I posted way back in early December about the Blood Bowl pitch and scenery I was working on, and it’s been in use regularly in the months since, but in all that time I’ve never managed to get a photo of it in action!
Here we go, finally.
Blood Bowl pitch & pitchside scenery in use. See text for details, click for larger.
At centre is the scoreboard, which also has a scatter diagram engraved in the tiles of the courtyard area. There should be magnetic sheet number panels up on the stone backdrop to show the score, but I left them at home (derp) so the d6 is showing the 1-0 score at present.
Either side of the scoreboard structure is each team’s dugout and tracking area – three tracks for First Half Turn, Second Half Turn and Re-Rolls, and the usual three dugout spaces behind for Reserves, KO’d and Casualties.
The whole Blood Bowl setup is at that mildly irritating “80% done and usable but not really finished” stage; the fabric pitch itself needs a couple of passes of green and brown spraypaint to get a bit of a grassier look going on, then masking and spraying for the white pitch lines. I also want to do a Lizardman team logo at the centre of the pitch, and possibly team name in the endzones, so that’s more masking and spraying.
The pitch-side pieces need at least one more coat of drybrushing, then flocking, vines and various greenery to complete the desired jungle temple look.
I’m actually starting to build a whole new scoreboard structure, the same footprint but quite a different design that will, among other things, incorporate a Weather indicator as well as the score and scatter markers. Photos of that later this week, probably.
I spent some time messing around on Google Image Search, and tried another jaw/tooth-based logo out for a bit before tripping over the Aztec “cipactli” glyph, which is a cayman/crocodile and also “e;a primeval sea monster, part crocodile, part fish and part toad, of indefinite gender”e; (from this Wikipedia article) which sounded cool enough as a concept, fit the jungle/tribal/vaguely-Central American theme usually found with Lizardman teams and looked easily reproducible and scalable as a team logo. I found a couple of versions of the cipactli glyph I liked, redrew them in Inkscape so I could work in SVG vector format, then started messing around.
One of my favourite things about Inkscape is that the canvas is infinite. Unlike GIMP or Photoshop where you define an image size and usually have to fiddle around to expand it, Inkscape will show you your defined page size, but the canvas around that page has no boundaries. Want to grab a copy of some part of your image, drag it to one side and fiddle with it separately or create different versions of it? Copy or duplicate the objects you want, and go right ahead and drag them somewhere out of the way to play with them!
Inkscape working file screenshot. See text for details of what you’re actually looking at!
Above is a quick screenshot I took of Inkscape and the working file I’ve got for Croc team logos and related graphics. See the tan rectangle in the centre? The grey box surrounding it is a North American-standard Letter-sized sheet of paper (roughly A4 for the rest of the world) so the “real” size of this working area is theoretically huge.
The green box on the left is an entire standard-size Blood Bowl pitch with 30mm squares (a 26 x 15 square pitch, for non-BB players!) that I set up to check scale and sizes. The collection of black toothy shapes were an earlier, now abandoned idea for a team logo; the various red things are interations of a possible cipatcli logo.
Variations on a cipactli theme. See text for details and click for larger.
The closeup screenshot of possible cipactli logos above shows where Inkscape really shines. Rather than work on just the one image and rely on undo/redo to track changes, or creating lots of versions of a single file and having to have them all open at once, if I want to tweak an object in Inkscape I can just grab a copy (Ctrl+D for Duplicate is useful, it’s Copy+Paste right over the existing object) then drag it off a bit on that infinite canvas. Rinse and repeat until you have a version you’re happy with!
Oh, and the cipactli varient I’m most likely to use, at least at this point, is the third down and third along. The slightly longer snout makes it look more croc-like, but for some reason the even longer nose of the rightmost one doesn’t work for me. I might well try another few variants, there’s no shortage of room!
Quick overhead snapshot of the painting bench recently. As you might have guessed from recent posts, I’ve been in a “clear the decks” sort of mood, finally finishing off a number of smallish projects that have sat around ignored and dusty for too long, some of them over a year…
The workbench this week. Lots of stuff going on, see text for details!
