Warhammer’s Ogre Kingdoms army is the perfect choice for gourmands
It’s a bit of an unfair observation that ogres are only good at eating and fighting. They are also loyal mercenaries, skilled traders, and, when the need arises, even capable of diplomacy. But deep in every ogre’s rumbling stomach lies the realization that if you love eating meat and breaking bones so much, why would you do anything else?
Unlike the insidious forces of Chaos or the brutal Dark Elves, Ogres don’t just inflict pain—more often than not, it’s a by-product of their all-consuming greed. They believe that power makes right. If you are too weak to stop someone from taking something from you, it is your fault that you have not become bigger. Perhaps not the fairest approach to owning a property, but exactly what you would expect from a 10-foot closet made of fat and muscle. This way of thinking extends to politics as well. “Ogre Kingdoms” is a misnomer, conjuring up images of laws, structure, and royalty. But instead of a monarch, ogres are ruled by an Overtyrant: usually, the biggest, richest, loudest, and most ruthless being an ogre has to offer.
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This description barely matches the current Overtyrant Grisus Goldtooth. Or, to use his full name, Trade Lord Greasus Tribal Reaver Drakecrash, Gatekeeper Crusher, Treasure Keeper Goldtooth Surprisingly Obese – an ogre so rich and obese that he forgoes walking in favor of being pushed by globulars on an armed treasure chest.
This insatiable desire to consume is spreading or quite possibly coming from the Great Maw. Ogres revere this yawning abyss on the planet as a god: a bottomless, all-consuming void that poisons the surrounding landscape, so vast that it could engulf an entire race. Ogres worship and fear the Maw. It is the source of their inner magic but also a reminder of dark times. Legend has it that the astronomers of Great Cathay dropped a comet on the ogres for their transgressions, wiping out most of the race and driving them from the fertile grasslands into the icy mountains of Morne. Now Butchers and Masters of Slaughter serve the Maw, feasting on the fly to satisfy its bottomless hunger.
You can see the worship of everything intestinal in their armor. Most Ogres waddle into battle wearing only a pair of breeches and wearing an unnerving smile. But the stomach is sacred and therefore usually protected by the intestinal plate. Griseous doesn’t care because they don’t make large enough gut plates, and no ogre in their right mind would want to cover such a great belly space.
On the battlefield, the ogre army is usually outnumbered but rarely outnumbered. Fighting back an ogre attack is like trying to fight a landslide with a spoon. Even the simplest Ogre units, the Bulls, will crush all but the most resilient enemies on the offensive. And their more elite iteration, the Iron Guts, is the same, but with better armor and more self-confidence.
Lowest on the ogre food chain are the gnoblars: the dastardly cousins of the goblins, whose continued existence is based on being more useful than edible. They are useless in combat; they mainly exist to slow enemies down while larger, more dangerous units maneuver into position. However, they have limited enough intelligence to create things like launchers: essentially a way to turn weapons too small for ogres into deadly long-range projectiles.
Leadbelchers are just as prone to ranged combat, perhaps because a cannon is one of the few things as loud and dangerous as an ogre. While other races spend ages maneuvering their artillery into position, the Leadbelchers have cannons. Their range is terrifying, their strikes are devastating, and they’re still a 10-foot wall of fat and muscle even after they’ve run out of ammo. And the Ironblaster is the largest gunpowder weapon that ogres can use, a cannon that makes the human and dwarf equivalents look like armed sugar sculptures.
And then there’s the cavalry. To get an idea of just how destructive the ogre-mounted units are, you just need to consider what animal would be big enough to carry an ogre and decide if you want to stand in front of it. And the answer is no because it’s basically the same as asking if you want to be hit by a hippo-driven ice cream truck. The Mournful Fangs’ cavalry is fearsome enough – huge feline predators that roam the inhospitable mountain slopes – and the Crushers, who ride a lumbering rhinoceros, are the same, but with more weight and worse eyesight. And then there is the Stone Horn, which answers the eternal question: what if a mammoth made a baby into a mountain?
Let’s end with the famous saying about ogre intelligence: they are often as thick as two short planks, yet smart enough to knock those planks together and beat a thoughtful observer into a bloody mess. This perfectly characterizes the Ogre Kingdoms: there is little room for subtlety or subterfuge. But you’ll be too busy eating, fighting, and hitting planks to care.
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