Characters / Total War: Warhammer - The Greenskins

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"WAAAAAGH!!!!"

"I'm gonna stomp 'em to dust. I'm gonna grind their bones. I'm gonna pile 'em up inna big fire and roast 'em. I'm gonna bash 'eads, break faces and jump up and down on da bits dat are left. An' den I'm gonna get really mean."

A seething flood of tooth, blade and brazen green flesh, the Greenskins make up the most barbaric and prolific raiding force in the Old World. Rather than a single race, they are a conglomeration of smaller sub-races, banded together by their like-minded brutality, lack of intelligence and lust for carnage. Mobs of savage Orcs roam the Badlands' plains while Night Goblins move unseen in the deep tunnels of the Underway. Whenever the feeling takes them they pour out in earth-shaking numbers to plunder other races' settlements, invaders to the end. After slaughtering the occupants, they daub the walls in crude graffiti, settling amongst the corpses until restless green fingers start itching for bloodshed once more.

Greenskins lack any form of government, subscribing instead to a ‘might-makes-right’ ideology that sets the nastiest and sneakiest firmly at the top of the pecking order. Orcs, brutish and aggressive, make up the ruling class. Goblins, malevolent and cunning, are subjugated by the Orcs in exchange for their begrudging protection. Trolls, Giants and other fell creatures are easily coerced to join their cause with the promise of battle, loot and a few of the weaker goblins thrown their way as a tasty snack. The variety and versatility of Greenskin armies and the brute strength of their warriors more than makes up for what they lack in intelligence and diplomacy.

Endlessly seeking out conflict both within and without, Greenskin hordes roam from the Old World in search of worthy opponents to stomp into the ground. At the head of each is a Warboss, a rank earned only by the murder of the previous Warboss. As such it is a title earned by only the biggest and nastiest Orcs of the lot. Greenskins live to fight, and if their Warboss cannot sate their appetite for battle, their numbers will dwindle as infighting takes hold. When word spreads of a truly mighty Warboss, however, momentum builds quickly. With each successive victory, more and more Greenskin mobs join the horde. Eventually, these patchwork armies merge to become a WAAAGH! — an unstoppable green tide that leaves nothing but ruin in its wake.

The polar opposite of the Dwarfs, the Greenskins units come in large sizes and have mercifully cheap upkeep. As a melting pot of different races united by love of war, the Greenskins are a versatile force: brutish Orcs form the backbone of the force, cowardly Goblins fill out the numbers and fulfil the fast-strike role, while Trolls and Giants provide the Greenskins some extra muscle. The force hits hard up close and if somehow brute force fails, there's always another horde ready for another go. However the Greenskins have very limited technology and economical options and their forces are sustained primarily by raiding and warring with their neighbours rather than trading with them, though of course, as they'd say, "trade's jus' a load of muckin' about anyway". Their unique faction mechanic is the WAAAGH! meter, which slowly fills as they raid and raze settlements. At maximum, it allows the Orcs to pick a faction and gives them twenty turns to burn down or occupy their capital city. The catch is that as their armies continue on the march, they slowly fill a secondary army slot up to a new maximum capacity of forty units. This makes a veritable rolling green ball of death, and few things have the ability to stand up to the sheer magnitude of greenskins coming their way.

Introduced in Total War: Warhammer, the Greenskins are playable in custom games, the Grand Campaign, and Mortal Empires. With the Warden and the Paunch DLC, the Greenskins became playable in the Total War: Warhammer II Eye of the Vortex map. In Total War: Warhammer III, they are playable in the Immortal Empires combined mega-campaign for owners of I, II and III.

