Xenos
Snakebites
Keepers of da Old Ways · Beast-Riders
XENOS · ORKS · KLAN
Keepers of da Old Ways
The Snakebites are the most traditional Orks of all, greenskins who cling to the wild, uncivilised ways of their Feral Ork ancestors even when fancier wargear is theirs for the taking. The flashier klanz sneer at them as backward savages, and the Snakebites wear the insult as a badge of pride. They understand technology as well as any Ork, but they distrust it: where a Bad Moon hides behind a forcefield, a Snakebite trusts to thick hide, blue tattoos and good honest war paint, and where an Evil Sun rides a screaming machine, a Snakebite rides a beast that breathes. To them the old ways are the true ways, and everything that came after is just gubbinz.
The Rite of the Serpent
The klan takes its name and its glyph from a brutal rite of passage that every young aspirant must endure. To prove his toughness, the boy must goad an exceptionally venomous serpent into sinking its fangs into his flesh, then suck out the poison and live, surviving by sheer Orkish resilience. Those who endure are reckoned Boyz worthy of the klan; those who do not feed the squigs. This love of dangerous beasts runs through everything the Snakebites are. They are the galaxy's finest breeders of grots and squigs, their Runtherdz raising the fiercest, most biddable stock, and their reeking menageries are tended with a craftsman's pride that no other klan can match.
War on Tusk and Hoof
A Snakebite army goes to war behind a stampede. The Boyz ride huge, foul-tempered war boars, Boarboyz crashing into enemy lines on tusk and hoof, while packs of feral squigs are loosed ahead to swamp the foe and clear a path. Towering over all come the Squiggoths, vast beasts of war that only the Snakebites possess the lore to breed and feed, lumbering bastions of muscle and bone that shrug off shellfire and trample whole companies into red ruin. The klan scorns the kustom guns of richer Orks, preferring choppa, spear and the unstoppable mass of an enraged animal. It is primitive war, and it is appallingly effective.
Bogrot Bones and the Squiggoth Stompy
The Snakebite way found its emblem in Grukk Face-rippa's Red WAAAGH!, which tore through the Sanctus Reach. Riding with that green tide was the Snakebite beast-breeder Bogrot Bones, perched atop a Gargantuan Squiggoth he had named Stompy, a mountain of bellowing flesh that flattened entire formations beneath its bulk. Yet Stompy, like all its kind, could hold but one thought at a time and was easily bewildered, prone to thundering off in whatever direction last caught its tiny attention. Sometimes it broke the enemy line; sometimes it ploughed straight back through the Orks' own mobs, scattering Boyz like ninepins. To the Snakebites this was no flaw, merely the honest temper of a proper beast.
How the Imperium Fights Them
Imperial commanders sometimes make the fatal error of mistaking the Snakebites' primitivism for weakness, reasoning that a foe without forcefields or fast machines must be easily broken. The error is paid for in blood. War boars close ground faster than expected and hit like battering rams; squig-tides absorb volley after volley and keep coming; and against a charging Squiggoth, light weapons are an insult and even battle-tanks can be overturned. Munitorum doctrine calls for massed heavy ordnance to put down the great beasts before they reach the line, and for fire-discipline against the squigs that screen them. But a routed Snakebite charge has a way of rallying, because the beasts, unlike Boyz, do not understand the concept of giving up.
M41–M42 Status
While the rest of Orkdom races toward ever-louder dakka and ever-faster wheels, the Snakebites endure unchanged, exactly as they have for ten thousand years, and in the Era Indomitus their old ways have found vigorous new life. The galaxy-wide eruption of feral Ork populations on countless wild worlds feeds the klan's ranks, and the warrior cult of the Beast Snaggas, squig-riding traditionalists who hunt the biggest game on the battlefield, has carried the Snakebite spirit into the fiercest WAAAGHs of the age. Where greater Warbosses muster, the brown-hided beast-riders join them, loosing their bellowing menageries upon the foe. The old ways, it turns out, never needed improving.
See also
Sources
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