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this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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Tell me about these orc things. Is it an idealism type of world where people agreeing on belief manifests reality mechanics?
In Warhammer 40k, there are two planes of existence: the material plane, and the Warp. Formerly known as the Realm of Souls, tens of millennia of war and death and suffering have transformed it into a nightmare world akin to Hell. The Warp reflects the collective unconscious of nearby conscious beings. For example, the warp near modern day earth would be a heavenly stock market run by Supply Side Jesus, because that's what most modern humans believe in. Our fundamental beliefs about the world, either religious or otherwise, manifest in the Warp as spirits. The Warp also has the ability to influence the material plane through basically magic. Powerful individuals called Psykers have the ability to manifest their will directly in the Warp instead of unconsciously, and cause that will to affect material things and thereby cast spells. Everyone has some level of psychic potential, but usually it takes a lot of people believing in something as strongly as a religion.
Orks are a genetically engineered bioweapon that has decayed over tens of thousands of years from the ultimate soldiers, to a bunch of murderous football hooligans with cockney accents. Orks have stronger median psychic abilities than humans, but they don't have exceptional psykers who can do fancy things on their own. Instead, the collective will of all the Orks in an area forms a WAAGH field which enforces their collective beliefs upon reality. This is what makes their crude technology work. There are also Ork shamans, who can't use psychic powers on their own, but who can direct the WAAGH field to cast spells like a human psyker. A shaman is only as powerful as the ambient level of WAAGH nearby. No Ork army, no magic powers.
Note that humans are capable of the same thing, their abilities are just much weaker per human. The reason everything always sucks in 40K, the reason suffering and death are so normalised, is because trillions of humans believe in suffering and death at a fundamental level. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Humans created three of the four Chaos Gods. Humans are the ones choosing, on a subconscious level, for everything to keep getting worse and more miserable. Orks, on the other hand, are actually having a great time. Orks are genetically programmed to love fighting, so the human belief in endless war has created a great environment for the Orks, who are happy to do their part to keep the party going.
Quick correction. The warp was turned from a calm reflection of reality into hell not by the modern galaxy but the war in heaven which took place at some starting point up to around 68 million years ago. The Aeldari certaintly did not help the warp by birthing Slaanesh but the vast damage done to the warp was done by a conflict so vast it makes the modern fighting look like a water gun fight.
And this is the conflict the Orks were created to fight in. The galaxy was once home to a species now known only as the Old Ones. They controlled a little over half the galaxy. The rest belonged to an empire called the Necrontyr. The Necrontyr came from a planet with horrible radiation, and they had evolved to live short lives to compensate for their inevitable death due to super cancer. The Old Ones were masters of genetic engineering, and the Necrontyr pleaded with them to share the secret of long life. But the Old Ones refused. In their envy, the Necrontyr declared war on the Old Ones, and sought to eradicate them. This galaxy-spanning conflict was called the War In Heaven. The Old Ones created the Krorks, perfect super soldiers programmed with instinctual knowledge of weaponsmithing and arcane might, to fight as footsoldiers. A fungal infection that could bloom from a single spore into a ready-made army, infinitely loyal and eternally bloodthirsty.
The Necrontyr couldn't stand up to the might of the Krorks, the Eldar, and the Old Ones' other armies. So they struck a deal with the gods of their kind, stellar parasites called the C'tan, or Star Gods. The C'tan created immortal bodies of living steel for the Necrontyr to inhabit. Ageless and indestructible. The peasant class were furnished with artificial brains powerful enough to understand only simple orders to destroy. The opulent rulers were allowed to keep their memories and personalities, to live eternally. However, they were deceived, for in the bargain, the Necrontyr lost their souls. In Warhammer, the soul is a real thing. It is the connection between a person's mind in the material plane, and the Realm of Souls. Without it, one is cursed to live a half life. Never to truly change or grow. The Necrons, for that is what they were now called, had become forever stagnant. Their souls consumed by the C'tan. In vengeance, the Necrons slew their own gods. Fractured their divine essence into shards and imprisoned the shards in war engines that drained their infinite power for use in battle. And then they finished off the Old Ones. The galaxy was left devastated and essentially barren after the war. So the Necrons went beneath the surface of their billions of worlds and slept, waiting for a galaxy worth ruling to re-grow. While the Krorks devolved into Orks from lack of fighting, and the Eldar became the dominant force in the galaxy.
"And the eldar said, 'Fuck it.' Literally. And they repopulated the entire galaxy, and fucked so much that they broke their reproductive process, and birthed Slannesh sometime around the year 30,000