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Great Ork Gods
You're Green, You're Ugly and the Gods Hate You!
This little game revolves around Orks, the green, stupid and ugly variety, and their Gods, who hate them utterly. As you can see in the product summary section of this review the game was written by Jack Aidley, who claims it was developed on The Forge, a network of game designers.
The review is broken up into four sections:
- What's in the package?
- What's it all about?
- How does it work?
- The Pig's opinion.
What's in the package?
The game is supposed to be in beta status and probably on hiatus, nothing happened since June 2004. For the time being you can get it here for free (as in free beer). In the package you will find three PDF-files, the 11 page »core rules«, including a sample scenario, a rules summary hand-out, and a sheet with seven God cards. The presentation of the rules is nice and clean and the author has gone the extra length to detail which fonts and tools were used in the creation of the document. The layout is two columns on letter-size or european A4 format, thus it is printer-friendly. The hand-out is also two columns but suffers from condensed fonts that slightly hamper readability. The God cards are a rehash of the Gods as presented in the rules and should be cut out before the game starts. The layout of the sheet is not optimal for this purpose and you better have a cutting board or you will have some ugly cards.
The rules summary hand-out and the core rules clash in a minor point about deployment of a game resource in conjunction with the naming habits of Orks, but this may only be a case of poor wording or me being brain-dead. Nothing serious and i think the summary is rather unnecessary anyway -- the players will know the rules after a few minutes into the game -- so i'm going to overlook that.
There is almost no artwork in the rules -- actually there is a picture of an orky axe and an illustration of an elf-on-a-stick -- but the author is upfront about shortcomings in the layout and art department and provides some samples on his homepage. This is a beta product after all, so artwork is not impacting my judgment. We haven't had any difficulties imagining dumb Orks milling around anyway.
This section covers almost all that is mentioned under Style in the RPGnet guidelines, so i pass my verdict on Style here. The material as presented is certainly adequate to convey the rules. The layout is pedestrian but usable, the game lacks index, table of contents, bookmarks or hyperlinks. For such a small game they are not really necessary, but still there is room for improvement. The writing is easy, funny and rather error-free, but then, English is not my first language. So i wrap it up in a final score of Style = 2.
What's it all about?
The game is about Orks and their Gods. Unfortunatly the Gods hate the poor, stupid Orks and can't wait to see their preferably painful and bloody demise. This idea is packaged in a role-playing game with the unusual (unless you know Paranoia) undercurrent that the players are expected to compete in a cut-throat competition for destruction and Oog. But since the author knows about the uncommon predicament of his game, i quote the very first section of the rules:
Great Ork Gods is a roleplaying game of rampaging Orks and their malignant Gods. Unlike many other roleplaying games, Great Ork Gods is designed to be played for an evening and then forgotten about. Don't take it too seriously; it's not that kind of a game.
The players are expected to play both, Orks and Gods, and to make each other's lives miserable on the way. Death of Orks is common and to be expected anytime. Other than that there is no prefabricated theme. The rules suggest or better: hint at a bog-standard fantasy world with all common tropes like elves, dwarves and pointy-hat magic users. The Orks are going to rough up the place good in the most stupendous and stupid way imaginable and will die unnecessary but very funny deaths.
It should be in the review summary info somewhere, but to make sure: we actually played a session of Great Ork Gods. I will present examples from our session from time to time to illustrate some points of the rules better. And now is just such an occasion. For our game i decided that in Plain-Fantasy-Land a powerful artifact was held in a monastery of some religion. I wanted the Orks to attack the monastery and steal the artifact! Unknown to the Orks a small group of adventurers was currently in the monastery, a paladin, a wizard and a ranger. Voila, setting.
How does it work?
The most eye-catching feature of the Great Ork Gods game is probably the way task resolution is done. Sure, it uses dice and some traits -- here it's the hate of the Gods -- but the actual difficulty is dependend on the Gods, who are also controlled by the players. In our play test we had four players, so three players got two Gods each and one player got only one. Fortunatly this God was Slashing & Slayings -- the God of War -- so the disadvantage wasn't too big. I gave the player another point of Oog to compensate, but this did not even out the lower number of Gods. Why having less Gods than the others is a problem will become apparent soon, but first I want to give a brief presentation of the main elements of the game with a basic coverage of the mechanics, for the full monty i refer you to the PDF on the homepage of the game. The main elements of the game are of course the Orks, the Gods, and three game resources by the names of Goblins, Spite and Oog.
