Raising the DEAD PT. 5 – Painting a Triple Blood Bowl Team (Necromantic Edition)

Finally! FINALLY! After 10,000 years I am finally free! It is time to conquer EARTH!

Wait, wrong diabolical scheme pronouncement. Let me try again.

AFTER many long months! It is time to start painting my triple undead blood bowl team! YES! As the kitbash & conversion project finally reached its conclusion I was looking forward to finally spraying all these models and getting them ready for painting. I am reminded of making terrain for wargaming and that feeling of seeing all the random multicolored bits, glued and epoxied hastily together looking like a slapdash effort at best, then after finally spraying them seeing the unification of that effort.

Spraying using my ultra high quality undercoat spray paint (Dollar store) & high-tech spray booth. (Cardboard box)

I started off spraying just the bits I needed for the necromantic team, but ultimately ended up spraying them all since its cold as the dickens right now in my realms and being outside for the like 4 or 5 spray sessions per wave of models is harrowing despite the short bursts it requires. I am not a pro painter by any means so cold, wind, etc. doesn’t prevent me from spraying and I haven’t seen a huge difference. Hot, wet moisture is the biggest issues i’ve seen so far and now that isn’t the case so the spraying went well enough.

Browning the Bases

It’s been a while since i’ve done a painting project like this and the variety of models is pretty big so I just wanted to get something going and decided that I was just going to do all the bases up first. There are more than a few models that have tight spots to pass a brush through and I don’t want to get done a model only to crap it up with some base painting when I will most likely end up just putting flock and grass on it later. Also, since they are meant to be on gross muddy ground, a little brown ‘undercoating’ at this stage around the feet and hands near the ground will only give a nice dirty look later.

First muddy base (Wet Left, dry Right) Rhinox Hide I think.

Drybrushed with a lighter brown (Snakebite leather)

Finally dry brushed with reddish brown (Dark Flesh) on the left.

Bunch of finished reddish bases on the left.

Overall the bases turned out alright. I told the Magicianess that I spent an hour painting mud and she laughed at me. Haha. I laughed too. What a life we hobbyists lead. She later complimented my mud claiming it looked very much like mud. I then told her it was ONLY THE BEGINNING OF LOOKING LIKE MUD. YOU WILL ALL SEE! Anyway.

The Goal & the Vision.

This brings me to the real issue. The goal with the whole painting project. So I managed to devise a team name and story for my necromantic horror team, the Glowbone Gang. Well, ultimately these three teams are steps in the story of the coach who has come a long way to raise himself and his players from the grave. Just a tidbit of what’s written at the above link, but the coach was once a thrall on my vampire team in their first season of league play, but was the first player killed in the entire league by a khemri tomb king skeleton. I wrote a story there how the undead magic bound him and this and that and clearly I have a bit too much time on my hands but I digress!

When this coach raises zombies and brings undead and fell creatures of darkness into his care, they all emanate a glow from their bones, their insides which shines inside of them. SO I want a team of glowy dudes on the pitch, each different colors to show positionals easily and overall just have a cool (hopefully easily paintable) theme that looks good. I am not going for super detailed paint jobs, I want interesting and clear colors. As discussed in the previous article I am going for a black with gold trim color scheme for most of the armor and uniform bits, but otherwise the ‘flesh’ of the bodies will be colorful and glowing. In the first article, and when the team was growing from a concept to a concrete thing I took these notes:

The original ‘plan’ with some light painting notes.

Erd

Basically my aggressive players (Werewolves, Wights, Blitz-Ras) were going to have a red glow to them, either in their eyes or their whole bodies as with the skeletons. I think the skeletons with reds and oranges will be fairly painless and doable enough, but the wolves are a concern. I want them to still look like wolves, but want that flaming glowing look from their eyes, mouth, potentially claws and paws as well.

Although a fully red wolf and an orange wolf might look cool, I don’t know. I’m not sold on it completely and might go a bit more subtle. Paint one black and one white or grey with white or something and then do their eyes up glowing.

Glowing red eyes with a little OSL might be enough to sell the glowbone gang factor I am hoping as opposed to getting myself embroiled in painting a literal magma wolf. If this was the khorne team and I was painting those neat khorngors all fiery that might be something. (There I go thinking again… Future issue future issue! FORGET (for) NOW!) That should be alright. I will think about what color to do my wolves up, but a pitch black one and a grey and white one sound good at a glance. Solid plan.

Damnit. I was doing some of the writing for the progress on the initial base colors when the bright idea struck me to turn one of my werewolves into a were fox. I have a great love of foxes and this werewolf model is a rare opportunity (and a completely simple and slight alteration compared to everything I did with the tomb guardians and flesh golems. And those damn shoulder pads. Damnit.) I like the werewolves I got and they don’t look bad at all, but for some reason I saw raw pewter and just…wanted to do something to it. Too pristine, too clean, too…unsullied by these magician’s fingers.

The wolves in question. They conveniently go on sale after I buy them of course haha. Still got an awesome deal on them.

I am thinking that top right wolf (the brown one) will actually make for a pretty good target for some simple sculpting and foxification. The leaning down wolf on the left is in a pretty feral position already and seems more wolfy to me being so aggressively posed. I will do up the ears to be a bit more large and pointy, and also bring out the cheek fur a bit more too to get that fluffy look. The biggest bit will be the tail which I am going to fluff up real nice and maybe give a little swoop to. Ultimately it will be paint that separates these and denotes the fox as a fox more than anything. But the putty additions will help sell it and also satiate my (apparent) need to personally affect every model in the team save a few zombies.

I looked at more than a few tutorials for painting black fur, but this single image feels like all I need honestly.

Kind of wonky model, but nice crisp colors.

(3.3 update: I didn’t bother with any additional modifications on my werefox, but it still looks good.)

Bleh

For blue, I am planning on doing up my ghouls with blueish grey skin and have that phosphorescent glowing whitish blue coming from their eyes and mouth like the wolves. Maybe the bits where their bones near the flesh I can get some light glow going on there too to show how thin and papery their skin is. I am debating if I should do my Throw-Ra’s in blue or green as well, but we shall see.

Gurn

For Green I plan on doing the Throw-Ras, Wraiths, and maybe the flesh golems as well. I got some tesseract glow and plan on putting it to some work if I can since there are some really nice paint jobs which take advantage of it. I am also thinking of doing a lot of the staff like my coaches and such with the green as well. Maybe do some darker green here and there, then the tesseract, and then highlight with whites and maybe yellows. We shall see. Got a lot of practice to do yet. Also looking over the colors I am doing for everyone, my shambling mummies may also be green too. I will be trying to get some light peeking out through the helmet visor and maybe here and there along the seams of the wrappings as well.

Poiple

So, I want my zombies to be kind of a more muted color so a glowing purple would be best. Everyone will be glowing so it’s going to be a party on the pitch, but the purples and maybe pinkish action should be a bit more low key than the reds and greens I am guessing. Although the skeleton down there with those synthwave purples and pinks looks excellent. The foot on the ground and glow from the eyes and mouth is awesome. I want to replicate that. Zombies have strange spots where their insides become their outsides and that is a perfect to show their inner light bubbling out. I want to do some purple and green mixed on the flesh golems actually since they are meant to be multiple people sewn up frankenstein’s monster style, and I think having two colors mixed up around in there would be interesting to represent that. Also, most folks consider flesh golems to be glorified zombies on the pitch anyway so ayyyy. Also, since the tomb guardians and zombies won’t be on the same team, painting them up purples and pinks may also be part of the plan too. We shall see. I will most likely save them towards the end.

Yeller

Yellow. I want pretty much all the other line skeletons to be a glowing yellow. I figured it was close-ish to regular bone and also allows me to say that is the one part of the (Khemri Tomb King Egyptian Flavored) desert that the skeletons bring with them to this night rave club scene that is my undead. They will mostly be painted similar to the other skeletons, just yellow.

Challenge Lies Ahead

So. Clearly I have an idea that I want to do a bunch of glowing undead and fell creatures of the night. I swiped and copy pasted a ton of interesting and inspiring images onto this blog and am thinking long and hard about how it is all going to happen. I have an idea of what colors I want for what positionals which is a good start. But there are a lot more to these models than just glowing. Plenty have fur, wood elements, leather, bone/teeth and other cloth and uniform bits, metallic armor, etc. To keep it simple and to give me time to wrap it around my mind and get to know the models, I think I will do all the armor in a dark grey/black first, but then again they are all sprayed black already.

So after finishing the bases for the most part, I need to start doing the inner bits first. I have become more of a ‘paint deep first’ kind of painter going for the guts of inner goodness on a model before doing trim and stuff on the outside. Painting skin then armor, and so on. I will use the term skin loosely since most of these guys are bone or ghastly ectoplasm and such. Let me think a second. If you can’t tell already I am basically planning the road map as I go with this article so I can hit the ground running if time presents itself to paint. I don’t have a lot of time so dilly dallying with a brush in my hand is time I could be using to put paint on a model.

Process Attempt #1

Step 1: Completely base coat innards a medium level brightness version of the ‘base’ glow color.

The base glow color being red for blitz-ras, green for throw-ras, etc. It doesn’t need to be pretty, but I will make it a medium version of the color it will glow. In the case of mummy wrappings and fur I will just do them the base coat color I want them to be. A darker tan/light brown for the wrappings, and a darkish grey or brighter grey working my way towards white with the wolves. Skeletons, ghosts, ghouls, zombie innards, etc will basically just all glow (inner light baby, inner light!) and start out that color.

Zombayyz

Here are some of my zombies I did a base coat on. They are still wet so don’t look that good actually. Why am I even posting this picture?

WORKS IN PROGRESS BABY.

So I ended up going with my gut and just painting the zombies regular boring zombie green color first, and then will do the glowy bits when I get my base coat down. The urge to soak them in blood for the blood god is strong.

I found it heartening and worrisome at the same time seeing the conga line of zombies slowly approaching me. This green (And the green I have planned for the highlight dry brush is too good.)

In general I think I am going to take my zombies as far as I can since they are literal fodder and I don’t mind making mistakes with them. Then I will post more updates with the positionals.

Flesh Golems

With zombie color already underway, I did up half the FGs with the same color and did purple for the other half. Thinking that doing more stitches would have been cool to add a third patch of color in there, but what can you do. The green/purple looks good and they have some nice opportunities for glowing with brighter purples and pinks. I am going to do glow along the seams like the light is bursting out of them.

