Two summers ago I ran a demo game at my local store on one of those folding boards they keep behind the counter, and I took the Orks because the lad I was teaching had come in specifically for Space Marines. He’d never rolled a dice in his life. Somewhere in the second turn I gave him the standard speech about the Waaagh!, which goes like this: it’s once a game, it’s your big melee turn, you hold it until the Boyz are close, then you call it and charge everything you own. He typed it into the notes app on his phone.
A bloke at the next table, packing a Guard army back into a case, said without looking up that the invulnerable save lasts through the opponent’s turn as well. Which it does. The 10th edition wording has the Waaagh! active “until the start of your next Command phase,” so that 5+ invuln covers the whole enemy turn, and there are absolutely games where you call it defensively while getting shot off an objective. I had been giving people the charge-button version of that advice for about two years at that point. I didn’t correct myself in front of the new guy. I just quietly said something different to the next one.
Warhammer Community put the new Codex: Orks army rules up on 14 August, the day after the Ghazghkull datasheet reveal ended by teasing a status called riled up and telling everyone to come back tomorrow. This is the come-back-tomorrow article. Codex: Orks is the first codex of 11th edition and it ships with fifteen detachments.
What riled up actually does
The first half of the rule is free and permanent. Every friendly Ork unit with the Waaagh! ability re-rolls its advance moves, all game, no activation, no resource spent. That’s just on.
The second half is the status. A unit that is riled up gets a 5+ invulnerable save, gets [ASSAULT] on its ranged attacks, and can declare a charge in a turn it advanced. Units become riled up through War Cry, a once-per-battle-per-army ability used at the start of the Command phase that riles up every Waaagh! unit until the end of the next turn, or through character abilities. Ghazghkull can hand it out to several nearby units by spending a Makari token, which is the ability the datasheet reveal dangled and refused to explain.
Some units get extra on top. Meganobz have a rule called Krumpin’ Time that gives them +1 to hit in the Fight phase while riled up. The Stompa is permanently riled up with no activation required at all, and anything that disembarks from it comes out riled up for a turn. The Shoota Boyz detachment adds range to your guns while units are riled up.
War Cry is still there for anyone who hasn’t built a character shopping list, and it has the same shape as the old rule. One press, whole army, until the end of the next turn. It’s the floor now. Every Ork army in the game gets that press for free, so what actually separates two lists is how many other sources of riled up you packed and what they cost you. That’s a points question and we don’t have points.
The Codex: Orks army rules dropped the melee bonus
The 10th edition Waaagh! in full: advance and still charge, a 5+ invulnerable save, and “add 1 to the Strength and Attacks characteristics of melee weapons equipped by models from your army with this ability.” Once per battle. One window.
That last clause is gone. Riled up has no melee line in it whatsoever. The 5+ invuln survived, the advance-and-charge survived, and where the strength and attacks bonus used to sit there’s now [ASSAULT], which is a shooting keyword. Shoot at full effect after advancing.
Stack that against the free advance re-roll and the shape of a riled up turn gets strange. A mob advances, re-rolls the advance if it rolled a 1, fires its guns anyway because Assault says it can, and then charges. Orks hit on 5s at range, so Ork shooting has always been an argument about volume rather than quality, and the Shoota Boyz detachment stretching range on top of that is GW pointing at something fairly clearly. Shoota Boyz, incidentally, are the daftest unit in the game and I mean that with total affection. Twenty lads with two-handed pipes going off in every direction at once.
The melee power sits on datasheets now. Meganobz buy it with their points. Ghazghkull’s new aura, Prophet of da Great Waaagh!, gives nearby Ork units +1 to hit and +1 to wound in melee, so if you want the old army-wide chop bonus you now bring the Ork who is the reason it exists. The new Nobz will presumably have their own version of this once someone leaks the sheet.
So yeah. Army rule does the moving and the surviving. Chopping bonuses come off the datasheets you spent points on. Every write-up I’ve read this week led with Ghazghkull’s toughness and went straight past that, which is fair enough, toughness 10 is a better headline than a missing clause.
