Perhaps the Waaagh! characteristic can represent how 'infused' the Orkish psyche and Orkoid spore is with the local environment. At high levels the Anzion effect is in full swing allowing for high levels of Orkish tech and the local flora and fauna is supplanted by fungi and squigs.

I can't really see piety as being a big factor in an Orkish colony.

An un-orky colony would be disliked by other orks, and wracked by constant infighting as the propa orks try to set things right.

Personally I assume snotlings, grots and squigs come before boys in the orkiforming process. Why? Well if you look at ork inductry and warfare they're based largely on the assumption that you have a massive effectively endless supply of expendable squigs and runts to make it work squigs in particular.

Squig Hide is what orks have instead of textiles, unless you have a hundred squigs running around for every boy those boys are going to be naked. Yet it doesn't stop there because even after that you have orks using the things as walking IEDs too. There's only one logical conclusion here which is that anywhere there's orks there are already an effectively inexaustable supply of squigs. So I have to assume Squigs are probably the first orkoid that shoots out of the ground, Grots second because they're the majority of the labor section of the Orkoid economy and the average boy doesn't produce fuckall.

IIRC "un-orky" is the orkish equivalent to "heretical". So I think the orkish equivalent to "Piety" could be "Orkiness".

An un-orky colony would be disliked by other orks, and wracked by constant infighting as the propa orks try to set things right.

The problem I have with making piety synonymous with Orkiness or proppa Orky behaviour is that Orks have a very stable (if violent and anarchistic) society. I just can’t see a colony that has its size increase beyond its piety suddenly develop large scale un-Orky tendencies. I can see huge infighting developing if a colony size exceeds the amount of control its leadership exerts on the boyz but that seems to be more of a function of order than piety.

Personally I assume snotlings, grots and squigs come before boys in the orkiforming process. Why? Well if you look at ork inductry and warfare they're based largely on the assumption that you have a massive effectively endless supply of expendable squigs and runts to make it work squigs in particular.

Squig Hide is what orks have instead of textiles, unless you have a hundred squigs running around for every boy those boys are going to be naked. Yet it doesn't stop there because even after that you have orks using the things as walking IEDs too. There's only one logical conclusion here which is that anywhere there's orks there are already an effectively inexaustable supply of squigs. So I have to assume Squigs are probably the first orkoid that shoots out of the ground, Grots second because they're the majority of the labor section of the Orkoid economy and the average boy doesn't produce fuckall.

Yes you’re right. All the reading I’ve done suggests that squigs and fungus emerge first and they start terraforming the local environment. Then once a certain threshold has been reached snotlings emerge and their inbuilt behaviour aids in this terraforming (The best write-up of this process I have ever read can be found here: http://www.the-waaagh.com/forums/?showtopic=30519 ). Once the instinctive behaviour of the snotlings has reached the point of diminishing returns in terms of preparing the area then gretchin emerge, start bossing the snotlings around and generally start fixing up the place. Only once that has all happened to the Orks finally start to emerge. But that is for a ‘natural’ colony… spread by spores. What we’re talking about is an Ork warlord dumping a bunch of boys on a world and telling them to sort it out. This means that the world may not be Orkiformed yet and things like squig shortages could happen if the number of Orks grows beyond their area of influence. I’m still not sure if Waaagh is what I’d use to replace piety or if it should be linked to the Anzion effect or the infusion of the orkish spore but so far it is the best I have.

After some of the discussions from this thread http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/99970-playing-an-ork-freebooter/ and particularly some of the points raised by N0-1_H3r 3 I think perhaps I have been going about this in the wrong way. Orks aren’t humans and I shouldn’t try to reskin the human colony rules to cover an Orkish colony.

Orks are ridiculously resilient and what would cripple a human colony would barely cause an Ork colony to flinch. Their faith is essentially hard coded into their DNA and once a colony is established they don’t need to worry about half the workforce taking time off to produce offspring so the colony can grow at an exponential rate. You don’t even really need to drop any Orks on a planet to start a colony you just need to have the crew go down to the surface and walk about for a while. Though that probably won’t create a viable colony during the scope of most games.

So perhaps an Ork colony should be created by just dumping a bunch of raw materials and boyz down on the planet (which still costs profit factor as normal) and then leave them to it.

The colony gets the following statistics.

Belligerence – This is a measure of the colony’s resilience and aggression. If something would negatively affect the colony then they roll their belligerence to resist the effects.

Loyalty – This is the measure of the colony’s loyalty to the group that founded it. If the colony’s loyalty is lower than its belligerence then it stops providing profit factor to the founding group and must be reconquered or otherwise convinced to give up their wealth.

Size – As per human colonies this measures how large the colony is.

What do you think?

I like it. You still need Productivity in there though.

True... just because the colony is loyal doesn't mean they're producing anything other than broken teeth and fart jokes.

Hey you get enough teef and fart jokes together and you can conquer the galaxy!!

Ork laziness and short attention span are probably the biggest issues they can face.

Imperial colony, for example, will dig for metals and prometheum and whatnot, motivated by their faith or money or whip depending on situation but their overseers will make sure that they work.

Orks on the other hand...

The meks will build and tinker just for fun, the grots will work when an runtherder with a whip is around, but generally speaking the average boyz are likely to be distracted by something or start fighting each other sooner or later. If they know that a good fight is coming their way they might be motivated to build and gather resources for building (weapons and ships) but usually it takes a WAAAGH to get orks to really start building and arming. I get the impression that orks are more likely to loot a planet that already has a civilisation on it to arm themselves than build something from scratch.

They might be more interested in the food they can find on a planet and the chance to increase their population by getting the fungus growth cycle going on on the planet. Or they might want to loot some planet that already has a civilisation living on it. (the fact that they have to figh for it is a bonus.) After all, orks are more interested in looking for the next fight than spreading across the universe (which is a side-effect.)

Also, the population growth needs to have a random factor that knocks the population down as the orks fight each other.