Beantown Barking Spiders: Conversions

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I managed to get a little conversion work done for the Beantown Barking Spiders, a new goblin team that I'll be trying out in my Blood Bowl league. As I mentioned in my previous post, I am using a selection of Reaper Miniatures goblins and trolls for this team. The Blood Bowl rules specifically prohibit players from bringing weapons on the field, and while goblins show disregard for this ruling by sneaking a few secret weapons into the game I disarmed most of them by snipping off the swords, spears and bows that they had used to arm themselves. However, there was one spear-bearer figure that was in a pose with the spear shaft across his body that could not be easily converted with a few simple cuts. I have two copies of this figure. With one of the cross-body spear-bearers, I chopped the spear tip off and replaced it by sculpting a boxing glove.

For the other cross-body spear-bearer, I decided to convert him into my team looney, a chainsaw wielding lunatic that can be an equal danger to the opposing team as he is to himself. In my box of bits, I found a saw blade that I believe came from an old 40K orc dreadnaught. I thought it would make a great chainsaw for my looney. It is a metal bit and I quickly realized that it was too heavy to be glued to the Bones plastic without something underneath it to support its weight. To remedy this, I chose to make a support for the chainsaw by modeling a sawed up opponent at the looney's feet. I built a basic frame for the sawed up corpse from some skeleton and marauder bits.

And then I green-stuffed some skin over the skeleton rib cage which provided the needed support to get the saw blade into place. The saw had a pretty terrible paint job on it. I think the previous owner might have used Testor's enamel paints. Normally I would have tried to strip it before using it, but since I intend for the final look on the chainsaw to be rusted and blood-spattered I think I'm just going to try to paint over it and hope that it adds to the final dilapidated look.

Now to the pogoer. Digging back into my bits box, I found a spear that had a skull staked on it and thought it would make a great pole for a pogo stick. First, I snipped off the top of the spear above the skull.

Then I used a pin vise to drill a small hole into the top of the skull.

I had selected a wolf-rider goblin to use for the pogoer. I removed the left hand that he was using to hold the reigns and carefully bent his right arm so that he was straddling the spear. Then I shaped the end of the spear into a narrow pin...

... that would fit perfectly into the hole that I had previously drilled into the skull to create the primary structure for the pogo stick.

Then it was time to break out the green stuff. I rebuilt his left hand so that it was grasping the pogo stick and I made a little support on the top of the pogo stick so that I could affix the top of the spear bit. I also used a small bit of green stuff to help hold is left foot to the side of the skull so that the pogo stick had another anchor point which I hope will give it some additional rigidity.

Finally, with a paper clip bent into a spring, and a crossbar added to the pogo stick, my pogoer is done being converted.

The last conversion that I wanted to tackle was that for my bombardier. This one was pretty simple. I started with the goblin warchanter.

I simply cut off the whip and short sword that she was holding and modeled a bomb into her right hand. Simple and effective.

Beantown Barking Spiders: From Bones to Blood Bowl #1

Last year, I backed the Reaper Miniatures Bones Kickstarter and when the Bones finally arrived I was a little overwhelmed by the volume of little white plastic minis that had ended up on my doorstep. When I backed the project I didn't actually have anything specific in mind for what to do with the miniatures. I just thought it would be reasonable to kick in support at the Vampire level to get enough cheap miniatures for almost any conceivable fantasy role playing scenario that I might come across in the future. However, without being currently involved in an RPG campaign I opened all of my Bones to take a closer look at what I had received and then boxed them up to wait for their turn on my workbench.

My local Blood Bowl league runs through four seasons annually that represent the same four major championships (Chaos Cup, Blood Bowl, Spike Magazine Cup and Dungeon Bowl) that are detailed in the Blood Bowl background fluff. With the start of each new season, I usually get motivated to start a new hobby project that will help me get a new team on the pitch that I haven't played before. Looking through the list of teams in the league over the last year showed zero representation for the litte, green-skinned cheaters so I thought maybe it was time to introduce some goblin mayhem into the mix. It's fitting for goblins to try to infiltrate the kingdom of the dwarves by any means necessary. A plan for a motley band of gobbo lunatics, the Beantown Barking Spiders, to play some Nuffle Amorical Football matches and earn their way into the underground dwarf stadium at Barak-Varr seems like the perfect way for them and their hooligan fans to overrun those hallowed dwarven halls.

