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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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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