Ghouls

The blue looks good on them. Nice and dark. There are a a few bone spots and obviously the eyes and mouth which I will glow up. Also, I am going to glow up spots on their spinal column and along elbows and knees, see if I can’t get a neat effect there since they are so thin you can see right through them basically.

Wraiths

I actually ended up snipping off a bit of the fencing on one of them since it was going to be a nightmare to paint later. Tesseract Glow is awesome, but I need to put a proper base color under it in order to let it work its magic. I already like what I am seeing though. These girls will be the most glowy of all the players since they are spectral.

Even though the base coats are sloppy and messy, this is all according to plan. I like to paint in such a way that making mistakes doesn’t chip away at my mental reserves, time, or make me think I am wasting time and effort. Staying positive and enjoying the process is most vital. Doing that AND also getting a result I am proud of and happy to show of, that is the sweet spot I strive for, particularly on this project. But what of my werewolves? Well, to be honest the whole reason I fell in love with Necromantic was because of the werewolves and after a handful of games on fumbbl, I loved the wraiths too. So I want to make sure that they look really good. Most of that will be dealing with the fur and making that look good. I honestly love foxes and am debating doing one up in Orange. Now I am debating doing up his tail more fluffy and nice and making his arms and snout longer too. Gahhhh what am I thinking! The putty phase was already complete! Yikes. Now I have doubts and ideas and unused putty on hand on top of it all. *Runs off and googles* The tail… the orange color… gahhh.

Zombies with ‘inner glow’. Started with a bright purple and decided that all showing bones, entrails, and exposed places (Eyes, mouth, spots where skin has ripped open) would be the ‘sources’ for the light. I also did a light rim around those areas.

Zombs on the left with a dark pink on the more inner bits, some purple remaining exposed. Part of me likes where it is going and part of me thinks it looks like absolute trash. Needless to say, I shall plow forward.

‘Inner light’ from the scars and the eyes/mouth. It all looks like bubblegum to me and I am hoping when I finally get to light pink and white it doesn’t.

The ghouls on the other hand are looking pretty legit. Blue was a good choice and they are holding bones or have things protruding from them which was cool to use as light sources. They will have interesting play with the light and with more bright colors and white it should be looking good.

The dry brushing in step 3 is going to make or break it. The colors are very easily seperated and need to be softened on the edges and blend better. I will do some dry brushing back and forth between colors and hopefully soften it to look a bit more like actual glow as opposed to candy-flavored guts. OSL-esque painting is tricky. My only proper practice doing something like this was with a chaos chosen of Slaanesh team I painted a little while back. Here is my coach and my Minotaur:

I tried for OSL on the claws and on the ground near where the hooves touched the tiles and in between them like the ground beneath them was pulsing with purple power. I even tried a bit on the loin cloth draping down too. A bit too much white on this one, but my reasoning was that my Mino was drawing the energy towards themself so it was brighter where they were standing.

The tile glow on my coach/assistant coach model was a but more subdued and came out better than the mino base I think. I will take away from this the feeling that I don’t need a lot of super bright white and that keeping that minimal will be something to keep in mind. (2.25)

Step 2: Wash innards a darker watered down version of the color they will be.

With my base colors sorted, now I want shadows and a free road map. I often use shade and inks for shadow and shading of course, but also the spots where the ink doesn’t settle is basically where I am going to highlight and to a rookie painter like me that is convenient. Thankfully most of these models (except the ones I converted/kitbashed) are of a high quality and the ink should settle in a good spot leaving me with a fairly clear spot to highlight. Not to mention it will be a darker version of the color I want them to glow and represent the spots where the ‘light’ is its darkest. I know in my heart this isn’t ‘true’ OSL, but I just want a decent look, not a super awesome one. I mean I’d love a super awesome look, but I also need my blood bowl team ready in a month or two if I am to jump into this coming season with a chance of playing all my games.

Dry brushed zombo on the right. *Cause this is thrillah~~*

So here with my zombies I actually ended up dry brushing them a lighter color once and then washing them. I will dry brush them again after the wash dries.

I don’t have a green wash so I mixed nuln oil and a little bit of warpstone glow and it worked out fine. I want my zombies more green than yellow so I will be very gentle with my following dry brush to preserve as much of that green as possible. (2.24)

washed zombo on the right *Thrillah nighttt~~~*

Zombies looked pretty good after the wash dried off. I quite like that dark green. Honestly, another drybrush and they would look alright I think. Of course I shall ruin that notion!

Black was too dark a base for my wraiths with one coat of tesseract, so I went over it with some ice blue (fore) and then further did another coat of tesseract (Back). The blue itself looked pretty decent and ghastly, perhaps I should keep one blue and one green? When I do some dry brush highlighting I am aiming they will be closer to a glowing green/white.

THe green zombie wash worked well on the green half, and a purple wash also looked great on the purple half. So far so good. THe coloration of the purple is very very strong so I will need to calm it down with some lightening as I get going.

These cheap glow gloves sold on aliexpress or something I found online may be a huge basis for how I paint these guys, especially my bone buddies.

Funny what inspires you and what speaks to you. I have had a heck of a time finding models of people with glowing ‘BONES’ as opposed to the easy to find skeletons with glowing light within the eyes, etc. it must be a pain in the ass to do. Certainly this isn’t a sign of things to come.

Special Werewolf aside zone

Even with the werewolves and mummies/TGs (and to some extent zombies and flesh golems), though, I want to do their glow color as a dark inky wash at this stage. Even though I am focusing on the ‘openings’ with those models, knowing that they have some glowy goodness going on beneath the fur/skin will be interesting to get a glow effect I think. I will need to be a bit more subtle bringing it up to not ruin the wrappings/skin, but it’s worth a shot. If I don’t like it I can just dry brush away mistakes and things I don’t like. Also, potentially dry brushing some dark dark blue on the black armor/outfit at this stage might not be a bad call.

Initial werewolf painting has been going well! I like the color scheme so far and it looks pretty decent at this stage.

Step 2.5?: Do base colors for non-glow bits which are adjacent to glow bits.

Added this step after writing the one coming up next. I figure I might want to get some base colors down on other spots on the model before I do dry brushing all over the place so that some of the naturally occurring over brushing that will no doubt come from this brouhaha of dry brushing will come off as ‘OSL’ as they call it. Hah. But for real, after dry brushing like 40 models in a row I will probably be begging to use a brush for more careful painting purposes.

Zombies are looking alright! I like the glow and the extra colors I added in here an there (brown for the cloth and leathers, hair, etc. Looks decent.

3.3:

Ghoul initial glow and paintwork. They are looking pretty sharp.

Wraith models are just too good and washing them repeatedly and drybrushing with a nice bright color works wonders.

The Flesh Golems are a source of worry for me, but I am in that zone of ‘I looked at them for too long and I don’t know if I love them or hate them’ currently.

Step 3: Dry Brush medium level color again, then brighter. First Highlights.

With the wash/shade down, I can drybrush the medium again. I will be pretty liberal with this I feel to start with and then pick and choose my spots more judiciously with my drybrishing as I get brighter. (See glowing gloves above). As I grow tired and angry of dry brushing (and secretly lament the lost paint on the paper towel like I always do when dry brushing) I should be able to pick up a nice brush and start touching points of super bright versions of the glow color or straight white at this stage at key locations and call the ‘inner glow’ done for the time being.

Step 4: Touch up the models, misc. basic non-glow related highlighting. Gold trim on armor.

After the great dry brushing of our time has come to a close (So I am sure I would like to think when that time comes to pass) It will be time to clean up the model and start to do some repairs on colors that got overly dry brushed, black armor/outfit in particular if I got overzealous with the dark blue. Then do up the gold trim and stripes on the pants, armor and shirts, various accessories, and helmets. Hopefully by now the black armor will have some glow action going on from the dry brush explosion, but with the blue be a nice stark change from the brightness of the bodies. In that dark black base I will do the gold trim. I will no doubt be on the next (or following article) by the time I get to that stage since this is going to take a while I am presuming.

But after this stage I should have models with glowing bodies, basic highlights from dry brushing, and somewhat clean armor with nice gold trim on them.

Step 5: Pick out details? OSL-esque glow? Throw models out the window?

Step 6: Final Goodness, numbers, base rim, etc.

Update 3.9.

Yeah so much for progress pics within the ‘category’ I planned for painting. Ended up doing something similar to that, but it became a wild ride of back and forth between models, different color stages, brushes and paints, etc. I am essentially around step 4 with most of the models.

Zombies Nearing Completion. Same model, different lighting, big difference!

The Zombies are all but done at this stage besides clean up, final details, and basing. I am typically staring at them under bright light (Image on the left) so when I took a picture under less light I was ultra pleased with the result. The glow game out pretty good, at least in the picture! Staring at a model for hours will have my brain try to convince me otherwise, but I am happy with them. I think the trick with these guys was after drybrushing them to the point they were pink in the face with ‘glow’, I went over the areas less lit up with a bright green which helped sell the fading light I think.

Maybe I was a bit heavy handed on the corrective dark blue drybrushing or bright white spotwork on these guys since I felt like the ‘glow’ was getting away from me, but they don’t look as good as the zombies. I will give them another build up of brighter blues since I lost a lot of the mid tones in my correcting I think. It should be alright.

Flesh Golems looking alright. The glow overall looks half decent I think, but they still need some work. Maybe another wash of purple or green on the flat areas of skin to tone down that ashy look. They need to look more sweaty, stinky, and messy I think. This is a hodgepodge of body parts given unlife, and despite how much the maker loves them, they certainly ain’t going to be bone dry like they look now. I also need to touch up a few more details.

I say they are just ‘alright’. I don’t know if this is a ‘simple is best’ scenario or if they need some kind of special something to really pop. I have my extreme high and lowlights on the model pretty clearly defined so maybe I can try and smooth that out a bit or add in some yellow here and there to give them more pops of brightness. Fading green to yellow and then white may make them stand out a bit more. I also need to think about how to put numbers on them. Most likely the tomb stone in addition to the base itself, but I am trying to devise a way to work the number into the glow on the back of them that isn’t too obtrusive.

Hell yeah they get their own heading! Wolf Time!

I haven’t really posted a lot of good WIP shots of my wolves since I had them on the back burner for most of the painting project until I got a clearer vision of what to do. Then I knocked them out in like two session essentially to get to this point. Like I said before I didn’t bother to mess with the model any more since I am lazy and they were already base coated. The color is good enough to sell them as a fox so all good there.