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General Tropes

Grimgor's 'Ardboyz

Bonerattlaz

The Bloody Handz

Crooked Moon

Broken Axe

• Achilles' Heel:
  • Their low leadership. Thought not as bad as that of the Skaven, anything that is not a Big 'Un, Savage Orc or Black Orc has a tendency to run away once things go south, leaving the slower heavy troops without any sort of quicker support or proper ambushers or rangers. Even some of their monsters are prone to fleeing earlier than the elite units.
  • Large units. The Greenskins have very few dedicated Anti-Large units so any army that fields powerful and/or plenty of cavalry or monsters will be able to blindside them completely.
• Adaptational Modesty: On the tabletop, the Giant River Troll Hag had exposed breasts. In-game, they are covered up with cloth or other obfuscating articles of clothing.
• All Trolls Are Different: A type of monstrous infantry. Large humanoid creatures which vomit acid bile on their enemies, these dimwitted creatures tend to join up with Greenskin hordes in exchange for food. In addition to the basic variant, the Greenskins have access to several other troll breeds.
  • Stone Trolls possess a tough, rocky hide from which they derive their name. They inhabit mountain caves and wield large hammers in battle.
  • River Trolls are an aquatic breed found in waterways throughout the Old World. They possess piscine characteristics such as fins and scales, and smell foul even by troll standards. In addition to the basic River Trolls, there is also the giant River Troll Death Hag, a wizard Hero Unit with the ability to use the Lore of Death.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Greenskins love war and delight in violence, without exception. However, they have a lot of ways to go about it, ranging from simple raiding to full-on invasions.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: While all Orcs and Goblins are green (it's in the name after all), the exact shade depends on a number of factors including environment and subspecies. The smaller species of Greenskin, such as Goblins and Snotlings, tend to have a lighter shade to their skin, while their larger Orc cousins have darker shades and the mighty Black Orcs have skin so dark it could pass off as being black.
• Arch-Enemy: They view the "stunties", as this, though the hatred of the Night Goblins trumps all the rest, having a longstanding history of war against Dwarfs, either being exterminated preemptively or the Night Goblins mounting assaults on their Karaks and other strongholds.
• Armless Biped: The squigs, which the Greenskins get as both a monster unit and as cavalry, are essentially giant round heads mounted on a pair of strong, taloned legs, which are also their only limbs.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: The most powerful Orcs tend to become the leaders, but they also absorb more Waaagh! energy because they are the leaders, and grow bigger because of it. So the stronger the Orc is, the more authority he gets, and in turn, the more authority he gets, the bigger and physically stronger he becomes. Regardless, Greenskin society ensures the strongest grow strongest, and only the strong rule. As of the WAAAGH update, Greenskin factions will now confederate with others if their leaders are beaten in battle by another Greenskin tribe's leader.
• A-Team Firing: Orc Arrer Boyz are Orc Boys who fire arrows, but they are not particularly good shots. They know this, and do not particularly care, they just try to fill the air with as many pointy shafts as possible. To make up for their lack of marksmenship, they are actually decent melee combatants, but a lack of appropriate equipment and discipline means they are Masters of None when it comes to trading off between ranged and melee combat.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Orcs and even Goblins prefer to attack by moving toward their enemy and screaming. In line with that, every aspect of Greenskin gameplay emphasizes forward momentum.
  • Greenskins love fighting and looting but hate working and building things. As such they have no access to trading and a terrible internal economy, with only Gold and Diamond resource buildings generating significant income. To compensate, they make a lot of money from fighting, from boosts to post-battle loot and a common, cheap hero who increases it for any army he's attached to (the Goblin Big Boss), but also campaign skills that will increase income from raiding, looting and sacking settlements and so on. It is entirely possible to accumulate a massive amount of money only to breeze through it constructing buildings and recruiting high-end units in the lull after a major warfront... then to start the process over again with a bigger, better army to get even more loot.
  • Greenskins have No Cure for Evil for the most part, with their magic lores being primarily concerned with direct damage, buffing or debuffing. Combine this with a lot of Melee Attack and Weapon Strength to go around for Orcs but very little Armour or Melee Defense, they can dish it out but they can't take it. Generally, the best way to use Orcs is to try to pound the enemy into submission too fast for them to rally and drive the Orcs off. The Lore of da Big Waaagh! is well equipped to do this thanks to Fists of Gork (which gives one unit a significant boost to Melee Attack and Melee Defense plus Magical Attacks) and 'Ere We Go! (which grants a major boost to melee attack to several units over a wide area).
  • In the Stance System, Greenskins combine the Encamp and Raiding stances to form Raidin' Camp, which allows them to raid enemy provinces, heal up between battles and recruit units from the Global Recruitment pool all at once while also removing the main weakness of raiding (tired units). in the first game this was the main way to get the Fightiness meter to go up too. Post-The Warden and the Paunch, they can access this stance regardless of movement (which makes it a good way to heal up after razing a settlement) and any time they want to. Their campaign victory conditions require them to bring in a certain amount of Gold from raiding anyway, giving even more incentive to use it.
  • Since the power meter necessary to declare a Waaagh! during battle is charged up by entities being in melee, it's generally always a good idea to have most units in melee even if the matchups aren't great, since a good Waaagh! can fix that and turn the tide quickly.
• Ax-Crazy: Both Goblins and Orcs live only to kill, and greatly enjoy it, taking immense pleasure in destruction and mayhem, seeing not much else in life worth doing. They're also both off their rockers and mentally unstable. Although both races show it in different ways, Orcs being loud-mouthed brutes that will smash you to pieces; Goblins, conniving, sneaky "gits" that always plan to stab you in the back. Most of their units' dialogue reflect these mindsets well.
• Bald of Evil: The vast majority of Greenskins are bald, for unknown reasons, and are also violent savages. The occasional model will bear a top-knot, especially if they are Savage Orcs.
• Battle Cry: "WAAAAAGH!". In-game, Greenskin units will be constantly shouting it. This also works as a battlefield mechanic. Greenskin commanders can activate a powerful "WAAAAAAGH" ability, which gives a very powerful factionwide buff to all units' stats.
  • As of their rework it's been changed to a battlefield mechanic in itself. The Greenskins now have something called a "WAAAGH!" meter, similar to the Tomb Kings' Realm of Souls; as the battle progresses and the Greenskins clash with the enemy, they gain more and more "WAAAGH!" points until they can activate it. It causes a swirl of green power to surround every Greenskin unit along with a loud audible warscream, and it greatly enhances the Greenskin units for a short time. Unlike with the Realm of Souls and Murderous Prowess mechanic, a "WAAAGH!" can be activated as many times as long as the player earns more "WAAAGH!" points, albeit with a rising point cost after each activation. There are two variants of a regular "WAAAGH!", one that basic lords get, and another "Greater WAAAGH!" basic lords get during a campaign WAAAGH! with enhanced stats. Every Legendary Greenskin Lord also gets their own special "WAAAGH" Battle Cry with unique bonuses.
• Battle Trophy:
  • Orcs adorn themselves in stuff belonging to fallen foes, like Human skulls, Greenskin tusks, and Dwarf beards.
  • Greenskins are rewarded with a special Battle Trophy after completing a successful campaign WAAAGH, ranging from severed Elf heads, to ripped apart Dwarf Beards. Each trophy confers a special bonus, a bonus which is strengthened depending on how powerful the faction you just defeated was.
• The Berserker: While all Greenskins are this to varying degrees, the Night Goblin Fanatics are this to the extreme, getting high on various mushroom concoctions to do as much damage on the battlefield as possible.
• Beast of Battle:
  • Squigs, vicious fungoid beasts that resemble nothing so much as hopping balls of flesh with large, taloned legs and gaping mouths full of fangs, which the Greenskins send out in herds against the enemy.
  • Feral Stegadons make Greenskins their meals normally, but they are occasionally rounded up by Goblin Beast tamers prowling Lustria and used as living Siege Engines by the Green Tide, the player can recruit them by acquiring a high level Lizardmen trophy or they can randomly show up in WAAAGH armies.
• Beneath the Earth: The Underway, a massive system of underground trade highways created by the dwarfs during the golden age of their civilization. As the dwarf empire has fallen into decay, huge swaths of the Underway have been abandoned and populated by Greenskins and other monsters. In-game, Dwarf and Greenskin armies can use the Underway to effectively teleport short distances across the campaign map, allowing them to bypass enemy armies and terrain obstacles and overcome terrain or corruption-based attrition.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Greenskins are over-dramatic, not very bright, dress in whimsical and colorful outfits and are very Laughably Evil overall. None of those traits are good reasons to underestimate the unthinkable devastation the Greenskins are capable of, nor makes them funny to the people caught in the path of their rampages.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Greenskins are fungal creatures that reproduce via spores. This serves to explain why the Greenskins outnumber every race in the Old World, save the Skaven, and why they're nigh-incapable of being eradicated despite constant efforts to do so.
• Blood Knight: An entire race of them. The Greenskins live for war and fighting; if they don't have any other foes to fight, they'll start fighting each other. Fittingly, most Greenskin units on the battlefield will be cruelly smiling, and laughing. Retreating Orc units even yell out "Don't wanna leave!", as they'd rather go down fighting than flee to fight for another day.
• Boss in Mook's Clothing: Black Orc Big Bosses are classified as Heroes, but they have Lord-quality stats across the board, making them utterly terrifying in combat and priority targets. Hell, one of their campaign skills is literally called One-Man Army.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: Most factions have a Raiding stance and an Encamp stance; the former limits an army's movement and vigour to take money from a province and reduce public order, the latter allows the army to replenish, ignore attrition and have access to global recruitment even in foreign territory at the expense of requiring the army to stand still. The Greenskins have the Raidin' Camp stance, which effectively combines the functions of the two.
• Brutish Character, Brutish Weapon: Orcs commonly use jagged axes, alongside rusty blades and savage clubs.
• Call a Human a "Meatbag": Greenskins refer to every other race by nicknames, either as a deliberate insult, as a reference to some obvious characteristic or as a result of translating their proper names into their own rough tongue. Humans are "humies", Dwarfs are "stunties", Warriors of Chaos are "spiky boyz" and Skaven are "ratmen", to name but a few.
• Cannon Fodder: Low tier Greenskin units, especially Goblins, are not that much good at anything, besides being used in hordes to overwhelm one's foe and soaking up enemy fire. This is especially true for Goblins, who are generally used this way in Orc-dominated armies because Orcs don't care if a Goblin runs screaming.
• Chaotic Stupid: Greenskins often employ questionable strategies. Their general lack of intelligence was once represented by their rather pitiful technology tree and primitive building chains, although these also emphasized how war-focused their society is. Even after it was updated in The Warden and the Paunch, the tree is still very primitive, but the Greenskins consider these ideas (such as getting a bigger cart for the loot and bullying goblins to make them fight harder) "Big Thinkin'".
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Not nearly as bad as other factions, but the fact their society (insofar as they have one) functions entirely on Asskicking Leads to Leadership means that the moment one of their leaders shows even the slightest bit of weakness, the others will almost immediately turn on him. The only way a warboss can remain in power is by constantly beating down any Orc that breaks rank.
• Cool Mask: Black Orc Big Bosses wear heavy, steel-faced ones that cover the entire lower half of their faces, with protruding spikes. Many fans have likened them to Bane's.
• Combat Pragmatist: Highly encouraged. While a well-buffed Greenskin line may be able to beat down the opposition through sheer strength, a more generally successful strategy is to use surprise and numbers to ruthless effect. In particular this is generally the best way to use Goblin units.
• A Commander Is You:
  • A Hyper-Aggressive Spammer/Brute faction. Their Orc units are built for straightforward head-bashing and head-on collisions, their Goblin units being more numerous but also more fragile and designed to be used in sneaky ways to get the most out of them. A Morale Mechanic they used to have allowed the player to summon an AI-controlled army as reinforcements after building up enough Fightiness (through raiding and victories), but would cause armies to suffer attrition if they failed to win battles regularly. The Greenskins also possess a weak economy, cannot use most special resources for profit, and cannot trade, and so depend largely on raiding and sacking enemy settlements for dependable income.
  • The Crooked Moon place more emphasis on Spammer: They cannot recruit orc units outside of a special settlement they must capture, and so are dependent on cheap-but-brittle goblin units. However, the Crooked Moon enjoy 40%-off upkeep for all goblin-type units they recruit, allowing them to sustain huge armies more easily, and their Heroes level up twice as quickly from performing campaign actions (which are also 50% cheaper to perform).
• Conlang: Greenskin language is a newspeak variant of the troops, Orcs using variants of human words but "Orc-ified" to accommodate their heavy accents. "Swords" become "Choppas", "men" become "Boyz" or more famously, "war" is turned into "WAAAGH!", the screaming part being obligatory.
• Defeat Equals Friendship: More like "Defeat means your boyz will tear you apart and then join the victorious Warboss". Not only will Greenskins like factions who war with them more, they have inherited the Norscan style of confederation in their rework. When a Greenskin Lord is defeated by another Greenskin Lord, the winner will have the option to confederate with the loser, or force them into becoming a vassal. This also means one can, playing as any of the five Legendary Lords, find the other four, defeat them, and make them their underlings.
• Dirty Coward: Most Goblin units are this due to having really low leadership. Though they are plenty in number and eager to pull off cheap and dirty tricks for the sake of victory, they are just as eager to run away screaming from battle once things don't go their way. Orcs are mostly better, but still not disciplined to deal with failure well, and it often takes the presence of a powerful Black Orc or two to get their heads together.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Black Orc Big Bosses are infamous for being this; whilst venerable killing machines, their true value is their extremely cruel, but highly effective skills in training their kin into becoming better killers, using the most brutal training methods available to turn unfocused rabble into a disciplined army. They have a unique campaign skill tree that heavily buffs units in their army, with a wide assortment of powerful bonuses to Orc units, and they always confer an immunity to psychology to Orc units around them. Bringing one of these into your army is like bringing along a second lord.
• Dumb Muscle: Orcs are very strong and bulky but not very smart as a rule. Averted by Black Orcs.
• Elite Mooks: The Greenskins' Black Orcs avert the Stupid Evil tendencies of their brethren and are terrifyingly intelligent heavy infantry that can destroy enemy formations in seconds, wielding massive great axes and wearing armor of black iron. And that's not even getting into their Regiment of Renown, The Krimson Killaz, a pack of even bigger Black Orcs who dual-wield great axes!
