Blood Bowl Game 1 Report

Four Feet of Chaos V.S. The Hellburgh Squeakers

DEATH FROM BELOW! GO FOR THE KNEES!

(The results from the Chaos Dwarf point of view)

The team so far

The height depraved players of Four Feet of Chaos served their chaotic patrons well in the great bloody ritual that is Blood Bowl and brought glory to themselves winning 3-0 against the Hellburgh Squeakers who squeaked their painful death cries from under their stocky boots. The day was temperate and cool, a good day for killing in the name of the great unholy ones and at the start of the second half Tzeentch decided to part the clouds and bless us with a bright sun to keep the vile skaven rats from making a sneaky come-back. (Which they're known for doing.)

In the first half on the first turn of the game, the Hellburgh Squeakers took the ball. Their Rat Ogre, Phillip, with much enthusiasm and ferocity, smacked the Chaos Dwarf team leader, The Chaos Dwarf Blocker Gharzhakh Bloodhammer, an especially menacing dwarf who earned his name from permanently staining his hammer red with the blood of countless elves in a great war, on the head leaving him unconscious in the pits until the start of the next half in which he made a come-back and scored a touchdown on the last turn of the game.

The Rat Ogre's arrogance was repaid in double when the Chaos Dwarf Blocker Khatan Ogreslayer badly injured Phillip on the first turn of the second half, sending him to the apothecaries to miss the next game.

Khatan Ogreslayer smacking a gutterrunner

Rhalkos The Destroyer, a great black bull centaur who once stomped an entire halfling village flat beneath his hooves, caused so much terror in That One Rat that That One Rat tried to flee but was ultimately stomped flat and crushed dead. (Sadly it was from a dodge roll, not a block, so the gods did not bestow any star player points on Rhalkos for this.)

Shazhakh Ironhoof, The reddish brown Bull Centaur and apprentice to Rhalkos proved himself to Khorne by spilling the blood of a rat named Scoob, crushing him beneath his iron hooves and giving him a serious concussion, causing him to miss the next game and have a permanent -1 to armour value. Shazhakh Ironhoof also scored a touchdown for the game, leveling him up.

The Hobgoblin player, Nottan Orc, who is a rather skinny orc disguised as a hobgoblin to get back at his old team who fired him for being too weak, with the bludgeoning fists of his team mates was able to score a touchdown in the first drive.

Złakoza The Hooved, named so for his cloven hooves mutation he received for some deed involving goats and unspeakable things only he and Slaanesh are aware of, was awarded the MVP, causing him to level up!

In the end, this spectacle of blood and gore in the name of the chaotic gods was greatly enjoyed by the fans and Four Feet of Chaos became a little more famous, earning almost enough gold to hire their sixth Chaos Dwarf player but not quite enough.

Their next opponent will be next weekend (after this because I will be in Las Vegas from Thursday to Wednesday) against Jeremy Ford and his Imhotep's Legion of Khemri!

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One extra photo of models for the team.
These two models will be used for the star players Nobbla Blackwart and Rashnak Backstabber. I also need to get a 6th chaos dwarf blocker painted for the team and the minotaur pretty soon.

Blood Bowl Team WIP + A couple extra pictures

The final players for my Blood Bowl Chaos Dwarf team arrived just two days ago. Just in time too, since the league starts the day after tomorrow so I've been working on them with all the free time I have available.

My dog died in his sleep yesterday so I had to bury him and I wasn't feeling up to painting a whole lot so progress has been slow, but any progress is good and there has been progress. I put the pictures in order from oldest to newest. I'll post another set of photos when all the base coats are done or nearly all done.

Here's the team all together. The minotaur won't be starting with the team but hopefully as the league goes on I'll be able to buy him onto the team. That gives me some extra time to paint him!

The 1st edition goblin was painted as a test model for the paint scheme (Blue/Black). He's the only one I have named so far. Hobb the Gob. I still need a team name too. (Masked Marauders? eh.. probably not.)

