Waaagh! Grom

Of all the greenskin tides to ravage the world of men, none is remembered with such rueful awe as Waaagh! Grom, led by a goblin so gluttonous and so cunning that even orcs followed him without complaint. Grom the Paunch united the fractious tribes as few warlords ever had, and turned their endless appetite for war westward toward the lands of men.

The Orc and Goblin Tribes came in a green flood that overwhelmed frontier and heartland alike, torching towns and devouring the countryside as they marched. The Empire of Man mustered against them again and again, and again and again the horde slipped away or smashed through, for Grom had a low animal genius for war and a horde too vast to encircle. Where the Empire failed to stop him, the horde spilled onward into the fields of Bretonnia, whose knights charged the green tide with reckless valour and broke upon it like waves upon a cliff.

Grom cared nothing for conquest, only for plunder, feasting and the sheer joy of the Waaagh! He ate his way across two kingdoms, growing fatter and more legend-wreathed with each burned city, until he reached the western sea and did the one thing no warlord expected: he built a monstrous fleet of ramshackle ships and set sail, carrying the war beyond the horizon toward the shining isle of the elves.

Waaagh! Grom left the west scarred and smouldering, its armies humiliated by a goblin they could neither catch nor kill. That he departed of his own accord, bound for Ulthuan, was the only mercy in it, and a curse the high elves would soon come to know for themselves.