Xenos
Deathskulls
The Luckiest Orks · Bluest of Looterz
XENOS · ORKS · KLAN
Blue Is the Luckiest Kolour
The Deathskulls are greenskins convinced, down to the last Boy, that blue is the luckiest colour in creation, and that smearing it across skin and machine draws the favourable eye of the brutal Ork gods Gork and Mork. On the eve of battle a Deathskull will daub himself in blue warpaint, some painting themselves head to foot until they resemble walking bruises, certain that a smudge of azure will turn aside the bullet meant for their skull. Maddeningly for Imperial observers, it seems to work: Deathskulls are demonstrably luckier than other Orks, their bodged guns jamming less and their patched-together tanks running longer. Whether faith bends fortune or fortune rewards faith, no savant can say, but the blue klan keeps on winning.
Inveterate Looterz
Even among Orks, who are hardly fastidious about ownership, the Deathskulls have an unsavoury reputation as the galaxy's most shameless looters, scavengers, borrowers and outright thieves. They strip the battlefield bare, plundering the bodies of foe and fellow Ork alike, and their definition of personal property is so elastic that nothing left unwatched stays unclaimed. Between battles they fight and bicker endlessly over scavenged gubbinz, pilfering from one another with cheerful disregard. Naturally the klan breeds more Lootas than any other, and Lootas exiled from rival klanz are welcomed into Deathskull camps with open, sticky-fingered arms, as brothers in the great and holy work of nicking everything that is not bolted down, and a fair amount that is.
Meks, Salvage and Looted Steel
Because everything a Deathskull owns was prised off someone else, the klan prizes its Meks above all, for it is these canny tinkerers who weld mountains of scrap into deadly weapons, tanks and buggies. A Big Mek of the Deathskulls holds high status, surrounded by salvage-heaps and grumbling grots, and the klan's armies bristle with looted vehicles, an Imperial Leman Russ here, a stolen wagon there, all repainted lucky blue and crewed with reckless glee. They favour stealth and ambush more than most Orks, slipping forward to plunder before the foe even knows the fight has begun. To a Deathskull, the perfect battle is one where the enemy obligingly leaves behind a great deal of loot.
Plunderers of the WAAAGH!
The Deathskulls rarely raise a WAAAGH! of their own; their genius is for attaching themselves to someone else's, then walking off with the spoils. Wherever a great Warboss gathers a green tide, blue-daubed Boyz appear in its ranks, fighting hard enough to earn their place and then looting the wreckage harder still once the shooting stops. Their Big Meks turn captured tanks against their former owners within the hour, and their Lootas haul away anything the WAAAGH! does not immediately need. Other klanz tolerate them because a Deathskull contingent fights well and, crucially, fixes what it steals, but every Warboss keeps a wary eye on his own wagons, for a Deathskull's loyalty lasts exactly as long as the plunder keeps flowing.
How the Imperium Counters Them
To the Departmento Munitorum the Deathskulls are a logistical curse, for they wage war on captured Imperial materiel and grow stronger from every defeat the Astra Militarum suffers. A field abandoned in retreat becomes, within days, a Deathskull motor-pool of repainted Leman Russ tanks and Chimeras turned against their makers. Imperial doctrine therefore demands the thorough demolition of all wreckage and the denial of salvage at any cost, melta-charges set on disabled vehicles, ammunition dumps cooked off rather than left intact. It is a grim, wasteful discipline, and a hard one to enforce on a routed army, but commanders who neglect it find their own guns booming back at them from behind a wall of lucky blue.
M41–M42 Status
The torn galaxy of the Era Indomitus is, for the Deathskulls, one vast unguarded warehouse. The wars following the opening of the Great Rift have strewn the void with wrecked fleets, shattered armies and abandoned forge-worlds, and the blue klan picks over this carnage with insatiable delight, growing fat on salvage while greater powers bleed. Deathskull Lootas and Big Meks ride with nearly every major WAAAGH! of the age, including the world-shaking campaigns of Ghazghkull, ever ready to fight, to fix and above all to filch. As long as the Imperium keeps losing ships and tanks faster than it can guard their corpses, the luckiest Orks alive will keep getting luckier.
See also
Sources
⚜ Enter the Interactive Codex →Languages: Türkçe
Unofficial fan project · Not affiliated with Games Workshop · Non-commercial editorial reference under fair use.