WELCOME, SPORTS FANS.
(Originally published in Blood Bowl
Magazine #1, Copyright GW 2000)
‘Good evening sports fans and welcome to first official
Blood Bowl magazine. You join a packed crowd in anticipation of this historic
occasion. Wouldn’t you say Bob, that this magazine really is the first of it’s
kind.’
‘Thanks Jim.
I’d have to agree with you on that one. Blood Bowl magazine really is the first
of what should be a long running and exciting series. You know there’s been a
lot of debate and more than a little confusion about where coaches stand in
regard to the NAF rulebook these days, and that is what this issue is all
about.’
‘You can say
that again Bob. I’ve been more confused than a Halfling that’s been landed on
by Morg’th N’hthrog! If you’ll excuse
the pun, this issue tackles the basics. After reading this every coach will
know which rules are in, which rules are out, and which rules are just plain new. Hey but enough of my waffle lets go over now
to the real expert, the head commissioner of NAF, the big cheese himself, so
here’s Jervis to tell us more.’
Famed as I am for waffling on, for once I’ll cut to the
chase: Blood Bowl Magazine One is not really a normal magazine at all. Rather
it’s a supplement for Blood Bowl that updates the rules for the game. The rules here when combined with the rules
from Blood Bowl and Death Zone give you, in effect, the 4th Edition
Blood Bowl Rulebook. Why have we done this? I’ll explain below…
THE 4TH EDITION RULES
The current version of Blood Bowl is the 3rd
version of the game. Since it was
released waaaay back in 1994 (I know, I was shocked by how long ago it was
too!) we’ve published more than a few sets of optional rules, amendments, and
new teams for the game, and there have been more Q&A’s and FAQs published
than you can shake stick at. None of
these things have ever really been official additions to the game, and this is
now starting to lead to certain amount of confusion amongst coaches around the
world, who not only have to track down all of the relevant material, but also
agree as to which they will use and which not. I’ve also received lots and lots
of feedback about the game, and have come up with a few ideas and thoughts
myself about the way I’d like to see it develop.
All in all it is clearly time for a bit of a spring clean,
and that is why the bulk of Blood Bowl Magazine One is taken up with laying
down exactly what is now considered to be ‘officially’ part of the game, and,
by implication, what is not. Basically,
as far as I am concerned, the Blood Bowl Handbook, the Death Zone Playbook, and
Blood Bowl Magazine One constitute the official ‘vanilla’ version of the game. As long as you have these three (very fine)
publications, you have all of the official rules, teams and Q&A for the
game. Of course, anything else that has
been published previously can still be used if you wish, but it requires an
opponent’s and/or league commissioners agreement before the match starts.
Before getting onto the rules proper, I should warn you that
some of the changes are really quite, erm, well radical. They will, purposely, change the way that
Blood Bowl plays. In particular I’ve
curtailed the ability of player’s to use skills (a player can only use one
skill during an action now), and increased the cost of keeping highly skilled
players in your team. The purpose of
these changes is to make it (hopefully) impossible for coaches to create ‘super
teams’ that will massacre lower rated teams.
Don’t worry, experienced teams still have a big edge, it’s just not
quite as drastic or sustainable.
I’ve also made most of the suggested changes that we ran in
the old Blood Bowl Compendium official changes to the game. So the big guy
rules, the infamous IGMEOY rule, and a number of other important new rules are
all represented here, along with several teams that have appeared elsewhere
since. All of these should bow be
considered part of the official ‘cannon’ of rules for the mighty sport that is
Blood Bowl!