Since all the chaos dwarfs are wearing masks I'm going to paint each mask in a different crazy bright color to try to get an old-school chaos feel. Yellow, red, pink, bright green, something else for the 5th. I think it should give them a neat look, though I haven't tested it yet so I guess we'll see.

A little further along yesterday.

Where I currently am at. Not a huge amount of progress but it's not bad considering the time I've had to work with. I'd like to get basecoating done by saturday at least, but who knows if I'll actually get that done. I shall try anyway.

Here's some individual photos.

The team leader. I still need a name for him, but I think he looks the most menacing of the group.

Behind shot

Guy with cloven hooves mutation. I like his expression.

One of the blockers with a split color pattern. Kind of feel like the odd boot should be a sort of off color that doesn't exactly fit the scheme and looks out of place like he just found it or something but I'm not really sure how well that'd go. Brown might work just as well.

One of the bull centaurs (Hthark the unstoppable 3rd edition model) I feel like these guys don't exaaaactly go with the 2nd edition chaos dwarfs but I really didn't have the time to convert my own boar centaurs or really find any old boar centaurs to convert and I found two of these guys for a good deal so I just went with them. I think they'll do fine.

The blue/black color scheme is going to be very prominent on these fellows. I think it'll look quite nice if I do it well.

The only hobgoblin who is actually a hobgoblin model. This guy's one of the 3rd edition hobgoblins. I need to find some more of them for 5 and 6 as I'll probably be needing to hire some more during the league. I was surprised how well he looked with a simple basecoat like this. Quite an easy model to paint.

Still unsure on his hood color though. Could do a bright orange or a simple brown or perhaps a dark red would do well enough.

Couple Hobb the Gob photos I think I posted previously, but just to keep everything together, here.

And that's all for blood bowl stuff. Just for fun I had a few extra pictures on my camera that are worth throwing up, so here.

Found this guy in a box of old things (along with a snotling carrying a squig on a tray!) with the rider all broken into several pieces. I glued him back together though I don't seem to have the rest of his lance.

Old school cockatrice!

Amusing silhouette from spraying figures. Surprising how well those silhouettes look. Can you tell which model is which?

The messy pile of minis section of my work table. (Zoats!)

A couple recent ebay buys I thought were pretty cool. Goblin king's chariot and red dragon.

Pull pig, pull!

Needs touched up a little but otherwise very cool!

And just for fun, a photo of a chaos dwarf mortar team who may be a couple of blood bowl fans. They certainly need to be painted up soon! I'm actually pretty excited for them.

And that's all! Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy my photos of old lead.

Paintlog + A Couple Games

My actual painting progress has been slow as I've been doing a lot of filing and cleaning of the minis and there's been some problems with the priming (The paint was coming on all fuzzy and gritty) so I had to strip and reprime a few guys.

It's been a little frustrating but I have gotten a few things done and I was able to play my first very very very basic game of 3rd edition fantasy battle!

I'll start off with the painting.

Here's an old chaos dwarf I had who was sitting on my painting table already primed from years and years ago and I felt inspired to paint him, so at around 2 in the morning I started to work and here's what I ended up with.

 I think he's pretty nice. Definitely can be improved on but perfectly suitable for tabletop use. I rather like how the red/blue color scheme turned out. I've always wanted to do do a chaos warband in that kind of scheme. Maybe this is a good start?

 This next guy is part of my Chaos Dwarf Blood Bowl team for the upcoming league (starts in a week!) A work in progress. I just finished base coating tonight.

He is of course, a 1st edition goblin. I'm rather short on blood bowl hobgoblins so this is Hobb the Gob. He'll be pretending to be a hobgoblin for the duration of the league. (Also two 1st edition orcs have snuck onto the team in disguise.)

