Got fluff?

I love the fluff behind Blood Bowl, it is what got me interested in the game as a 16 year old (those were the days!). The carnage, the mayhem, and somewhere inbetween, there was a ball, not that it mattered much.

I really enjoy the fluff stories that arise, none moreso than the ones that have fluff with NAF "Did you know" facts. I used to coach a Skaven team that had several such facts, and I felt it added to the playing experience, every mutation gained as adressed with suitable fluff.

However, the two teams that I think suit the BloodBowl universe best are the Humans and the Orcs, the original teams in the box set. You can go several ways with the fluff with these teams, Orcs are clumsy louts who dont really care for winning but just like the chance to have a bit of a dustup with a few others. Comedy is usually the best fluff for Orcs, with some sort of broken Cockney English as their language. Humans can be like this also, but I have found that they can be well suited to a darker more serious theme. My friend used to run a Human team, who were basically a team of escaped convicts. Now they were a cool team. I want to try to run with that theme for my next Human team

The "Kislev Konvicts" were men who have denied charges of murder, robbery, GBH and worse. These men have been constantly turned down for parole, but the warden has decided that he will allow them parole, to let them see their families, if they agree to sign up to the Prison Blood Bowl team, who were strictly amateur at the time. Each man has a set target to reach within the team, after which he can be considered for parole. The team manager is a corrupt prison governor, whose nickname is "Boris the butcher", mostly due to his fondness of sending his teams out to face Ogres. He himself was mangled by a Ogre during his playing days, in fact he was a rather successful Blitzer for the Kabbaheim Komets, scoring an impressive 11 Touchdowns in a season. "Boris" maintains that sending out his teams against such monstrosities is the only way to make them men, like he claims to be.
The players know that in order for them to gain parole, they must commit unspeakable acts on the playing field. What will they do? they claim to be innocent... or are they?

I always gain a lot more attachment to a team if they have a good bit of fluff. I like the above story as you can roleplay a bit with your players. I intend to have some players who are wholly innocent and balk at the idea of this, but must weigh up the options of what they must do to gain parole, while others are plainly guilty, and will enjoy the chance to do what they love doing.

One aspect of fluff that I absolutely detest and really boils my urine is team fluff that sounds like it came out of a Warhammer Fantasy novel, and not a very good one at that! It doesnt make sense! I understand that in the fluff, BB was discovered by 2 factions at a battle but it is no reason to have a 3000 word diatribe of a battle to describe the background of your team when there are so many more better possibilities to develop them.

What is your favourite type of fluff for your teams? Do you even use any?
What is your favourite NAF fact? It can be one you completely made up!

Comments welcome

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Scrappa Sorehead & NAF Human Runner

Hi guys!

Just to let you know I'm back home, with bad sunburn at that!

I decided to put up some pictures of the latest 2 minis I have been painting, Scrappa Sorehead and the NAF Human Runner, part of a team of 12 that was handed out at the last NAF World Cup. The mini was made by Impact Miniatures.


The colour Scheme I decided to use on the Runner was based off the NAF Logo. The NAF are responsible for organising the larger BB Tournaments and give out free Dice if you become a member!
I wanted to keep the scheme simple on him as there is not a huge amount of detail on him. They are sculpted in a cartoony style and I think that plastering him in Logos and what have you would not be good (in my mind!)

Scrappa is going to be purple because he is part of a Night Goblin themed team who wear a purple Strip! The team features a River Troll feasting on a hapless Night Goblin (watch this space!) and to keep with LRB5 rules, you may have positional weapons, and I have used Scrappa as my Pogo dude!

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Away until Saturday!

Hey! Incase anyone is wondering, I have a course to attend and of course I forgot to bring anything to paint, (business trips are never too exciting) or indeed a laptop so am using the course PC (had to fight them off!)

I am back on Friday night so hopefully I will have something concrete to show you guys! I have been working on one or two of the NAF World Cup Human teams, despite not attending the event, I managed to get hold of! They are really hard to paint as there is not much detail so I am not sure what you will make of my colour scheme!

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Should I go the well trodden path with my Chaos?

I am about to start running another Nurgle team and it got me thinking about in LRB4 how nasty Chaos were with Claw/RSC/PO Warriors, who could inflict a casualty on a hapless Wood Elf Lineman nearly 1 time in 3, around 30% of the time.

Some time ago, I ran some numbers to see exactly what damage these guys could do.

Breaking Armour

Skills	7	8	9	10
None	41.67%	27.78%	16.67%	8.83%
MB	58.33%	41.6	27.78%	16.67%
Claw	41.67%	41.67%	41.67%	41.67%
Claw & MB	58.33%	58.33%	58.33%	58.33%
PO	65.97%	47.84%	30.56%	15.97%
PO & MB	82.64%	65.97%	47.84%	30.56%
PO & Claw	65.97%	65.97%	65.97%	65.97%
PO & MB & Claw	82.64%	82.64%	82.64%	82.64%
LRB4 Claw	72.22%	58.33%	41.67%	27.78%

Now maybe the table doesn't mean a whole lot but may be better explained by a chart!

Now it is fair to say that you can tailor what skill to take if you want to cause a stun vs a particular race. Piling On and Mighty Blow, on their own or together is a great skill to stun Elves and other lightly armoured races, but as you gain more armour, their effects dramatically wear off. Claw is a wasted skill vs teams like Skaven, Woodelves, Goblins (bar all the Big Guys) but it is a skill that Treemen should fear. Claw on its own will beak a Treemans Armour almost 42% of the time which is an excellent tactic seeing they are so difficult to move.

You can clearly see that LRB4 Claw is pretty much on a par with LRB5 Mighty Blow/Piling On, if only a little weaker. Claw was a much feared Mutation in LRB4

Do I need to even mention the whopping 82% success rate of Claw/Mighty Blow/Piling On on anybody?