As well as going over the rules of the game, I’ve taken the
chance to go through all of the Star Players and new teams that we’ve published
rules for. Again, the ones included in
this magazine are the ones that I now consider to be officially part of the
game. You’ll see that a few teams and
quite a lot of Star Players failed to make the cut, mainly because they
required too many special rules and new skills to make them work. Once again, this doesn’t mean you can’t use
them, just that if you do so you need your league commissioner’s permission to
do so. Which leads neatly too…
One of Blood Bowl’s greatest strengths and its great
weaknesses is that its very easy to make up new rules for the game. This is cool because it makes it easy to
keep the game fresh and interesting, but if you let it get out of hand the game
can fall apart as coaches struggle to remember all of the rules that apply to
the game. Because of this I’ve been
quite harsh in keeping the new rules that I’ve added to Blood Bowl to a
minimum. Lots of really great stuff
that has been published or appeared on the web for things like new types of
Wizards, stadiums, balls, etc., etc., etc, is not included here, on the basis
that if I made all of this stuff official then a new coach would get swamped by
the sheer number of rules they needed to try and learn.
Now, to belabour a point, this is not to say that you
shouldn’t use any of these rules as ‘house rules’ in your league. However, if you do this, then the league
commissioner must approve them. I also
recommend that two or three times a year the league commissioner goes through
the house rules being used in his league and ‘prunes them back’ – don’t worry,
plenty of new house rules will come along to take the place of the ones that
you get rid of!
This lead me to one important point about league
commissioner’s – their word is LAW. To
paraphrase a comment used often by Toumas Pirinen at our Grand Tournaments, if
your League Commissioner tells you a Dwarf can fly, you say “Yes Sir, how
high?”. It’s important for players to
understand this, but it’s also important for League Commissioner’s to take on
board that with this power comes great responsibility. Basically the league commissioner is there
to make the league work; it’s up to him or her to deal with rules questions,
deal with beardy coaches, sort out the trophies, get the coaches fired up for
the next season, and all in all make sure that everyone has a fun time. It’s a tough job, but when it all comes
together, it’s really worth it. If
you’ve ever run a great BB League then you’ll know exactly what I mean.
FUTURE PLANS
Once this issue of Blood Bowl Magazine (BBMag for short) is
out of the way I’m going to concentrate my efforts on getting out some new
models for the game, and on setting up a structure to get as many people as
possible playing Blood Bowl all around the world.
The models bit is proving fairly straight forward; we’ve
already released an Amazon team for Blood Bowl. At the time of writing (31st August 2000) we’ve just
had the first test shot of a new Blood Bowl Treeman through from the mould room
(check out the Mail Order pages for details). Designers are also working on new
Orc and Human teams to supplement (rather than replace) the Orc and Human
players we already have, and I’m hoping to commission a designer to make models
for a BB Lizardman team soon. We’re
also working on a plan to make Blood Bowl dug-outs, grandstands and corner
tower models available, so that you can make your own BB Stadium if you wish!
All this is very cool, but at present I’m much more
interested in making sure that the Blood Bowl game itself becomes available
again, and also making sure that the full back-catalogue of Blood Bowl
miniatures are available from our UK and US Mail Order departments. The good news is that we will be able to
make sure that both these things will happen, while the bad news is that its
taking rather longer to sort out than I had first hoped (ain’t it always the way?!?!). All I can say is please bear with us while
we get things set up – and keep checking up on the Fanatic web site for the
latest news about what is happening to the world’s best football game!
There’s much more I could write about here, as the notes on
my future plans for Blood Bowl really only touch the surface of what I hope to
be able to do, but Warwick has only given me three pages so you’ll just have to
wait until next issue.
Over the years, in almost every set of designers notes that
I’ve written for Blood Bowl, I’ve mentioned how it feels like the game is no
longer mine any more but belongs to the coaches that play it. This has never been more true than over the
last few years, where Blood Bowl has kept going quite cheerfully on it own,
while I have had to concentrate on other projects. Thanks to you one and all for this - Blood Bowl would not be
around and this magazine could not have been put together without your efforts. Not, of course, that you can now rest on
your laurels. Oh no! Now is the time to restart that league and
start recruiting new coaches. Let the word go out that it’s the start of a
brand new season – and that Blood Bowl is back with a vengeance!
Keep rolling 6’s!