I was kind of using him as a test model for the rest of the team as well since I didn't know how the black and blue scheme would turn out. I think it's rather nice. Not sure I'm a fan of the gold gauntlet he's wearing but maybe a good armor wash over top will make it a bit more suitable. If nothing else I guess I can just say he has a golden arm. (As in he's really good at throwing/catching?)

Now for my first Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd edition game. It was very simple, very basic and very small. My friend came over and brought a unit of 10 skaven to do battle with a unit of 10 dwarfs. Several turns were spent crossing the table to eachother and then the fight started.

My dwarfs attempted to charge the skaven upon seeing them come through the woods but their light armour and shields slowed them down a little too much. They barely failed the charge.

The skaven were clanrats and my dwarfs were warriors with spears. The clan rats had a magical banner which gave +2 to combat resolutions instead of +1. The rats then charged my unformed unit of dwarfs and didn't have much trouble forcing them to rout.

After routing and rallying several times and losing half of the unit mostly to free hacks (and losing the standard as well.) my dwarfs were pushed back until they were at the edge of the table.

There was not much that could be done against the oncoming skaven so they were forced to retreat the battlefield in shameful defeat. (but at least they looked nice doing it!) They'll be back though and in greater numbers!

Overall it was pretty fun. My friend had never even looked at the 3rd edition rules before I'm pretty sure so I had to look a lot of things up and try to remember rules I'd read 2 weeks before and there were some things we were unsure of (like are free hacks only on units in base contact or is it for all of the front line of the pursuing unit?) I feel like the magical banner really pushed things in the skaven's favor, but my failed charge also made things start off pretty badly.

Just from this one small one on one fight I kind of like the combat better than the current fantasy edition. There seems to be a lot more to it. The maneuvering system is really confusing but it apparently is the most complex of all the editions in that regard. I hope I can start to understand things better so our next game can be bigger and more interesting.

I also set up a makeshift sort of 40k/space hulk/space marine assault type thing on another table in my room using a bunch of my old video game collection.

I bought a couple of these starter box things about a year ago for 5$ each. They come with 5 space marines, 8 genestealers, some paints, a brush, a little red die and very simple rules to play with and some mission scenarios for you to try.

Image taken from SantaCruzWarhammer

The scenarios and simple rules inspired me to set up this table and try to make an interesting game from it.

There's two sides, a Space Marine (or in this case Squat) team and a group of 8 genestealers spread out around the table in groups of twos. Each model is moved individually, so no keeping unit coherency or shooting at a single target with all the guys or anything like that. You can split guys up, keep them together, shoot at different things, whatever. It also uses the very simple combat rules on the back of the box's manual.

The squat's objective is to get a valuable relic from the armory which is north of the loading bay (the place with the land raider). The armory door, however, is locked, so they must first get to the security console to open it. (the room directly on the other side of the wall where they start.)

From the security console they can control a turret in the loading bay (the unpainted metal ork) which can fire two bolter shots per turn at a target. Inside the land raider is an energy shield which gives the squats a +1 armor save.

The genestealer's objective is simply to kill all the squats.

There is also a mad ork roaming the halls who is controlled by each player during their turn. Though it might've been better to make him a bit more unpredictable.

In the end I think things need to be rearranged a bit and perhaps it was too hard for the squats. In these halls of death all five squats were killed, and so was the ork, and there were 3 genestealers left alive. I'd like to tweak things a bit as even though the squats didn't get very far, it was a lot of fun.

A little update + stripping some metal minis

I've been reading a lot of other people's blogs the past few weeks, most notably Orlygg's . Such a great source of old-school information, pictures and tutorials. Check it out if you like old warhammer stuff, and any of the links in my sidebar. Loads of great stuff. ->>>>>>>

When I'm not reading blogs, scouring ebay or killing myself slowly at the gym, I've been working to get my Blood Bowl teams ready for league time. Unfortunately things are going much slower than I'd like, but they are going! I just hope the last few players I need for the team arrive in time to at least get a basecoat done.