• Enemy Civil War: The Greenskins are in a constant state of this. Which is often stated to be the sole reason they haven't conquered the world... yet. Greenskins are one of the least likely factions to form diplomatic confederations with each other as a result. After The Warden and the Paunch update, the point about confederations remains true, but if one Greenskin faction beats another's faction leader, the former has the option to confederate with the defeated faction. So the Greenskins can fight one another, but if one faction keeps beating the other tribes' leaders, the civil war abruptly ends as the newly expanded tribe starts to turn its attention outward.
• Epic Flail: Night Goblin Fanatics have a special ability wherein several of their number hurl themselves into the enemy ranks swinging a massive ball and chain, spinning about in a bloody circle of destruction. The Eight Peek Loonies go a step further and use captured dwarfs as their flails.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humour: The other races really can't understand or empathize with the Greenskins' idea of "fun", since it involves unprovoked attacks and invasions on anyone nearby.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Regular Orcs are unapologetically bloodthirsty and love a good fight, but still that think that Savage Orcs are totally bonkers.
  • Even Goblins, who will backstab each other for petty reasons and cheerfully eat each other when the chips are down, think the Hobgoblins (another Greenskin subspecies, who have an Empire of their own near Cathay) are treacherous bastards and will shoot them on sight. Especially given that the Hobgoblins sided with the Chaos Dwarfs during the uprising against them amongst the Greenskins.
• Fantastic Caste System: Greenskin society is divided according to who is the killiest. At the top reign Bosses, Big Bosses and Warbosses who are the toughest and strongest of their species. Under them are the Boyz who, depending on what unit they are in, benefit from varying standing in the tribe. Beneath the Orcs come the Goblins or “Gobbos”, and then the Snotlings who are pretty much pets or slaves depending on the mood.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The Greenskin race as a whole are a fantasy-based pastiche of 80's-era British Football Hooligans, hence their Dumb Muscle tendencies and Cockney accents. Regular Orcs and Goblins also have some Scottish Highlanders traits, while Savage Orcs draw heavily from Stone Age Africa. Grom the Paunch adds some boorish Eagleland flavor.
• Fantasy Pantheon: The Greenskins worship some number of gods, but none so fervently as their two Top Gods, Gork and Mork, who represent the ideal all Orcs aspire to be. While Gork is brutal but kunning, Mork is kunning but brutal (or is it the other way around?).
• Full-Boar Action: Warboars are used by Orcs as mounts. Orcs who take to the field in cavalry units are called Boar Boyz and greatly enjoy the prestige it affords them. They are slow-moving by cavalry standards but have high mass and hefty charge bonuses, and their attacks are armour-piercing and Anti-Infantry. Experienced Boar Boyz becom Boar Big 'Uns and abandon their choppas for large spears that allow them to go after other cavalry units instead. The Orc Warboss, Orc Shaman and Black Orc Big Boss can also use a Warboar as a Power Up Mount.
• Funetik Aksent: Orcs and Goblin speak like this, and their Flavor Text is usually written this way.
• Genius Bruiser: Black Orcs are genuinely clever despite their brutish manners, and are terrifyingly disciplined, fiendishly intelligent, and surprisingly regimental. They're are also physically bigger, tougher than all of their cousins, and clad in thick, black plate armour, armed with heavy great axes that make mincemeat of everything. They're also decent metalworkers as well — they make their own weapons and armor from scavenged battle loot, something no other Greenskin can do. They're the result of special breeding experiments and dark magic done by the Chaos Dwarfs to create the perfect soldier that succeeded beyond all expectations. Fortunately for the rest of the world, they're far rarer than regular orcs. Black Orc Big Bosses are especially horrifying; they are Hero Units that can fight Lords and win... but they have a vast range of abilities that concern them passing their tactical knowledge and discipline to the warriors under their command.
• Giant Foot of Stomping: The Foot of Gork spell of Da Big WAAAGH! summons a manifestation of the Orc god Gork to stomp his foot on the battlefield. It's devastating when used against enemy cavalry, or tighter formations of infantry.
• Giant Spider: Forest Goblins ride Giant Spiders for cavalry and Goblin Bosses sometimes ride a Gigantic Spider for a mount. They are generally very fast, and always have the Poison special rule, making them especially annoying when they are used as Skirmishers. A mountless variant, Spiderling Hatchlings can be recruited at a special landmark (at Mount Arachnarok; the spider hatchery), acting as super cheap war "dog"-esque units, with the added benefit of poison. There's also the Arachnarok Spider, an absolutely massive variant of this trope, quite possibly the third biggest monster in the game just after the Mammoth and Dread Saurian. Unsurprisingly, Forest Goblins worship these nightmarish horrors as living gods, and form primitive societies around their tribal worship, capturing sacrifices, and even offering themselves to them. A symbiotic relationship has emerged between the two races, and the Arachnaroks give the Forest Goblins some of their young to be used as mounts, and occasionally even go into battle with their tribal leaders, with large platforms accommodating archers being built upon the Arachnarok. High-Level Goblin Shamans can get an Arachnarok mount, the twisted crimson Catchweb Spidershrine!
• Glass Cannon:
  • Many units in the Greenskin army have comparatively very high melee attack to their counterparts from other factions and will shred an enemy unit in short order, especially when buffed with WAAAGH! magic. However, only the Black Orcs go into battle wearing any real armour, and the Greenskins also lack melee defence across the board; even Grimgor Ironhide has a Melee Defence rating of only 35, paltry for a Legendary Lord. If you shoot at Greenskins they will mostly drop like flies, and they won't stick around in a protracted melee either.
  • Savage Orcs are even more, as they have boosted attack ratings over their normal Orc equivalents but no armour whatsoever, just a loincloth and some funky-smelling warpaint.
• Golem: The Rogue Idol is a massive stomping construct of boulders, WAAAAAGH energy and a big crude mask for a face to make it look like Gork or Mork. It's one of the biggest monsters in the game, although also one of the slowest as it packs a mean punch and is able to take some serious punishment in return. Because of the energy it radiates, it motivates the Greenskins in the army to fight harder as long as it is alive. And the more damage it takes during battle, the harder it starts to hit, albeit with the cost of armor. Then there is The Big Un, an even tougher Idol that can chuck boulders from its body at the enemy.
• Grievous Harm with a Body:
  • Goblin Doom Divers. They fire goblins wearing spiky helmets. With catapults. Then the airborne goblins use wings to steer themselves right to their enemies' doom... and their own, for that matter.
  • The Eight Peek Loonies use chained-up dwarfs as the business end of an Epic Flail.
• Heavily Armored Mook: Black Orcs and their Regiment of Renown wear blackened, painted heavy plate armour they made themselves and are the only unit in the Greenskins' roster with a decent Armour rating.
• Henchmen Race: Defied by the Black Orcs as a race; they were created by the Chaos Dwarfs to be used as slave warriors but Turned Against Their Masters (almost destroying them were it not for some last minute treachery by hobgoblins) and then set out on their own.
• The Horde: The Greenskins take to this trope more than any other faction. Rampaging hordes of bloodthirsty savages are the only "societies" they ever form, and they make a living off of pillaging.
• Horns of Villainy: Orcs commonly wear horned, viking-esque helmets. The regular Boyz have ones made of metal scrap and chainmail, looking junky and very worn. In contrast Black Orcs have thick iron full-faced helmets, with massive horns sprouting out of their sides.
• Horse of a Different Color: Greenskin cavalry and mounts come in many flavors.
  • Orcs make use of Warboars, foul-tempered and brutal beasts who naturally appeal to reckless and battle-loving people like Orcs. This is most prominently represented by their cavalry units, Boar Boyz and Boar Boy Big 'Uns, but Warboars are also used for Orc Boar Chariots and as Power Up Mounts for Orc Warbosses and Orc Shamans. Savage Orc variants with tribal warpaint also exist. Warbosses can also ride Wyverns as an upper end unit.
  • Goblins make use of more size-appropriate mounts. Regular Goblins ride giant wolves, Night Goblins ride Cave Squigs and Forest Goblins ride Giant Spiders. Again these are represented through cavalry units — Goblin Wolf Riders and Forest Goblin Spider Riders, both with missile variants with Archers in the name, Night Goblin Squig Hoppers and Goblin Wolf Chariots — each with their own strengths; Wolf Riders are very fast, Spider Riders have Poisonous Attacks and the Strider trait that lets them ignore disadvantageous terrain effects, and Squig Hoppers are Immune to Psychology. All also have Vanguard Deployment. These also serve as mounts in various capacities for Goblin Great Shamans, Goblin Big Bosses and Night Goblin Warbosses.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: A breakdown of Greenskin relations with every other faction:
  • Empire: Weak gitz dat deserve ta get stomped. Sometimes dey can be a gud fight, like if deyz got lotz of boomy barrels an' magic an' Stunty-made choppas or what 'ave ya, but usually dey don't.
  • Dwarfs (or Stunties): Gud fights, even better loot. Boyz been fightin' da Stunties a long time an' so dey wanna fight us more than anyfink else in da world.
  • Bretonnia: Like da Empire but less loot. If you see da fancy gits on da horses, ignore da runtier gitz and go fer them coz deyz da best fights.
  • Kislev: Deyz 'ardier than most of da Empire and Brettun gitz and can put up a good scrap, but da weather up dere is way more killy and da ice hags makes it even more killy before the fight can get any fun. No fun freezing yer arse to deff before the smashin' even starts. Besides, no good loot outside o' some good booze.
  • Cathay: Bit like most humies, but bettah loot, even if no stuntie-made choppas. Though it getz fun once da big rock men an' dragons come out ta scrap! Bit of a slog to find a way through da mountain or dat big wall to get dere, though.
  • High Elves: Great loot an' great fights, but watch out coz boyz don't come back if da fancy gitz win fer some reason. Gobboz get scared of dem so ya need ta be even scarier ta keep 'em in da fight!
  • Dark Elves: Great fights but watch out cos deyz sneaky gits. Sometimes dey don't wanta fight and dey pay us ta fight for 'em, but dey always fight us sooner or later, which don't matter ta us.
  • Wood Elves: Super sneaky elf gits who sit in da trees and shoot arrers, not gud fights. Sometimes da trees fight too, deyz gud fights and da wood is gud fer chariots and rock chukkas an' what have ya.
  • Lizardmen: Da scaly boyz iz dead killy, brilliant fights. Shame dey never have any gud loot unless you attack da rare cities wif lotz of gold in 'em. If yaz take da gold off them dey get real mad and keep coming fer ya, which suits us jus' fine.
  • Vampire Counts: Bludd-drinkaz is really great fights like scaly boyz and Ogres. Da dead-uns, not so much, dey keep gettin' back up and dey never have any gud loot. Sometimes da bludd-drinkaz gotz gud loot but dat loot iz weird and tries ta whisper ta ya so I dunno any boyz hang on ta it fer long.
  • Tomb Kings: Deyz' might look like da ova bony gitz if they had fancy gold armor and whatnot, but they're dead 'ard and gotz some propah loot. Shame dat da rest of em are only a bit bettah den the dead-uns that da bludd-drinkaz 'ave. Also, once da flashy git gets krumped, da other dead-uns just crumbles. Shame.
  • Vampire Coast: Lika da regular bludd-drinkaz, but less loot and not as good of a fight. 'Ardest part is getting past all da shootin' gitz, wich is kinda fun, but theys die too fast once we're within choppa-range. Just takez da joy right outa it. Still, da crabs make good eatin' aftah.
  • Skaven: Not gud fights at all, dey are weaker gitz than even da humies. Dey gotz great loot though, and coz deyz so many, you never want fer food when you win. Deys also super sneaky gitz who use warpstone to make arr boyz fight fer dem.^note There have been some cases where orc warbosses have found weapons made of warpstone which made them more powerful at the cost of becoming more aggressive and even insane. And some of those weapons were made by skaven with the intent of having the greenskins fall under their influence or at least fight to the benefit of their plans by drawing away attention and dealing with potential threats.
  • Ogres: Dems some hardy gitz, alright. Probably second to da spiky boyz. But all da loot is just too big ta use or just rubbish outside of da food! And during scraps, they keep eatin not only da boyz, but also da choppas!
  • Beastmen: Deys tries ta be all sneaky-like like da knife-ears in da woods, but dey jump out soon enuff ta get some close up. Leave da humie-lookin' onez for da gobbos since theys no good fights. But da biggah goat-gits are alright. An da bull-boyz make for a zoggin good scrap! The lootz kinda crap, though. Mostly humie trash cobbled up an' bashed togedah.
  • Chaos Dwarfs: Oh, dey got a specul place in our 'earts! Da Black Orcs REALLY wanna crump da big-hats as theyz even bettah fightz dan da regular stunties, specialy once da tankity tanks come out! An' bettah loot too! Sure' deyz might hide behind a buncha runtier greenskins and doze zoggin backstabbin' hobgobbos, but it gets all worth it once ya get past 'em.
  • Warriors of Chaos: DA BEST FIGHTS OF ALL! Da spiky boyz are dead 'ard, more dan da bludd-drinkaz and da scaly boyz and da Stunties, and like fighting almost as much as da boyz do! Great loot too!
  • Daemons: Da red onez are hella 'ard and all 'bout fightin', just like us! Da rottin onez are kinda less hard and lotta da boyz feel funny aftah fighting dem. Da pink onez are gud fights, but theyz keep talkin' 'bout weird stuff like "plesur an' extsy" an get all happy when ya chop 'em till dey die. Da blue ones are a buncha panzies who keep throwing spells an firah an being even more sneaky dan da gobbos and just being da worst fights! An' all da loot jus' goes ta smoke when da daemons do fer some reasun...
• Irony: Despite the Orcs enjoying a good scrap more than virtually every other faction in the game, when the base game was released, they had no dedicated melee hero, which made it relatively easy for them to rout if they were losing. This was finally addressed during the release of The Warden and the Paunch, where the Black Orc Big Boss was added as FLC.
• Junkie Prophet: Goblin and Orc shamans take this appearance, wearing decrepit clothing and animal furs. Some even receive visions of Gork and Mork (usually after imbibing certain "special" mushrooms)!
• Large and in Charge: The way Greenskins distinguish their superiors. Orcs are essentially immortal, and part of their biology is that the more they fight and survive battles, the larger they grow. Some will find themselves leading orc warbands while others will lead entire hordes of greenskins.
• Laughably Evil: They are a race of Ax-Crazy lunatics who can only think about war, but their sheer lunacy makes it impossible to not get a laugh out of it.
• Lethal Joke Character: Goblin Archers, but only under Grom. Though some of the more ridiculous buffs from Grom's Cauldron were nerfed for the release, they are still pretty strong with Grom's personal buffs and the buffs from his dishes.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: While they'll certainly crush anything and anyone in their path, they might ignore a smaller settlement or community if they think it won't give them a decent fight, and will generally be satisfied just sacking a settlement instead of razing or occupying it (unless they have a deeper enmity with the faction). While they also might engage in some light torture, they'll inevitably be bored with it, and will probably just kill the person in question or (if said person is REALLY lucky) let them go. They are also capable of a certain low level of honor and respect if a foe proves themselves capable enough (though this often just translates into them trying even harder to smash them), and even affection to their select allies and pets. This does put them a cut above the the unfailingly cruel Dark Elves, the fractious Skaven, and the malevolent forces of Chaos, even if in a small way.
• Lower-Class Lout: As is typical of Warhammer games, Greenskins all speak cockney.
