Circus Rukkus  

Skraga Blitzkrag and Da Circus Rukkus

History

Warboss Skraga Blitzkrag was the boss of a veteran tribe of Snakebites operating primarily on the Imperium's southeastern fringe. Blitzkrag's tribe participated in several different Waaaghs! over the years, always drifting on once the boss found “da party” “borin'.”

Blitzkrag's orks had been fighting a particularly venomous strain of tyranid when they heard of Grog Ironteef's second attack on the Tau Empire. Though Waaagh! Grog called particularly for heavily armed tribes, Blitzkrag thought that fighting the Tau would be a fun change of pace from their most recent foes. Additionally, Blitzkrag looked forward to showing both the Tau and his freebooter rivals that “da old ways” could overcome any amount of fancy taktiks or shiny up-gunned shootas. Thus did Skraga Blitzkrag join the War of Dakka.

Though he dismissed many of the tactics of his fellow warbosses as un-orky “dancin' about,” Blitzkrag himself possessed an intuitive grasp of certain infantry tactics. His infantry assaults, though straightforward in conception, were well-coordinated and vigorously prosecuted. These simple tactics initially met with great success against Commander Farsight's Tau. As the Waaagh! progressed and Tau tactics adapted, however, Blitzkrag increasingly found himself outmaneuvered and outgunned. He responded in the only way he could fathom: with greater aggression.

One fateful day, Blitzkrag found himself leading his boyz across an open field towards a Tau strongpoint anchored by a Hammerhead gunship and a crisis suit team. The Tau were able to rain heavy fire upon his troops from well beyond the range of their primitive sluggas. Blitzkrag had nearly reached the crest of the hill when he was gruesomely scattered across the hill by a barrage of seeker missiles fired from behind the next hill, guided by a pathfinder team he had stormed blindly past. Only the timely action of his faithful attack squig, Tim, preserved enough of the boss for the painboyz and meks to stitch back together. When his badly battered troops finally pushed the Tau off the hill, they found Tim guarding a pile of body parts, lovingly gnawing on his former master's arm.

When Blitzkrag came to on the operating table he was horrified to see the extent of the cybork modifications necessary (or so the doks assured him) to treat his wounds. With typical optimism, however, he reasoned that his new shiny bits made him even harder than before—and what could be traditionally orkier than that? A similar thought process slowly revolutionized his view of orky warfare. Gork and Mork had made the orks to be not just the biggest, toughest, and greenest—Blitzkrag now found it unthinkable that orks should not also be the fastest and shootiest around. After all, fast was good, and shooty was good, and the number one rule of orkiness was that orks were best.

With his newly expanded view of green supremacy, Blitzkrag set about rebuilding and expanding his tribe. He found a ready supply of well-equipped replacements in the numerous freebooter mobs in the Waaagh! As word spread that Blitzkrag was back and ‘arder than ever, orks began to flock back to his tribe of their own accord. One of these was Gulgor Skulmek, who was delighted to find that Blitzkrag's appetite for guns, dreads, and wagons was insatiable.

Battlefield experience soon validated Blitzkrag's revelation: the only thing more fun than krumpin' an enemy face to face was krumpin' that enemy with a power klaw after leaping from a battlewagon that had just squashed half a dozen of his mates. Skraga Blitzkrag found that he was having more fun in the War of Dakka than he had had in decades.

Such was his success that Grog Ironteef “rewarded” Blitzkrag with custody of a conquered sept world while the rest of the Waaagh! moved on. Blitzkrag soon discovered that most of Tau society was dreadfully dull compared to the entertainment provided by the fire caste, and the remaining kroot mercenaries who had taken to the woods to wage a guerrilla war were poor sport. It was not long before Blitzkrag, bored out of his skull, decided to abandon the conquered sept world in search of a fresh fight. Though the captured Tau starships he had inherited with his “governorship” were disconcertingly predictable compared to the space hulks he was used to traveling aboard, Blitzkrag embraced the novel opportunity to dictate his destination with relative certainty.

He settled eventually upon the Carthian Sector, north of Tau holdings. It was close enough to make for a short journey and offered a wide variety of potential opponents. Best of all, it was not home to an active Waaagh!, a fact which Blitzkrag intended to remedy. A counter-attacking task force from Commander Farsight sent to retake Blitzkrag's world was stunned to see the orks apparently fleeing the system. The orks departed without firing a shot. For Skraga Blitzkrag, the party was elsewhere.

