Project: Blood Bowl - Chaos Dwarfs

 I did actually buy Blood Bowl in the 90s. I might have even bought my favourite team; I don't remember. Like so many things, I gave away or sold these things as I moved to university, keeping only my Empire army and a few bits.

Luckily, Games Workshop reprinted them a couple years ago. I finally started painting them for the new ruleset and...

watch the sulphurous, vile avian!

..finished putting the finishing touches to the bull centaur blitzers last night, so the whole project is done! That's quite satisfying, even if did lead me to procrastinate from my Squats commitment until dangerously late in the month...

At any rate, below the cut for more photos of this tusked mob as well as some team name ideas!

friends (they are not friends)

Test models, painted in late January - after literal months of agonizing over a scheme. It's hard to design a scheme that feels authentic for Chaos Dwarfs - reds and oranges, after all - while also working with both pink skin and green.

I think the orange-and-white works, while the red on the dwarfs gets brought across to the hobgoblins via the religious iconography. They are slightly different reds, but that is to create more visual interest on the dwarfs. It's hard!

hobgoblin linemen

The hobgoblin linemen were surprisingly fun to paint. They did look awful until the thin sepia shade was applied, though.

chaos dwarf blockers

Also fun to paint, although they are even more limited in design from one another than the hobgoblins. Their masks are painted leather to reinforce the brutal fantasy nature of the game - it feels weirdly more sword-and-sorcery than steel masks would have. Plus it vaguely echoes some of Conan and Red Sonja's villainous foes, which works with the Assyrian styling of these slavers from the wasteland.

[I'll allow the criticism of the Orientalism of sword-and-sorcery to speak for itself.]

enslaved minotaur

Enslaved minotaurs are terrible players, but this classic sculpt popped up on eBay through one of my favourite sellers, so I decided to get him. He's certainly a very masculine sculpt, isn't he?

I did, of course, paint the enslaved minotaur as a classic milking cow breed. It's a bit perfect. His reddish eyes speak to his true nature, though.

Tremendous fun to paint; I loved the relative simplicity, even with the two-tone colouring on his flesh.

bull centaur blitzers

Finally, the bull centaurs. Absolute weapons in the game and an essential classic for the mid-90s Chaos Dwarfs (which are my favourite kind). The sculpts themselves are a bit awkward, being in three parts - and these were clearly coming from moulds that had been reused a number of times, as you can tell from the lines I never quite managed to remove. I also had to use some green stuff to gapfill, and I'm not the best at that.

I'm still pleased enough with them. Look at those big goofy faces. Classic.

They each got a classic shade of bull: red, black. I was tempted to paint one as a milk cow, but the joke is funnier on a minotaur, let's be real.

Zharr-Naggrund Ziggurats box art

Of course, no Blood Bowl team is complete without a hilarious team name. My criteria for a team name, in no particular order:

1. Puns/hilarious
2. Alliterative
3. Place name + Animals [eg Sydney Swans]

Zharr-Naggrund Ziggurats only hits one of these, for example. Washington Redskins hits none of these and is also gross. So let's see me do better...

• Uzkulak Underminers
• Lavapool (via here)
• Azgorh Artificers
• Gorgoth Gallûs (reference)
• Dawi Devils
• Dawi Daemons
• Dawi Destroyers
• Daemon's Stump Devils
• Gash Kadrak Villains (secretly alliterative - 'Vale of Woe Villains')
• Uzkulak Udugs
• Uzkulak Utukku (reference)
• River Ruin Raiders
• River Ruin Redcaps
• Kwisatz Ziggurats (thanks to the Blood Bowl Facebook group)
  

Which of these is your favourite? Do you have any other suggestions?