They're all over the place!

I managed to get some more work done on the human team, though they're not one of the ones that'll be used in the league so they've been put on an indefinite hold for now. At least they're painted to a playable level! Just gotta get them based. I'll probably follow Orlygg's basing tutorial here when I get to it.

 The following pictures are... a mess. Whoever previously owned the great throng of dwarfs I came into possession of not only had quite a bit of money to spend on these figures, but also on glue! Over half of the figures that I found in their original condition were COVERED in glue. The ones in this picture aren't even as bad as some. I've found ones that are head to toe on one side of their body in a thick hard sickly yellow resin. All of the vehicles and siege weapons had to come apart and many dwarfs had to be ripped from their bases (All managed it safely except for one imperial dwarf who's tab broke off.) I should've taken some pictures back then. Some of them were indeed horrifying to behold. Here are some of the remnants who's bases were too difficult to remove at the time. There's still a few more with globs of glue on their faces and arms, but these were ones I'd set aside to be stripped a while ago. I figured I'd get those done and clean my Blood Bowl team players while I was at it.

The guy with the broken base had so much glue between his legs I couldn't even get him out of the base without potentially damaging him.

Check out that guy's arm. He's like some sort of mutation.

The whole group ready to be stripped.

USE WITH CAUTION

All right, so this stuff... is pretty nasty. It's strong as hell, and probably overkill for any simple stripping job, but it's the only thing I've tried that can remove 20+ year old hard-as-rock glue. I can't say I recommend it to anyone unless you have this problem as this stuff is highly toxic, (read the label), must be used in a very well ventilated area and burns like crazy if it gets on your hand for more than 15 seconds. You also shouldn't pour it down the drain as it can damage the piping. So yea, lovely stuff. Anyway, it does the job very well and works like nothing else I've tried for stripping metal minis of pretty much everything that isn't metal. Just NEVER use it on plastic. They will melt and turn into a gooey liquid.

So here was the first group to be put in. I eventually added in the rest and covered them with Jasco and let it sit overnight. In the morning all the nasty glue was off and the black base had melted into a puddle, but the dwarf who was trapped within was now free. I took the minis out, shook them off a bit in the bowl to get most of the goop off, put them in a glass pyrex bowl and let them sit under a stream of warm water for a bit, turned the fan on and left the room and closed the door while that was going on. (The small amounts of jasco in the water made some pretty strong fumes and I didn't want to be around them.)

After 15 minutes or so I took each one out, scrubbed them with an old tooth brush on a towel and any bits of old paint still on them came off pretty easily. There were no more traces of glue and the minis were quite shiny and looked almost new. The first time I tried this I was worried a little about loss of detail, but in all the times I've done it, the models haven't been harmed in any way. They've always come out looking shiny, new, and ready for priming.

I took them out later on once they were dry and sprayed them in a box in the yard. I should've taken some pictures of how they looked when they came out, but I didn't. perhaps next time I'll remember to do so.

One last thing, I've been trying to think of a way to get started on painting my old dwarf army. I've been reading around on "how to start oldhammer" and one idea that seemed to make sense was from Orlygg's blog again. Starting out with 12 or so guys and building around them. My friend Joe, who has a blog on my blog roll under the name Jabberw0cky, has been collecting skaven models since he was little but has painted very few of them. He seemed pretty interested in trying 3rd edition fantasy battle so we're going to start by making a unit of 10-20 guys and start off with a small one on one skirmish using the basic rules from the WFB3 book pretty soon.

I chose 13 of my favorite dwarf models (because every band of dwarf adventurers must have 13.) from my drawer of dwarfs, dwarf drawer, if you will, and here they are:

The leader in the center with his hood and pipe, the map reader to his side, the dwarf holding up a lantern to guide the way, a grappling hook to get the group over ledges and walls, the thuggish brute with a club to beat down any troublesome rats, the brave one with a hammer high ready to strike, several who are simply ready to fight, and one to pass blame onto the nearest friend (see picture below, rank 2, file 2,) , the tall look-out man (who might just be insecure), the engineer who always bring tea and the ever-popular cook.

