Blood Bowl: Bleachers

The thing about Blood Bowl is how it brings everyone together in a joy of death. You have Orcs, Dwarfs, men and even Beastmen sharing the same stadium, and all desperate to see blood-curdling violence.
- Jim Johnson, Blood Bowl II

I quite enjoyed Cyanide's Blood Bowl video game back in the day, despite its many bugs and absolutely hideous AI. A sequel came out in 2015 and was available for something like €15 last year, which I think is an acceptable price to pay for a Games Workshop-based video game. In this case, it's a great deal: while the AI is still very bad, it's not nearly as ludicrously incompetent as it used to be. No longer will an AI team start its turn with an AG 2 player attempting three dodges and going for it in order to assist on a block, and even though I don't have the faintest idea how I can possibly get the achievement for an interception as the AI never, ever throws the ball, they occasionally even manage to score! Some twenty games in, I still hadn't lost, but I'd had to settle for a draw twice, and even ended up in overtime in an elimination game. All this made me want to do an offline Blood Bowl project as well; since I already have several finished teams, I started thinking bigger...

Eventually, I'd love to be able to build an entire damn Blood Bowl stadium, but I'll start with a single component: some bleachers. Working from the 6'×4' playing surface I've got at our cabin, I have a plan for a modular Blood Bowl stadium, and the simplest part is a 20cm×30cm set of bleachers. So that's where I'll start!

**

The components I'm using are:

- one sheet of 2mm thick balsa wood, 100mm × 1000mm
- one square dowel rod, 8mm × 5mm × 1000mm
- one square dowel rod, 5mm × 5mm × 1000mm
- one round dowel rod, 5mm × 1000mm

First, I used a craft knife and steel ruler to cut the balsa wood into three 300×100mm pieces, which were then each split into four 25mm×300mm pieces. I then glued 25mm pieces of 8×5mm rod, short side up, to the underside of each piece, so that a 5mm rod would fit in at the 50mm mark from each end:

What we have here is, if you like, a single bleacher, standing exactly 10mm tall. For this stand, we'll need ten of them. I'll mostly be trying to build my spectators out of plastic models, but if you're going to use a lot of metal figures, I'd reinforce these with a dowel rod lengthwise under the bench.

Then we stick them together! I've tried to get a 5mm overlap, to leave 20mm on each bench so the models will fit, but I mostly eyeballed it; after all, these are lower stands for a Blood Bowl stadium, they're probably built by the lowest-bidding goblin contractor!

Then it's time to reinforce the whole thing with the 5mm×5mm rod:

Finally, add supports cut from the 5mm diameter rod.

And it's finished!

I intend to glue this to a plywood sheet when I start building my modular stadium, but for now, it's done!

**

As I got started painting, I remembered that my original idea had been to use the leftover balsa to make a backboard for the highest bench, so I did:

I started by spraypainting the whole thing white and applying a coat of Cavalry Brown.

I then painted the tops and sides of the benches with a cross-grain coat of Mahogany Brown, to add a little depth and make them look slightly weathered.

And that's it: some spray varnish and they're done.

**

Stands are nothing, of course, without fans. Just as I was finishing my bleachers, the first batch of spectators arrived from Oathsworn Miniatures.

First up, Evil Reginald. He's a Starling Rogue, who I've painted up to look like Reginald from Nedroid was doing Shakespeare in the Park. Only the first part of that was intentional, the Shakespeare thing just kind of happened.

His feathers are Medium Blue, pants Neutral Grey, waistcoat Dark Red with Old Gold buttons, and the scarf is Orange Red. The base is Mahogany Brown, as is the dagger hilt and handle, and his talons and beak are Ivory.

Reginald will be joined in the stands by a Mouse Nun:

As well as one half of Reaper's Eastern Mouslings.

And an anime schoolgirl, because I didn't exactly know what else to do with her.

Here they are:

**

My second set of spectators starts with a Squirrel Witch, busy hexing the opposition or whatever it is she's doing. A fantastic model! I'm also definitely a fan of the Drunken Weasel.

As I was working on a Beastman project at the time, I had some Gors and Catachan bits hanging around, which led to these guys:

This is how you go from a laspistol to a foam finger in just a couple of easy steps!

Last but definitely not least: an Oathsworn Pug Bounty Hunter.

All the Oathsworn Miniatures are very high quality, and a delight to paint. Highly recommended! Here they all are:

**

That's it for now: I have a set of bleachers, which were easy and fun to make, with some spectators as well. Next time, I'll be mounting the bleachers on some plywood as part of my modular stadium project, and adding more punters! And I don't know, maybe we should also consider playing some Blood Bowl again...