Clockwise from the top left we have (deep breath…) a batch of nine Pulp Figures thugs, two-bit crooks and menacing bystanders; a quartet of Baby Crocs for fantasy football from Impact Miniatures; a lady in a blue dress obviously being held captive by a gang of terrifying savages (Pulp Figures again); three twisted and disturbing stone monoliths intended as markers for a friend’s Chaos team in Blood Bowl (previously); Phantom Ace, Pulp Girl and little Lillie Poots from Statuesque Miniatures; some extra bases I whipped up with Milliput and pennies, one of which has an unprimed cobra in a basket on it from Pulp Figures…
Central to the whole assembly in their hospital-green robes, we have six Frothing Lunatics from Statuesque. (previously…)
Across the foreground from bottom right, we have a really, really massive Warg from Reaper Miniatures, being painted up as a quasi-supernatural Terror to inflict on people in games of Pulp Alley; a dino skull and some bones being done up as Blood Bowl markers for my Lizardman/Crocodilian team; the previously-mentioned finally completed pulp-era luggage and the Kali bronze; a quartet of light deck guns from Pulp Figures suitable to arm all manner of vessel or vehicle; three more Blood Bowl markers made of Renedra plastic barrels intended for my brother’s Scotling team.
Finally, last but not least, clipped into the two wooden clothspins (useful things to keep around a hobby bench!) there’s a pair of spiked footballs from Impact Miniatures. Blood Bowl again, obviously.
This assembly is only slightly tarted up and organized for the photo, everything here really is in progress or was recently finished and it really has been getting that crowded on my painting bench the last while. It’ll be satisfying to get more stuff completely finished, into storage and more importantly, onto the table and into use!
Not having the time or energy right now for larger projects, I’ve been bashing away at a few sets of markers for Blood Bowl teams, both my own and those of some of the folks I game with.
For BB, you need a way to mark several things: the score, each team’s available re-rolls, and the turn, possibly twice as there’s two halves to each game. My BB tracking scenery has a magnetized scoreboard, so I’ll only need three markers – re-roll, First Half turns, Second Half turns – but some setups will also need a fourth marker for the score, so I’ll eventually do sets of four markers for each team.
Various in-progress markers for Blood Bowl. See text for details, and click for larger.
For my Sarcos crocodile team (Lizardmen, in BB terms) I’ve hacked up a cheap plastic dinosaur skeleton I was given at Trumpeter Salute a couple years ago. Various leg bones cut free and propped up for most of the markers, and the dino skull on a wooden tripod lashed together, over on the left of the photo above. They’ll also serve for the “Swampling” team I mentioned last post – a proxy-Halfling team using Baby Crocs. All three are on spare 25mm slottabases.
For Corey’s Scotlings (Halflings in kilts waving cabers around!) I used a sprue bunch of Rendera’s plastic barrels on spare bases for quick, easy markers. Each marker has a different arrangement of barrels on 25mm bases.
The Milliput things on the right are Chaos obelisks for Sean’s new Chaos team – stone twisted into disturbing shapes by raw, chaotic magic, or similar. The leftmost one was the first, and actually started with me messing with leftover Milliput last week at the end of an evening. I started twisting it around gently after smoothing a lump over an older, hardened lump of putty, and the resulting shape was too cool not to keep playing with! The middle obelisk still needs more putty around the base to finish it, and the rightmost one is still just a few lumps of leftover putty mashed together and will need a good bit more work to finish. Again, these will go onto spare 25mm slottabases.
My Amazon team will eventually get a set of worn stone plinths, made of pink styrofoam and Milliput, but I confess I haven’t start those markers yet and don’t even have a really good motif in mind for them… might start looking at Mayan or other Central American designs for inspiration there, as the team is named the Jaguars and the Impact Miniatures Blitzers for the team have cat-skin heads and cloaks.
Had two small orders come in last week. I have been saving money for an epic bike vacation to Europe in a few months (Vienna, Austria to Nantes, France over six weeks!) and not ordering much new stuff for wargaming the last few months, which is one of several reasons it’s been quiet around here. Nevertheless, some new stuff comes in every so often!