• Magikarp Power: Their rework has pushed them to this territory. On the campaign, Greenskins start out in mostly weak positions with their mediocre unit tiers compared to the other factions, but they have a vast variety of ways to improve this. Their reworked "Big Thinkin" technology tree is focused on giving their units truly staggering buffs (such as giving basic Goblin Archers massive armour-piercing values), they can activate the insanely powerful WAAAGH mechanic (which not only gives them huge bonuses, it gives every Greenskin army a free second stack), and their scrap mechanic allows them to further strengthen the initially mediocre-seeming units with a staggering amount of upgrade options, making it possible to turn the Greenskin horde into a veritable Elite Army... they just need time, money, and winning some fights to build up their strength. Even on the battlefield it takes them a little to build up enough WAAAGH! points to activate their battlefield Battle Cry ability, temporarily boosting their stats up enough to make them overpower enemies in melee. Just as importantly, Greenskins that beat other Greenskin faction leaders will gain the ability to instantly confederate the other faction, with no diplomatic penalty for doing so, allowing the disparate major and minor players in the badlands to rapidly unite under a single banner into a major power.
• Might Makes Right: The entire mindset of Greenskins when it comes to relationships between each other. The strong decide everything and runty weaklings have no say on the matter, and their rework has this be the reason why a Greenskin faction's leader being defeated lets them be confederated into the winner's army.
• Mighty Glacier: Rogue Idols are quite literally the slowest unit in the game — besides moving extremely slowly, their actual attack animations take a very long time to resolve and thus lead to a greatly reduced damage output. They make up for this with some of the highest health pools and attack power of any in-game entity, and all of their powerful attacks have a large Area of Effect. It may take them a good long while to get in range and other enemies may dodge around their attacks, but they will hit eventually — and then it will hurt. They're meant to get stuck into a fight and then stay in one spot, smashing all comers.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
  • Orcs tend to have threatening last names. Such names like "Throatcrusha" and "Neckbreaka" usually tell their preferred method of killing people.
  • River Troll Hags also have similarly intimidating names. For example, Grom always starts with one which is named "Da Fishy Tiddlemuncha"- "tiddle" being Orc slang for child.
• Not So Stoic: Depending on the Writer, but, some sources state that greenskins are capable of forming genuine emotional attachments, despite their rather stunted sense of empathy. This results in their actually being upset when that favored individual inevitably gets killed. The strongest example of this in canon is the Night Goblin Skarsnik, who displays a most un-goblinoid affection for his monstrous cave squig pet, Gobbla. And is absolutely heartbroken when Gobbla got killed in The End Times.
• One-Man Army: Or "one unit army". The Krimson Killerz, an insanely expensive regiment of renown, duel wield greataxes, and despite their rather small unit size, can fight two or three units of Imperial Greatswords and win!
• Our Giants Are Bigger: A giant monstrous unit in the Greenskins roster. Lore-wise, the Giants are the inbred, drunken descendants of a long-fallen race who roam the world and fight for whoever will provide them with enough battle to sate their bloodlust and enough money to indulge their alcoholism, with the Orcs being one of the likeliest factions to actually hire them.
• Our Goblins Are Different: Small, green, devious, and shamanistic; most get pushed around by Orcs. Forest Goblins ride spiders, Night Goblins live underground and enter a berserker rage by drinking mushroom brew. They're generally more intelligent than their bigger relatives, but are usually bullied, and thus develop a real nasty streak, being viciously cruel to anything and anyone "weaker" and smaller than themselves. They rely on ruthless cunning and sneakiness to survive.
  • Then there are the snotlings, a smaller and weaker sub-species that even get bullied by other goblins, represented in-game by the Pump Wagons.
• Our Founder: The Orc tribe that controls Black Crag (Grimgor has it by default, but others can take it from him or confederate with him to control it) can build a statue of Dork, the Orc Warboss who took Black Crag from the Dwarfs and renamed it from its original name of Karak Drazh.
• Our Hydras Are Different: Feral War Hydras can be recruited as special units on the campaign after acquiring valuable trophies after a successful Waaagh.
• Our Orcs Are Different: Big, green, tusked, dumb, mono-gendered Proud Warrior Race Guys who leave the thinking to the goblins. Black Orcs, meanwhile, are smarter, more focused, more organized, and generally pretty brainy in comparison. Fortunately, they're also rarer, so they tend to be tribe leaders rather than hordes of their own. Orcs are universally, barring a few exceptions, stupid, so they rely on the goblins to handle their already limited infrastructure and barbaric technology.
• Our Mages Are Different: Greenskin wizards are called Shamans, and channel the Greenskin gods Gork and Mork into both physically violent spells, fearsome buffing spells and even sneaky dirty fighting spells through their unique magical lores. Orc Shamans, including Wurrzag, use the Lore of da Big Waaagh!, while Goblin Shamans use the Lore of da Little Waaagh!.
• Our Wyverns Are Different: These large flying reptiles are speculated in-universe to be lesser relatives of dragons, though they are little more than vicious beasts who lack the wisdom, power, and majesty of true dragons. For their part dragons typically regard the notion of being related to such base creatures as a grave insult. Orc Warbosses can use Wyverns as flying mounts, and the "WAAAGH" patch adds them as a standalone monster unit for Waaagh armies; they have lower stats than most other dragon-esque units, and lack a breath attack, but they provide poison debuffs to anything unlucky enough to feel one's claws, and are still powerful flying Lightning Bruiser units and the only non-Lord flying unit the Greenskins can get. Additionally, Azhag lures more of these beasts into his Waaaghs, and is the only Legendary Lord that can recruit them outside of special areas on the map.
• Paper Tiger: Despite their enthusiasm for battle, Greenskin units generally suffer from bad leadership, meaning they'll usually be quick to run if things don't go well for them. This is because they enjoy fighting, but not losing, and generally lack much in the way of military training or discipline unlike most other armies. Warbosses can fix this by keeping close to their units and activating their leadership-boosting abilities to keep their heads in the game during tight spots. This has been alleviated somewhat with the release of the Black Orc Big Boss unit, which finally gives the Greenskins a hero that can provide leadership without getting shredded in the heat of battle.
• Pet the Dog: For all their cruelties toward civilized people, the Greenskins show genuine affection toward the monsters they ride. Skarsnik and Gobba are the most obvious example, but the fact that none of their mounts appear to be brutalized implies this applies to all of them, unlike the horrifically cruel Dark Elves who torture their monsters into submission.
• Ping Pong Naïveté: Greenskins are generally described as very stupid, but are also capable of ingenious feats of mechanical skill and outmaneouvering supposedly much more intelligent foes. They seem to have a much wider range of intelligence than most other factions, most noticeable in the trolls, who are by and large so stupid they can't even form words, but can also produce skilled magic casters and leaders of men.
• Playing with Fire: A very insane tribe of Forest Goblins use Fire Arrows and have a rare breed of fifty feet tall Arachnarok spiders that are covered in flames and spew out magma exist and can join the players WAAAGH army randomly.
• Predecessor Villain: Gorbad Ironclaw and Grom da Paunch, two legendary Greenskin warbosses who, respectively, burned half the Empire to the ground and killed an Emperor, and being the first Greenskin to invade Ulthuan. Both disappeared/got killed centuries before the game starts, but both are held as platonic ideals of what an Orc or Goblin can accomplish. Subverted with the release of The Warden and the Paunch, in which Grom the Paunch is revealed to still be alive and preparing for round two.
• Psychopathic Man Child: A race-wide trait. Greenskins will behave very childishly at any defeat or setback. That's not even going into the fact they view "fighting" as basically just having a good time, and the entire Old World as their "playground".
• Rape, Pillage, and Burn: The standard Greenskin motivation, although they're not interested in the first one. (Though Greenskins do a lot of slave-taking to serve as labor, bloody entertainment, or foodstuffs.) Most of the income you'll get playing the Greenskins is loot from sacked towns. This is actually represented in-game by the ability to set up raiding camps, razing and pillaging the countryside while increasing Fightyness and burning off your troop's frustration at not having anything to fight, as well as increasing your income. You can do this in your own provinces, giving you the above benefits, but immense public order penalties.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Most Greenskins have beady little eyes with red irises. Emphasized in the announcement trailer for The King and the Warlord, in which Skarsnik's bright red eyes outright glow in the dark.
• Road Apples: As if having a settlement sacked by the Greenskins was not bad enough, they will occasionally leave an "Enormous Pillar of Poo" behind to pile the humiliation on their foes. Understandably it decreases public order and income in the region it is "built" until it can be removed.
• Right Makes Might: Greenskins follow the command of whoever is the largest and strongest among them. Greenskins who are in command tend to physically grow in size and power as they are empowered by the support of their underlings. Because the Greenskins believe that Might Is Right, that makes this trope applicable From a Certain Point of View.
• Savage Wolves: Regular Goblins ride Giant Wolves as mounts. They are extremely fast creatures but not very dangerous to a well-trained soldier. As such, most Goblin cavalry are used either to run down fleeing enemy forces off the map, flank the frontlines to hit the enemy's wizards and war machines and hold enemies in place for an Orc unit to charge. Some Goblins use them to pull chariots as well.
• Siege Engines: Greenskins make use of crude engines such as the Rock lobbers, catapults launching rocks at the enemy troop, usually manned by Goblins overseen by a crippled Orc.
• Screaming Warrior: All they'll be doing on the battlefield besides fighting, is yelling warcries.
• Shorter Means Smarter: Downplayed. Goblins are generally more intelligent than Orcs. Goblins operate all the artillery units, and Goblin Tinkerers are responsible for any and all technological advancements. However, while Goblins are more clever than Orcs, in many ways their minds are much weaker, reflected in the game partly by their woeful leadership and partly by their lack of psychic strength^note On the battlefield Orc Shamans can draw a score of mental energy from the massed Orc troops while Goblins' minds provide far less power. Inverted with Black Orcs, who are bigger and smarter than regular Orcs.
• Slobs Versus Snobs: Most factions take a haughty, above-it-all attitude to the Greenskins; besides everything else, they look down on Orcs and Goblins as uncultured savages for lacking sophistication and nuance. For the Greenskins' part, given they generally combine the culture of a warlike Barbarian Tribe with the overall worldview of a massive sports riot, they enjoy juvenile pranks at the expense of their victims and opponents, such as leaving behind piles of dung in cities they sack, or digging through Dwarfen gold and diamond mines partially for the shiny bits but mostly because they know it riles up the Dwarfs immensely when they do.
• Smash Mook: Rogue Idols have only three attacks — smashing several enemies with a hard punch against the ground, clapping enemies between their hands, and smashing lots of enemies with a giant bellyflop. Their Regiment of Renown version, the Big 'Un, has a more advanced trick where it tears a rock from its body and throws it to smash from a distance. They're also very slow, taking a good long while to get to their enemies and having long attack animations, but make up for their low speed and lack of grace by having high armor, high attack power with splash damage, and lots and lots of health.
• The Smurfette Principle: The Giant River Troll Hag has the unlikely distinction of being the only female unit in the Greenskins' entire roster. Which compares favorably to other factions!
• The Social Darwinist: Greenskins have this mindset. The weak are there to provide entertainment for the "da biggest and the strongest".
• Spit Out a Shoe: One of the animations of the Arachnarok Spider is to eat an enemy and then spit out its weapons.
• Stealth Expert: Nasty Skulkerz, elite goblin infantry who are excellent at ambushes, especially with their stalk ability and smoke bombs, which significantly lower the speed of enemies around them.
• Suicide Attack: One of the weapons the Goblins constructed is called the Doom Diver. When using it, goblins load themselves onto a catapult and launch themselves at their enemies. Naturally, the goblin dies upon impact, but he takes a few enemies with him, and his wings allow him to actually aim for his targets making it a very accurate artillery piece.
• Turn Red: Or in this case turn... green-er. When their WAAAGH! mechanic activates, the Greenskins themselves are surrounded into a swirling green Battle Aura.
• The Usual Adversaries: The Dwarfs and the Greenskins have been fighting each other longer than either species can remember, and are ''the most common" factions to clash with each other on the campaign map.
• Villain Respect: For the Norscan tribes, who alone among all the races of the world match their own mindless lust for battle.
• Villainous Valour: Black Orcs. They have decent Leadership values by Greenskin standards and the special trait Immune to Psychology, meaning Fear and Terror units don't intimidate them. Black Orc Big Bosses install the same iron discipline into units around them.
• We ARE Struggling Together: All the orc factions start out at war with each other, or they're about ten turns away from declaring war with each other. A Greenskins player will first want to bash some heads together (metaphorically and occasionally literally) to unite the scattered tribes under one banner, and then look for bigger and better fighting elsewhere.
• We Have Reserves: Greenskins have a Lack of Empathy, a love of fighting, and the only care they have about taking casualties is whether waiting for the reinforcements afterwards will slow them down. Given how their reproductive biology works, the sheer amount of Orcs there usually is, and that the harder the fighting gets the more orcs will come rushing to refill the ranks, replacing losses is rarely a major concern for them.
• Worthy Opponent: If you give them a good fight, they'll consider you this. Infact, in-game, unlike every other faction, waging war against them increases their disposition towards you.
• Zerg Rush:
  • Orcs usually do not bother with tactics and prefer to form a big wave of infantry that crashes against the enemy ranks, counting on their numbers and natural strength to prevail. These strengths already make the Greenskin tribes quite dangerous, and when the occasional Warboss decides to learn about the basics of this "tactics" thing humies keep shouting about, he risks taking enemy commanders by surprise and can actually threaten to topple whole empires from the sheer shock value. The standard Greenskin strategy boils down to overwhelming the enemy with sheer numbers and brute force in-game.
  • Their new reworked "WAAAGH!" campaign mechanic is centered around this, alongside We Have Reserves. A player who properly builds up fightiness is given the opportunity to call a WAAAGH! on a certain enemy faction. Not only does it provide a myriad of buffs to the army, it grants the Greenskins a unique feature; every army a Greenskin faction has can field forty unit large army in a single stack, the first faction in Total War history that can do so. The caveats are the following: the army size determines how many reinforcements you get (an army with ten units will only get ten extra WAAAGH! units, for example), the army itself moves slower while under WAAAGH!, the units they get take a long time to gather in the army, the units themselves are randomised (dependent on the terrain the army itself is in), and are usually 90 percent chaff. But even with all these conditions, forty unit stacks, with completely free upkeep for the reinforcements.