CKII: The Great Mercian Interregnum

Last time, I chronicled the life of the Empress of Mercia, Éowyn the Great. Sadly, both of her daughters died before she did, leaving the throne to the least competent of her children, Emperor Cynewulf the Monk (1123-1155).

Cynewulf picked up where his mother left off: she had inherited a claim to the duchy of Orkney from her mother and, being Éowyn the Great, conquered it. Her son decided it might be nice to own more of Norway, and secured a foothold in Scandinavia.

Frankly, Cynewulf's stats were useless, and it's a miracle there wasn't a revolution. I tried to use the theology focus to get rid of his slothfulness, but it didn't work. A pilgrimage to Rome helped a little, though.

Cynewulf also joined the long line of Mercian hermetics, and I decided to break some new ground by creating a horoscope for his oldest child Eleanor.

Apparently the horoscope picks an attribute for the character that you can then encourage, or not. Eleanor got Intrigue, and I went with it, which got her a bonus and (maybe?) the Deceitful trait.

Meanwhile, through a sequence of events I don't fully understand, the Byzantine Emperor was a Taoist, and the Pope - driven from Rome to Germany by Byzantium - called a crusade on Byzantine Italy. Now, this was a little too Fourth Crusade for my taste, and with Taoist Byzantium capable of mobilizing 75 000 men, there was no way we were going to win this. I decided to participate by storming the strategically vital Byzantine stronghold of, um, Corsica. Handily getting everyone, including Cynewulf's oldest children, the twins Eleanor and Æthelflæd, the Crusader stat, and running away like hell as soon as the first massive Byzantine army showed up. Eventually the whole thing ended on an anticlimax when the Taoist emperor was overthrown and replaced by an Orthodox ruler.

In other futile holy wars, the party of 'Ali tried again, but they made only a token effort and were easily defeated.

Unfortunately, there were sad times ahead for the imperial family. Princess Eleanor died of disease, leaving her twin sister Æthelflæd first in line to the throne. A well-forged claim and a brief war gave Cynewulf the duchy of Vestlandet in Norway, but as he was fighting to secure the last of its counties from the King of Norway, he was killed in combat.

As you can see, Emperor Cynewulf the Monk never did improve his miserable attributes. But he did his best for his children, left a larger realm for his daughter than he inherited himself, and seeing as how he went out with a sword in his hand, he died his mother's son.

**

After Cynewulf's death, things became... complicated. He was succeeded by Empress Æthelflæd the Drunkard (1155-1162), which was a completely unfair nickname because she became Temperate almost immediately after receiving it. She also found the Seljuk empire in surprisingly bad shape, and launched a holy war on the duchy of Bahrain.

The war went well for the empire, but badly for her: she was terribly injured in battle and died shortly thereafter.

Both of Æthelflæd's sons took monastic vows during her reign, so the throne went to their sister, Empress Æthelflæd II (1162-1166), who was 14 when she became Empress. She brought the conquest of Bahrain to a succesful conclusion.

Sadly, Æthelflæd II only reigned for two years until she was assassinated - I have no idea by whom.

She was succeeded by her sister, Empress Cynehild (1166-1173). Her reign started with another Sunni jihad on Arabia.

She came of age defending the realm from the infidel.

The Pope was distinctly unhelpful! Can you imagine excommunicating a ruler defending themselves against a holy war?!

As the war was still raging, Empress Cynehild died giving birth to twin sons.

The older of the twins then became Emperor Eadfrith the Great (1173- before his first birthday, losing his mother and getting credit for defeating the Sunni jihad.

Some years into Eadfrith's regency, the Islamic world looked to be in enough trouble for us to try another holy war, this time on Basra.

The former Seljuk empire had split in half, into a Seljuk realm and the Persian empire, and while they were fighting who knows who, we took advantage.

This is what the map looked like after we captured Basra: the Persian empire is now the Taid empire, and they've lost a lot of territory to the Byzantines. With their holy places in Christian hands and their jihads failing, the moral authority of both Sunni and Shi'ite Islam has collapsed.

Meanwhile, as my regency neared its end, the inevitable civil war broke out.

During the war, Eadfrith came of age and turned out to be pretty decent at managing money.

The civil war, though, was going very badly. My troops were mopping up the Middle East just fine, but we lost a couple of big battles in England and were running out of money to hire more mercenaries - until I had an amazing stroke of luck.

With the leader of the rebellion in my hands, it was all over.

**

The civil war ended in January 1189. So in total, the 35 years since Cynewulf's death saw the reigns of three empresses, and a sixteen-year regency for Eadfrith, capped off by a massive civil war that, frankly, I was going to lose. In retrospect, it's kind of amazing we got through all that with the imperial line and realm still intact. You think that with primogeniture and everything that you can plan the succession, but lol nope.

