Blood Bowl Chaos Pact - Blitzer Marauders

After the most recognizable part of the team - the Renegades, it was time for the cornerstone, the linemen and linewomen - the Marauders.

Seeing as they are supposed to be a rag-tag bunch of mismatched misfits, I decided to play around with the skintones - so everyone's skin is different, both realistic ones and some weird ones. That was both the fun part and the challenge about them, but that's how it is usually. I got a whole 10 of them in the box, so I decided to break them into two groups - both to organize them by their role on the pitch and to fit them reasonably well here. After some tweaking, I chose 5 of them to be the fighty ones and those go in first.

Intent on creating the greatest Chaos team, the goblin headhunter Dugtig gathered the mismatched Renegades and was now faced with finding the marauders somehow. He looked through many of his books and finally found some notes about Kreegans - a travelling band of aggressive Blood Bowl fans. Taking people from all around the world, the Kreegans were united by their love of the noble sport, fondness of riots and pitch invasions, as well as their only vague understanding of the rules. Nobody ever considered recruiting them, but Dugtig was nothing if not unorthodox - while unskilled, their potential was limitless, he thought. The unassuming goblin appeared in one of their camps one day and announced his recruitment - naturally, the response was more than enthusiastic. It was easy to find good violent blitzers - but digging through the applications in search of various specialists would take some extra time.

Here are the girls - and those two were probably the most challenging when it went to their skintone. The one on the left is meant to have a very dark, almost black skin, but with very bright patches caused by vitilgo Vitiligo. I always thought that's a very interesting look and wanted to try it out - and this was the perfect opportunity. The one on the right sports also very dark skin, but warmer in tone - I never painted skin even close to this, so it was also an interesting task.

And here are the guys - your usual brooding agressive types that are well known on the tabletop - with skintones much closer to my usual work - with some tints added. I gave them some simple tattoos to make them stand out just a tiny bit more.

Blood Bowl Chaos Blockers - WIP 4

Finally, the last Champion of Chaos is complete - the most flashy and overdesigned of them all, the Snake.

Here the stats came first - this one got blessed with extra agility, giving us something like a nimble elf that can still punch and take hits like a Chaos Warrior. When designing them, I realized that some mutation skills give an equivalent to extra agility for some actions - Two Heads for dodging and Extra Arms for handling the ball - so I decided to merge them all into one and finally be free from the restrictions about the amount of extremities.

This gave us this snake-like monstrosity - inspired by the Naga Queens from HoMM3 and some old Slaaneshi Champions. The central part, the torso-head is a variant of the disturbing babyfaces used on may Inq28 pieces - I used a female vampire head from a bust I won some time ago (I never really expected to paint it). This thing got then decorated with all kinds of details and pieces to make it all complicated and at least a bit bizarre.

Blood Bowl Chaos Blockers - WIP 3

Third Blocker is done - and it's actually two Champions of Chaos - the Twins.

I had one of the tough guys planned as the mobile one - then I had to think how to represent him. I went through some iterations, until I finally decided to make a weird 'cavalry' piece. Two conjoined siblings would count as a single player as far as the rules are concerned - allowing me to sculpt something wildly different from the norm. Of course, I had to design them so that I will avoid certain rules - so they only have two functional arms to share between them and only one set of eyes (probably one mouth too). The bottom one is stomping forward and punching, with the one on top concerned only about the occasional ball handling situations. As you can see HERE, I sculpted the big mouth and even every tooth separately, because I was unsure if I wanted them open or closed. I decided on clenched teeth because it was less obvious - most monsters with large mouths tend to keep them open as they run, just ask any squig.

It was a nice project, all the greenstuffed flesh reminded me of the Sloth the Sloth.

Blood Bowl Chaos Pact - Renegades

Finally, something painted and finally, the Chaos Pact team project is starting to emerge! It's been almost 1,5 years after I got them and the WIP was posted in January. I tried working on them bit by bit, but life keeps happening, even now.  

These here are the first members of my Chaos Pact / Chaos Renegades team, part of the Alastoran Malice Team from Greebo Games. The idea behind the team is a mismatched collection of chaos marauders and other races brought together to play the noble sport, a much less elite variant of the Chaos Chosen team. One of their features is access to 3 Big Guys - those are still being painted - and another one is a single orc, skaven, goblin, and a dark elf available in their rosters, each one bringing some nice flavor from their main teams and I decided to start on them.    

