Category Archives: Fantasy

Posts on fantasy gaming using the Fantasy Rules 2nd Ed. and Hordes of the Things rules.

Blood Bowl Team Roster PDF

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!

Blood Bowl Tracking Sheet PDF

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.

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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!

BB Tracker Sheet PDF – permission granted to copy or print for personal use. Included Public Domain graphics from the Open Clipart Library.

Blood Bowl Pitch, Part II

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.

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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.

Happy (Belated!) New Year!

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!

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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.

Blood Bowl Crocs, Nearly Finished

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.

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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.

Starting A Blood Bowl Pitch

Being a completist, when I decided to get into Blood Bowl there was no way I’d just leave it at a team or two and nothing else! Besides, although there’s a lot of other players around with BB pitches of various sorts, from the basic card field from the box set to very elaborate homemade ones, I wanted a setup of my own so I’m not dependent on other players to provide everything needed.

For this BB pitch, I had a couple of goals. I wanted a jungle ruins theme overall, to fit with the Lizardman & Amazon teams I’m starting with, and the whole thing had to be transportable, probably in a boot-sized shoebox. I do almost all of my gaming away from home, so portability is key. That meant the actual pitch was going to be fabric, not hard panels of some sort, and the various accessories and decorative elements had to be modular and not really oversized. Light weight would also be nice. I also wanted to incorporate a bunch of BB’s play aids and things like turn & re-roll tracking right into the scenery, to minimize the amount of clutter around and on the table.

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Various Blood Bowl accessories in progress. See text for details, and click for larger.

The photo shows where I’m at after a couple of hours over a couple of evenings. The main construction material is half-inch pink insulation board for all the stonework. Turns out this is 14mm thick, so if you slice 14mm wide strips off then cut those roughly 1 inch long, you get a nicely sized “stone” block. It’s like Hirst Arts plaster blocks, without the weight, fragility or the mess of dozens of casting sessions! The square tiles are 20mm by 20mm cubes cut from the same styrofoam, then sliced into thirds, so each tile is somewhere between 3mm-5mm thick. A hot glue gun was used to glue everything together; the bases are just mattboard, the good quality card used in picture framing.

The two foreground pieces are a pair of Re-Roll & Turn Track markers, one for each team, made to look like some sort of temple plaza/stone-paved roadway setup. You can etch/carve insulation foam with a pencil, so the wide stones on the left have the name of each track (“R-R” for Reroll, “First” and “2nd” for first half/second half turn tracking) and then the numbers 1-8. I used Roman numerals for the 2nd half numbers, just because, although looking at it again, using those for Rerolls to make it different might have been cleverer. Not too late to slice off the name label tiles and put new ones on, I guess.

Top left and top right is a dugout for each team, with the 3 areas in each needed for Reserve/KO/Injured.

Top centre is the base for the scoreboard. I haven’t quite finalized the design for the actual scoreboard, but magnets to hold some sort of placard with the score number on it will be used. The 3×3 square of paving at the front of the scoreboard will be pencil-etched with the BB scatter template for reference, and I might actually extend the front of the paving by another row to put the 3×1 throw-in template there.

Everything will be painted in stone, then various vegetation, vines and such added to make it look jungle-like without hampering the functionality of the various Blood Bowl game elements being built into the scenery. I’m also wondering what other game elements could be carved into the stonework to add to the utility and bump the decorative level up a bit, too. Given I currently lack proper bash dice, I might put the d6 conversion table for them along the top of the back row of each dugout, one on each of six stones… any other ideas?

I’ve got a piece of brown cotton flannel big enough for a 40mm pitch, which I’ll turn into a muddy jungle field with the aid of fabric dye, ink and a black permanent marker. I might actually put a standard-size 29/30mm pitch on the back, just because, and the offcut should include a piece of fabric big enough to put a BB7 pitch on, possibly in 40mm even. The actual fabric pitch will probably be my Christmas holiday gaming project.