Legendary Lords

Grimgor Ironhide

Grimgor Ironhide, Black Orc Warboss

"Say my name! Say my name!!"

"My axe, Gitsnik is somewhere in dat pass. A bag of teef to de orc dat finds it an' hands it over — and if any of you fink youse gonna keep it instead, well, you'll find my boot so far up your arse that you'll be tasting squig leather until you die! Wich will be straight afta!"

Voiced by: Gary Martin

No one knows much about Grimgor before he staggered out of the Blasted Wastes with the Immortulz, his bloody-minded bodyguard. Even for a Black Orc, Grimgor’s thirst for war was exceptional. If a single day went without battle, Grimgor was known to start camp-decimating arguments, his one good eye blazing with eagerness to find fault and start a good scrap. Two days without battle and Grimgor would smite anything he could reach, save (perhaps) his fellow Black Orcs. No one knows for sure what would happen if three days without a battle occurred, but even unquenchable thirst for battle is a sign that marks out a Warboss for leadership, a sign that that the Orc is favoured by Gork.

Grimgor maintains a tough, elite retinue of Black Orc warriors around him. This is the hard-as-nails mob known as da Immortulz, a moniker earned due to their habit of surviving almost impossible battles. On the whole Grimgor much prefers Black Orcs to any other kind of Greenskin, but plenty of weedier types have snuck into his camp when the steely gaze of his single eye is fixed elsewhere. So long as things are going well (which means there are lots of other things to fight against), Grimgor tolerates the company of other Orcs and Goblins, at least as long as they stay out of his sight.

Grimgor has slaughtered his way across the Blasted Wastes to the centre of the Empire and back. Yet after winning many victories, Grimgor returned to Red Eye Mountain. Deep underground, beyond where the Red Eye Night Goblins dwell, the endless hordes of Skaven can be found. Here, for a time, Grimgor can appease his need for daily butchery — for the ratmen feed uncountable numbers into the fray solely to occupy Grimgor’s fury.

Grimgor leads what was initially known as the main Greenskins faction, simply named Greenskins, but was renamed Black Crag as of The Potion of Speed update, then updated again to Grimgor's 'Ardboyz as of the Total WAAAGH! update.

---

• Achilles' Heel: Being a foot lord, Grimgor was once fatally vulnerable to being thrown around and rendered useless due to his surprisingly low mass. This was finally fixed in the Total WAAAGH! update, increasing his mass to the point that only the gargantuan Kholek and Settra's War Sphinx can reliably throw him.
• Armor of Invincibility: The Blood-Forged Armour, a suit of blackened full plate tempered in the blood of a Dwarf runesmith. Thanks to it, Grimgor has one of the highest armour ratings of a foot lord, and that's before its ability to repeatedly explode when he's in melee combat kicks in.
• Ass Shove: Part of a death threat during one of his Quest Battles, issued in case any of his boyz think about nicking Gitsnik for themselves:
  Grimgor: My axe, Gitsnik, is somewhere in dat pass. A bag'a teef to da orc that finds it and 'ands it over. Any'a you think yer gonna keep it instead, well, you'll find my boot so far up yer arse, you'll be tastin' squig leather until yoo die! Which'll be straight afta'!
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: As is traditional for Orcs, Grimgor ascended to his position simply by being the biggest and toughest around.
• Ax-Crazy: Even by Orcish standards. He's willing to incite a whole camp to self-destructive brawls if a single day goes by without him getting into a fight, and to just straight-up start swinging his weapon at anything in sight if two days go by. His boys don't want to know what'll happen if three days go by without Grimgor getting some action, which has never happened mostly because the world of Warhammer is that kind of world where someone is always fighting someone else. It goes even further if you go down his unique skill tree, culminating in Grimgor gaining Frenzy.
• Bad Boss: He is incredibly foul-tempered and has a tendency to kill his own warriors when he can't find any other foe to kill. His troops are terrified of him as a result. In his trailer, he demonstrates this quite well by casually snapping an annoying goblin underling's neck.
  Grimgor: If you wanna come an' kill some stunties too, den come; but don't be gettin' in my, or da' Immortulz', way. I don't care who's under me choppa! If it's your skull instead'a some stupid stunty's, I'll laugh just as hard!
• The Berserker: He wields a massive runeaxe, and uses it with reckless abandonment.
• Big Bad: From the Dwarf's perspective, being a mighty Warboss that threatens to unite the Greenskin tribes into a massive Waaagh!. Defeating Grimgor and destroying his faction is necessary to complete a campaign as the Dwarfs.
• Blood Knight: The most extreme of a whole race of them.
• The Chosen One: What many Greenskins believe him to be. This is probably the reason Grimgor still has a large number of followers despite his inability to deal with boredom well and infamous team-killing tendencies.
• Continuity Nod: One of Grimgor's Quest Battle speeches has him making reference to "Ratmen". In another, he points out that the forces of Chaos got their goods from the "Big-Hatted Stunties." These refer to the Skaven and the Chaos Dwarfs, respectively, neither of whom are present in the first game. The Skaven are playable in Total War: Warhammer II and the Chaos Dwarfs in Total War: Warhammer III making this a double case of Early-Bird Cameo.
• Demoted to Dragon: This can happen to Grimgor if the main Greenskin faction is confederated by another Greenskin subfaction. Downplayed in Mortal Empires, where he doesn't lead "The Greenskins" anymore.
• Disproportionate Retribution: An orc warboss called Gorfang Rotgut unwisely decides to mock Grimgor. Grimgor's response is to march his entire army down the length of the World's Edge Mountains and attack Rotgut's fortress at Black Crag, in the Badlands. This serves as the Greenskins' battle tutorial; and if the player so wishes, this can be followed up with the complete eradication of Rotgut's tribe, the Red Fangs.
• The Dragon: He can recruit the superior Black Orc Big Bosses far easier than the other Greenskin factions, and he starts with one, implying the Boss in question is this to him.
• The Dreaded: Grimgor is one of the most feared Warbosses in the entire Old World. One of his unique skills (aptly titled "Imposing Presence") grants him the Fear and Terror properties.
• Drugs Are Bad: Grimgor is a consumer of magical 'shrooms (according to his skill tree), which heavily increase his health pool.
• Elite Army: He buffs Black Orcs and reduces their upkeep by a fair margin, and his home province of Black Crag can churn out gold chevron-ranked Black Orcs once fully owned and built up, encouraging players to recruit more of them into his army.
• Eye Scream: No word on what actually caused him to lose an eye, but it's heavily scarred over from whatever took it.
• Fantastic Racism: Grimgor holds goblins in utter contempt even by orcish standards, considering them worthless, pathetic weaklings who actively hinder his horde.
• Genius Bruiser: Downplayed, in that he's far more of a doer than a thinker, but Grimgor is still a Black Orc, which gives him 1.5 times the brains of any given foot soldier in his army and makes him lucid enough to use proper strategy in dealing with enemies and allies. In one quest battle speech, he tells his men to deal with Dwarfen artillery so they can better enjoy a fight with the infantry and warns them not to underestimate their enemy, for example.
• Inexplicably Awesome: Nothing is known of Grimgor's past before he stumbled into the Old World: why he's encased head to toe in full plate, where he got his Immortulz, or why he's so incredibly good at fighting, and outside of the End Times continuity no-one has tried to reveal any of it.
• Large and in Charge: Befitting his status, Grimgor is one of the largest Orcs alive. As of the "Warden and the Paunch" he has both massive mass, as well as physical stature, so much so he's practically a Monstrous unit in all but name.
• Magikarp Power: Grimgor is built around spamming Black Orcs, which combined with the unique landmarks around Black Crag, allow him to mass-produce elite units of heavy infantry at a dizzying rate, which is all well and good, but requires him to reach a significant tech level beforehand to really get going.
• Mighty Glacier: Grimgor's a combat powerhouse, but cannot ride a mount, forcing him to run around on foot with his Mooks. His Melee Defence rating (35) is also fairly mediocre for a Legendary Lord. Grimgor is tasty in a scrap and extremely dangerous in a duel, but he has to be careful to not tank too much at once or he'll go down shockingly quickly.
• Mysterious Past: As previously stated no one really knows anything about Grimgor before he came to the old world. All that can be inferred with any degree of surety is that he had some manner of run in with the Chaos Dwarfs at some point. Whether or not this means he was one of the original black orcs created in Zharr-Nagrund is unknown.
• Neck Snap: During his campaign trailer, he does this to a Goblin who kept bugging him to give to his horde the order to strike at their next foe.
• The Power of Hate: One of his perks gives him bonus damage against other races, simply because he hates the sight of them and wants them dead. In the tabletop, Grimgor had the exclusive rule Hatred (Everybody!), exclamation mark included.
• Praetorian Guard: His personal bodyguards are a pack of Black Orcs known as Da Immortulz. Of course, Grimgor can handle himself well enough in battle alone. In-game, they are represented by a unique Banner in Grimgor's possession which can only be assigned to a Black Orcs unit in his army. The banner causes the unit to not lose any of their members until their morale drops below 50%, rendering them unkillable if they stay confident.
• Pretender Diss: Towards Gorfang Rotgut, who challenged his superiority.
  Grimgor: I'm 'da Greatest', not some stinking goblin-lovin' git called Rotgut!
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Grimgor is infamous for starting out right next to Thorgrim, with the two's mutual penalties, any and all campaigns that don't have the player intentionally making a point to leave an enemy right next to their capital will quickly lead to one or the other's demise.
  • And in Immortal Empires Grimgor finally gets some free space as he's moved eastwards to the Mountains of Mourn, away from Thorgrim and any Dawi...only to be right next to KHOLEK SUNEATER. And ZHARR-NAGGRUND. He is infamously a huge pest to Chaos Dwarf players, who will quickly have to deal with a green tide coming down from the mountains to battle their most hated enemy.
• Super Fly Reflexes: In the Greenskins trailer, a fly makes the mistake of buzzing too close to Grimgor's face, visibly annoying him. He catches it in his hand and crushes it.
• There's No Kill like Overkill: That quote at the top of the page? That's from him. And that's when he's in a good mood.
• Tin Tyrant: He's decked out in the Blood-Forged Armour, modified with bits and Orcish war paint. It just makes him look even bigger.
• Victory Is Boring: Grimgor once came within a hair's length of successfully invading Hell Pit entirely by accident, having gradually battled his way through the Skaven tunnels from Mount Red Eye through the increasingly horrible creatures Clan Moulder were releasing into the tunnels to stop the 'invasion' (including multiple Hell Pit Abominations and an octuplet of specially designed Storm Fiends). The only thing that saved Clan Moulder was that Grimgor had, at that point, gotten bored of slaughtering the endless hordes of rats and rat-related monsters and went back to Red Eye to find something else to fight.
• World's Best Warrior: As far as the Greenskins are concerned, Grimgor is the strongest Orc Warboss alive. In-game the Legendary Lords that can beat him in a one-on-one can be counted on one hand (once upon a time, provided they aren't mounted and simply kill him by repeatedly throwing him off his feet), and in the Canon Discontinuity Storm of Chaos storyline Grimgor duelled Archaeon and handily defeated him (his attempt to repeat it in the End Times continuity went less-than-stellar).

Azhag the Slaughterer

Azhag the Slaughterer

"Bloomin' 'at! Stop whispering at me! I know!"

"Shut up, crown! Dis is not a waste of time! We kill who I say we kill!"

Voiced by: Richard Ridings

Azhag is unusual amongst Orcs, and all the more terrifying because of it. Whereas most Orcs rely only on their brutish strength to achieve their ends, Azhag can grasp far-seeing strategy, utilising it to gain the edge on his enemies. To have such a tactical mind as Azhag possesses is entirely peculiar to most Greenskins. Though plenty are more than happy to follow a Warboss who wins the battles he picks so consistently and with such flair, something about him seems unnatural. He talks with words other Greenskins do not understand.

At times, his eyes glow with a dark aura. Occasionally he can be found in a trancelike state, mumbling or even arguing with himself incoherently. Rumours abound that the iron crown sitting atop his brow is actually an age-old relic, possessed of an ancient and powerful evil. Through this artefact Azhag has achieved a dark communion, augmenting his simple mind with the notably un-Orcish gifts of foresight and guile, earning him his fearsome reputation and grizzly title.

Though having spent the first game and much of the second game as a Legendary Lord available for the main Greenskins faction, the Total WAAAGH! update granted him a sub-faction up in Karak Ungor, leading the Bonerattlaz in Mortal Empires.