The first order was from Impact Miniatures, all Blood Bowl/fantasy football related stuff. A set of three block dice, two of their football markers, and eight more Baby Crocs – Skinks, basically, for their Sarcos Crocodile team, which I bought last year.
The footballs are neat. I haven’t confirmed with Impact, but I’m pretty sure they’re 3D-printed – they’re a slightly flexible resin-like stuff, with a large spike-adorned football and a ring/loop so you can hang the football of a figure’s arm or around their neck or shoulder when they’re carrying the ball. Imagine the sort of cheap charm ring you get in Christmas crackers, except in white resin and with a spiked football instead of a fake jewel. It’s a great idea for Blood Bowl or other fantasy football games and a much easier way to show which figure has the ball than the freestanding individual balls, which can be awkward to balance on some figure bases.
I already have eight Baby Crocs, so why double the local population? So I can proxy Baby Crocs as Halflings and field a BB team of Croclings, mostly! I’ve heard that Halflings are a challenging team to use and don’t expect them to win much, but what the heck, they’ll be entertaining. Corey also has a team of Impact’s Scotlings (Halfings in kilts with cabers) so a Scotling-vs-Crocling matchup should be entertaining.
I’ll also be using a few of the extra Baby Crocs as auxiliary figures for my existing Sarcos team. Cheer-crocs with greenstuff pompoms added to their hands, maybe an apothecary-croc with a barrel of go-juice to get injured players back on the pitch, that sort of thing – the fun, oddball sideline figures that round out a BB team.
Oh, and for the Treemen on the Croclings team, I’ll probably pick up a pair of these Reaper Bones Spirit of the Forest figures and convert them a bit as swamp-flavoured Treemen. Like the Impact Trollcast resin figures, the Reaper Bones plastic resin figures are a great thing, nice figures in easy-to-convert material for a very good price!
The other order is from Statuesque Miniatures in the UK, and as oddball as the Impact order was, this order was definitely crazier. Crazed, in fact, and lunatic, as it included six Frothing Loonies, a small girl, and a pulp hero & heroine! All part of a special introductory bundle deal Statuesque had put on back in the first week of March.
Lunatics & Heroes. 28mm figures from Statuesque. Head sprues for the lunatics at the bottom, headless lunatic bodies, then (L to R at top) Lillie, Pulp Girl & Phantom Ace. Click for larger, as always.
The six loonies have three different bodies and a sprue of six heads. Because I got two packs of three figures each, I have two of each body and two full sprues of heads, so I have half a dozen spare lunatic heads now – fodder for converting other figures, perhaps! The bodies are in hospital robes (yes, they’re all partially open at the back, in proper hospital robe style…) and have shackles on their wrists. The heads look suitably lunatic, and most have obvious scars across their shaved heads where diabolical, insanity-causing surgery was undoubtedly been performed by mad doctors!
The small girl is Lillie Poots, who wanders the world curious and unafraid, her path lit by the large lantern she holds up in one hand.
The pulp hero is Phantom Ace, a large man in flying leathers, helmet and goggles, with a pair of automatic pistols, one in each hand. Pulp Girl, his crimefighting companion, is a slender teenage girl with some sort of mystical or weird-science apparatus on one wrist and hand.
All the Statuesque figures are very cleanly sculpted and beautifully cast, with hardly a mold line or casting vent mark to be seen. The adult figures are bulky 28mm, sized to go with Pulp Figures, Copplestone and other common pulp lines. The only downside to them is they’re all designed to fit on slottabases, which I strongly dislike – my Blood Bowl teams are the only figures I own that I mount on slottas. I’ll be snipping the mounting bars off all of these figures and putting them on pennies or other flat bases to match my existing pulp collection. That aside, they’re lovely figures and I’ll be keeping an eye on Statuesque in the future as they expand their pulp ranges – I believe they’re going to be adding asylum staff and other asylum denizens at some point.
When I started this whole Blood Bowl thing back in December, part of the joke was “playing a GW game without giving GW a cent”. Parts of this are easy – the rules PDF is given away, lots of other companies make fantasy football players, and pitches and tracking sheets are easy enough to make. The one tricky bit turned out to be the team roster – it seems like all you can find online is blurry JPG images of other people’s roster sheets.