Werefox with the flaming phalanges. Wolf buddy in background.

The red glow worked way way better on the black wolf than the fox. Having orange fur already kind of interferes with the way light plays on the eyes. The brown ‘paws’ look way better, although the eyes are acceptable I believe. Take a look at a few more angles below.

Overall they are looking good. I was super happy with the play of the auric gold on the black spots. I also took a long time trying a few different patterns before determining the diagonal stripe was the best for the job. That, and the occasional ‘X’ here and there. That will all need to be cleaned up, but that is final stages just before doing the details like numbers on bases and armor. Probably the next time that I update this (For you it will be as simple as scrolling down but a few lines) will probably be the conclusion of the painting of the Necromantic Section of the Team. I will link to a gallery where I plan on dropping a bunch of pictures which I will use on the league page commemorating the team(s).

Then I shall begin the Shambling Undead / Khemri section of the team. They will be lumped together since the zombies and ghouls will already be done so all that is left are the mummies and wights. And Wights are just skeletons which means they will go great with the Khemri phase of the project and the mummies will vaguely be similar to the Tomb Guardians. In all honesty I doubt I will play shambling undead, but who knows. Khemri just keeps growing on me though, but that shall be discussed in that section no doubt.

Finished! (Besides final basing.)

So the deed is done. At least as much as I am willing to pour into the necro for the time being. I am happy with how they look and I have a few tiny tiny tiny details to fix up, but I will do all that at the very end of the project in the final pass. Let’s have a look at a few touches I added in and look at the models.

What’s the deal with the hotdog pokeballs?

This is something a coach in my league does and I love the idea and this is the first team I have painted since I saw it where I remembered to bother. Such a clever trick and helpful for game play. Do you know why?

Zombie left, stunned. Zombie right, Prone

That’s right. It helps to clarify if a model is prone or stunned. Yellow facing up meaning prone and red meaning stunned. Since it isn’t a particularly visible part of the model unless they are downed (In which case they have most likely upset me no doubt and their shame should be exposed for all to see.) I didn’t really care that it was messy. Such a clever trick and I am looking forward to seeing it in action.

The Glowbone Gang – Necromantic Horror Blood Bowl team

There they are! In their glory! Quite a motley crew to be sure, but the black and gold ties them together quite nicely and I am happy with how they turned out. Lighting in this picture wasn’t anything to write home about, but it was midnight in a darkened hovel where I paint my minis so what can you do. Besides I will be taking the proper gallery images from multiple angles for each positional when the whole project is completed. Buuuuuut… I couldn’t help taking a couple pics of them in my light box so I can post some nice pics on the league page to show off my roster.

The Zombie buddies. In non-super bright light (Like this lightbox. Oops.) the glow effect looks good.

The zombies look pretty good and I am especially happy with their green rotting skin. Ample washes of dark greens and browns over top of some drybrushing in various greens as a simple highlight gave them a nice look of depth and putricidity. The GW zombies with their guts hanging out also were great since their ‘inner glow’ is on full display. Love these guys and can’t wait to see them on the pitch.

My positionals all get a little love on the base rim. I have gotten into the habit of doing a thin line in a color that marks their position. This is a NAF suggestion:

Excerpt from a Tournament Rules pack citing the NAF’s suggested colors.

I consider my Wraiths blockers as they come with block. And are green. (Planning!) And my wolves as blitzers in red. Since they have glowing fiery red eyes and claws. They have high movement and frenzy as well meaning marking them as a threat in red makes sense to me and stylistically pleases me. (Ghoul) Runners don’t have a set color and could be considered catchers I suppose, but I didn’t want to yellow up the bases and went with blue instead matching their color scheme. Also the red/green/blue color sequence has deep significance to me in general. Lastly my flesh golems are basically semi-big guys so have no color so I did them up in purple to match their scheme.

Just an aside on positional coloring schemes, I also do my dark elf witches up in purple too since it feels thematic. I like to have the colors be easy to see at a glance and ideally evoke some kind of emotional response so it’s easy to remember what they can do. I am wondering if I should put some kind of marks/dots/squares near the numbers indicating the pre-loaded skills as well, but I use loom bands for that.

Anyway, you can’t see it very clearly from a single picture (Look forward to the finished product when the entire team is complete!), but I took my time doing to numbers on the base rims, both front and back, and also put the numbers on the models themselves. For the wolves and ghouls, I didn’t want to disturb their armor since some of them were spikey and/or had that nice thin stripe of gold. So I opted to do them in black along the gold stripe on their pants on both sides. It was one of the easier, flatter, more visible areas to get a number in and I was happy with it. The 5 and the 6 on those ghouls came out especially well and the #1 on my werefox was horrendous and it haunts me (ayy) to this very moment.

Final Reflection on the Necro Positionals.

My wraiths were a tricky situation. The myrnmorn banshee model doesn’t really wear any armor to speak of besides their breastplates and it is so small and fiddly I didn’t dare take a brush in there and try to write a 3 or 4 on one of the boobs or something. I also talked about working the numbers into the ethereal goodness and you can see an example of #4 to the right here.

I think it was effective enough and doesn’t take away from the model’s etherality in general. There is a smaller number on the front like, dress-looking area of the model in a similar color as well. With these wraiths, I honestly feel like they look fine with a single glaze coat of tesseract over white or light blue and they are good to go. I managed to try and highlight, glaze down, rehighlight, drybrush, etc. back and forth countless times and don’t really think it did much. I added a bit of yellowish green into the eye and mouth zones and along the fingertips to try and get a little bit more glow action in there. Painting ghosts is both super easy and tricky at the same time. Love these models so much, but anticipate them being far too large to play nice in a regular blood bowl game since they are going to be in traffic undoubtedly especially after they get some guard.

The flesh golems ended up looking pretty nice as well. I think they might be missing something, or maybe the glow just doesn’t sell as well as I’d like it to, but I love em. Ultra breakthrough was on the shoulder pad number. The stripe was big and thick and I wanted to write the number large and ended up doing a kind of inverted colors look which outlines it over the stripe. Came out great and I kind of want to do it on all my models, but I would need a paint brush the size of a single bristle for some of them and I don’t have the patience.

Ghouls came out alright overall. I liked the numbers on the sides of their shorts. These guys are also the smallest players on my team since they are all balled up and hunched over. Happy with the coloring for the most part even though I didn’t get the glow exactly how I imagined it.

My werewolves, or werewolf and werefox, came out great. I was happy with the models but not blown away when they were just pewter, but they paint up fairly nice. I was also happy with how the two schemes I attempted came out as well and the glow effects on the black wolf were awesome, but got lost in the fur of the fox for the eyes. I probably should have gone for a dark grey wolf instead of a bright orange fox to be honest, but the mood struck me and I do what I please, glowing eyes be damned.

Fumbbl Experiences/Necro Strategy

Finally, and end to the rambling. And to this article which has been kicking around for just under a month or so now! I managed to get that team painted up fairly quickly believe it or not. I posted the previous raising the dead series article on Feb 19th and today is March 11th. Not bad at all. I put a good amount of effort into these guys and the glow was a lot of experimentation so that took some time.

I am looking forward to putting them on the pitch and playing with them IRL as opposed to on fumbbl. I have had a few decent games on fumbbl actually:

Also learning a lot of harsh lessons about the team build and skilling as well. 3 rerolls is a luxury honestly and I could use them, but don’t think I will need them once I get used to my team. Playing on fumbbl makes it difficult for me to really ‘feel’ how each player works so I make a lot of mistakes. I also care little for the results in the long run and it’s just practice and fooling around for the most part. If you saw some of the fool-ass dodges I make towards the end of some turns or idiotic passes you’d tut tut me like an obaachan watching someone walk and eat ice cream. But when those crazy plays actually work a bit, it gives me a strange undeserved confidence to try silly plays. 4 wins, 2 draws, and a 3 losses isn’t bad though.

My skill choices are … aight. And I did a lot of random skilling. I have a lot of money since I got my positionals, suffered a lot of injuries as well. I need to be smarter about how I hire zombies since I have two or three extra players in the reserves box at the end of every game it feels like so firing a couple zombies wouldn’t hurt. Lessons learned. That frenzy/tackle zombie has been a strange and interesting weapon though believe it or not. Ex Chaos Dwarf he was, fitting he found tackle again haha. Or is that just regular dwarves who get that. I don’t remember.

Guard piledriver wraith has been a surprising ass kicker as well. Piledriver is often commented on as one of the worst skills, but I have risked it a few times and it can come through in the clutch after making a big block. Getting dirty player or sneaky git would make Gassy the Betrayer a true threat on the pitch. Regardless, sidestepping block/guard is gross and those guys are just deadly glue that pin players and cause trouble.

My flesh golems ended up as glorified zombies for the most part, but stand firm has been crucial I will admit. Finally getting block on one should hopefully make them a bit more interesting as I typically set them up as pillars one both ends of the central field just before going into the wide zones and leave a small spread out mess of zombies between them as a net. It is basically a swamp of annoying people to get through so it forces players up the side lines unless they can get a few removals or effective and timely pushes, knockdowns, etc. My Ghouls are completely godly with ball carrying and snake stretcher has become a beast with all two random and two chosen skills. I typically will run GFIs with him just for the fun of it since I can. He needs sprint. I usually put one or two ghouls in the backfield depending on if I am kicking or receiving. I like to go back and forth doing handoffs with these guys every turn or two and enjoy watching the opposition try to reposition while my zombies, flesh golems, and wraiths just lay into whoever got caught in the undead net.

My zombies have almost all lucked out severely with their random skill rolls as well. Tackle (Though he has a -1 to MA), wrestle, block, and the beast with frenzy/tackle.

What should I do/ have done before? Fire zombies 9, 16, and sadly potentially #10 (Tackle but with -MA). I am learning with necro that their regen is pretty reliable and zombies, etc. typically make it back into the next drive so the need for a bench isn’t nearly as severe compared to ‘living’ teams. And zombies are free basically when the proper CASes start to roll in. A block, a wrestle, and Frenzy/Tackle zombie are more than good enough to shore up the front line with the flesh golems essentially giving me control of the midfield unless I face some pretty tough bash.

