Goffs

The Goffs are an Ork clan (a kindred of the ork species) reckoned the largest, toughest, and most combat-obsessed of the known clans. Allied to no power but their own appetite for war, and standing among the xenos species opposed to the Imperium and its neighbours, the Goffs hold no formal doctrine beyond an unwavering preference for close-quarters violence, fighting on foot with choppa and slugga rather than relying on bombardment from range. They dress in black, mark their wargear with checks and dags, and take the bull’s head as their clan emblem, wearing horned helms that double as weapons in a head-first charge. Camouflage and guile are regarded with contempt, since a proper Goff has no wish to avoid a fight.

The Goffs are not attached to any single home world, crownworld, or fixed territory; as with other ork clans, their identity is a matter of culture, bearing, and colour rather than dominion over a charted world. Goff warbands are correspondingly loose in organisation, forming and re-forming around whichever warboss can promise the surest prospect of battle, and because size and belligerence are the clan’s most prized virtues, an unusually high proportion of ork warbosses and nobz across the galaxy are Goffs. Goff mobs muster in greater numbers than those of other clans, so that a true Goff horde advances as a single close-packed mass of boyz, and the clan further maintains a reputation in the fighting pits, where a Goff is proverbially reckoned always worth his teef.

In the wider affairs of the galaxy, the Goffs have featured prominently in some of the largest ork offensives on record, including the Second War for Armageddon and the Third War for Armageddon, both fought on the Imperial hive world of Armageddon. These campaigns are most closely associated with the Goff warboss Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, commonly called Ghazghkull Thraka, who is recorded as a self-proclaimed prophet of the Waaagh! (the ork war-cult and the military upheaval it produces) and among the most influential ork warlords of the era. Goff mobs also formed the core of the Red Waaagh! under the warlord Grukk, and later accounts place Goff forces at the heart of the Great Waaagh! mustered by Ghazghkull.

Within ork society the Goffs are regarded, not least by themselves, as the natural aristocracy of the greenskins, their size and aggression taken as proof of a right to lord it over other clans. Whether this reputation reflects genuine pre-eminence or simple self-regard is not settled even among orks, but the clan’s disproportionate contribution of warbosses, nobz, and stormboyz to ork armies galaxy-wide, together with its continuing association with Ghazghkull Thraka’s campaigns, keeps the Goffs among the most consequential of the known ork clans in the present era.