Summary
As I’ve grown older, I’vemoved away from building whole Warhammer armiesin favour of crafting small units andhigh-concept models. Of course, I’ve still kept my pride and joy, myDark Mechanicus army, which I continue to slowly add to, but I’m an adult with a life and responsibilities, I can’t spend a whole day playing out an epic engagement any more.
That’s why I look to smaller projects. That could be convertinga house of servants for my Imperial Knight, building a coolKill Team, or just creating a unique unit for an army I’ve never considered before. While I’m incredibly excited aboutAge of Sigmar’s new Skaven, I doubt I’ll build a full force of them, instead opting for some cool individual characters I can be proud of.
My latest project is building aBlood Bowlteam. Except, that’s not quite true. This is an old project that I built when Blood Bowl 2016 released. I was gutted that my favourite Norse team didn’t have official rules or models, so I built my own using plenty of Chaos models, mostly from the Darkoath range.
I dug the models out of storage this weekend in order to start a new league, and the conversions hold up. However, I immediately came across a major problem. I built this force for the old Norse roster, when it was a Team of Legend. That meant I had Throwers and Catchers, which no longer exist, and a distinct lack of Valkyries and Beer Boars.
Luckily, one of my Berserkers had already been converted from the Darkoath Warqueen Marakarr Blood-sky. That was one Valkyrie ticked off. The second needed to be built from scratch, butGames Workshop’sofficial Norse team (which had been released in my hiatus) and some conversion parts from various human teams I’ve bought over the years made the process fairly simple.
For the second Valkyrie, I wanted her to embrace the drunk and disorderly side of the Norse team, something that Games Workshop has really doubled down on in recent years. Using the body of a Norse Lineman, I gave her two tankards of beer and the head from an Imperial Nobility character. I shaved off the posh bits, removed the feathered plume, and added some historically inaccurate horns from a Berserker head. Thus, Ölrun was born. Yes, that’s beer reference from the ancient Norse poetic edda, Völundarkviða. It was either that or Stella Artvarsdóttir.
My Catchers and Throwers became simple Linemen, their athletic poses and reaches for balls fitting perfectly for Blood Bowl dudes. They’ll be doing more smashing and punching than ball-carrying, but that won’t stop me from having fun with the conversions. I’d vastly prefer to have a Lineman who looks a bit like a Catcher (a role that no longer exists, so there’s no chance for confusion) than a bog-standard, straight-out-of-the-box model.
My two Ulfwerener look great already, but I updated one of them with some superior parts from the new Norse box. Creepy wolf-hands and a screaming bearded face took him a step above my old conversion, despite the fact that he’s now in some strange liminal half-painted-half-grey purgatory.
That leaves one Lineman and two Beer Boars to round out my roster, but I built these standard. I hear you shouting, “boring!” at the top of your lungs, but there’s a Lineman with a nice sculpt, and how do you expect me to convert a little piggie? I know most Warhammer kits come with little Pokemon buddies these days, but there’s a distinct lack of ale-carrying swine.
I only built a couple of models for this project, but a Blood Bowl team is the perfect size for a bit of modelling fun. I don’t have time for massive armies, so teams of drunken Vikings will have to do. The only problem is, now I want to build a stadium for them to play in.
