Blood Bowl and I

This Friday, the two undefeated teams at the top of the table collide in the first game of a double header.

The chaos dwarf coach (SGT Dave), sketched up this image in anticipation. Sharing because I think it's awesome and needs to be seen.

Does he do that professionally? Because that is awesome!

quozl wrote: Does he do that professionally? Because that is awesome!

No, but I think he does some independent comics on the side.

Birdman37's dice came in yesterday and I'm going to need them!

I'm doing terrible with only one win on the season and one more regular season game to go and against one of our leading teams (who's part of a three-way tie for first). If I can beat him convincingly I can spoil his parade and prevent him from securing a spot in the final. It's my rival, James, so a noble goal.

Thanks again, Birdman37, these dice are ace!

My pleasure, Jeff, glad to see they arrived safe and sound. Good luck in the match, I hope you roll many cracked helmets and skulls with them!

drewcula wrote: JW,
Could you give us a run down of the "screwing of Tom Anders?" I'm familiar with GW's C&D and the Specialist line death sentence - but not so much on Anders
-AW

AW,

Here's a little more. I was looking around for a halfling chef and saw this Impact mini buried in their Eflball line. I had never seen it before, but the description is great. I'll probably pick up the version of this halfling without the witch for my team.

www.impactminiatures.com/index.php?optio...r_profile&id=EO_TAND

Mr. White wrote:

drewcula wrote: JW,
Could you give us a run down of the "screwing of Tom Anders?" I'm familiar with GW's C&D and the Specialist line death sentence - but not so much on Anders
-AW

AW,

Here's a little more. I was looking around for a halfling chef and saw this Impact mini buried in their Eflball line. I had never seen it before, but the description is great. I'll probably pick up the version of this halfling without the witch for my team.

www.impactminiatures.com/index.php?optio...r_profile&id=EO_TAND

Wow. New respect for Impact Miniatures. Thanks for the share.

Despite the goofy name Elfball is a lot of fun and I appreciate having a bunch of paper standee teams for cheap.

A really great read. Thanks for the kind words about Impact! I do my best to make it the best place to get anything you need to have a great BB experience without breaking your wallet.

I got a laugh from the "screwing of Tom Anders" comment (which is how I found the forum doing some Google searching to make sure I was not missing any customer complaints on a forum that I could fix).

Since it was asked ... here is what that was:
Jervis Johnson asked me to help rewrite Blood Bowl to get it to be a better game. There were 3 people at the head of this project. JJ, myself and Ian Williams. JJ had to drop out as GW would not allow him to spend the time continuing to work on it and Ian had family commitments that meant he could not continue. So JJ was actually attending Gen Con that year and had dinner at my house. He said ... no one else can or will lead this project so I'm willing to make what we have as the rules now the official new rulebook unless you are willing to take full control over the process. The rules were still in the works ... making that version official would have been a major mistake so I agree to take over as the sole person working on Blood Bowl. This lasted for a little over a year with me as sole rules editor. In that time, I think I did some good things ... I pushed in the change to the Norse roster based on the original 3rd edition first version of the team, I created the Slann team and the rules for the Chaos Pact team and was able to tweak a LOT of skills to get them better or more balanced. I worked with fan of the game, Stephen Hutton, to put in all new background to match the new edition. And the entire PDF you see online ... I typed that myself along with all the graphic and layout work. In total, I spent roughly 2,500 hours working on the new rules (split between discussing the changes with playtesters, multiple forum discussions and work on creating the layout copy of the new rulebook (along with having to type in all the text of the rules).. I was never paid for any of this work. (in full disclosure as a thank you Jervis gave me the GW copy of the helmet that was given as the prize for the 1st ever BB tournament GW ever held. They made two copies of the helmet, one went to the winner of the tournament and they kept the other. When JJ asked if there was anything not monetary he could give me for multiple years of work (both on the committee of 3 and then on my own) I asked for the helmet. So I did get something for my work but it was not meant as payment ... but it was a cool thank you.)