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• Artifact of Doom: The Crown of Sorcery contains at least a fragment of Nagash's soul, which constantly speaks to Azhag and manipulates his actions.
• Ax-Crazy: Whilst Azhag was never the sanest Orc, the Crown of Sorcery pays a heavy toll on his mind, not only being subjected to arguments with the spirit of Nagash, he's plagued by horrible dreams, which his unique skills Flavor Text talks about.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: One of Azhag's campaign bonuses in the first game, if you chose him as your starting Lord, is a permanent +10 boost to diplomatic relations with all Vampire Count factions on the map. Once he was split into his own faction for The Warden and the Paunch, this trait was upgraded to a +40 diplomatic bonus, towards both the Vampire Counts and Arkhan the Black.
• Blessed with Suck: Grimgor's faction bonuses were once (which you get if you made him your starting Legendary Lord) a flat +10% movement speed to all your armies and upkeep bonuses to the powerful Black Orcs unit. Azhag... used to get a +10 relations bonus with the Vampire Counts, a faction typically outside your diplomatic range who had exactly zero ability to help in your crucial opening battles against the Dwarfs (10+ wouldn't even be enough to get them to help you anyway). In Mortal Empires this was replaced by a +10% research speed... which would be moderately useful if Greenskins could do any research at all from turn 1, which they can't (they need a tier 3 building to start researching). As of the Greenskins race rework that came along The Warden and The Paunch in II, this has been subverted. Azhag's subfaction is located in close proximity to Sylvania and he now enjoys improved versions of both his previous faction traits — a 40-point diplomatic bonus with the vampires (and Followers of Nagash), as well as a 20% bonus to research (going hand-in-hand with a far more accessible tech tree), along with buffing up elite Orc units and giving them Vanguard deployment.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: He's considered this by other Orcs in-universe. Despite his tendency to loudly argue with his helmet and use of downright non-Orcy tactics like "flanking", he's considered one of the greatest Greenskin Warbosses since Gorbad.
• Clingy Costume: His crown cannot be removed or replaced with other artifacts once you unlock it.
• Consulting Mr Puppet: He can be heard arguing with the Crown in a few quest battles speeches and occasionally on the campaign map. Of course, in his case, the crown actually does speak to him and attempt to take over his mind.
• Cool Crown: Azhag wears the Crown of Sorcery, which once belonged to Nagash, the first and most powerful necromancer in the setting, and contains a sentient chunk of Nagash's soul inside it. In the fluff, the crown influences Azhag's behavior and occasionally attempts to take the metaphorical wheel of Azhag's body by force: in-game, it allows him to cast spells from the Lore of Death. Azhag also can't remove it from the Artifact slot once he completes the quest battle for the Crown.
• Cursed with Awesome: Yes the crown of Nagash pays a heavy toll on his sanity, but it grants him mastery of Death magic, and a host of other supernatural abilities.
• Demonic Possession: Zig-Zagged. The Crown of Sorcery whispers Nagash's thoughts and commands directly into Azhag's mind, trying to make him go to Nehekhara and bash everyone so Nagash can have his revenge and pave the way for his return. However, Azhag is too strong-willed to let Nagash actually control him. At worst the Crown can temporarily control Azhag's thoughts in his quest battle speeches, as seen when Azhag occasionally starts speaking with uncharacteristic sophistication, even dropping his accent, but the Orc always reasserts his will and tells Nagash to shut up.
• The Dragon: Arguably to Grimgor, seen as they're part of the same faction in the first game. As he takes orders from the Crown of Sorcery, Azhag is essentially this to Nagash as well.
• Dragon Ascendant: As of The Warden and The Paunch, Azhag has split off from what was once "The Greenskins" to independently lead the Bonerattlaz up north, no longer playing second fiddle to Grimgor... provided Azhag doesn't get defeated by Grimgor personally.
• Dragon Rider: Azhag can ride the wyvern Skullmuncha into battle, having tamed the mighty monster when it was fully grown rather than raising it from an egg as is usually the case.
• Dragon with an Agenda: In the first game. He's not especially loyal to Grimgor; he merely followed the larger Warboss' trail of destruction down to the Badlands and joined his WAAAGH! to pursue his own goals. Meanwhile, Nagash keeps trying to order Azhag to head south to Nehekhara, but Azhag keeps dragging his feet on the matter, what with all the fights he can get into on the way.
• Dual Wielding: With Slagga's Slashas, a sword and axe. No-one's actually sure who "Slagga" is, though.
• Evil Sounds Deep: In a game filled with hundreds of villains with comically deep, gravelly voices, Azhag takes it another level with an almost implausible baritone croak which sounds like he's talking through a mountain.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Azhag possesses an unique variant of the Great Halls of Nagash landmark, found in Nagashizzar, which grants his entire faction benefits such as immunity to Vampiric Corruption and even more diplomatic bonuses with Nagash's servants. So you can in fact do as the Crown of Sorcery says and go south, and get rewarded for doing so. It comes with some unique flavor text too:
  Alright, Iron Hat, we'z 'ere. Now what?
• Genius Bruiser: By Orc standards at least. Azhag is a decent strategist, a powerful mage (granted to him by his crown), and an all-around strong fighter, even without the raw power of Grimgor. Several of his unique skills note his tactical prowess.
• Giant Flyer: His Wyvern mount, Skullmuncha, which unlike other Wyverns seems to have poisonous fangs, granting the Warboss poison damage.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: His eyes glow green as a side effect of wearing the crown.
• Healing Factor: His final unique skill, "Darkest Nimbus" grants him regeneration (alongside immense winds of magic reserves), which is caused by Black Magic from his crown.
• Hearing Voices: The Crown of Sorcery's info states that, whilst wearing it, Azhag hears a voice "as dry as the grave and old as the southern deserts". It can be briefly heard during his Quest Battles as it tries to override Ahzag's mind.
• It Can Think: Downplayed, since everyone knows Orcs are intelligent (so to speak), but few if any expect anything more from them than brutish base cunning, and nobody expects an Orc warlord with as good a grasp of sorcery, strategy and tactics as the Crown of Sorcery grants Azhag.
• Magic Knight: Once he gains the Crown of Sorcery, Azhag can cast spells from the Lore of Death.
• Magikarp Power: Azhag's stat line is worse than a regular Warboss, his starting units are worse than Grimgor's, his access to the Lore of Death is restricted until he completes his first Quest and gains the Crown of Sorcery, and he can't ride Skullmuncha until he reaches level 21. Once he does gets his crown and Skullmuncha, he becomes much more powerful thanks to his flying mount and Death Lore spells.
• The Magnificent: Azhag the Slaughterer.
• Now What?: Verbatim the description of the unique building Azhag gets in Nagashizzar, due to Azhag having finally reached Nagash's body like his crown incessantly asks, but lacking the means to resurrect him.
• The Plan: What weirds other Greenskins out so much about him is that not only does Azahg have these, he actually bothers to explain them to his subordinates much like a human general would. This is in direct contradiction to the usual Orcish practice of having no real plan other than charging straight at the enemy, and "explaining" orders via bellowing at the nearest underling along with a complimentary smack.
• Power Born of Madness: His unique skill "Imbued by Madness", which grants lower attrition and hefty upkeep decreases to his army, notes Ahzag's horde is made stronger by the fact Azhag is completely bonkers.
• Spared by the Adaptation: In the Warhammer canon, he died a few years after Karl Franz's coronation and some years before Grimgor's rise to power while in this game the two co-exist as legendary lords of the Greenskins.
• Squishy Wizard: Comparatively speaking, but Azhag's combat stats are worse than Grimgor's by far and even generic orc Warbosses will defeat him one-on-one. He is still more powerful than Wurrzag, and this goes away entirely once he's riding Skullmuncha.
• Villain Team-Up: His use of the Crown of Sorcery makes it easier to form alliances with Vampire Counts and Nagash's Tomb King loyalists led by Arkhan the Black.

Skarsnik

Skarsnik (and Gobbla), Warlord of the Eight Peaks

"Gobbla iz ungry!"

"So, 'ere's de plan. Take 'em in de front and in de sides — I want the way the clear so I can get my new prodder! Get it? If I see any of youse running your own way... well, Gobbla iz ungry. He's always hungry."

Voiced by: Christopher Adams

Skarsnik is the chieftain of the Crooked Moon Tribe and is widely acknowledged as the most powerful Night Goblin in the World's Edge Mountains. This reputation was earned through devious machinations, relentless spite, and wholesale brutality rare even among his pernicious race.

A vicious melee fighter in his own right, what makes him truly formidable is his favoured pet, the Giant Cave Squig Gobbla. The beast’s colossal teeth and voracious appetite make it a horrifying spectacle on the battlefield; to Gobbla, enemy units are as much a perambulating smorgasboard as a physical foe.

Skarsnik is a Legendary Lord available to those who purchase The King and the Warlord DLC. Skarsnik also leads his own unique, playable sub-faction, the Crooked Moon Clan.