Whether it’s better I genuinely couldn’t tell you until points land. What riled up reads like, on the page, is the music in a pub getting gradually louder across an evening, with three or four people at the bar all able to nudge the knob. You can’t point at the moment it happened. From the other side of the table that’s an awkward thing to build screens around, and it’s more decisions per turn for the Ork player, who now has to work out when each source gets spent.
A Waaagh! is a build-up before it’s a shout
The lore has been fairly consistent about what a Waaagh! is. It’s an ambient psychic field that Orks generate by being present in large numbers.
White Dwarf #349’s The Great Gathering describes an emergent Waaagh! as something Meks physically travel toward. As word spreads, tribes converge on the construction sites, and the piece has Meks “somehow aware that the time of gathering has come” following “the psychic reverberations produced by the emergent Waaagh! fever to its source.” Nobody calls them. They feel it and start walking. Some arrive in steam tractors, some in gyrocopters, some in ramshackle submarines, which is the sort of detail that makes me want to build an Ork army every couple of years before remembering the state of my Tyranids.
Waaagh! Ghazghkull has a good entry on what happens when that build-up has nowhere to go. On Octaria in 852999.M41, so many Orks migrate toward Ghazghkull’s Waaagh! that they overload his Madboyz Mob with the sheer overflow of psychic energy, and the power-drunk Madboyz “vomit forth a great green wave of force that ripples outwards to the far ends of the galaxy and back.” The book says it registers with every warp-sensitive soul in the Imperium. Gathering greenskins with no immediate fight available is described flatly as a dangerous thing.
Psychic Awakening: Saga of the Beast puts it plainer than either: where Orks gathered, their Waaagh! energy swelled to near impossible levels. Weirdboyz turn up in greater numbers because there’s more of it about, and Warpheads get addicted to the surges. This is the same logic that makes Ork tech work at all and the same logic behind Ork force fields in the Sanctus Reach material, where shields hold because a sufficient number of Orks are sure they will.
Who gets to switch it on
That’s the bit I keep going back and forth on with the new rule, because the 11th edition version has several named characters handing riled up out like passes.
In Waaagh! Ghazghkull, the moment Ghazghkull receives his mandate happens aboard the Kill Wrecka after a lance strike knocks him over and he dents the deck plating with his skull. An arcing crown of green lightning explodes out of him. His Warpheads convulse, catch fire, speak with one voice, tell him to unite the Orks, and then detonate, covering the command deck in viscera and green light. He is the conduit. The energy is not his and it very nearly kills the psykers standing next to him.
And yet. Orks physically grow near a bigger boss. A mob fights harder because the boss is present, the boss gets bigger because the mob believes he’s the boss, and the whole thing is a loop that GW has been consistent about for decades. That’s covered in more depth in the piece on Ghazghkull as prophet rather than warlord, and honestly, having typed out my objection, I’ve mostly argued myself out of it. A character node that concentrates a field the mob generates is a reasonable abstraction. Ghazghkull spending a Makari token to rile up four units near him is not far off what the books describe him doing, other than the tokens.
What I’d have liked, and what nobody was ever going to write into a competitive ruleset, is riled up scaling with how many Ork models are actually on the table. Big mob, more of it. That’s the thing the lore keeps saying and the thing the Weirdboy datasheet already gestures at from a different direction…
The permanently riled up Stompa is the one bit that reads as a straight lore statement. White Dwarf #351’s Stompa feature has Mekboyz getting caught up in the fever of a Waaagh! and becoming obsessed with giving mechanical form to one of the Ork gods, at which point scaffolding goes up and the hulk takes shape inside a cradle of steel. The article frames the finished thing as a religious idol that happens to carry enormous guns. So it doesn’t need shouting at. It was built inside the field and never left it, and the passengers spilling out in a rage for a turn follows from that. The current Stompa kit has been on shelves since 2009, which is a couple of years longer than I’ve been in this hobby at all, and it’s still the model I stop in front of at the cabinet.
Detachments land next week, fifteen of them, and until points go up none of this is anything but reading tea leaves. I’ll be looking at the Shoota Boyz one first.