There are some small conversions involved - the goblin has a second head behind the first one, the elf has a decoration on his helmet to bind him together with the GW team, orc has some disgusting pustules all over him (to signify Foul Appearance mutation) and the skaven sports some edgy, oversized horns. As for the painting, while I liked painting all the different colors, the models themselves are very fine and sometimes I struggled to recognize what is what - but that's a good thing too, weirdly enough. Their bases are made according to my own tutorial, but perhaps not that well visible from this angle.      

  The first batch of human marauders coming up soon! Click the image for better resolution.

The goblin headhunter Dugtig is well known in the Blood Bowl world for his skill in finding really good players. Still, many talents he discovered were rejected by the coaches because of ‘chaotic influence’, ‘unworkable personality’ or other similar details. Now, after recent difficult recruitment drives for the Dreadspear Dragons, Badlands Badbuttz and Backbiters, to mention a few, he thought that with all the money he earned through the years he could start his own team, taking all those talented, but misunderstood players. Collecting this small group of mismatched rejects, he created a core for a new Chaos Renegades team. Now the real recruitment begins.

Blood Bowl Chaos Blockers - WIP 2

Today I want to show you the second blocker - and probably the weirdest of the bunch - the Fishman.

I'm not really sure how this idea came to me and what inspired it, it just happened during one sleepless night earlier during the year. A Champion of Chaos that may look comical, but is actually dangerous and cruel - spindly human legs diappearing inside a metal fish costume with bulging eyes, with a strange head and elongated arms, nobody sure where does the armor creature ends and the armor begins.

Contrary to how simple he may look, he was really tasking for me to sculpt... Different layers of sketches, empty mouth, different parts made separately, only to be glued on later, arms made out of Milliput sticks joined at the joints with wire to set the pose properly, the textured, hammered metal - it was a lot of work and it was probably all my fault. He may have turned out too fat and too big, but I accepted it and I'm happy with him, all things considered.

Blood Bowl Chaos Blockers - WIP 1

With the beastmen done, it's time for the Blockers. They are the four Champions of Chaos that brought their own retinues to form a Blood Bowl team, so they are getting a lot of attention. I am probably overdoing them, they take a lot of time to be done, so I'll be posting them one at a time. Still, I think they deserve it and I'm quite happy with my progress so far.

The first one is probably the simplest - the Marble One. He is a reinvention of an idea back from high school, when I wanted have a Tzeentch champion, whose Chaos Armor manifested as marble skin - soft and nimble when moving, hard and cold when struck. To show off something like that, I wanted a lot of exposed skin with sculpture-like muscles, so I bought myself a Kairic Acolyte body. Sadly, it was way too small for an imposing Champion of Chaos - so I cut the body into pieces, lenghtened it and then basically sculpted the whole body over the original plastic. Trying to sculpt a realistic musculature was a first time for me and I learned a little bit, which is always nice. The head was supposed to be simply helmeted at first, but then I got inspired by the eerie and beautiful marble mines found IRL - so he sports some interlocking blocks of stone for a head, with two little, strange eyeholes.

Painting him will surely be an interesting challenge!

Blood Bowl Nurgle Extras - The Pimplettes

I guess it's time to post something else than the neverending posts about weird beastmen, something painted would be good - so here are the Cavorting Nurglings, an unique small inducement available to the Nurgle Teams in Blood Bowl. I have a pile of primed minis ready to be painted and I chose those guys here as a nice start of going through it.

Unexpectedly, they weren't as nice as I wanted - quite a lot of detail and a lot of different skinshades. Still, they were a nice change of pace and a pleasant return to the Putrid Punters project.

The WIP post is HERE - I took a normal Nurgling base from GW and Bloodbowlified them a bit - added a ball-eating one, some helmets, a hotdog, etc. Their pose was perfect to write the team name on their backs.

Sloth the Sloth is legendarily shy and his handlers have tried out many different ways of encouraging him to actually move onto the pitch and play. One of those was getting a small bunch of Nurglings to throw him as snacks - which seemed to work for a few matches. Until that is, they bought a particularly feisty batch of them. When they saw the beast approaching them, they quickly cut their ropes and ran in all directions, causing all kinds of chaos and mischief. Sloth the Sloth followed them all around the stadium, trashing few stands and causing several fatalities, not bothering to play at all. The Punters lost that one match, but the surviving fans loved the spectacle and the team actually rose in the popularity rankings! The cheeky Nurglings got employed instead of being punished and they formed a merry band called "The Pimplettes" and their presence always rouses the audience to do their best. One or two still gets eaten by Sloth the Sloth occasionally, but it's all in good fun.