One of the things that always marked GW out as something different in a rpg market that sometimes seemed more pompous than a room full of upper-class twits was the fact that there was always a vein of silly and sometimes quite juvenile humour than ran through the stuff they put out in the late eighties and early nineties. The original RT hardback was full of daft jokes about the hobby and thinly veiled pokes at certain parts of the UK and it's populace. And Bloodbowl was perhaps the game that for me summed it all up most sweetly and with the most fun involved as well.
I'd always had the idea of a BB team in the back of my head, but when a friend found that he had not only his own first edition of the game in his parents' loft, but the three copies that his childhood friends had left with him as well, the chance to play some games seemed too much to resist.
At the time another member of my gaming group was having a birthday and as he's not either a collector or painter of miniatures, I decided that I'd use some of the WHFB orks that I had lying around my study to make a team up for him.
These are my favourite miniatures from the main line-up of the team, huge, mean and beefy greenskins covered in plate armour and intent on doing nothing more than steam-rolling over the opposition. In the second edition of the rules the ork teams had black orks as blitzers and I suppose that these guys are probably part of that strain of super ork.
The linemen are the backbone of the team, the poor grunts who have to form the defensive line, take the punishment from the star players on the opposing side and generally perform any role that a specialist isn't on the spot to do. I think these two sum up the differing styles of ork BB tactics quite well, on the one hand you have the guy on the right with his helmet and head stuck straight out to absorb whatever punishement comes his way and the one on the right who simply doesn't care and just wears his colourful cap and leaves it all up to chance. The guy on the left is also an example of using an ork head from the Assault on Black Reach boxset in order to add variety to the team.
As well as a collection of linemen, throwers, catchers and blockers, I thought the team could do with the ubiquitous chainsaw-wielding loony and a musician to play the team onto the pitch. The loony is the only model that actually comes from the WH40K range, but thankfully the differences between that and the WHFB orks are so small as not to notice. The drummer is a really old WHFB ork with a drum from the Chaos Marauder boxset. I wanted to sculpt a mohawk on his head, but for some reason it just ended up being the most ludicrous quiff I have ever seen instead. But somehow it just seemed to fit with the feel of the model and the team as a whole.
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