I should have skilled my wolves more carefully. They are more fragile than I thought and wish I had dodge on them. They need to be blodged up. Block or wrestle, maybe jump up would be good for them as an ultra threat. Catch isn’t a bad call though, but I went too far in on it I think. Rolled it radom once and decided to take it on another thinking the ghouls would do the picking up and then hand off to the wolves would run it in. Happens often still, but maybe not catch on both. Maybe strip ball or tackle to make them a bit more lethal. I should probably go ball-carrier with one (Block or wrestle/catch/Dodge/Jump up, etc) and Violence with the other (Blodge, strip ball, tackle, jump up). They are basically hyperspeed witch elves with claws if I can get dodge and jump up on them. And I love me some witch elves. I typically set up my wolves in the wide zones two or three squares from the line of scrimmage. Ready to spring into the backfield to snag a close kick or to receive a handoff and dash away when on offense. These guys and the wraiths basically play around with the ball like a bunch of dogs in a yard until the other team has enough people tied up or removed for me to push hard and open a nice hole for them to get through and run for daylight. (Well, moonlight.)

The ghoul could have probably been leveled more carefully as well, but once I have blodge on them I basically let the dice take the wheel unless they have a big enough game where I can pick. Sure feet and sneaky git were not bad rolls, but I picked sure hands I think. Blodge is a must for survival sadly, and I like to take sure hands on one to avoid any issues. They have such high movement they can get anywhere and pretty reliably hand off to wolves or ghouls positioned in the backfield. Ghouls have the same primary skills as wolves so its tough to say. I like the squirrely blodgestep ghoul, maybe toss in some fend for good measure and that is a player you can’t take down. Reliable ball carrier who is almost untouchable. Maybe give them sure hands after block and then roll on the AG table to see which way they go. Lots of potential there.

I talked a bit about my wraiths already, but guard is solid, mighty blow ideal. Tackle in high dodge leagues, maybe even frenzy. Grab would be fun since they already have sidestep, being able to grab people (And cancel sidestep) as well would be tasty.

The Coming (IRL) League Season

Here is a sneaky peeky at my starting roster for the coming season.

I have read plenty of tomes of information both new and very very old with all kinds of ideas, insight, and strategy on how to play the necro effectively. There are multiple schools of thought, but this is how I am playing it.
Starting Budget of a million GP, standard.

For me, two wraiths and two werewolves are mandatory, period. I am a firm believer of anything ghouls can do wolves can do better (Except dodge.) and wolves and wraiths ARE the Necro horror team to me. They is my baseline hence they are #1~4 on the roster. I originally had two ghouls, and more zombies or more rerolls, etc. but I decided based on my fummbl experience that I only needed one ghoul for the time being and dropped the second one (#6), although I came up with a name for him already. I honestly usually start with no flesh golems and work my way towards them, but I liked having them on my team despite being so expensive and will stick with one to start and end up using him as one of the pillars in my defense. I will just use a few more zombies to cast my ‘undead net’ and hopefully have the golem lure big guys and other linos away from the action to try and deal with them instead. Good distraction piece.

So the team is two wolves, two wraiths, a ghoul, a flesh golem, and 5 zombies. That is a zero bench, 2 reroll Necro team, but I spent the remaining cash (30k) on dedicated fans. No matter what my first game I am going to get a minimum of 35 K in winnings even if I lose and we both roll a 1 for fan factor. If we both roll 3’s that is 55k. Pretty much half a flesh golem before even factoring in touchdowns. I think the dedicated fans gambit might be a good one, but only time will tell. If my season goes similar to my fummbl performance, After two or three games I plan to hire my second flesh golem unless another positional dies (Again. Permanently) in which case I’ll need to replace them. And then I will consider if a second ghoul is worth it or not depending on how the wolves/ghouls are skilling up.

If I am really looking good with cash I will go for a 3rd reroll, but I don’t anticipate everything going that smoothly. Honestly, this is my first proper season with them on the table and it will be a learning experience. The best way I learn is to run out of rerolls haha. You learn a lot of things quickly, harshly, and without remorse. This is the Way (Of Nuffle).

Conclusion and Looking forward

And so the Necro team is all but finished. Roster ready, plans laid, built, painted, and looking good enough for the table. My goals with the necro team besides getting them skilled up enough to stand a chance in the ‘tough’ division of that league is to keep my CTV under control and play a lean team where possible. I can forsee grabbing an extra Zombie here and there, but I am hoping that they join the team ‘willingly’ from other teams instead of my digging through the old names and raising them up.

This has been a fun project so far and getting the team I plan on using painted and ready (And before the next season actually starts no less!) feels really good. Going to keep the machine going and bust out the Shambling Undead / Khemri Tomb Kings and paint them up going forward. It is mostly a ton of skeletons so I will need to get good at that, and quickly. I think it should be a bit more straight forward than the kind of mismatched nature of the other positionals as far as sources for the light are concerned, but it will be a unique challenge for sure.

I am mostly looking forward to painting up those tomb guardians since they were seriously the ultimate labor of love in the construction phase.

If you managed to read this far, good for you and have pity on your soul! Hah.
Until next time dear reader,

tRM

February 23, 2022 1

Blood Bowl Rules in Japanese UPDATE・ブラッドボウルの日本語訳のアップデート！

The first page of the fluff, a parody looking moderately similar to the original!

The Deed is Done? Yet it is far from done.出来上がりました？が、まだまだだぞ！

Well, it is complete! Or… nearly complete. The words are done, and about 1/3 ~ 1/2 of it looks like an actual rulebook and not just some bland sea of black letters on a white background.
完了しました！ま。。。もう少しで完了しました。言葉が完成し、1/3,半分ぐらいがちゃんとルールブックっぽく見えます。白い海の中にただの黒文字が浮かんでいるやつじゃなくて。

It has actually been done for quite a few months in all honesty. Real life and such has prevented me from sharing more about it, and also the big issue of how is the best way to get this information out there to the coaches and commissioners of Japanese-speaking realms?
正直数か月前から完成しましたよ。現実、生活も、どうやって広げようかの悩みなどのせいで、今までシェアすることができませんでした。どうやって必要な人たちの手までに送れるでしょうか？

The Final Stretch・ラストスパート

Honestly the goal was to have it looking like the original rules, pages matching one to one (For easy comparison) and that is currently happening. But it’s a slow, harrowingly repetitive process and I am but a single Magician! Granted I am aided by great verdant forces, but this is a task for the Red Magician. Here is the last page I finished typesetting：
正直といえば、ゴールが全ペイジ、ワンツーワン（比べやすいため）で、現在それをやっています。　　すごい遅くて、（ある意味で）苦しいつまらないしごとだし、ただ魔法使い一人のじゃ！もちろん偉大な緑豊かな力を借りているけど、これが赤い魔法使いのすべきことです。今までの進歩の最後のペイジをどうぞ：

And here is the one I am working on currently:
そして現在の最中のペイジ：

Page 71, ‘Halfway There, living on a prayer (To Nuffle)’　71ペイジ「途中がナッフルの渡し絵の贈り物」

I am mostly using tables to make the columns all match up properly and keep the text in a relatively close position to how it looks in the original. It is working pretty well, but basically I am getting into the deep waters of the rules where the charts come a flooding in and my OCD has me wanting it all to look really good, which means endless tweaking and I basically hit a bit of a wall. A magician needs time to rest and study their spellbook afterall! (New Season of the Witcher is fire. My BB League is rocking. Recently get involved in a Cyberpunk TRPG campaign with the honorable Sorcerer!)
基本的にテーブルを使って、コラムを整い、オリジナルルールブックを何となく再現しています。なかなかわ来るないともいますが、淵（ふち）に入り始まり、強迫性障害的に、全てのテーブルがきれいに並べないと気が落ち着かないので、休憩です。魔法使いも休みを取りスペルブックの勉強の時間が必要のじゃろう。（ウイッチャーの新しいシーズンが最高。ブラボのリーグが熱い。大好きな青いソセラー最近新しいTRPGに参加し始まった。。）

So things have been slow going.
とにかくペースがゆっくりのほうになってきました

Are you teased?・いじめられているかい？

Just a humble update. It is done and can gladly be passed to you, you need only ask. I would be happy to hear any ideas on how best to get this information to the people who need it.
ただの謙虚なアップデートです。とにかくある程度完成したし、聞けば喜んで渡してあげられる。必要な人の手までにいい届き方に対して考え、提案があればぜひ聞かせてください。今まで影に包まれている路地で秘密的に渡している感じです。

Checking my site stats, I get a fair amount of hits on the original translation article so people are poking their heads in and taking a glance! If that is you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and let me know what you think.
サイトの情報を見ながら、もともとの記事がかなりみられているみたいですので、人が顔を出してみてみることをしている様子があります。もし、それがあなたであれば、連絡を送ることをためらわずに考えていることを教えてください。

Until next time my friends.
ではまた、ともたちよ。

tRM

January 20, 2022 0

Raising the DEAD PT.2 – Converting a triple blood bowl team.

Greetings traveler! Welcome to part two of the great raising of the dead that is & will be my triple blood bowl team. Last we left off I was putting together the pieces and planning out ideas. I have gotten a fair amount of work done, and gotten more than a couple goodies in the mail, but have hit a minor standstill, thus I turn to the hobby blog. Hoblog? Feels forced. Anyway, I go over what I have done, and gain inspiration from my progress to give me ideas and fire to push forward. It has worked before and shall work again I hope.

(So much for the pitch creation blog I have had sitting in my drafts for half a year now. Whoops. I’ll deal with that later. Probably. It warped a little which is breaking my heart, but I know how to fix it. It will probably work. Aghhhh. Back to the dead.)

This will be released someday! I just have too many other projects on right now that I am focused on.

Flesh Golems

So the flesh golems were my first main goal here as I wanted to get those bull ogors looking more undead asap. I made some fair progress pretty quickly. Filled in the massive tummy gaps with blue tack.

I repositioned the arms, stuck them with blue tack and then glued them in place leaving the blue tack since I planned on puttying around it anyway. I picked up a bit more quick dry epoxy putty which is my go to for more detailed modeling stuff and got to work. The main deal with the flesh golems is their frankenstein-esque appearance with the huge obscene stitches. I did them up with big bellies to match their large frames and did stitches with a variety of modeling tools. It doesn’t look like much now, but I am hoping with a proper paint job and different flesh tones it will sell much more. Such a fear and a thrill when doing this kind of conversion work as it looks like slop (And probably will regardless) but with some paint it will be much better I hope. So far I am happy with the arm placement and have some much better dynamism in their poses ready to throw blocks and toss foolish weaklings out of their path.

Stitches on the back as well to try and sell the piecemeal look.