Well, that is just causing at the very worst, Stuns. What happens if you are a bloodthirsty so and so and want to rid the earth of the team you are facing? The following numbers incorporate breaking Armour, so take the percentages from the point when you knock the opponent down.

Causing a Casualty

Wow, just look at the pure killing power of Claw, Mighty Blow & Piling On as a Combo. The only downside to it is that you need to go prone to use it which puts a great big "Foul me!" target on your head, but if you think of the implications of this over a match... There are 16 turns in a game, and if you were able to Blitz (and knock down of course) a player every turn, you could expect to cause 5 (yes that is 5!) Casualties all with one player. However, such a player is going to cost you his base cost + 60kGp, plus at least 31 Star Player Points.

Who knows what this strategy would have for your chances of actually scoring. Will your opponent try to single him out and take him down early, leaving you with your main game winner out of the game or will he run and hide, try to rack up as many TD's as he can. Perhaps he could just induce some journeymen and feed them to your monster and score freely.

Another interesting point is that a player like a Human Blitzer can become a real wrecking ball vs lighter opponents.

I had considered developing Nurgle/Chaos with some flavourful mutations, such as an Extra Arms Beastman and one with Two Heads to aid the ball playing aspect of the game, but these nasty casualty combos are quite powerful indeed!

Let me know your thoughts!

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My top 5 favourite BB minis of all time

Here are my favourite Blood Bowl minis down through the years
These minis may not be to everybodys taste, but I have found these minis to be enoumous fun to paint and just ooze character.

• 5 - Orc Blitzer
  
  I just love the pure cartoon theme to this mini. BB to me is a game of comical violence. I was never that fond of "realistic" players in BB, like the newer stuff out is taking (Re: New Zug and Griff models) which just look like Empire WFB style to me, but BB is a totally separate universe which is anything but serious!
  
• 4 - Dwarf Trollslayer
  
  Another one of the comic style, but this guy just looks like he cannot wait to cave someones head in, and the bigger the better!
  
• 3 - 2nd Ed Skaven Thrower
  
  This mini I have chosen because I think it is sculpted extremely well. The 2nd ed range of Skaven are far superior in my mind to the current edition of Skaven. These guys also cost a pretty penny to buy on ebay, but are a team I would love to paint in the future!
  
• 2 - Bomber Dribblesnot
  
  A goblin on a Football field, wearing a pirate hat, and lobbing bombs (albeit very poorly!) at the opposition. How cool is that?
  
• 1 - Halfling 2
  
  Yes, what sums up a brutal game of BB where the mortality rate rockets, with Chainsaws, Bombs, Lawn Rollers of death, Zombies and Knives any better than a runt with a saucepan as a helmet, complete with a spoon as his cherished medallion of past glories on the pitch! Just before he gets his leg eaten by a Troll.

What are your favourite BB minis?

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Bark but no bite

I just created a Necromantic team over on FUMBBL, and I called them Bark but no bite.

In all my time playing Fantasy Football, I have never played these guys, so after a long hiatus from FUMBBL I made up the team and entered them into what is known as a "Speed Freaks Challenge" (SFC for short!). I won't even go into the fact I had already made a league just like this called the "Need for Speed League" (NFSL for short) and had my idea robbed by a former admin who then claimed it as her own! Anyway, that is water under the bridge! The basic premise is that your turn time is limited to 1 minute instead of the normal 4 minutes, ensuring that the gameplay is to say the least, frantic! There are 8 teams involved in the league, and you play 4 opponents, in a swiss round robin system.

Despite a disastrous starting game, where my Golem and Ghoul got niggling injuries (lest I forget, FUMBBL still uses LRB4 rules at this point) I still had chances to win the game, and conceded a late TD to lose 2-1 to an Undead team, who were the eventual winners. Next up for my broken horde were Ogres! The last race you would want to face in a league like this. I lost a ghoul this game (the one who wasn't niggled!) but focused on bringing down the Goblins as the coach had very few rerolls and relied on Bonehead saving me. I scraped through with a 1-0 win and thought I had weathered the storm.

Wrong!

Khemri were up next against a coach consistently ranked in the top 100 coaches on FUMBBL. He played a great game and my Zombies managed to contain his Mummies while I managed to use my speed to take advantage of a loose ball and scoot away for a 1-0 win, as Nuffle would have it, he (or she) decided that I had enough beatings for one night and granted that I would progress to the final round with a full squad. I need not have worried as my final opponent was an Elf team, who were absolutely mauled in the 3 previous rounds. I managed to add to their misery, dealing out 4 casualties on the hapless Elves, ending up with a 2-0 win and finishing 3rd from 8 teams. Not bad after a years break from playing games on FUMBBL!

I really like the Necromantic team. At first I always thought they were the poor mans Undead, and always felt uneasy having my best players on the team having no means to save them, and costing 120k to boot. I still haven't played Necromantic in LRB5 yet but they do seem to have improved a lot, though one of my favourite pastimes (fouling teams to death with Undead) is seriously hampered, but I guess that's what house rules are for!

I am hoping to get some pictures up before the weekend is out of some minis I have been painting, so stay tuned!

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New mini blog open for business!

Hi there!

I decided that I would like to share my love for painting the 28mm Blood Bowl miniatures and have set this blog up as a result. I have a range of miniatures, ranging from Blood Bowl, to Warhammer Fantasy, Necromunda and even some 40k.


My painting style is affectionataly known as "chewy". You will see why once I start putting my work online!

I play the game avidly, along with other Fantasy Football Games, such as Impact's "ElfBall"

I plan to update the site with minis that I currently own, am painting and selling off!

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