So, as I mentioned in my previous post, last summer I painted up a Dwarf Blood Bowl team. I started in late June and finished in late July. But although I took a quick snap of the team to share on Facebook, I didn’t get around to properly photographing them until now. But at last, here they are.
Most of the models are from Iron Golems, who have sadly closed down. At the time, most of their models were still available from resellers such as Comixininos, but they are becoming increasingly scarce and I’m glad I got hold of this team while I had the chance. Like many of the best third-party teams, it’s sculpted by the talented Pedro Ramos. Here and there I have added a few models from other manufacturers as well, but the Iron Golems models make up most of the team.
Normally the heart of a Blood Bowl team is the linemen. But Dwarf teams don’t have any players by that name. Instead the players that make up the numbers are the blockers, also called Longbeards in some editions of the rules. They’re slow and not very agile, but they’re also tough as old boots. The Iron Golems team includes 6 blocker models as well as a ‘team Captain’ model who appears essentially to be another Longbeard. In order to have a full roster of 16 players, I bought an extra two blockers, bringing me up to a total of nine. To make the duplicates less obvious, I was careful to paint their beards in different colours.
Next up we have two Trollslayers. I tried a different way of painting skin on this team from any I had used before, and while it’s not perfect, I’m overall fairly pleased with how it’s come out. It’s particularly visible on the barely-clothed slayers.
The blitzers wear rather more armour.
The fastest players on a Dwarf team are the runners. They’re even as fast as the slowest players on a human team!
Finally we have the infamous Deathroller. Strangely, and contrary to how Dwarfs are usually portrayed in fantasy settings as as upstanding and honourable (albeit greedy), Dwarfs in Blood Bowl are second only to Goblins when it comes to flagrant disregard for the rules of the game. The most notorious example of this is their habit of riding around the pitch running people over with a steamroller. Unfortunately, the Iron Golems Dwarf team doesn’t include a proper Deathroller model. There are two alternatives available, one is a large robot and the other is a slayer with a sort of battering ram/bulldozer blade contraption. Neither of these particularly appealed to me. Fortunately, a few years before sculpting this team, Pedro Ramos designed a Deathroller model for Vortice Miniatures which is very much in the same style as the rest of the team, so I ordered that one.
As usual, I have a selection of sideline models for the team. The fellow with the book is supposed to be Sacred Commissioner Roze-El, the Dwarf who originally translated the sacred texts of Nuffle and introduced Blood Bowl to the World. He also works as an assistant coach. He and the cheerleaders are also from Iron Golems, but the Head Coach and Apothecary are from SP Miniaturas. They’re designed in a bit of a different style from the rest of the team, but with the appropriate paint-job they just about fit in. Finally the referee is the original 2nd-edition GW model, designed by one (or possibly both) of the Perry brothers.
I also have five star players, corresponding to those available during the CRP era of the rules. Four of them are fairly standard renditions of Grim Ironjaw, Flint Churnblade, Boomer Eziasson and Barik Farblast. This is the only version of Flint Churnblade I’ve seen that portrays him as a slayer, although he does have the unusually low (for a Dwarf) armour value of 8, so portraying him as shirtless at least makes sense. The fifth is ‘Dara the Slayer’, a version of Zara the Slayer re-imagined as a Dwarf.
The sixth CRP-era star available to Dwarfs is, as with any team besides Undead, the legendary Morg ‘N’ Thorg. This model isn’t from Iron Golems; it’s the old 90s GW model by Gary Morley. This is one of the most iconic and instantly-recognisable Blood Bowl models ever made. There have been a couple of attempts to update it (and there is an older version dating back to the 2nd edition as well) but I still prefer this one. Although I painted him up as part of this team, I tried to paint him so that he would fit into any of my teams equally easily, which is why I painted his shoulder pad and shorts in plain white.
So that’s it for this team. As mentioned before next up will be Skaven. However, back in the summer last year I also painted up some additions to my Orc team and touched up the paintwork on my humans. I have a few extra Star Player models to add to both the Orcs and the Humans, so once I’ve done those I might well see about getting some new photos of both teams.