When I got back into the miniatures hobby, one of the things I low key really enjoyed were the conversions I saw out there. I mean, most of them were Space Marines because there are just so many fucking Space Marines. But there were cool other conversions, too.
But, in Blood Bowl, it seems like a really hard thing to do.
It wasn’t that there weren’t ways to do it. I made my own Runt Punter for my Ogre team. But the miniature economy for Blood Bowl is different than in most other games.
Today, I have baggies and baggies of bits sorted by gang, sometimes sorted by part. I do have a general bits grab bag that I started after I got Cursed City and Fireteam. And, to be sure, there are some bits left over after putting together a team box in Blood Bowl. Just… not as many. We’re really talking about maybe a spare head here or an arm holding a ball versus an expressive hand there. I bought two boxes of Ogres and had a handful of leftover heads but nothing you’d build a bits box around.
I bought two boxes of Ogres and had a handful of leftover heads but nothing you’d build a bits box around.
So there’s the fact that, if you’re just a Blood Bowl player, there aren’t that many choices to kitbash from in the first place.
Then there are the number of models you get. Now it’s a set thing, one box gets you one team. Yes, yes, you could get a second box and field a team of all linemen if you really wanted to but… no one does that. But even when you needed to buy two boxes or orcs or skaven to get the right number of blitzers, black orcs, or gutter runners, you’re not talking about an amazing surplus of bodies and parts and, what you do have extra of is almost certainly just a lineman and not something interesting like a positional you want to make special.
So there didn’t seem like a lot of opportunities for trying out kitbashing. And then I took a look at the Star Player list.
It should be pointed out that before Blood Bowl 2020 (or Second Season), the list of Star Players was as long as my leg. I guess I could go count but… let’s say there were fifty. And, when I got into the game there were models for maybe a dozen. There was Griff, and Karla, and Morg, Deeproot, and a very, very rough looking Varag. But there were not models for the several dozen or so other stars. So I started looking around.
The first one that popped up as an idea was Gretchen Wächter, the Blood Bowl widow. I thought, there’s an AoS mini that’s a ghost with a few, minor modifications and a paint job, I might be able to turn into ol’ Gretchen. Fortunately, I’d bought an early copy of Blitz Bowl and had some spares lying around, so I cut off her arm, cut away some of the sharper, more vampire looking details, glued on a human linebacker arm, and sculpted her some shoulder pads.
I think it came out pretty cool!
Unfortunately, I was literally painting her when the Warhammer Community article came out announcing that they were releasing a version of her in resin. And it’s a great model. But… there went my little idea…
The next big idea I had was seeing a goblin on a giant squig. Right away, I thought, Madcap Miggz.
Now, at this point Blood Bowl 2020 had come out and the star player list had been pared all the way back. But there had also been a few releases where they’d re-introduced Star Players that had been cut from the revised rule book. And the new Black Orcs team had enough spare heads, I got to thinking again… is now the time to build Madcap Miggz?
So, out run I to the Warhammer store. I pick up a squig model, put it together, just shaving off a few details. Then I sculpt some knee pads for the squig. But on the goblin, I go to work. I take off his weapon arm and replace it with, literally, the other linebacker arm I had from my Gretchen Wächter conversion. Then, I replace his head with a goblin head from the Black Orc kit. Shave off his pointy toes, make his hood a little less fantasy, fill some gaps with green stuff and, hot damn, if it doesn’t look like a pretty good take on a classic Star Player.
I even get him painted up in record time, expecting, at any moment, he’ll be re-released for the Badlands Brawl teams. This was in 2020 or 2021…
It’s 2026 as I write this. And Madcap Miggz hasn’t even been mentioned in a Spike! Magazine since pre-2020.
I do have one glorious example of where some kind of conversion I made actually made it to the field…
When I was assembling my first Orc team, I knew I wanted to have a pair of goblins. Not to always field but to field occasionally so I could maybe throw them or they could sneak past a line. It was a lark but I had big ideas for how I wanted to build my teams (for another article). But I hated the standard Games Workshop goblins. They were weird and angular in a way I didn’t like. But then I somehow stumbled across War World Gaming and their excellent goblin team. And I’d thought about maybe building a goblin team but what I really wanted was their troll.
See, I was building a Snotling team and I didn’t like the GW trolls. But their troll… sweet…
There was just one problem, it was a resin cast and it came in only one pose. But, I thought… I’m bold and creative. I can give it a shot. So I ordered two and then sawed the opposite arms off, reposing them for a little variation. I had to replace some fingers on each hand… But I made knee-pads for where their hands had been. A little chunky but for a first time sculptor, I’m still rather proud of them. And then, as I like to say, paint hides a myriad of sins.
I am happy to say, I still play them when I run a Snotling team and I’m still damn pleased of how I differentiated them.
There are a lot of 3rd-party miniature Blood Bowl teams. All you have to do is visit a tournament and you’ll probably find that maybe a third come from some other producer or 3D designer. But what you won’t find, in general, are a lot of conversions of Games Workshop plastic and I feel like these are the reasons why. Converting a box team doesn’t really get you much. Not like even just swapping weapon hands gets you unique builds in Necromunda. And the rules are such that there’s not much you can represent on the miniature beyond what’s already there (unless you play chaos and there are eye stalks or second heads). And, today, unlike even a few years ago, all of the Star Players have a miniature. So there’s no a lot of need or room for your own take even if you have the impulse to do so.
All of which is a long way around saying that, while I’ve been interested in converting miniatures for new an unique sculpts since I got back into the hobby, that interest wasn’t fully realized until I got into Necromunda and I began to see what was possible. And even that started pretty damned basic.
