The Mortal Realms are filled with dangerous beasts of every conceivable kind, and one maxim remains true throughout them all: only the strong survive. And of all the denizens of the realms, the Ogor Mawtribes are certain that they are the strongest.
Ogors are hulking brutes with insatiable appetites, and the roaming mawtribes see every other clan, people, and nation as a source of nourishment just waiting to be consumed. This ravenous consumption has a religious edge, for the mawtribes feast in tribute to their Gulping God. While others may regard them as all-consuming monsters who simply gorge and destroy, the warglutts and alfrostuns forge armour and weapons, engage in tribal politics, and fulfil mercenary contracts. They even maintain and employ looted or traded blackpowder weapons, to devastating (if unsubtle) effect.
There are two main cultures within the Ogor Mawtribes. The Gutbuster warglutts are tribal gatherings that roam out from their strongholds in great circular migrations called Mawpaths, consuming almost everything in their path and dragging the remainder back to their feasting halls and cooking pots. The Beastclaw Raiders are rugged, purely nomadic tribes of hunters who tame powerful beasts to stay one step ahead of the Everwinter, a supernatural blizzard that seems to follow wherever they go.
Overview
Warglutts can range from a loose band of scavenging ogors to a mighty warhost capable of trampling even heavily fortified cities to get to the chewy centre. These are commanded by Tyrants, who lead their tribes with unwavering authority and ear-splitting bellows. Any dissenters find themselves invited to great celebratory feasts… albeit as meals rather than guests.
The warglutts receive spiritual guidance from their Butchers and Slaughtermasters, who enact gruesome gastronomic rituals. They cook up grand sacrificial feasts to summon great, hungering mawpits from the land itself, and perform acts of holy consumption to empower the ogor warriors of the tribe – the Gluttons and Ironguts.
While warglutts primarily pursue battle as part of their looping, harvesting rampages, they may at times offer their services as mercenaries. These bargains are often lopsided or short-lived, as ogors tend to view anyone weaker than themselves as walking meals. Nevertheless, a canny employer can see the benefits of putting a wall of ogor muscle and fat between them and their enemies.
Beastclaw Raiders are perhaps slightly more in tune with the land. Their roving alfrostuns ride great stonehorns, thundertusks, and mournfangs from place to place, with no time to settle – for they are pursued by manifestations of a divine snowstorm, known as the Everwinter. Even the thick hides of the ogors and their mounts cannot protect them from such raging magical blizzards indefinitely, though they can at least call on the Everwinter’s power in battle, if only for a short time.
Battle Traits
Whatever their affiliation, the Ogor Mawtribes fight as an avalanche of muscle and meat. With a Trampling Charge, they use bulk and momentum to deal mortal damage to all that stand before them.
Hunger stokes these Ravenous Brutes into a deceptive swiftness. All ogors benefit from a passive boost in speed, right up until they Feast on Flesh – a once-per-battle ability that sees the whole tribe gorge themselves on the foe in combat, restoring their vitality and dealing mortal damage.
Battle Formations
The Ogor Mawtribes have four battle formations in their Faction Pack – including one specifically aimed at the Beastclaw Raiders. These Beast Handlers pluck their war-steeds from Brutal Stock, so their impressive bulk causes more mortal damage than usual when they thunder into enemy units on the charge.
Other battle formations exemplify other elements of ogor society. One capitalises on the hungry magic of the Butchers, while another allows experienced gunners to fire at point-blank range. A fourth masks your advancing infantry under the scouring shroud of the Everwinter, encouraging warglutts and alfrostuns to work together.
Arcana and Incantations
Mawtribes have their fair share of shamans and will-workers. Butchers are the most prominent, weaving gastronomic magic to heal allies, fill them with bloodlust, and conjure torrents of foul grease to impede enemies. The Huskards of the Beastclaw Raiders, however, are equal parts warrior-chief and PRIEST, speaking with the voice of the Everwinter to reshape the battlefield.
Call of the Blizzard is answered with a chanting roll of 4+, allowing you to give a terrain feature the ‘Obscuring’ ability for the rest of the battle. Shrouded by wind and snow, they’ll block sharpshooters from drawing a bead on your ogors. Hold on for a chanting roll of 10+, and every terrain feature on the battlefield that you’ve hit with a blizzard will also provide a WARD (5+) for friendly Beastclaw Raiders within 3".