In addition to making stitches along the body, I also filled in the gaps and attempted to replicate some of the musculature of these brutes as well to questionable effect. We shall see.

Adding on other bits. A helmet, neck bolts, and the pants.

After feeling confident that the main body was in good enough shape, I went to add in some details. I did the helmets out of space marine shoulder pads and some epoxy on the back (Not pictured yet.) and used some plastic rod of varying circumference to create something akin to the neck/forehead bolts. These guys don’t have much neck space so I went with forehead bolts instead. Call me a ruiner of tradition if you wish, but idgaf. It’s blood bowl and my necromancer uses magic to bring these guys back from the dead, not science. Regardless, electricity gets to the brain zone in any case so its all good. The flaps around the waist making the pants seem more natural against the gut was a tremendous pain in the ass and I am glad it is over with. The helmet chin strap on the right one came out so great I think. Reminds me of a proper hockey or football helmet chin strap.

There is a bit more to go on these guys and I will update as soon as I can if I remember to take pictures of these guys before I release this.

No Bones About it. (Bones about everything.)

Bones! Skeletons. Skeletons were a source of ire and concern for me in the previous post, but I have since remedied that issue pretty well! TT managed to show up with another set of of those skeletons I was after and they got snagged right away! But in the meantime, I managed to find a pair of D&D skeletons which I thought would be alright. Here is one next to a normal BB skeleton.

Size wise (And pose wise, hah.) they are fairly close! You can also see the heinous armor that I plasted on the back of the skeleton, but I shall talk about that shortly. First… BOOTS!

So, not shown here, but I snipped off a sword and shield from the D&D skeleton and they were pretty much just a straight up skeleton. While normally I would say just roll with it, no big deal, let’s play some blood bowl! I want to do these guys up and have them look a bit more cohesive so I saw the other skellies all had boots and went about doing some up with some leftover putty I had from doing the flesh golems. At first this was a tremendous pain in the ass, but I got it down to a pretty decent science. Took a kind of thick cylinder of putty and pressed it against the back calf and under the heel of the skeleton and then slowly using a modeling tool pulled it forward/upward around the leg/foot until I basically had it wrapped up like a blanket. Then I pressed in what I would describe as shoelace eyelets with a sharp flat edge of my tool and it had a really nice effect. I used the spoon-like scoopy bit of the tool to form and smooth the cap over the toe. Lastly, using the the flat edge of my modeling tool, I went around the bottom border of the shoe to create the sole and then again did a ton of straight lines on the bottoms of the soles to give the boots some tread.

They honestly look like gigantic high tops, like mario live-action movie jump boots levels. Regardless I was still fairly impressed with my work and found the process of figuring out how to ‘make’ sneakers/boots from nothing quite interesting. I ended up making a pair of boots for my two D&D skeletons.

Ghoulish Pants!

Ghouls! These guys are really important players on the team so I want to make sure to give them some TLC I’ve used ghouls before for players on a blood bowl team when I had a small boatload of them from a previous trade deal. They are the thralls on my vampire blood bowl team. Check more pics of them out here. (As well as a picture of the first pitch I made using the styro/foamcore technique. What a random coincidence, that.)

The standard Ghoul and my Vampire Thrall on the right.

So I realized that the official BB ghouls are all wearing shorts and maintaining a bit more decency on the blood bowl pitch which is respectful, appealing, and allows a chance to add a bit more team color to what would otherwise essentially be a naked dude with bone & stake piercings. With the thralls I went for knees and elbows with like blocks of stone tied on to them with cloth since the vamps don’t really care for their thralls very much. In addition, the shoulder pads match my vamps and the helmets are cool too.

I decided to go for a more sporty-style look for these undead ghouls and am starting that with some shorts. They came out pretty well. There were a few spots where with fur/hackles near the nuttal zone got in the way, but I just said whatever.

Nuttal Zone is an official term to represent the ballanic curvatures.

So nut jokes aside, My favorite part about this, and one thing my (typically passive) partner noticed and complimented right away when I ran up and showed them was the gap in the pantlegs making them look like actual clothing being worn as opposed to epoxy flattened around the leg. I really made sure that this kind of stood out where I could. I also snipped some spinal junk off of these guys since I think it’s a bit much and some was going to get in the way of my armor plans undoubtedly.

Tried to show off them dump trucks from every angle.

Using magic of the Hot Water Circle

Indeed. The hot water circle technique is one where boiling water and the ancient ritual components are mixed and plied and the desired material is impressed upon them! With more repeated pressings and offering of the sanctified materials one can have an endless supply of almost anything! Yeah, so Hot water Circle is just a playful translation of [Oyumaru], a Japanese craft/toy/repair item which is absolutely phenomenal. It is sold also as ‘blue stuff’ which I originally bought, but the prices are grossly obscene compared to buying oyumaru directly. Also, I can get it at the damned daiso for nothing basically. Truly beautiful days when you can essentially get a full blown casting operation going from crap at the dollar store. That is junk magic right there baby. Red Magician’s specialty!

Anyway, that long intro to the game plan aside, feel free to scoot around youtube for how oyumaru/bluestuff casting and molding works because I am not going to go into it here. What I will go into is what I am making. Well attempting to make. SO I have those funky ghoul/zombie dudes and these D&D skeleton dudes and they need some proper armor to match their players in arms. So I decided to make a cast and crank out a few more sets. Currently all I have is the back part.

A few back parts laying out waiting to be cleaned up and some on the models.

This is perhaps why my project stalled out since this is a setback. As you can see it’s not pretty and I am planning on doing sculpting on some putty to finish them off, but I don’t know… They don’t really seem to hit the mark so far and it worries me.

My first oyumaru molds were alright, but I wanted a proper two part, but it didn’t go down like that. I will need to spend some time making a few more molds from different angles that are easier to work with I think. That is the plan. Maybe I will rip off all those bits and start fresh. We shall see. That light blue putty is what I use to make casts of other models which I give away as gifts to my friends and when I have some left over I forged a few shoulder pads with it. So far it isn’t horrendous, but I am hesitating to progress since it doesn’t seem adequate enough. I shall report back in part 3.

Going forward.er.

As mentioned before, I need me some werewolves and they are actually on the docket. A good friend of mine and I will be throwing lots in together and snag some goodies off greebo and I shall be getting them soon enough. They are basically all sorted out as is and will need little work done to them anyway.

Also, as mentioned previously I got a set of those badass skeletons!

Snagged some of them and got to clipping weapons and shields on them and they are actually looking pretty good. I will need to do a little blade and dremel work to get the clipped bits looking like bones again enough to cover the rest with clever painting, but they are doing OK. I will add more pictures of them next article.

Finally, I need to finish my flesh golems, and solve the shoulderpad dilemma that I am currently facing. When I can get through the shoulder pad dilemma I have a feeling the rest of the project will start to fall into place quickly. That was it! That was what I needed to figure out through writing this and know I know. With a few more oyumaru casts of the shoulder pads are different angles I should be able to cast more than a few usable bits which will look great and be easier to sculpt into a cohesive thing than what I have going on right now. I feel foolish honestly, but don’t we all before we find clues to our troubles?

Dilemma solved, I shall move forward and hopefully take better pictures and return soon enough with another chunk of tasty hobby update for you to enjoy.

Until we meet again!

November 24, 2021 0

Shrine to Nuffle & Musings on this Deity of Chaos

Who and/or what is Nuffle? Thankfully to date this is one piece of GW game lore that remains a mystery to a large extent. Here is a wiki page for Nuffle. That wiki shows the following image depicting Nuffle:

Is Nuffle a Zeus-like old white dude holding the Living Rule Book 6? Who can know?

So Nuffle is a mystery especially when it comes to what he or she or they even look like and this is excellent for it really gets the creative juices going for a lot of players who fall into the truth that is Nuffle and begin to seek out description of their deity who gives and gives. Below are a small selection (almost exhaustive?) of all the depictions of Nuffle I have found. I am mostly surprised that there are so few given that the game is over 30 years old.

Also if you don’t want to hear about my musings in Nuffle then please click here to jump directly to the shrine build.

Gallery of Found Nuffle Images/References

Of the images of Nuffle I have found there is a mischievous cat, a robed figure with a blocking die for a head, a robed merlin-like classical wizard look with dice, a baby nurgling, Jesus with a D6 staff, a large shoed goblin, a zeus-like deity, and meat loaf from the Bat Out of Hell tour. I mostly trolled google for these images and the pickings are desperately sparse after the first few.

I also found a few of these: (The Jesus, the large shoed green being, and the nurgling-esque baby) from the both down podcast page that had a contest about this very subject in 2012! It is a great podcast and they really go deep into the lore which is a breath of fresh air honestly, despite theirs being one of the longest running podcasts on the internet. I have listened just about every cast they put out.

In particular I like the idea that Nuffle is a cat smoking a cig messing with people. THat is courtesy of the excellent Blood bowl site and it’s writers/artists at the blood bowl strategies site. A really excellent page that has such a distinct style both artistically and how they view the game. I myself strive to become a better coach and appreciate how they kind of describe the process from fledgeling coach all the way to veteran and beyond.

But Meatloaf… Where does that come from? Actually, there is a quite well known player of blood bowl called Doombeard Dave who occasionally guest-hosts on the skulls and ones podcast who is very vehemet about a few things: 1. The Slow Jams (Sade, etc.) 2. Nuffle looks undoubtedly like Meat Loaf from the Bat Out of Hell Tour 3. Bash over Agility as a general rule. I respect this person and their opinion. I love agility teams myself, but play them as bashy as I can. I also like the jams going during blood bowl, but understanding the slow jams is something that I am working on improving both as a coach and a person. But one thing that just took off like wildfire among my local league was the fact that meat loaf is closest depiction of Nuffle there can be.

On this podcast where Doombeard Dave guest hosted a discussion of the new (BB2020 Second Season edition) rules and when they discuss the new prayers to Nuffle table Dave makes the declaration very clearly and with great belief in his words and for good reason.

This podcast episode in general is a pretty good one and I respect a beverage imbibing during a podcast as I actually co-host a similar one of my own! But this first episode (Of three) is the best one before things start to spiral a bit, but more power to them, it was a damn pandemic. So before I go on to play the Djimm Thorpe to Dave’s Roze-El with regards to purporting the idea that Nuffle is BooH Meatloaf, please listen to his words directly for everything from here on out is official Red Magician conjecture and personal belief/expansion of the concept/personal discoveries made manifest and shared freely. Stare at these .gifs while you listen for maximum power.