Anyway, now that we have a young ruler with an impressive if somewhat unearned sobriquet on the throne, maybe we can achieve a little stability.

Let's Read Tolkien 52: The Palantír

The sun was sinking behind the long western arm of the mountains when Gandalf and his companions, and the king with his Riders, set out again from Isengard.

The king's party stops for the night in a hollow, and as they bed down, Pippin is obsessed with the orb Gríma threw down from Orthanc. Merry tries to dissuade him, but when everyone else is asleep, Pippin steals the orb from Gandalf and looks into it. Soon enough he screams loudly enough to wake the entire camp.

Under interrogation by Gandalf, Pippin tells that he looked into the stone, and soon enough found himself talking to Sauron himself. Luckily, Sauron seems to have thought that the stone was still in Orthanc, and Saruman was torturing a hobbit he had captured, so he didn't start asking questions.

Afterward, Gandalf discusses the stone with Aragorn and Théoden. They agree that it must be the palantír of Orthanc, brought from Númenor by Elendil. Aragorn, as Elendil's heir, takes charge of it. Just as they've finished their conversation, a Ring-wraith flies over them, riding a winged beast. Gandalf immediately sets off for Minas Tirith, taking Pippin with him to get him away from the Orthanc-stone. As they ride, Gandalf explains what the palantíri were - seeing-stones made by the Noldor in ancient times - and speculates on how the palantír of Orthanc must have been Saruman's downfall; he had kept it secret from the other Wise, and evidently been corrupted through it by Sauron. The chapter ends with Pippin falling asleep as Shadowfax gallops toward Gondor.

**

Unfortunately for the good name of Took, Peregrin son of Paladin seems to be the Fellowship's designated moron: from dropping rocks down wells to sneaking a look at the wizard's special magic rock.

Doing so, I think, makes him the only member of the Fellowship to have actually had a conversation with Sauron. Unless Olórin talked to him before the Fall or something. Still something you can put on your resumé, I guess. The effortless way he lifts the stone from Gandalf again makes you think there's definitely something to this notion of hobbits as burglars.

But there's something about Pippin's telecom experience that I don't entirely understand. When the palantír is thrown from Orthanc, it's described in some detail, and Gandalf says of it first: "It is not a thing, I guess, that Saruman would have chosen to cast away." And second:

Strange are the turns of fortune! Often does hatred hurt itself! I guess that, even if we had entered in, we could have found few treasures in Orthanc more precious than the thing which Wormtongue threw down at us.

So obviously Gandalf has some notion that the orb Wormtongue threw at them is a very special rock indeed. But then at the beginning of this chapter, Gandalf ruminates to Merry:

There was some link between Isengard and Mordor, which I have not yet fathomed. How they exchanged news I am not sure; but they did so.

Later, after Pippin has had his way with the stone, Gandalf says: "But my mind was bent on Saruman, and I did not at once guess the nature of the stone." Aragorn then remarks that now they understand how Saruman communicated with Sauron.

I don't know, maybe I'm reading this poorly, but if Gandalf didn't know what the palantír was, then why did he go on about how it was the best thing they could possibly have got out of Orthanc? Was he that convinced that the best thing Saruman has stashed in his wizard's tower was a cool rock that's hard to break? Maybe it's just me, but the transition from last chapter's "ha ha, Wormtongue threw a super cool treasure at us" to this chapter's "I wonder what this rock is" is a bit jarring. Unless the Lord of the Rings is a role-playing game, and the players forgot everything between sessions again.

In another startling leap from Tolkien's pages into the real world, Palantir is also the name of a surveillance corporation founded by the fascist and vampire wannabe Peter Thiel. In Tolkien's theology, the palantír seems to straddle the line between technology, which is acceptable, and Machine, which isn't; its rightful owner can use it, but it threatens corruption. The kind of surveillance networks that information technology is beginning to make possible, and the naked misanthropy of so many "techbro" entrepreneurs, would have horrified Tolkien, and definitely been, for him, an example of vanity and sin: the Machine writ large.

**

So, that was Book Three: from three guys burying their dead comrade to armies, battles and war. I mentioned that I think Tolkien is better with pacing than he gets credit for; he's also quite good at raising the scope of the story. We've now gone from some hobbits rambling around the countryside to all-out war and wizards, and even a personal appearance from the Enemy himself. Finally, we witness what is I think Aragorn's first act in his capacity as the heir of Elendil and Isildur, and Gandalf rides toward Gondor and the war.

Next time: some entirely different hobbits.