I bleed you for one and the edge, but what more can I do?
Give in to the hunger and savour the best parts of you
Meat and metal, all must die
All but I…

In the comments to the last of these little diatribes I hinted that the imminent release of Codex: Necrons might stick a spanner in my Orky workings, and this has turned out to be true… up to a point.

The thing is that I really like modelling Orks. I like the background of the Orks. I like the no-nonsense fun times of the Orks. What I do not like is buying, building and painting multiple units of twenty or thirty lil’ guys, whose vintage skinhead style doesn’t protect them from a Guardsman with a laser pointer, and swarms of jankity-ass vehicles that can go boom if a Tactical Squad shoots at them.

I also really like the tactical possibilities of Necrons. I like that a viable Necron unit can be had by purchasing a single box of dudes, rather than three boxes of dudes. I like that the Necron Codex has a fully developed and background-rich alternative army selection scheme in the shape of the Decurion Detachment. The only downside is that, because the Necron kits are perfectly adequate as they are, they don’t inspire me to play around with plastic glue and sharp implements any more than is strictly necessary to have them table-ready.

This is more important than you might think, since while I dislike painting anything beyond the small handful of models at a time, I really like building and kitbashing in plastic. It’s an important part of the hobby to me, and it’s what makes my armies into something I actually want to keep around rather than a bunch of semi-disposable game toys that can be converted into beer tokens whenever I’m strapped for cash. That’s something I’ve been neglecting for a good seven years now and it’s time that was addressed if I’m to make like Jimmy and achieve Hobby Nirvana.

Fortunately, the current territory of 40K endorses this kind of behaviour to varying extents. Obviously there’s Unbound, but I’m not sure how keen I am on that – I like engaging with some sort of structured, defined project, otherwise I just mill around buying things for no reason and never actually putting pewter to plywood and playing some ruddy games. However, yer Battleforged army lends you a lot of space to play around with, and seems wide open enough that any little sub-structures I fancy should fit nicely.

At the moment, I’m considering a Decurion Detachment for the Necrons. This gives a lot of nifty little rules perks as well as expressing the Necrons’ character through the structure of the army, and has the advantage of being quite flexible. The only thing it lacks is Objective Secured, which is easily fixed with another Detachment – either a Combined Arms from the Necron book or an Allied detachment from somewhere else.

Here’s where I start thinking Orky. An Allied Detachment only obliges me to put together one or two Troops choices, ergo one big stodgy unit of Kromlech Orks (the Shootas vs. Sluggas debate will be one for another time, although I incline toward shootas since Orks have much better ways to deliver axe to face in the form of Kommandos and Stormboyz) and maybe some Gretchin. It also stops me going mad with my desire to have ALL THE ORKS since every Ork unit you take in involves buying/building/painting Quite A Lot of little dudes. If I only have one Elites slot (already filled with my customised Nobz mob), one Heavy Support (already filled with my Killa Kanz) that only leaves Fast Attack (I’m thinking Stormboyz since I already have this whole militaristic thing going on with the Kromlech boyz) before all my slots are full. That gives me a couple of big units to hold objectives, a wedge of walkers that can actually kill stuff in melee, and a close combat unit that might strike first once in a while, and I’ve not had to build too many Orks to get there.

My approximate plan is to massage all this crap into a 1200-ish point Decurion Detachment (’cause my mate Lawrence down Plymouth way plays 1250 points as standard, unless he’s pulled his finger out and built another Hammerhead since our last throwdown) and an 800-ish point Ork Allied Detachment (’cause my mate Ben up Wolverhampton way generally plays 2000 points). It should be possible to reverse the roles and have the Necrons play at being a conventional Combined Arms Detachment without too much trouble, and I could easily ram the independent Formations from the Necrons’ book into the Ork army for 1500 points.

As far as ‘justifying’ this in terms of ‘fluff’ goes… well, I have the germ of an idea but knowing me that’ll be a post in its own right by the time I’ve thought it through.

It’s nothing I couldn’t achieve within the Necron Codex, really, but I want to build some Orks and it’d be nice to use them. Then again, building the Nobz Mob was the point of buying them and I think I’ve had my fun over two days of putting them together. Would the sky really fall in if I didn’t field them? I don’t think so. Would that spare me paying close to a hundred Euros for each Ork unit? Undoubtedly. Will I have changed my mind again by payday? Fuck knows, here’s some Nephwrack.