I finally got a copy clear enough to read, then it was easy to re-create as a spreadsheet in LibreOffice.
Here’s the PDF of that, if it’s useful for anyone else: BB Team Roster PDF. Permission, as always, granted to copy or print for personal use. Enjoy, and try not to roll Attacker Down on the Block dice too often!
I’m in the middle of the five-week field assignment for work, so away from most of my usual gaming habits and my workbench. All is not lost, however, because the co-worker I’m on this thing with is also a miniature gamer and we decided to bring our Blood Bowl teams along and have an “Exiles Micro League” of two players and four teams while we’re away. It’s something to do other than watch terrible TV during evenings in the hotel suite!
I brought a new 30mm fabric BB pitch along, made with felt. This isn’t the dark brown one seen here previously, this one is tan felt and a significant improvement over my first attempt at a BB pitch. I’ll get photos of it at some point, probably after I get home at the end of February.
Along with the pitch and teams, I realized we needed a tracking sheet, as I haven’t brought along my tracking scenery due to lack of luggage space. I broke out the ever-reliable Inkscape and worked up a basic tracker – space for two sides to track phases for two halves, re-rolls and score, as well as the two scatter templates.
Thumbnail of my Blood Bowl tracking sheet. Full PDF file below!
As we played we added a few things with pencil – quick reference notes, mostly, as well as a shared dugout space for players in Reserve, KO’d or Casualties. I’ve gone back into Inkscape to add those to the tracker sheet, and added some colour and graphic flourishes as well. Hopefully someone else finds this useful!
Finally got a can of green spraypaint at the local hardware place and laid my fabric BB pitch out to blotch green across it, just to break up the brown fabric. It looks a lot better with green on it now, and the dot grid that lays out the field is still visible.
My 40mm BB pitch, laid out on garbage bags on the porch to spray with green for a turf effect.
I’ve got an Amazon BB team on the painting table right now, as well.
Been fairly quiet around here lately – blame all the usual holiday business – but the holiday season was a good one for gaming around here, too.
Early December saw my long-promised Russian Civil War game over in Vancouver at the Trumpeter Club’s gaming night finally happen, about eighteen months after we first discussed doing it. I never did write that battle up here on the Warbard, but it was good to get the Russians out again after a long break, run a long-promised game, and spend a weekend over in Vancouver – even if that weekend was the coldest of the year, with daytime highs around -5 C!
We’ve also had our first two games of Blood Bowl, now that my Sarcos croc team is finished and Sean’s humans are assembled and mostly painted. Unfortunately for him, both games have been fairly resounding wins for my big reptiles, 3:1 and 4:0 respectively. Better luck for the humans in upcoming games!
Crocs (Lizardmen) vs Humans Blood Bowl game – Sean tries to figure out how to keep my Skinks from scoring yet again, while a wall of big green crocodiles stomp his humans!
My home-brew Blood Bowl pitch is coming along slowly, although it’s in a playable and usable state now. That’s the fabric field under the figures in the photo above; it needs a lot of work to look good (I want it to look like a muddy, weedy patch of jungle) but is thoroughly usable in it’s current form!
Onward and upward in 2014! I’ve got a mountain of pulp figures to paint, another BB team that’ll get primed this week, and some Russian Civil War bits to fill in on that project! Then there’s always the unexpected new stuff, or the old projects that capture your interest again… it should be a good year, in any case.
Quick late night workbench photo of my Impact Miniatures Sarcos crocodile team for Blood Bowl. They’re 99% done, with only the hook-hands of two and a few other details to finish off.
Sarcos Crocs nearly finished. Click for larger.
I’m quite pleased with how these figures have come together, they’re really nice sculpts and well cast, and it’s been great to get back into painting — these are the first figures I’ve actually gotten paint on since May of this year!
I’m out of town for a while visiting family so it’ll be sometime around Christmas before I can get decent daylight photos of these guys, but I want to get photos of them as soon as I can.