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• A Commander Is You: Skarsnik leads the Crooked Moons, who are probably the single best example of a Spammer faction in the series. He begins the game with a 40% upkeep discount on the already dirt-cheap goblin units and can push the price even further down as the campaign progresses. Players have reported being able to recruit several stacks of goblins per turn, making Skarsnik the only faction able to reliably outnumber the Skaven.
• Androcles' Lion: Skarsnik first befriended Gobbla when he saved the young squig from being abused by one of his rivals. Years later, when said rival threw Skarsnik to his squigs when they were battling for leadership of Crooked Moon, the largest of the squigs turned out to be Gobbla and defended Skarsnik. Naturally, once Skarsnik won he fed his rival to Gobbla.
• Arch-Enemy: The vengeful Dwarf King Belegar Ironhammer and the bloodthirsty Skaven Warlord Queek Headtaker, both of whom Skarsnik has fought with for control of Karak Eight Peaks for many years. The DLC Lord Pack The King & the Warlord for the first game pitted Belegar and Skarsnik against each other, and in Mortal Empires and Immortal Empires, all three have campaign goals and victory conditions that include taking Karak Eight Peaks and wiping the other two's factions out.
• Bad Boss: One of Skarnik's favorite ways of showing his love for Gobbla is by letting him eat any gobbo that even thinks about running away or disobeying his orders. It also seems to do wonders in keeping the normally cowardly goblins in line.
• The Beastmaster: He commands the dreaded Gobbla, a monster squig capable of devouring anything that ticks Skarsnik off.
• The Chessmaster: As a Goblin Warboss, he has to be really cunning to stay on top of the pile as well as brutal, and Skarsnik is damn good at that. Skarsnik is in fact the most devious Goblin this side of the World's Edge Mountains and his remarkable survival as the leader of the Crooked Moon tribe whilst being at war against the Dwarfs and Skaven simultaneously is a testimony of Skarsnik's talent at sniffing out rival schemes and assassination attempts.
• The Chosen One: According to his life story, Skarsnik once met a giant goblin made of stars (Gork, or possibly Mork) who commanded him to be the bestest gobbo since Grom da Paunch.
• Decapitation Presentation: According to his lore snippet in Immortal Empires, Skarsnik enjoys decapitating skaven and leaving their skulls around for Queek, mocking the Headtaker's main shtick by inflicting the same fate on the skaven.
• Eaten Alive: Gobbla tends to do this as a finishing move. Can reach Clown-Car Base levels after a decently long fight, thanks to Gobbla eating dozens of soldiers.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Really adores his squig, Gobbla. Gobbla, in turn, often licks him in affection as an animation. During Warhammer: The End Times, Gobbla is killed by a Skaven packmaster and Snarsnik suffers a Villainous Breakdown, losing all will to fight and just wanders off into the distance.
• Foil:
  • To Grimgor, as a powerful Night Goblin warlord opposite a Black Orc one, but also with Grimgor being primarily a doer while Skarsnik is primarily a thinker. During Warhammer: The End Times, Wurrzag da Great Green Prophet believed they would share the place of the chosen champion of the Greenskin gods — Grimgor the Champion of Gork, Skarsnik the Champion of Mork. Gameplaywise, Skarsnik is heavily based around sporting massive numbers of goblins and squigs that rely on ambushes and devious tricks, while Grimgor is more based around using elite Black Orcs that are fewer in numbers and head-on fights. As of Immortal Empires, Skarsnik has even taken over Grimgor's position as the major Greenskins warlord in the World's Edge Mountains.
  • To Grom, as well. Apart from being unusually powerful Goblin Warbosses who both command Orcs despite being Goblins, the two are polar opposites. Skarsnik leans into their races strengths by rising to power with cunning and trickery and commands Orcs by virtue of the prestige involved with his command of Karak Eight Peaks, while Grom has completely moved away from being a Goblin and looks and behaves more like an Orc, and as such commands Orcs because he's big and strong enough to beat them up. Skarsnik's campaign is focused around reclaiming his home, while Grom wants to destroy someone else's. Both their campaigns are also fairly focused on migration, but they want to be going in opposite directions; Grom to the west towards Ulthuan, Skarsnik to the east by south east towards Karak Eight Peaks.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Unlike in the tabletop lore, Skarsnik does not actually start out holding Karak Eight Peaks; a rebellion has ousted him from the hold and he needs to reclaim it.
  • Skarsnik, like all Goblins not named Grom, can't unleash a WAAAGH! during battles in the tabletop (Goblins are too weedy to get a good WAAAGH! going). Here, he has his own unique WAAAGH! like the other Greenskin legendary lords.
• Genuine Human Hide: Yes, that is the flayed bearded face of a dwarf that he is wearing around his neck.
• Glass Cannon: Skarsnik is even slower than Grimgor, is also stuck footslogging, and his large size and low armour makes him very vulnerable to missiles. If he hits melee alongside a bodyguard that keeps him from getting surrounded, the pair will tear the enemy (especially large ones) a new one extremely quickly.
• Large and in Charge: Skarsnik is noted in the lore to be almost human-sized, and towers over his fellow Night Goblins. This is also represented in-game, though it's a trait he shares with all hero and lord characters being larger than their regular counterparts.
• Loophole Abuse: Crooked Moon's restrictions on recruiting orc units do not apply to Savage Orcs, making taking Ekrund and other Savage Orc recruitment posts very profitable for Skarsnik.
• Magikarp Power: Crooked Moon is rated as a 'Hard' start, starting with a minor settlement, being surrounded by hostile greater powers (The Empire, Karak Norn, Clan Angrund and Argwylon in Mortal Empires and Karaz-a-Karak, Zhufbar and Karak Kadrin in Immortal Empires) and having only access to weak goblins. Once Skarsnik re-conquers Karak Eight Peaks, techs up to his more advanced goblin units, and carves out an economic base in the Badlands, few factions can match Skarsnik's ability to drown the map in goblin armies.
• Master Poisoner: Like all Night Goblin bosses, Skarsnik can take a skill that gives every one of his units poisoned attacks. He himself can get a particularly virulent poison on his weapon.
• Morality Pet: Skarsnik is extremely fond of his pet squig Gobbla, treating him more like a friend than an actual pet.
• Our Goblins Are Different: Skarsnik is a Night Goblin, a sub-breed of goblin that lives primarily underground. Also notable is that Skarsnik's armies are generally restricted to Goblin units only, even if they confederate with other Greenskin factions. The only way Crooked Moon Tribe armies can recruit rank and file Orc units is to retake Karak Eight Peaks and build a unique building chain there.
• Right-Hand Attack Dog: Gobbla, a massive Squig that accompanies Skarsnik wherever he goes.
• The Rival: To Grimgor. The uneasy alliance he had with Gorfang Rotgut has been replaced with all-out hostility between him and the new boss over who's the meanest git in town. Depending on how diplomacy is handled, one will eventually either kill the other or force him to obey.
• The Strategist: An immensely skilled schemer and thinker by greenskin standards, Skarsnik is able to fight a two-pronged war against both Belegar and Queek at the same time using only goblins. In-game, Skarsnik has a big bonus to ambush chance, can Vanguard Deploy most gobbo units and temporarily give them Stalk and Unspottable as long as they stay close to him, representing his "schemes". In Immortal Empires he begins play with Lightning Strikes enabled, which requires an eight skill point investment for most other lords, and has a pair of unique blue line skills that buff his campaign movement and reduces reinforcement speed for Skarsnik's entire faction.
• Surrounded by Idiots: He's smarter than most Goblins (being able to count a decent amount beyond five, for example, as well as speaking at least three languages). His commanders often don't share his intellect, leading to much frustration when they don't understand his cunning commands or don't realise that maps shouldn't be held upside down.
• Wicked Cultured: Speaks Reikspiel (Empire), Khazalid (Dwarf) and Queekish (Skaven) fluently and once captured a human playwright to write his life story.
• Zerg Rush: Skarsnik's faction bonuses reduce the hiring cost and upkeep of all goblin units, including lords and heroes, by 50% (this includes all orc artillery, which is crewed by goblins). Once Skarsnik controls the badlands he can flood the rest of the map with super cheap goblin armies.

Wurrzag

Wurrzag, da Great Green Prophet

"I'm off to find Da Git, anyone comin'?"

Voiced by: Peter Cliff

Wizards are widely considered to be touched by the divine, which is unsurprising when one considers the maelstrom of forces they routinely channel. In this regard, however, the Savage Orc Shaman Wurrzag is in a league of his own.

The greatest herald of Gork and Mork, he appears in battle as a gyrating lunatic, actively seeking out the heart of the conflict where wizards normally fear to tread. Indeed, when Wurrzag is present, those gifted in the magical arts are advised to give him a wide berth, as magical mishaps are rumoured to befall those nearby.

He inspires his Savage Orc cohorts with a brutal battle-fervour, driving them to ever-greater acts of ferocity, and supporting them further with spells and incantations as he races around the field atop his fearsome War Boar Spleenrippa.

He was released as a Free DLC Legendary Lord that came alongside The King and the Warlord. He is the leader of a Savage Orc Tribe sub-faction, the Bloody Handz.

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• Affably Evil: Wurrzag is a lot more friendly and personable than the other Legendary Lords, even if he is a batshit insane warlord who wants to lead his savage lads to tear civilization down to its roots.
• Barbarian Tribe: Leads a horde of Savage Orcs, and his skill tree, besides enhancing his magic prowess, is focused on buffing them and making them even more powerful and resilient.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Wurrzag is insane even by Greenskin standards, and unlike most of his kind he expresses his craziness by being a big joker. His idle animation is an over the top dance. That doesn't mean he can't be as dangerous as any of the other Legendary Lords, if not more.
• The Chooser of the One: He's out to find "Da Once an' Future Git", a champion of Gork and Mork who will unite all Orcs and Goblins into a single, massive WAAAGH! and lead them on a rampage throughout the world. He seems to have pegged Grimgor for this role.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: By combining all of Wurrzag's disparate parts, such as his Orcish simplicity, his completely undisciplined spellcaster's mania, and his Savage Orc habits, he comes across as a friendly guy who just wants to party, which for the dead 'ard Orcs (especially the Savage ones), makes him look like an absolute lunatic.
• Continuity Nod: The Squiggly Beast references Wurrzag's trademark "Wurrzag's Revenge" spell from the tabletop, which let him One-Hit Kill wizards by turning them into squigs. Sadly, the spell was not added to the game and instead functions as a map-wide miscast mechanic.
• Cool Mask: Wears the vibrantly-decorated Baleful Mask over his face, which allows him to cast Magic Missiles.
• Dancing with Myself: When standing in place and not mounted, Wurrzag will stand around dancing.
• The Dragon: The only Legendary Lord among the Greenskins who is explicitly stated to be taking orders from Grimgor Ironhide. The others are either just tagging along for kicks (Azhag) or are at odds with Grimgor (Skarsnik).
  • The Starscream: That said, he still needs to eliminate the main Greenskin faction to win the Grand Campaign, which means either conquering them, absorbing them through confederation, or simply hanging back and letting the Dwarfs take care of it.
• Familiar: The Squiggly Beast, which is an Orc shaman Wurrzag transformed into a tiny squig. He now carries the creature in a small cage upon his back, as proof of his power. In-game, it allows Wurrzag to use the "Augment of the Winds" ability to boost his army's power reserve.
• Full-Boar Action: Rides a painted war-boar named Spleenrippa.
• Giant Foot of Stomping: Though he is mostly meant to use supportive spells to buff up his crews, once he has fully upgraded his unique skill tree, he can pretty much spam The Foot of Gork several times during a battle.
• Mad Prophet: Known as "da Great Green Prophet", Wurrzag claims to be touched by Gork and Mork and is on a quest to find someone he calls "Da Once an' Future Git". Like all orc shamans, of course, Wurrzag is totally insane, and this is only made worse by being a Savage Orc, who are a sub-race considered crazy even by orc standards.
• Magic Staff: The Bonewood Staff, which reduces Wurrzag's chance to fail at overcasting spells and allows him to bestow a map-wide attack buff on his army.
• Malevolent Masked Man: He's bad, but no moreso than any other Greenskin.
• Psychic Static: The passive trait "Wurrzag's Revenge" inflicts a +40% miscast chance on all enemy spellcasters on the battlefield, described as the orc shaman clouding their minds with confusion.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Ostensibly the in-game reason he's in charge of his own tribe rather than being part of the main Greenskin faction. Grimgor tacitly approved of Wurrzag claiming he was chosen by Gork and Mork but was not fond of Wurrzag's "mumbo-jumbo", so he sent him off to aid the nearby Savage Orc tribe at Ekrund. Downplayed, however, in that this is still a worthwhile mission and he and Grimgor start out the Grand Campaign on relatively good terms, including a Non-Aggression Pact.
• Support Party Member: His magical lore is an excellent mix of buffs and direct-damage spells, he has a unique trait that can grant Magical Attacks to his whole army and strip all magical resistance that the enemy has, and his unique abilities make Savage Orc units more effective in battle and much harder to kill (he can grant 50% Physical resistance to his Savage Orcs with the right skills selected). While he won't ever be a pure melee powerhouse like Grimgor or Skarsnik, or even a Magic Knight on the same level as Azhag, he neatly fits in with them as a Wizard Lord with a focus on making everyone else in his army more powerful and blowing up what they can't easily kill with his spells.
• Voodoo Doll: One of Wurrzag's abilities, "Da Effigy of Da Git", employs one of these. It can be used in combat to damage and pin down a single unit, implying mastery of Hollywood Voodoo.

Grom the Paunch

Grom the Paunch of the Misty Mountains, Warlord of the Broken Axe

"It's time we giv da pointy 'eads a proppa fight!"

Warlord Grom, known more famously as Grom the Paunch or Grom the Fat of the Misty Mountains, was not only the largest and most powerful Goblin to have ever lived, but also among the greatest of Greenskin Warbosses, being the only Greenskin Warlord to have ever made a successful invasion of the distant lands of Ulthuan. Gobbos are cowardly and disloyal, but nothing stirs their wicked hearts like Grom, mightiest of Goblin Warbosses. Stories of Grom's greatness still command attention around any Goblin camp and if a Shaman should conjure his superlative-sized image, even the most boisterous gobbo will behave with reverence.

In Grom's looming presence Goblins will stand up straight, refrain from grumbling backtalk and even limit their rampant nose-picking. These ultimate displays of respect are because, to lowly Goblins, Grom is a living god, the embodiment of everything that they will never be — large, ferocious and idolised.

All Warbosses are full of themselves and boastful, but once again Grom displayed his epic proportions. Here was a Goblin from a backwards tribe grown large and powerful, suddenly able to bully Orcs and command as he saw fit. It is no wonder it went to his head. Soon after, he crushed an opposing leader beneath his bulk and added the Night Goblins of Thunder Mountain to his growing forces. Grom began to refer to himself in the third person. If they wanted to stay in his favour, Grom's followers had to use phrases such as "yer immensity" when addressing him. Both Grom and his horde grew larger still.

Grom was added to the games in Total War: Warhammer II, as part of The Warden and the Paunch DLC. He leads the Sub-Faction, Broken Axe and is playable on both the Vortex and Mortal Empires campaigns.