And thus it begins. The great declaration of Nuffle by The Red Magician.

And of course, first off, this declaration is based off observations first pointed out (To my knowledge) by Doombeard Dave. On we go. With the three gifs above alone you should be able to get a clear indication of a few things. He is pumped up and charged full of energy and excitement. This excitement and energy sometimes courses so strongly it can barely be contained. Following that, the emotions that go along with this energy is deep and powerful evoking memories and truths from great depths. Finally there is the edge, the stare and gaze which stops any in their tracks and one tinged not with anger or fury, but subtle doubt and powerful questioning ability that makes any coach or player reflect on their lives up until that point and really dig deep for the hidden truths within the soul. Alright I just fancifully described a handful of .gifs and a single still image of meatloaf, but there is meaning behind this.

The usage of Marvin Lee Aday’s likeness (Meatloaf) to represent the one we all call Nuffle is an understood truth. I don’t care for the zeus or jesus-esque renditions of Nuffle because its overdone in general and blood bowl doesn’t really evoke that kind of ‘ultra-holy’ imagery and also because both greek pantheon and any form of Jesus worship doesn’t need to stick its nose in yet another quality pastime. If your Nuffle is a Zeus or Jesus-esque figure, then that is the truth. I think Nuffle’s demeanor is similar to that of a cat, and can’t question the artwork at all, but cats as well are just in too much media and I don’t want any cat deities in my life right now. If your Nuffle is a cat, then that is the truth.

Blocking die head, various wizards, crying baby nurgling, etc. are all wonderful ideas and iterations of Nuffle, but to me Nuffle is supposed to me something, somone, to look up to and aspire to. To want to appease while simultaneously be rewarded and alternatively, be chastised and taught by. This is also a being that despite being so mythical and deific, is something that is by my side every step of the way on and off the pitch. I don’t see that being as a cat by any means, and don’t see zeus or any others as being anywhere nearby me in any willing way. I certainly don’t want my deity to be a crying baby or some blathering monster either.

Meatloaf. A Rockstar. Not just a rockstar, but one that respects the operatic sphere as well – that is classy. Not just a rocker that delivers face melters and belts out the words, but also one that is sensual and caring and more understanding than your more traditional axe wielder. Also by focusing on the bat out of hell tour we capture a legend in the midst of a beautiful climax in various meanings of the word and rebirth. Read up on the whole tour and you will see what I mean. Also, this was during the late 70’s and early 80’s which is roughly when the game came out and undoubtedly right on brand in a variety of ways and blood bowl is one of the few brands left put out by GW that still has a little bit of rock and roll/metal fantasy vibe to it left. That and maybe Necromunda.

Blood bowl and almost every franchise started by GW had a few spots here and there which had a pretty badass flavor of what could be described as ‘Neon Mohawk’ to some extent. It is a big reason why I think a lot of people liked GW so much ‘back in the day’ and has such a unique look and feel and when ‘modern models’ still have little flares of that it is the best. Thankfully blood bowl has retained a great amount of that at least flavorwise and even some of the more models still have the goodness.

Anyway. Meatloaf is the truth. The energy, the passion… I see my Nuffle as someone closer to being a coach than some kind of old man or an animal/beast. An everyman and someone with flaws who takes chances, goes too far, might do a little bit more than zero nose candy, lashes out, but also has boundaries and self respect as well. Moderation and Moderation in moderation for this being who ultimately is an agent of chaos if only in the form of polyhedrals and timing with regards to this board game if not every random event that takes place in the universe, but let’s try to keep things closer to the board game than the cosmos. (Try being the key word there.)

Doing anything for love (Of Bloodbowl) but won’t do that. (Allowing you to succeed a reroll of 1 on a GFI before scoring a TD on turn 16.) Boundaries.

Tenants of Nuffle

I am currently in the process of thinking about this in more depth and will no doubt touch upon it in another article. By all means look forward to that. I didn’t think I would finish the build so early (Since my articles typically take a series of weeks and months to complete usually.) so I figured I would have more time to consider this in depth. I am also reaching out to Doombeard to see if he will grant me an interview/discussion of Nuffle Truths as he feels them.

The Nuffle Shrine Build

Needless to say, despite my devotion and trust and belief in Nuffle to a level which may concern more than a few people, I was not nearly as satisfied with my piety and my dice rolls still need a bit of love so I set out to create a great work. I set out to create a shrine to the great Nuffle.

Inspirado

Google is typically my first stop when I begin a new scratch build looking for inspiration. I knew of a few altars I have seen and collected the .stl file for 3d printing on thingiverse(can’t find it now and it isn’t saved on my profile either! Oh well), but my printer is all but trash at this stage unless I really put some effort into it. There was the altar upgrade in the BB2 game, a recent altar .stl/print from Kraken Studios and a few other 3D prints which used to be online. Also finally a reroll marker that has shrine/altar-like qualities which a Red Magician can respect. Main elements of all these altars are the stone dias/plinth and the honorable rule book (Was the LRBVI in most iterations, one of the darkest, yet brightest times of the hobby), skulls or dice bearing skulls/blocking dice, regular D6’s, and various dungeon regalia like torches, braziers, skulls, treasure, sculpture, etc.

I really like them all and have nothing to complain about and loved all these ideas and planned on doing something similar, but wanted to bring some real ritual into the act. I would not be able to call myself a Magician if I didn’t find some way to inject a little ritual into such fun, especially when it involves the rolling of dice and supplication to the chaos.

Shrine Foundation

The foundation of the shrine will have three main areas: Central Altar/supplication zone where models/coaches/players will be placed when they must go to attone, and two side altars before (dice) pools where the dice in question will be placed to offer up to Nuffle.

This is what I am thinking when I speak about ‘dice pools’ with my shrine to Nuffle.

The foundation was a piece of flat foam (The same one that I used for my Necromunda Tile build) and a kind of foam brick/sticker/wall decal that you use to make a wall look like it has bricks. My friend picked them up and handed them off to me a while back and I liked their natural look and sliced them in such a way that suited my needs. I cut holes in the pond areas and then peeled off the sticker and stuck them to the foam base pate.

I used more of the base plate style foam to carve out some stairs which I thought would add a nice effect like the shrine was super old and the earth around the shrine was winning out against these ancient stairs. I also used the foam to begin the front and back of the bottom of each of the altars.

My Chaos Minotaur (On a 40mm base) practicing to pray to Nuffle in repent of its horrendous performance against goblins. Even worshippers of Slaanesh must bend the knee before Nuffle.

Main Details

So the base would be foam and such, but we all know it’s the details that really make terrain pop and I wanted to spare nothing to show my praise and appreciation for Nuffle so I raided my bits box and came across quite a few gems which really are going to add a lot to the flavor of the shrine. I finished the altars themselves with more foam, beveled unevenly to show wear and tear of ages and to make it appear more stone-like since I am going with a humble greyish stone which will be painted to have some moss ideally. The side altars are straight flat stones and the main one is more of (in scale) huge book stand/plinth.

Tons of delicious bits, books, tomes, regalia, curtains, skulls, skulking creatures, etc.

The main feature of the side plinths, seeing as they would be the offering space for the dice, would be the dice themselves. I recalled from AGES ago when I just got back into 40k again (8th edition, during index times) and someone gifted me some of these ultra tiny dice and I knew they would be perfect for the task at hand. I also found a small little decoration with skulls on it (I think it was a grey knight thing) and sliced the skulls out and popped em on top of the 1 pip location on the dice. I also added a small lantern (since I kind of want to try some more OSL) and a bag of pentacles, I mean gold (11 coins actually…) since money goes a long way in most religious activities. The coins were cut from a thin length of plastic rod, but a toothpick could have just as easily done the job. I adore how they are spilling out of the bag and think it gives the altar a lot of flavor. Once painted it’s going to be something special I feel.

Skulls up baby! Glittering coins in the light of a small lantern on the blocking dice altar.

For the Central plinth I went with a book, and a (poorly made from two skaven bells and some random spikes, should have just used a damn ball) blood bowl ball tipped wand/mace. I glued down the wand, but am not sure about the book yet since it feels kind of small and needs prepwork anyway. Thinking about having multiple books to swap out or potentially just glue one in randomly. That will depend on the universe. Being able to change books will allow for some more fun and letting coaches have their own books and such if they are blessing playbooks, or brining their interpretations of Nuffle’s word, etc. Those are all little details that only matter to me though.

As for the 2D6 altar, I made sure the small D6’s both were correct (Had 1~6 and in the correct locations, these are mostly free cheapy miscasts/prints) and glued them down, Ones facing upward. To accentuate this altar was the ritual sword/dagger and the cup/chalice. Perhaps used separately or in conjunction as a petitioner offers their bodily fluids or perhaps just gets drunk af while praying or one after the other or, well, use your imagination here.

Vampire Coach, Lady VonZasswhippen overseeing the blessing of the items while sneaking in a few special prayers to ensure her vampires recover and succeed moving forward.

For those playing at home….

Just a quick side note and comment on the main implements of the altars. As a fellow Magician to THE Magician, I, the Red Magician wanted to add some delicious flare into my Nuffle shrine by making sure the four main tools of the magician were represented on the model- The Pentacle (Coin or Disk), The Cup, The Sword (Or Dagger), and the Wand (Or staff). Just something I wanted to add in to give it a more personal feel and to power it up. I feel with those implements on the altars, anyone who approaches will be ready to offer Nuffle their most sincere supplications.

Interested in the Tarot? Check out my podcast with the Loveable Sorcerer!

Why are the Skulls and Ones facing upward? Will you not doom yourself?

Perhaps. It is a real fear in the pits of my stomach, but these are the facings on the dice which cause many to curse the name of Nuffle and which people wish to see the least come up in their games of blood bowl. I myself have been working very hard on not externalizing the, “strong emotions” we shall call them, when such things happen. (Goal line 1 reroll 1’s are real and I just had one like a week ago and it cost me the win I feel.) But also Nuffle’s Chaos Number is 11. Obviously for the number of players on the pitch at a time, but more colloquially as the eyes of the snake. The often fatal 1 reroll into 1 that this game, and Nuffle’s often fickle will, are famed for. Likewise for skulls which are very popular in decorating various Nuffle Shrines, although I have seen many POW facings upward in those shrines, I do not believe that is the way.