 Most of them are 1985 adventurers (many of which you can find in the Citadel 1989 Autumn catalogue ). Two of them, however, the dwarf on stilts and the map reader, are recasts by GW that I believe are still sold today. These are some of my favorite old sculpts with so much personality.

A great bunch of dwarfs I think, and they should be fun to paint!

I'm looking forward to painting these guys and I think I chose a group that shouldn't be boring to do. They're not a band of soldiers fighting a meaningless battle for some general or a block of cannon-fodder to be thrown against a horde of skinks for a few turns or a bunch of identical clones standing regimented and painted identically to fulfill a single purpose, but a group of mismatched individuals all with some sort of common goal I haven't thought up yet. There's gotta be a story behind such a party, though, and that's what I like about oldhammer, all the imagination and wonder.

What do you think when you see a group together like this? Can you imagine all the bickering and fighting that goes on between them? The nights around the campire with the cook making a meal for everyone and the leader sitting on a log smoking his pipe, planning the next day's journey, the dwarf with the lantern leading the party through a dark damp forest, keeping an eye out for goblins or spiders, while the one with the map nervously tries to navigate in the dim light. These models just beg for a story to be written about them and I think they're the ideal place for me to start painting my dwarf army.

A little brown box from the UK

So I went out to the mailbox this morning, eagerly awaiting a package of old Blood Bowl stuff I'd ordered from a UK site annnnnnd, there it was! Just sitting right there.

 So I opened it up annnnd....

Oh the excitement!

1 2nd edition Minotaur                                          
2 Chaos Dwarf Players 2nd ed                                 

1 3rd edition Hobgoblin                                            

2 Orc players 1st ed (used as hobgobs 5 and 6)        

5 Skaven Linerats 2nd ed                                          

2 Skaven Catchers 2nd ed                                        

1 Skaven Blitzer 2nd ed                                            

1 Skaven Kicker 1st ed                                            

1 Rasta Tailspike                                                      

     

Here's some up close pictures.

This minotaur as a special taste for rat flesh. Nom.

The more difficult part of the team to assemble. I have another group of three chaos dwarf players coming from the UK for my team. Hopefully they'll get here in time for the league. I do really love the old players though. They're so much cooler than the big hats.

I'll be using these 1st edition orcs as Hobgoblins #5 and 6. The reason for this being they didn't make any 2nd edition Blood Bowl Hobgobs and 3rd edition only had 4 unique sculpts. 

Also, I'm having a difficult time finding the rest of the hobgoblins at a reasonable price, so I might have to fill in #4 with a regular old 1st edition goblin and name him Hobb or something. Hobb the Gob. That'll work.

Oh those damned dirty rats! The meat of a Skaven team, the linerats.

Oven mitt catchers! They just love to bake things. Maybe they're hoping for lessons from a Halfling master chef?

That blitzer looks like he would eat a Halfling master chef.

And these came seperately, but these are the bull centaurs I'll be using for the team. Yeah they're all big hatty and 3rd edition chaos dwarfy but they're the only Bull Centaurs released for Blood Bowl and they're not so horrid that they make me want to go out and find one of the older fantasy Boar Centaurs and cut them apart. (They're kind of expensive!)

One more Blood Bowl mini for my Skaven team, a very special addition to the team who came all the way from Puerto Rico:

He's such a badass.

One last thing that came in the mail today:

I now have the power of the giant carnivorous sand clam. If you don't know what I mean by that....

A pretty good day for things Oldhammer! I'm very excited to get my Blood Bowl teams finished and painted so I can smash some face with them at the league and to try out some Space Orc VS Space Dwarf Rogue Trader games! (I already have some sand clams picked out.)