In the final weeks of finalizing the new rulebook, Jervis told me that GW was concerned about how many new star players I had added to the game that did not have miniatures and that several of these small mini companies would try to profit from it and if they thought that would happen that they would force us to remove all those star players from the rulebook. Making sure each team had 6 Star Players spread out at different cost points was one of the things we had spent many many games and hours testing to balance and to just start deleting star players would mess with the overall inducement balance. So based on Jervis telling me this like he did frequently on items he wanted me to discuss with the players about (but I will admit he did not tell me to go talk to the players about this concern but it was common for him to bring up points for me to work on and get back to him as I was the head of the rules project). ... anyway I went to the community via TFF and put an appeal to the mini companies for the sake of the game to not make any star player minis or announce plans to do so .. thus allowing the rules as we had finalized them to become official.

This post was picked up by TableTopGamingNews.com and it was ran with a very negative GW spins that they would destroy 2 years of work over missing a few minis. GW had just hired a new head of legal and she was notified of this bad press and immediately wanted heads. In short order ... I was offered up as a scapegoat to her under the statement that I had discussed a private conversation between Jervis and I publically against my non-disclosure agreement. Which was nuts ... I frequently talked on the forums about things JJ asked me to check out with the playtesters ... it was commonplace. But the new head of legal wanted a head ... and mine was easy to offer. See the testing was completely finished, Jervis had already announced to the rules committee that he was disbanding it and I had already finished all the graphic layout and text work for the new rulebook and turned it to Jervis. My role was done ... so there was no negative to anyone at GW with offering me up to the new head of legal. So it was publicly announced by GW that I would never be allowed to work on Blood Bowl every again, that I would not be allowed to assist Cyanide anymore with their development and my name was removed from the rulebook as the Handbook and Rules Editor of this version and the one that really broke my heart ... all my new background material was removed from the book. But I was happy that by allowing myself to be the scapegoat meant that GW was willing to publish the rules as I had finalized them without changing them ... so I took the kick from them and didn't fight it. The game was all that mattered to me and the game changes were good in my opinion and if GW would make them official in exchange for kicking me in the teeth ... okay. They also took away my domain for my fan run BB site and forced me to delete about 50% of the content on it at the same time so that was in the mix as well.

And then just walking away and time fixed a lot of the worst kick in the teeth issues. Despite being officially banned in writing from GW legal from working on anything related to Blood Bowl, a few years later the woman who was head of legal was gone and forgotten and Cyanide needed help designing a new team and GW allowed them to bring me as a consultant. A few years after that ... the best thing of all happened. GW allowed my original rulebook that I created for the game to be published to the internet as the official rulebook for Blood Bowl. All my hours of work with all that background and images and layout was now officially available for everyone to get for free and approved by GW ... that was a good day (this is normally referred to online as the Icepelt Rulebook if you go looking for it).

Now I spend my time making Impact! as good as possible. Elfball is a really solid game that I designed after being kicked out by GW. It is my hope in 2016 at some point to bring the game out with a new name, an updated version of the rules based on a lot of player feedback along with a high end box to get hopefully some more players to actually get a chance to see it. The good news is that your BB teams work as teams in Elfball so you don't need to pick up new minis to play the game.

Hope that helps ... great post and thread.

Tom, thank you for taking the time to create an account and fill us in on the deets!

I had _no_ idea the story had a happy ending nor that the icepelt rulebook was online. Doing the search I see that Cyanide now officially hosts these rules. If you've got another minute I've got three questions.

1) Are you and Jarvis on good terms? I hope y'all have been able to make amends.

2) Since Cyanide hosts the rules, and makes the only new bb game, are they the official stewards of the game now? Does this mean brettonians may become an official team?

3) We're aware of the Age of Sigmar and the death of the old world. Also, we understand bb is not exactly in the warhammer universe. With that, what's the thought that the old world is no more... I mean, does that have any impact on potential development by either yourself or Cyanide?

Thanks again for dropping by and for all the work you've done for the game and it's community! I know you have also been very generous with prize support for tournaments. Thank you. I'm going to get the icepelt (oh, where'd that name come from?) printed out this weekend and look forward to Impact's continued growth.

1) Are you and Jarvis on good terms? I hope y'all have been able to make amends.

Unfortunately no. The last email I ever received from Jervis was when the new lawyer was in charge and it asked me to never email him again and if I had anything I wanted to email to send it directly to GW legal. I have never heard from him since. However, I was not a good friend of his. I was at best a co-worker who had him over for dinner once. He had to take the GW line at the time that I was the scapegoat for the bad PR to keep his job and pay his mortgage and feed his kids. I do wish after everything calmed down that he had reached out just once to say "thanks for everything and sorry for how that went down" but it didn't happen. I do not hold a grudge on this.