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• Adipose Rex: Grom is almost as wide as he is tall.
• Arch-Enemy: Of Eltharion the Grim. Lorewise this was a somewhat One Sided Rivalry, with Grom not really caring whose city he was currently burning down.
• Beware the Silly Ones: It's hard to believe that a mere goblin chowing down on a piece of troll meat would somehow make him powerful enough to invade Ulthuan at the head of his own horde, something that even most lords of Chaos can't brag about. He may look comical as an incredibly obese goblin, but it doesn't stop him from pasting anyone in his way.
  • This also goes for all the other goblins in his army. Normally, a Greenskin lord with nothing but goblins in his army is no threat since they're Cannon Fodder, but because of the very powerful bonuses and buffs he provides his goblins, along with the right meals eaten, they can become far stronger than most equivalent orc units.
• Big Eater: He ate raw troll meat on a dare, normally a death sentence due to the meat's tendency to out-regenerate the digestive system, and survived. In-game, Grom has the "Grom's Cauldron" mechanic, allowing him and the Broken Axe tribe to hunt down exotic meals for Grom to gain faction bonuses. His idle animations in battle include his goblin minion Niblet feeding him large shanks of meat, which he will happily down one after the other for the duration of the battle.
• Blood Knight: In contrast to most goblins, Grom loves fighting. In his Vortex campaign his main goal is to re-invade Ulthuan for a good fight.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef: Zigzagged Trope. The ingredients used and meals made in Grom's Cauldron definitely don't sound appetizing (Goblin Leg, Centigor Milk, and Poison Mushroom stew, anyone?), but not only does Grom love them, but they confer some hefty bonuses to him, his army, and his faction for an extended period of time.
• Cursed with Awesome: Eating that troll meat really turned out well for him, flatulence issues and an inability to see his own feet aside.
• Ectoplasm: One of the ingredients available for use in Grom's Cauldron is Ectoplasm, depicted as a bottle of green slime and obtained after defeating armies containing spectral units. When cooked into a meal, it provides the Ghostly Protection ability, which increases its targets' resistance to physical (but not magical) attacks.
  "Magic pus makes dish betta! No, me don't know where came from!"
• Expy: Grom's sidekick Niblet is an expy of the WH40K character Makari the Grot, who similarly to Niblet was a lucky goblin adopted by a great Warlord (the ork warboss Ghazkhull Mag Uruk Thraka) as his lucky charm. Makari being missing between 5th-7th edition was explained away as Ghazkhull having accidentally sat on him, just as Grom did to Niblet. Grom himself in the trailer of The Warden and the Paunch gives vibes of Immortan Joe.
• Fat Bastard: Really fat, and really malevolent to go with it — so much in fact that he managed to kill the warboss of a Night Goblin tribe by literally crushing him with his massive paunch. If not for his green skin you could plausibly mistake him for an Ogre. His sheer bulk means that he's always deployed on his chariot, in order to remain maneuverable.
• Fat and Proud: Being morbidly obese is nothing he has any shame about in the slightest. If anything, it is his biggest point of pride as it made him the mightiest Goblin of all time, with only Skarsnik being a close enough second to even be worth mentioning. He boasts about his size and weight with genuine pride in diplomacy dialogue.
• Foil:
  • To Gorbad Ironclaw, being his gobbo equivalent. Both of them are The Paragon of their respective race and united greenskins of both types under their banner and created the greatest WAAAAAGH!s of their time, defeated the dwarfs sufficiently to cause them to seal themselves in their holds, destroyed vast parts of the Empire, before ultimately being undone by attrition, infighting and a siege that didn't go their way. Ultimately, Grom came back, while Gorbad so far hasn't.
  • Also to Skarsnik. Both are great goblin warchiefs, but Skarsnik uses cunning and underhanded tactics and seldom uses orcs in his armies, while Grom is a Frontline General who leads through pure strength and will use any greenskin, orc or goblin, as long as it serves him.
• Gasshole: A side effect of eating and digesting constantly regenerating troll meat gave Grom constant, massive flatulence. It's not reflected in-game other than the occasional rude noise in the heat of battle, however.
  • Although, if he devours the rotten fish burger, his breath becomes so bad that he can unleash a deadly belch as a spell during battle.
• Gotta Catch 'Em All: Grom's Vortex campaign is based around collecting and cooking ingredients for new foodstuffs, with Grom having to cook 12 different meals before he can attack Tor Yvresse again (though you can just blitz and attack it straight away before it can get the mist defense).
• Healing Factor: The troll meat Grom ingested has fused with his own flesh, giving him the strength and regenerative abilities of a troll.
• He's Back!: His last siege of Ulthuan is explicitly mentioned by Eltharion, and Grom seems eager for a round two against the 'pointy ears'.
• Kick the Dog: One of Grom's important ingredients is Lizard Legs which are harvested from butchered Skinks.
• Large and in Charge: Immensely so; he's the biggest goblin in the game and bigger than even a Black Orc Warboss, which is why he commands such respect from both goblins and orcs, and the latter would normally never give a normal goblin boss the time of day. His quest battle involves picking a fight with a rival goblin who claims to be bigger than Grom, which turns out to be because he's got a really tall hat.
• Near-Villain Victory: He almost undid the Great Vortex centuries before the Vortex Campaign even began — Tor Yvresse is site of a vital waypoint in the ritual that maintains the Vortex. Had Grom succeeded in sacking the city, the Vortex would destabilize and collapse without any means to stop it.
• Number Two:
  • Grom is always accompanied by his Night Goblin sidekick Niblet, whom Grom once accidentally sat on. Niblet emerged unharmed once Grom rose to his feet again, which was seen as an omen that he had been blessed by Gork (or possibly Mork) to be Grom's assistant. In-game he can be seen dangling from the Lucky Banner attached to Grom's chariot and fetching him meat shanks to eat.
  • Grom used to be advised by the orc shaman Ol' Blacktoof, a shaman almost as bonkers as Wurrzag, until Eltharion the Grim decapitated him during the siege of Tor Yvresse. Niblet has recovered the head in Grom's absence, and Grom will occasionally be granted quests by the spirit of the old shaman still living within. Magic using Greenskins can also equip themselves with Blacktoof's head, which allows them to summon a Rogue Idol for a short period of time.
• The Paragon: Of goblins. Goblins are normally small, runty and cowardly, and little more than cheap cannon fodder and punching bags to their larger orc cousins, but Grom grew to such a size and ferocity that he can command his own Waaagh! and make orcs do as he says. Normal goblins idolize him. Additionally, goblins fear elves and hate fighting them, but Grom's mere presence in an army causes all goblins to overcome that fear.
• Red Baron: "The Goblin King". Lorewise he's also referred to as "'is immensity" or "'is enormity" by his tribe.
• Spared by the Adaptation: In the tabletop, Grom was a Predecessor Villain who disappeared a century ago, following the failed siege of Tor Yvresse. His ultimate fate was unknown to almost all Elves, who believe he drowned in the sea after fleeing Ulthuan What actually happened was that, in the end, Eltharion caught him and brutally tortured him to death for his crimes, before incinerating his remains in a magical furnace to keep him from regenerating. Not only has he explicitly survived in the game, Eltharion has apparently been futilely trying to hunt him down ever since.
• Stout Strength: Having grown to immense size for a goblin, Grom packs a wallop in melee even before his chariot comes into play.
• Too Important to Walk: Noticeably, Grom does not have the option of fighting on foot. He is ALWAYS mounted on his chariot.
• Unknown Rival: Git Guzzler, a goblin warboss who claims to be the biggest gobbo out there, despite being nowhere near as big as Grom. For the longest time, Grom hardly even knew the guy existed until he apparently tried to steal Grom's axe, which Grom tries to reclaim during his quest battle. Hell, all of the previous bravado Git Guzzler had was thrown out the window and replaced with pleas of innocence once Grom came knocking on his door. Turns out the incident with the axe was actually staged by Skarsnik, who attempts to ambush Grom during the battle.
• You Killed My Father: Grom killed Moranion, the father of Eltharion, during his initial invasion of Ulthuan. Grom, on his end, didn't really know or care who Moranion was, beyond being an obvious leader of the elves and wearing a really fancy cloak Grom looted and later granted to his shaman.

Noteworthy Minor Factions

Savage Orc Tribes

Savage Orcs are by far the most primitive breed of greenskin. While most of the greenskin races appreciate technology for its military applications, Savage Orcs have a primal, neolithic society and shun these advances.

Savage Orcs do not wear any armour and use weapons made of wood, stone, or bone. They also daub crude warpaint upon themselves, firmly believing these wards will protect them from harm, and in battle they fight as berserkers with little regard to their own safety. This firm belief somehow generates a genuine magical protection, which indeed protects them somewhat. To the Savage Orcs, this proves the superiority of their ways over the Orcs who have embraced technology.

Savage Orcs tribes inhabit the most remote areas of the world: large forests and especially the deep jungles of the Southlands. Some live on the great plains, following the mighty herds of boars and other animals. In the Southlands, the powerful sunlight and heat has strangely affected the already brutish brains of the orcs, making the Savage Orcs single-mindedly savage and brutal.

The Bloody Handz Savage Orc Tribe is playable for players who select Wurrzag as their Legendary Lord. It operates with the Greenskin mechanics, except for a special building that produces Savage Orc units and their WAAAGH armies also contain Savage Orcs. They also have an inability to hire other Legendary Lords until the main Greenskin faction is confederated.

General Tropes

• Ascended Extra: As of the King and the Warlord, it is possible to play one of the Savage Orc tribes with Wurrzag at its head.
• Bad with the Bone: Savage Orc Boyz wield crude clubs, which are often made of sharpened bone.
• Barbarian Tribe: Compared to even regular Greenskins, which isn't a small feat.
• The Berserker: Savage Orcs are even more bloodthirsty and wild than regular orcs, and charge into battle clad in little more than a loincloth and warpaint.
• Darkest Africa: The Southlands are the Warhammer equivalent of Africa, and take pains to qualify for every savage native trope there is.
• Glass Cannon: The Savage Orcs and their tribes are this, in an appropriately Orcish fashion. Every Savage unit doesn't wear armor and only gets a flat damage resistance to all damage sources. They spend time before a fight getting themselves worked up into a killing frenzy, so that they hit a lot harder than their counterparts in the "civilized" Orc army. They're all about just smashing the enemy to bits before they're shot down. Downplayed with playable Savage Orcs; Wurrzag's commander ability boosts the physical resistance from their tattoos, making his units almost as tough as regular Orcs (if a lot more vulnerable to missiles due to a lack of shields).
• The Horde: Zig-Zagged. The Skull Takerz tribe travels in hordes that contain all of their infrastructure, much like the Warriors of Chaos and Beastmen. The Top Knotz, meanwhile, occupy settlements in the Badlands.
• Ludd Was Right: At least, this is what they believe as they shun almost any weapon that isn't shoddily crafted together from bones, sinew, wood and rocks while only seeing warpaint as proper armor. None of this metal crap! And as for tactics, nothing beats simply rushing into a straight line like the good old days of the Southlands. No stinking sneaky stuff needed here! And considering how they smash things faster than their equivalent units in the main Greenskin armies and only heavily armored Black Orcs are tougher than them (long as magic damage isn't being used), they might have a point.
• More Dakka: A decidedly primitive example; Savage Orc armies in the campaign have a distressing tendency to include as many Savage Orc Arrer Boyz as they can, which can be surprisingly devastating if you lack sufficient cavalry or shielded units to counter them.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Due to all of their units essentially being variations of regular Greenskin units with 'Savage Orc' tacked onto the name, one of their higher-tier units is known as the Savage Orc Boar Boy Big 'Unz.
• Palette Swap: Of the main Greenskins faction, albeit with a strong focus on Savage units.
• The Savage South: The largest gatherings of Savage Orcs are at the very bottom of the Badlands, and the settlements where they gather are marked on the Strategic Overview. If a Greenskins player captures these settlements, they'll be able to recruit Savage Orc units.
• This Means Warpaint: Savage Orcs are covered in woad-like markings, which confers their units with a passive resistance to all forms of non-magical damage. Ostensibly, this is because the Savage Orcs genuinely believe the paint is affording them magical protection.
• The Usual Adversaries: Goddamn Savage Orcs will be a presence even into the very late game, where a horde of them can occasionally appear anywhere on the world map at random, logic be damned. Early in the game this can change a player's strategic calculation, while late in the game they are simply an irritant.
• We Have Reserves: The Bloody Handz playable faction has halved upkeep for Savage Orc units, which encourages a playstyle based around spamming loads of cheap but offensively powerful infantry that die in droves.

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