Skraga Blitzkrag

“Being ‘ard is good. Being ‘arder den you is orky.”

Skraga Blitzkrag is the veteran of over fifty years of active campaigning. Like many orks of the Snakebite clan, he has spent a good deal of his life traveling through space, always looking for a new challenge—in fact, he has spent so much time drifting through the warp that even Blitzkrag himself has no idea how old he is.

Blitzkrag is, even moreso than most orks, a true believer in green supremacy. Once a hardline traditionalist, his experiences during the War of Dakka have given Blitzkrag a much more inclusive view of orky nature. His violent racism now manifests itself as a desire to be the biggest, toughest, choppiest, stompiest, shootiest, burniest, hardest, fastest, and anything else-est being the eye can see, and he pursues his goal with a single-minded determination to wipe out any rivals to his superlativity. Blitzkrag harbors a particular resentment against enemy tanks, as all of them have the audacity to be bigger than he (his own battlewagons are exempt, reportedly because “dey'ze not bigger'n me if I can ride ‘em, see?”

Despite the violence with which he stomps his foes flat, Blitzkrag is fundamentally a happy-go-lucky greenskin. He fights for the fun of it, and quickly loses interest in “parties” that don't promise hard fighting. One of the few things that can consistently focus Blitzkrag's attention is a challenge to his orky superiority. Unfortunately, he tends to view most opponents as challenging his natural supremacy. When faced with a new foe, Blitzkrag can be counted on to draw upon his many decades of experience and intuitive tactical flair to cheerfully prove his superiority by systematically bashing his opponent's head in—at least until it's clear that the foe can offer no more meaningful resistance. He has earned the nickname “Da Patient”—perhaps an orky pun on the Tau doctrine of kauyon, or perhaps because he can plan an assault before roaring towards the enemy on his kustom warbike, rather than the other way around.

Blitzkrag refers to his burgeoning Waaagh! as “Da Circus Rukkus,” or more simply as “Da Party Krew.” Originally an enthusiastic but unsophisticated foot-slogging horde of choppa-wielding boyz, Blitzkrag has expanded it to include a bewildering array of “fun bitz.” These range from massive battlewagons cobbled together from destroyed vehicles to defeaning kustom shootas to smoke-belching warbikes, all coordinated with surprising forethought to support the singular goal of crushing the enemy in a power klaw-like vise. Da Circus also includes a large number of unusually high-quality squigs and gretchin troops, a legacy of Blitzkrag's Runtherd experience as a yoof.

Gulgor Skulmek

“You call dat a wagon? It's only got one wagon on it!”

Gulgor da Skulmek is the biggest big mek in Da Circus Rukkus. By mek standards, Gulgor is something of a Renaissance ork. Besides his wide-ranging technical expertise (or at least wide-ranging technical instincts), Gulgor is an accomplished squig trainer and enthusiastic hand to hand combatant.

It is rare to find big meks among the Snakebite clan, but Gulgor has always been odd even among oddboyz. He is famously fond of his cybork attack squig, Orkimedes, whom he claims to have trained to perform battlefield repairs on orky wagons and is allegedly responsible for giving Gulgor most of his best ideas.

Gulgor has a penchant for looting other races' weapons and vehicles that rivals most Deathskulls'. Unlike a Deathskull mek, however, Gulgor proudly displays such trophies in his creations in their original colors (perhaps with a little extra blood) and in their original condition (more or less). Gulgor sees this “collect an' konvert” practice as showcasing the superiority of orky know-wots over other races' plodding, deliberate approach to teknologee. In Gulgor's view, simply “bashin' about” a machine relying on orky instinct not only produces war machines of equal if not superior power; it also leaves more time for bashin' about the enemy.

This attitude meshed well with Blitzkrag's radical green supremacy, as did the warboss' insatiable demands for new krumpin' gear. Shortly after joining Da Circus, Gulgor and Orkimedes stomped their way to the head of the tribe's meks and established themselves as Blitzkrag's right-hand orkoids. Since da party's arrival in the Carthian Sector, Gulgor has found a veritable cornucopia of new challenges to his teknological superiority—not to mention raw material for new creations.