Unit Focus
For the forces of Destruction, might always makes right, and Kragnos, the End of Empires, is the mightiest of them all. A champion from a long-dead race, he has ascended to godhood and now roves the realms as an avatar of pure destruction.
The God of Earthquakes is one of the few beings who can exert command over the unruly Ogor Mawtribes. As The End of Empires he throws aside lesser foes (which is basically all of them), and thus inspires the rampaging hordes who follow behind him.
Protected by Tuskbreaker, The Shield Inviolate, Kragnos can shrug off the effects of sorcery, while the Rampaging Destruction that he unleashes when he barrels into combat inflicts mortal damage on everything within range – or if he’s up against an enemy MONSTER, he can test his strength and bring them crashing down.
Huskards are the mighty chieftains and mystics of the Beastclaw Raiders. They ride to battle atop beasts such as Stonehorns – unstoppable rock-eating creatures with a Stone Skeleton that reduces incoming damage.
A Stonehorn’s roar can even drive other MONSTERS into a frenzy. The Everwinter’s Goad empowers allied Companion weapons with Crit (2 hits), and penalises enemy Companion weapons as leashed behemoths thrash against their masters.
Ogor Gluttons are the backbone of any warglutt, and with the raw physicality you’d expect from this race of muscle-bound demolishers, they can shatter bones without breaking a sweat.
Their Insatiable Gluttony makes these young warriors extremely tough to shift once they’ve started to Feast on Flesh, increasing their Control characteristic for the rest of the battle. This is a more powerful version of other abilities that do something similar – granting a unit of six ogors a baseline Control score of 18 before any other modifiers!
By contrast, the Gorger Mawpack is made up of emaciated horrors – a hideous perversion of the glorious ogor form. Despite their comparatively skinny appearance, Gorgers are even more insatiable than a healthy ogor, unable to stem the hunger inflicted by the Empty Belly curse.
Banished from the campfires of their mawtribe, these Troglodytic Lurkers comb through feast-middens and stalk the edges of any conflict. When the opportunity presents, they leap into action as Frenzied Hunters, tearing infantry apart with a gory mania that perturbs even other ogors.
Word From the Studio
John: “We wanted to keep the key identity of Ogor Mawtribes intact, a.k.a. smashing into things and chopping them up, while giving the player more tactical options. The new prayer lore is part of that, allowing the player to summon literal blizzards to confound enemy attacks that target Beastclaw Raider units. Gutbusters have not been forgotten, and the Butcher's Maw-magic grants powerful damage-dealing buffs and healing to those ogors in need.
“In addition, the Ogor Mawtribes have been granted the brand new Feast on Flesh ability as one of their battle traits, which makes all those big monsters, characters, and even the higher-Health-than-usual infantry heal up significantly once per battle, while dishing out mortal damage at the same time. Healing big models that are damaged but not slain, and which are potentially stuck in combat, can really blunt your opponent’s momentum. And because this happens at the end of the turn, it can even help you steal a clutch objective or two. This is especially true for Ogor Gluttons, who gain a massive control buff once the ability is used. Nom nom nom!”
Spearhead Spotlight
Even your kitchen table isn’t safe from the Ogor Mawtribes now that Spearhead is here! The Tyrant’s Bellow is a hefty collection of miniatures – a Tyrant leading six Ogor Gluttons (who fight as two units of three), backed up by firepower from four Leadbelchers and a mighty Ironblaster artillery piece. They’re joined by a Mournfang Pack from the Beastclaw Raiders – though to balance their power, the Ironblaster and Mournfang do not arrive until the third out of four battle rounds.
Your opponent will still need to weather the onslaught of the Leadbelchers, whose repurposed cannons and relatively high speed make them punishing in such close-quarters battles. Their shrapnel blasts get even more accurate when these blackpowder-stained ogors are Firing From the Belly.
We’re shifting from one group of gourmands to another with our next Faction Focus, as we hold our noses, pay respects to the carrion king, and give in to the terrifying delusions of the Flesh-eater Courts.