With my goblin team in mind, I pulled out my box of Bones to see if I had anything that might be fitting. Inside I found the Pathfinder Goblins which look like they might be a perfect fit for the Barking Spiders.

If there's one thing that a goblin team in Blood Bowl needs it's a lot of players. I only had the 9 Pathfinder Goblins that came with the Reaper Vampire-level package, but I stopped in at a nearby game store last night and found that they had a blister-pack of Pathfinder goblin warriors in Bones plastic. The Bones plastic is very inexpensive and I picked it up for less that $3 USD to round out my team with 4 more goblins. One drawback to this material is that it is very common for the miniatures to warp. In the picture for the additional goblins that I bought you can see that one little fella looks like he is suffering the effects of an all-night bender. You can also see that some of the spears are a bit bent. I'm not at all concerned about the weapons since I'm going to snip them off to make the figures suitable for the Blood Bowl pitch. But, for our little friend with the hangover, I'm going to have to try giving him a hot water bath, repose him and dip him in ice water to give him new memory.

Next to a lot of players, the other thing goblins need for Blood Bowl are secret weapons. I plan on converting a few of the goblins into a looney, a fanatic and a bombardier. At the game store last night, I saw this pathfinder goblin and thought it would make a perfect pogoer. It isn't available in Bones plastic, but it was still pretty cheap and, being metal, I think will actually be easier to repose and convert into a proper pogoer.

And last, every goblin team needs its two trolls. I really couldn't find anything suitable in my box of Bones for these big guys, but I did notice that there is a troll from Reaper available in Bones plastic. In keeping with my Bones-inspired goblin team, and at only about $2 a pop, I decided to add two of these guys. I'll post more as this project continues.

Chaos Team Based

I finished basing my next Blood Bowl team project, an as yet unnamed Chaos team. While I have no immediate plans to play them in my local league since we just began a new season, I have been wanting to get them painted up for a while. They are the standard Chaos All Stars team from Games Workshop. For the bases, I used a common practice of making rocklike formations from cork board tile. Since figures in blood bowl get handled a fair amount, I was worried about how they would hold up if I just pinned them them onto or through the cork. Rather than pinning, I decided to mount the miniature on top of the base, instead of slotting it through the base, and to build a support for the miniature's tab with green stuff. The green stuff was pressed into the base's slot and then wrapped up around the mini's tab. Once that set up for a few hours, I then built the cork around the tab and green stuff support and underneath the figure's feet. Finally, since cork can be a bit crumbly, I tried to seal it by brushing the cork with PVA glue. The final result seems very secure.

Since the set only comes with 3 chaos warriors and the CRP allows a maximum of 4 on a team, I created the fourth warrior from a 1980's era Warhammer chaos warrior that I've had since my high school days. An overnight bath in Simple Green, a hearty scrub and clipping the mace from his hand has him ready to be included on the roster.

The four Chaos Warriors.

4 of the 8 Beastmen to show the 4 distinct poses.

Now I just need to clean up some of the mold lines, prime and paint.

Setekh Conversion

This is a another project that I recently started from the left over pieces of the Tomb Kings Skeleton Warriors set that I used to build the skeleton linemen for my Khemri team. I want to get better at sculpting and thought I would use this figure as a test subject for working with cloth and armor in green stuff. He's actually not a perfect match for Setekh, either in adequate size to represent a ST4 blitzer or in theme since he has a ram's head instead of a jackal's. Still, I think he has some of the spirit of that star player in his posture. So, should I ever get to induce Setekh for a match, this is the model I'll field.

Hack Enslash Conversion

I'm coaching a Khemri team, the Nekheb Bones Brigade, this season in the CABBA Winter Majors league. Since I'm starting a new team amongst many that have already been played for one or two seasons, I'm likely to have some inducements thrown my direction. Considering this, I'm starting to model up some figures that I can use for some of the allowed Khemri Star Player selections. To begin, I've started work on a miniature to represent the devious Hack Enslash. He started out as a skeleton from the Tomb Kings Skeleton Warriors set. I hacked off the default weapon that he had in his right hand and replaced it with a chainsword. Then I sculpted some green stuff around the bottom to turn it into a chainsaw. Though skeletons are not well armored, I thought a few armor plates would look good on him to help balance out the weight of the chainsaw. So I sculpted some shin guards from green stuff and added some trimmed down shoulder pads from a chaos marauder box.