2) Since Cyanide hosts the rules, and makes the only new bb game, are they the official stewards of the game now? Does this mean brettonians may become an official team?

This is one of those points that I think will be up to leagues ... but at this time I know the NAF has no intention of adding Brettonians to the official rules. Cyanide does not even see their own changes as being official. My evidence for this is two fold. One they created the Khorne team for their last game with the help of both Ian and myself (2 of the 3 principals in making the current rulebook) and then they come out with BB2 ... that team is gone. If you are changing the rules ... I'd have thought that would go along for the ride. And 2 ... they made no effort to include the Brettonians in the rulebook. Several people I know helping them work on BB2 could have helped them contact me about modifying the Icepelt rulebook to include the Brettonian roster in it ... but no such contact happened and Cyanide was happy to host the rulebook on their site to support BB2 that does not even mention the Brettonians. So I don't think they are the new official stewards and I do not think GW thinks they are either. Some REALLY bad choices were made on rule changes for BB2 ... so probably better for everyone if they are not the official stewards.

3) We're aware of the Age of Sigmar and the death of the old world. Also, we understand bb is not exactly in the warhammer universe. With that, what's the thought that the old world is no more... I mean, does that have any impact on potential development by either yourself or Cyanide?

I think BB is a great standalone game with SSOOOO much of its own background in the rulebook (now that Icepelt is public) that it can easily survive entirely without WFB being around. Heck I never played WFB or read those books and I completely knew the world that BB was in from the BB background from 1st and 2nd edition. It might mean that GW is really walking away currently from BB ... but that is not the end of the world for the game as long as they are licensing the video game and the card game ... it stays in gaming culture and the secondary market keeps it going. As an example when GW stopped selling BB, I worked with some of the guys in Australia to get the rights to several of their items so that I could add a kit to the store that had EVERYTHING from the BB boxed set (and MORE) for the exact same price that it was selling on the GW site before they removed it. ( www.impactminiatures.com/index.php?optio...q_profile&id=SB_BKIT ). So the game carries on.

Mr. White wrote: I'm going to get the icepelt (oh, where'd that name come from?) printed out this weekend and look forward to Impact's continued growth.

It is called the Icepelt rulebook because right after GW posted the CRP with all the background, images and several pages of rules removed, a person calling himself Icepelt Hammerblow came on the scene. He had seen and saved the original final rulebook that was up on the internet for a few days before GW had it taken down an all the fun stuff stripped from it to make the CRP. He used a PDF editor to clean up a few things and then had 50 of them professional printed. He then emailed the 50 people that he thought had done the most work helping create the new rules and sent them a copy of this book for free and he paid for the shipping. I love my copy that I received as one of the 50. The book had a letter with it thanking for all the work and a statement that if each person wanted to pay it forward to another person they could send $25 to a PayPal address to cover the cost of the book and shipping and a copy would be sent to whoever they asked. Though this underground effort based on my understanding about 300 Icepelt rulebooks were printed in full color and sent out to people running leagues all over the world. Which kept the original work alive and as a result we ended up with two names for the rulebooks. The CRP which was on the GW website and the Icepelt rulebook which was the printed. These names stuck. 2 years later, Icepelt Hammerblow sent out an email to everyone that had received the books that he was unfortunately done printing them and as a final act of rebellion to GW he posted his electronic copy to a free download site for everyone else to be able to get. That version he posted several years later was the electronic file that Cyanide used to post as the official rulebook for BB to support BB2. Which as I said was a really good day for me as that was the book that I spent thousands of hours working to create.

And that is why it is called the Icepelt rulebook.

Thanks for stopping by Tom, I hope you stick around as I know there are lots of casual BB fans around here (and more with BB2 just released). I really admire what you're doing with Impact, keep up the good work. I was actually thinking the other day with Age of Sigmar and the end of the Old World, if GW hadn't licensed the video game and the card game if the fans could have created a new setting for the rules that wouldn't have been GW dependent.

I have a notify me set up on this thread. So you can use it to summon me if you have a question on a different thread.

Ending the old world as a business decision is a really interesting one, because they have a lot of IP that is not miniature gaming that still depends on the old world setting.