Up next, some last carving and details, then paint! Not sure if I’ll go with basic grey paint, or try for the tan sandstone look so many of the Mayan buildings down in Mexico are made from.

Blood Bowl Crocs, Part Two

Work continues on the Impact Miniatures Sarcos crocodile team for Blood Bowl, and I finally got a photo in daylight before I went off to work this morning.

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Impact Sacros crocodiles, getting painted up for Blood Bowl. Click for larger.

The big Leviathan croc on the extreme right of the photo is closest to done, just a few details like his eyes left. The remaining sixteen, eight Salt Water Crocs (Saurus, in BB terms) and eight Baby Crocs (Skinks in BB) are all in various stages less finished than the big guy, but they’re progressing, at least. I am going to be doing a fair bit of highlighting and such on the base colours, especially on the Salt Water crocs, which are mostly too dark and monochrome right now.

It’s been great to get back into painting, too; this is the most painting I’ve done since early May of this year, which is way too long ago!

I’ve also got some accessories and such for Blood Bowl – team dugouts and other functional field scenery – in progress, and will get a post up about that in the next few days. Friday I’m off to Vancouver, though, to run a Russian Civil War game for friends there. This is a game I first started talking about running nearly two years ago, so it’ll be good to get it run finally!

…And Now for Something Completely… Crocodilian!

This is something I never actually thought would happen in my wargaming life: I’m painting figures for one of GW’s rulesets!

Blood Bowl has been played off and on for years up at the Sunday gaming club I’m involved in, and by other friends, and I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and get into it, after years of saying I might.

Several of us put in a combined order to Impact Miniatures for teams or (for the folks who already play) a few extra figures to round out a team. I decided to get a team of Sarcos crocodiles (who play as Lizardmen in BB) and a team of Amazons, both from the resin-plastic range Impact sells. I have to say I’m really impressed with the Impact miniatures, they’re very nice, both the pewter and resin-plastic ones.

I haven’t started assembling or painting the Amazons yet, but the Sarcos crocs are underway. They’re really neat figures, loads of character and detail. Here’s a fairly bad late night shot of them on the painting bench for you.

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What a Croc! 17 of them, in fact. Resin from Impact, and very nice. Click for full size.

One thing that amuses me about Blood Bowl is that you can, with a bit of ingenuity, play the game without giving Games Workshop a cent. They have the rules PDF available for free download, Impact and other folks make figures and dice, and other accessories are easily made at home. That said, GW is still apparently selling the boxed set and various figures, if you want to go that route!

I’m planning on making a field (pitch, in BB terms!) from fabric fairly soon, possibly over the Christmas break, as well as getting the Amazons ready for play once the crocs are done. I still need a team name for the crocs, too…

Lead Painters League 7, Round Six

Over to fantasy figures for the first time in this LPL for me, with a team of Reaper dwarves. Lovely figures loaded with detail, as you’d expect from Reaper. These short fellows are a lot of fun to paint, although picking out all the buckles, belt bags and bits can seem like an endless process.

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The Blackstone Guard – Reaper Minis dwarven fighters. Click to see full size, as usual.

I’ve painted these warriors up in almost all black livery, although the main colour on them is their extravagant dwarven beards and long hair. Apparently this particular clan of dwarves runs strongly toward red hair.

The current round of the Lead Painters League is ongoing over on the Lead Adventure Forum; go check out all the awesome painting on display!

What I’ve Been Up To Lately


Bit of a slow summer here on the Warbard, and in gaming in general for me. I haven’t touched a paintbrush since June (or possibly May…) and while I’ve done a bit of scenario design and a lot of reading, most of my actual gaming time has been taken up with the Savage Worlds RPG rules and planning a possible fantasy RPG with Savage Worlds. We shall see how it goes, as always, and I do want to get back into painting soon, I have Russian Civil War sailors and some cavalry to finish!