So the concept is that players will place their dice in the dice pools, ones and skulls up, as an offering to Nuffle that he may receive the ones and skulls, the holy number being beared and skulls proffered so that they will be taken away from the coach and the dice. Granted they will remain in Nuffle’s grasp to be returned at a later time, but perhaps they will be returned to an opponent instead of to yourself. And for coaches who think this is a microwave and we are weighting our dice to land on 6’s and POWs, they are offering their best dice to Nuffle which may take them away from them and be given to others. It could be thought of several ways, but I am going with skulls and ones up as my method of benefaction towards Nuffle. People all pray differently and have their own ways of conceptualizing things, but that is my logic.

Moving Right Along….

With the altar prep begun, the fires in my heart were lit and I felt that progress on the shrine was going well and already its giving energies were granting me gifts in ways I didn’t even comprehend fully yet. Also, I tried to dry fit a few more bits on here and there, but realized that until the ground was fully based and good to go it wasn’t even worth placing more bits around so I jumped to it.

So sloppay, but so smooth and tasty. That looks much better than before, especially in those pools.

I laid down some glue in the main gaps and around the locations which I felt were a bit too sheer/unnatural and then placed some ballast in there, and then went over the whole thing (All still wet) with a spackle/glue/water mix. Since everything was reasonably wet and malleable still, I was able to get some more natural curves and hills which I was hoping would look nicer when it was dried. Ultimately there will be more finer sands/flock, etc. that will go on later, but this helps to unify the shrine and act as a first layer to protect the foam for when I basecoat it.

The initial painting.

Black and two shades of grey! That’s it!

Truly! Just to get some paint down and to identify gaps, etc early on I like to lay down a layer of paint. Just some cheap watery black paint (Pictured) and two shades of grey. This is all my old terrain paint from making blown out buildings for 40k, perfect for a stone altar.

I also like to slop on my initial layers fairly thick when it comes to terrain since the paint also acts as another layer of bonding to give a nice solid layer. In particular the stones and altars themselves I tried to go thick with it, whereas the objects and regalia on/around them I try to keep more reasonable.

The Blocking dice altar all undercoated.

With the altars undercoated, it was time to give them some love. These aren’t some kind of fresh out the church of Nuffle made to order altars, nay. These are some ancient, hidden for centuries and discovered in the woods where a new pitch will be sanctified altars and pools of magical power. Thus, we gotta mess em up!

Altar Weathering

Oh yessss. 2 SHades of Grey and one or two of green pretty much gets the job done.

I use two shades of grey for my stone, then some watered down black paint as a makeshift wash, and pretty much soak the whole thing liberally. It looks like it is overkill and that is because it is! I then get some dark greens mixed right in the black I had mixed up previously and do the lower bases of the models and some of the edges and other spots I want to see some mossy action. I do one more mossy layer with a slightly brighter green as a ‘highlight’.

Looking nasty and musty already. That is a shrine that has seen a few winters, summers, rainy seasons, and a little bit of mud and dirt too!

After the shrines were looking ultra messy, it was time to finish up the base coats and bring it a bit closer to the light. I did a layer of cheap brown on top of all the black on the ground, and then did a slightly brighter layer of grey as a drybrush over all the stone and cement to make it look slightly less slick and damp. Finally, I did a layer or two of a drab green color over all the brown to simulate some kind of simple undergrowth/sparse moss/lichen. I intended on flocking it, but still adding these small shifts in color make it more interested in the little spaces between the flock and for when it eventually falls off it looks like there is dirt and soil beneath.

Finalizing the Foundational Colors

That drab green color looks so awesome I love it.

Beneath the main altar, some old books, a pair of skulls besides a spiked railing and a teensy tiny inset shrine space where fragments of single broken bone have been carefully placed. Whose bone was it? Certainly one who served nuffle eternally.

Also at this stage since I was itching to see more progress, I laid down some base colors on all the metallic items and a few of the bits on/around the altars. It starts to really make things pop and look like a location where some kind of activity takes place rather than a bunch of bits glued together.

2D6 Shrine: 2 D6’s, a ritual blade, and a chalice.

I did the colors up a bit a bit more adding details and weathering, shading, and touching up here and there with color and trying to make these items come alive on the altars. The altars themselves ended up looking pretty good and more than some cement-like grey stone, I was happy to get this interesting mix of light and dark greys with interspersed spots of greens and blacks that some off like these stones have been soaked for ages. I am a big fan.

Also, the tons of layers of paint also take away from the look that it is a piece of foam and looks more like stone I believe.

Coins, lantern, and 3 Skull dice on the block dice altar.

Pools of death!

Or pools of health depending on how well you pray to Nuffle!

One element of this altar is that I intend it to be an actual place where coaches can pray to Nuffle and place their blocking dice into the respective pools while a significant model on one team or another recites the incantations/makes the sacrifices/dark pledges to get those dice that they need. To do this I wanted each pond to have a glowing effect (Go back up to the zelda pond image) and really come off like you are placing your dice into a magical pool and hoping for the best.

I have been trying to practice OSL since I worked on my slaanesh team and it’s been a slog. The green turned out much better than the red I think. Regardless I am happy with how they look.

Side note on color usage

The Three Goddesses of the Triforce, Din (Red/Power), Nayru (Blue/Wisdom), and Farore (Green/Courage)

Some of the most iconic colors and also often linked with elements like fire, water, and earth/wood. I love these colors and of course respect their connection/representation within and to the triforce itself. Red being Power, Blue being Wisdom, and Green Courage.

I like to add these little nuggets of flavor and personal lore into my work when I can and this was no exception. Green in my mind was the courage to throw the block and such a pool of courage would bless your blocking dice. The Red pool, of power, would be needed to break armor, injure, and also throw and dodge successfully, which are all mostly physical aspects of power to me. I am currently at a loss as to what to do with blue without really messing up the vibe of the piece.

My original plan was to get hot glue and have it like all over the dice and pouring into the pools like tendrils of raw power. I thought it would look good, but I just skipped over that and went with a slightly more mundane approach ultimately. And then each pool would have more tendrils of red and green reaching out forming a kind of blueish ring in the middle but color-wise that doesn’t make sense and as I was working on the piece felt all the tendrils of power and such would just make it look like a mess.

So going forward I am thinking that I will do a small glowing set of runes on the space in a circle glowing in blue where someone would place their model. THat will represent the blue of the wisdom to come and pray to Nuffle in the first place and it will also break up the kind of dookie brown that the base ended up becoming which I do like, but, well, you will see what I mean.

Grass and Water (Flock and Water Effects)

Ain’t that pretty! You can see where the water effects have mostly dried and where its still wet beneath the surface after like 4 hours of drying. under a fan, not bad.

Oh hells yess. I was on the fence with how much flock I should put on, but got some nice advice and was ultra chuffed with how it turned out. The grass itself is one of my more preferred blends and comes out real nice and also the ‘soil’ browns and stone look real nice against the green of the grass too. Usually I like to spritz some glue water over flock like this, but I think I need to keep it looking fluffy, small bits of flock falling off everytime be damned.

So the base got flocked, and I also poured in a little bit of this ancient citadel water effects stuff I got a hold of a while back. I would compare it to modern day ‘ard coat I think it’s called, but basically makes whatever you paint it with shiny and nice. Good for gems and coins and pools of water of course. I want a beautiful deep resin pour, but I also can’t be asked so I just use this stuff and go for a general effect.

Also, I did make a super deep pour of this years ago and regretted it since it stays kind of soft and malleable and fingerprints get stuck in there as well so I am going to do a layer of glue water over the top of this water effects to give it a slightly tougher shell so that it doesn’t nasty up anyone’s dice and can handle having dice tossed around in it since its essentially a dice pool!

Glue Water on the pools.

Domina Netherslayer, Dark Elf Coach, praying that her blitzers stop missing games!

The pools dried well enough and then with a little glue/water they were looking primo and handling dice and pokes with little trouble.

Final TLC on painting / Books Etc.

A little mithril here, some gold there, touch ups here….

Last part of the process was doing some final touch ups and doing little details that I wanted to complete.

These blocking dice are reminiscent of a set of dice I made for my first league.

Painting the small details really adds even more pop. Although I want to go over the images on the dice with a super fine black line, I am falling into a situation where I am fussing over details back and forth and will just sit there and look at it endlessly doing little so I decided to call it here.

Glowing Blue runes on the base.

Notice there is no image for this heading. Because I decided to leave it be for the time being. If I am going to do some kind of arcane glyphs on the base of this shrine I will need to do some research or reach out to the sorcerer for some input and suggestion on how best to reach nuffle so I can do this right. For anyone else if you like the idea, cool looking squiggle may suffice, but this I feel, may be a slightly bigger project than I am realizing so I have decided to leave that part be for the time being.

Conclusion.

Almost all final details in place, painted, and looking good I called it.

Domina and my green dice in full array on the shrine.

I realized all too late that I still needed space for the D8 and D16! Which way should go up? I opted for 11’s being visible and placed it just around the coach just so. I think it is alright. Really I will leave that decision up to the coaches who worship at the altar. This is how I thought about it as I wanted to take a pic of it in ‘full prayer mode’ so to speak.

Opposite Angle so you can see Domina’s intense expression as she reaches forth toward Nuffle.

Well there you have it. A light primer on Nuffle as well as a shrine build and more than a little bit of interesting banter around the both of them! I will say that after a few test rolls, the dice did feel good but were also not happy to have their energy wasted on practice rolls and after a few super hot streaks provided skulls in plentiful amounts. I learned my lesson and look forward to sending them to the pitch to do battle properly and let the will of nuffle flow through them.

May 19, 2021 1

Painting the Hedgehog!

So I left the last gaslands article off on a cliffhanger! Well I finally finished the hedgehog. I’ll take you through my process step by step.

Parts breakdown in general

So I have a ton of 40k bits which puts my in a solid position in general, but I am finding myself very picky with which ones I will use. I also want to make stuff from scratch and not feel like I ‘have to’ use the bits which is what I accomplished with this vehicle.

Almost all of the decorations are carved sprue, light card (butter package) which I pressed the end of my tool into to give some texture, a couple toothpick ends, some excellent sturdy mesh sandpaper, and finally the handle from a miniature axe for the gun barrels.

Base Coats

In maybe a minute or two, I base coated the thing blue. I had to go fast. I love the freedom to be so sloppy with these cars compared to doing more detailed miniatures like BB teams or Munda gangs.

RATTATATATATATATATATTAT *Pokemon being ejected from guns*

I then did some gunmetal with a bit more care on the metallic parts and a few spots that I figured I wanted some damage or rust.