- Orks: If you want, you can think of Orks as the player characters of this game -- but remember, your Ork is going to die, several times. An Ork is described by his name and the hate of the Gods for him. They are created by either a semi-random point-buy or a full random dice method. Both methods are pretty convoluted for such a simple game but can still be completed well under ten minutes time per Ork. After this procedure you have a named Ork with seven hate scores, one for each God. After our first few dead Orks we dropped the point-buy method and adopted a much more simplified full random method.
- Gods: Each of the seven Gods oversees a defined domain and each time an Ork comes into touch with one of the domains it must be determined if the God shows mercy or not. In our game the most »popular« God was That which Guards the Gates, the God of Death. Anytime an Ork could potentially die, a roll against the respective hate score was necessary. For this, the God's player decides on the difficulty which determines the number of ten-sided dice to be rolled. If any of the dice comes up equal or lower than the hate score of the God, it is a failure. The players are asked to judge the difficulty fairly but in case of perceived unfair treatment there is the mechanism of Whining which decreases difficulty but increases Spite.
- Spite: Spite is one of three resources in the game. It is independent of the current Ork and stays with the player. A player gains a Spite point if an Ork defeats the domain one of the player's Gods controls. There are a few more rules about gaining Spite which don't come up as often as this one, so i will not elaborate. Spite can be used to increase the difficulty of a roll of another player's Ork, therefore Spite is the main tool to screw over your pals. And here the drawback of controling only one God becomes apparent, the player with the single God gained less Spite than the others and was disadvantaged in the screw-others department.
- Oog: Oog is another resource. Unfortunatly the rules are not quite clear if Oog is tied to a particular Ork or to the player; we decided to tie it to the player. Independent of this issue, you gain Oog for bravado, hilarity, cool stunts, achieving goals, etc. thus basically GM fiat. You may gain Oog by killing other Orks of greater Oog, too.
- Goblins: Goblins are a special kind of resource. They are wretched creatures that follow around Orks and thus form a pool of available followers. Goblins that don't follow a particular Ork are called free and can be commanded around by any Ork. The Goblins obey the Orks but in a mischievous and cowardly way. Whenever an Ork gains Oog, he may pick a new follower from the pool. Thus, Oog allows to pick Goblin-followers. By sacrificing a Goblin-follower in a hopefully hilarious way, Orks can increase their chances to succeed in a hate roll. Mechanically speaking the player pays one Oog to gain a Goblin-follower and then spends the Goblin to decrease the number of dice to be rolled, but the rules hint at the possibility that the sacrificed Goblin may be someone else's follower.
In our session we quickly dropped this two-layered approach; it demanded to much attention for our tastes. Therefore Goblins were around in sufficient numbers and for spending Oog an Ork decreased the difficulty of the hate roll. A hilarious description of a Goblin sacrifice was still required, though.
The actual game leads the players through small scenarios -- a sample is provided -- where they can earn Oog and cause mayhem. The game suggests to treat Oog like a score in a computer game, but due to the »Goblin-Rule« it is much more useful. After the scenario more Oog is awarded but no final result is suggested. A lot of things are still very sketchy.
The Pig's Opinion
We had a great session that lasted about 3 hours. Great Ork Gods is a fun game that should be played fast and loose. Unfortunatly the game rules, minimal as they already are, still hamper this on occasion. The Ork creation rules are convoluted and the Goblin-follower rule is simply awkward. These areas are the ones we changed quickly and the game is straight forward enough to do so with ease.
We didn't fail to note that this game is still in development and thus gaps were to be expected. One of the most obvious gaps is present in the assignment of the Gods and the long term consequences of an uneven spread of Gods. We failed to come up with an on-the-fly solution but in subsequent discussion we decided to double the Spite for »lonely Gods«.
There is also the question of motiviation that is poorly addressed. Breaking stuff and acting goofy is all nice and dandy, but why go to great length to screw the other over? Fortunatly i spent some thoughts on this before the game started and assigned Oog rewards for »objectives«, e. g. defeating a hero, first touching the artifact, etc. and announced them upfront. I also built the scenario around the basic idea that the Ork who brought the artifact to the employer -- an evil wizard, of course -- would gain a huge reward. So there was a final target which could only be accomplished by a single Ork. Death and destruction, here we come.
As a final verdict on Substance i have to say that the rules are spotty, incomplete and (hopefully) not final yet. On the other hand the game is fun, is written tightly, has a promising outlook and is free (as beer). Deployed in the right mindset and into a small timeframe you can have some quick hours of fun without much effort. Taking all this into account and with the distinct reminder that this is an unfinished hobby product i'm happy to hand out Substance = 4.
Final Rating
Style: 2
Substance: 4
Thank you for reading the review. I will try to answer any and all questions with regards to this review in the forum. I would also like to read constructive criticism on improving my reviewing technique.
Regards, Pig with Pen.