Rusty and Dusty

I start most of my rust by doing the bottom-most layer as a straight brown. It could be dirt, or old old rust, or whatever. Makes for a good layer as a base and adds more contrast in general as we build up our oranges.

Using a pretty standard technique when highlighting stuff, but doing it based on where everything was thickest in brown I add my oranges. Reddish orange I put almost everywhere I painted brown, then stippling regular orange in the center of the reddish orange before finishing with a very light stippling of the bright orange all over. I think there is a lot of rust on this vehicle, but only in the spots where the raw metal is. I am imagining that the armor and spikes have protected this vehicle for a while and its paint job has managed to remain intact to some degree, but due to that fact the metal and spikes are all rusted and corroding.

Final Touches

I use some very light blue to add weathering to the blue areas since the car isn’t in flawless condition. I also used that color to add the reflection of light in my blacked out windows. I did a little yellow on the front and red on the back lights as well. I want to try and pick out more details on the cars themselves so they look like real cars made of many different parts and materials and less like toys for gaslands that were just painted and drybrushed. Although I do like the look of the simple color and drybrush in all honesty, but can’t seem to let myself do it! And finally.

Best paint ever man. This stuff is too good and I just wanted to make sure those front spikes saw a little action. I play dark eldar in 40k so bloody and nastied up weapons and stuff are a part of my life and this was restraint. You can kind of see how the person running from the wreck of their car tried to dodge off to the right, but got caught on the spike, pulled over the hood and rolled off the front of the window mesh. They had a rough time of it.

Also at this stage I proceeded to do a healthy coating of black wash over the car in most spots to give it some nice shadows and kind of dirty and darken the paint job and rust. It cleans the model up quite a bit which is a tiny bit unrealistic, but I think it looks better.

Now there are two!

The first of what I can guess will be a great many.

So that was basically it. My painting style and pace for this vehicle was quite quick and not really overly precise. I went a little more mad maxy with this one, but surprisingly it still is in nicer condition than the other one! I think it has a bit more personality than skidz but also fits in with the general rusty beat up death machine party. I also found an excuse to imply vehicles hitting people as well which always adds a little zest to the equation.

That’s all for now!

Is this blog becoming a gaslands blog? It is certainly looking like that I bet.

But believe it or not I have a couple other ongoing articles that I need to complete, but the projects have been taking forever and stretching out a considerable length of time (Making an entire blood bowl pitch for example!).

Gaslands is such a short time from start to finish that it really gives you a quite immediate sense of satisfaction with minimal effort and it also means that I can snap a few pictures and when I get a chance to sit down at my desk, bang out an article like this in no time at all. In fact I have another one for the next two cars in the chamber already. Probably going to start writing it now and with luck finish painting them tonight perhaps. A magician can dream.

tRM

December 5, 2020 0

Blood bowl rules in Japanese・ブラッドボウルの日本語訳

Believe it or not, I live in Japan! I love Japan and living here has been excellent for a great number of reasons. Although the player base where I live (Not Tokyo) isn’t gigantic, I still get a fair amount of games in which balances well with my life. Do I want to play more? Of course, who doesn’t? But I also don’t want to live in a giant city like Tokyo for a number of reasons I won’t get into here, pandemic or not!

以下のリンクはネットとグーグル先生によって最も便利なブラッドボウルの日本語訳があるサイトの集めです。ちょっと田舎に住んでいる私は東京に住む興味ないので、地域の方ともっとゲームをしたいです！

To that extent, I want to talk a little bit about my journey to find the rules for blood bowl in Japanese. A short google search yielded just about everything I needed, so the story isn’t that exciting, but I still want to tell it.

I am starting a league and want to attract the attention of more Japanese players since mustering the 4 native English speaking players for the first season was quite the challenge in itself. We managed to finish the season and the fires of blood bowl are still lit in my heart and the local Japanese wargaming club does have a few players who I was hoping to court into joining the league. Also, in order to grow the hobby in general, I wanted to gather all the Japanese resources I have found into one location and ideally some day become the source of Japanese blood bowl in Japan! Maybe even court the eyes of companies who like the cut of my jib and hire me as a rules translator? ぜひ、お雇ください！ルール翻訳大好きです！ Don’t mind that!
So I have been looking for the rules and there have been a number of sources online which have been helpful for introducing the game and what its about to new players, and the actual rules themselves. I mostly want to translate the play aids that I have made to make games smooth and also to help with ‘non-human’ translation by having identical documents for all players to use so players who speak less English or less Japanese can still play a game and use the common documents while point at each others’ in their native language.

Also, many of the new rules and things from death zone vol 1 and 2 haven’t been translated as far as I understand and many of the skills still remain un-translated as well. Call it a labor of love, or call it summoning GW’s lawyers to my doorstep for my thankless desire to spread the game across the seas in the language of the people! Regardless, I want to document my process as well as share it with the world.

First, three websites:
1. Sentui.　せんてぅいさんのサイトはかなり古いんですが、結構いい情報が入っています。完全訳ではありません。
http://sentui.com/SinWiki/pukiwiki.php?Blood%20Bowl
The Sentui site has basic rules translations for a lot of wargames and has been a really helpful guide as I try to see how many proper nouns were given new names or just turned into cognates, or ‘katakana English’ when referring specifically to Japanese. It was also the first site I found and the rules are a translation of an older edition of blood bowl, and also incomplete. Regardless, I salute you Sentui san.

2. Ushio’s Translation of BB2 on STEAM.　うしおさんはBB2のPCゲームのルールを完全訳をしました。結構よくできています。スキルまですべて訳しました。
https://steamcommunity.com /sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=639284540
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=598363168
So, Ushio san essentially did all the work for us all and translated what amounts to the whole game for the most part into Japanese and did it well. I will be basing most of my translation off of their work I believe. It is the most complete and much of it is the same as the board game as well.
They even wrote up something for all the skills as well which will be invaluable. They also wrote a few guides to playing what I am guessing are their favorite teams (Dwarf, Skaven, and Human) at the following link: https://steamcommunity.com/id/ushio7/myworkshopfiles/?section=guides&appid=236690

3. ‘New’ Blood bowl Wiki in Japanese。「新」ブラッドボウルのウイキサイトです。完成してありますが、うしおさんの訳のほうが新しいです。このページは便利けれど。
https://w.atwiki.jp/bble/pages/29.html
I was pointed to this by Ushio san’s translations and it seems to be quite the complete translation as well based partially on (1) Sentui’s work as well as the translation for the blood bowl 1 PC game on the site below. Still seems mostly based on the video game.

4. ‘Old’ Blood bowl Wiki for BB1。上のページのウイキの元々あったやつ。古いんですが、情報がいいです。
https://w.atwiki.jp/youge_wiki/
Site 3. essentially is an updated version of this site, but this site still has some merits of its own. I think its a bit easier to read than the current blood bowl wiki, but both are great resources. They are basically the same site, but one is for the older edition.

5. Gozaru’s site talking up blood bowl。ござるさんのサイトは一番古いんですけど、子供のころの初めて作ったサイトを思い出すし、入門ガイドはストライトだし、そして面白いです。ござるさんのページをより深くチェックすると、チーム紹介などをして結構おもしろいです。
http://www.516.gozaru.jp/miniature/bb/what.htm
Gozaru has a neat little site and I am guessing it is one of the oldest sites in my list of links since they last updated in 2008 and in general it reminds me of the sites I had when I was just getting started in my online journey. But they put things in a fun perspective and if you backtrack to their main page and check out the links there, you can see all of their blood bowl teams. They made little profiles for almost all the orcs and goblins and reading them is quite fun. This dude gets it.

So these are the main sites that I have come across in my googling journey and they are the primary sources for blood bowl information in Japanese and generally form a fairly complete picture of the rules. None of them are easily downloadable and I have taken scroll captures of most of them for posterity and plan on re writing much of what I have seen and going over it with a fine tooth comb and seeing if I cant find the differences between some of the skills (Since table top blood bowl and BB2 have some small differences with a few skills) and also pretty it up a bit.

Not to mention translate a little bit of the newer stuff as I need it. When I complete my work I will share it up here for folks to enjoy.
上のサイトをベースにして、新しい訳を作りたいと思います。皆の動力をちょっと借りてPC反ではなく、ちゃんとテーブルゲームのバージョンを完成したいです。ちょっとすつできたら、ここにアップしたいと思います！

That’s all for now.

tRM

July 31, 2020 1

Browning the Bases

The Goal & the Vision.

Erd

Wolf (& Fox) Related Aside (Added 2.22.22)

Bleh

Gurn

Poiple

Yeller

Challenge Lies Ahead

Process Attempt #1

Step 1: Completely base coat innards a medium level brightness version of the ‘base’ glow color.

Zombayyz

Flesh Golems

Ghouls

Wraiths

Step 2: Wash innards a darker watered down version of the color they will be.

Special Werewolf aside zone

Step 2.5?: Do base colors for non-glow bits which are adjacent to glow bits.

Step 3: Dry Brush medium level color again, then brighter. First Highlights.

Step 4: Touch up the models, misc. basic non-glow related highlighting. Gold trim on armor.

Step 5: Pick out details? OSL-esque glow? Throw models out the window?

Step 6: Final Goodness, numbers, base rim, etc.

Update 3.9.

Hell yeah they get their own heading! Wolf Time!

Finished! (Besides final basing.)

Final Reflection on the Necro Positionals.

Fumbbl Experiences/Necro Strategy

The Coming (IRL) League Season

Conclusion and Looking forward

The Deed is Done? Yet it is far from done.出来上がりました？が、まだまだだぞ！

The Final Stretch・ラストスパート

Are you teased?・いじめられているかい？

Flesh Golems

No Bones About it. (Bones about everything.)

Ghoulish Pants!

Using magic of the Hot Water Circle

Going forward.er.

And thus it begins. The great declaration of Nuffle by The Red Magician.

Tenants of Nuffle

The Nuffle Shrine Build

Inspirado

Shrine Foundation

Main Details

For those playing at home….

Why are the Skulls and Ones facing upward? Will you not doom yourself?

Moving Right Along….

The initial painting.

Altar Weathering

Finalizing the Foundational Colors

Pools of death!

Side note on color usage

Grass and Water (Flock and Water Effects)

Glue Water on the pools.

Final TLC on painting / Books Etc.

Glowing Blue runes on the base.

Conclusion.

Parts breakdown in general

Base Coats

Rusty and Dusty

Final Touches

Now there are two!

That’s all for now!