Season 2 of the Spielburg Cup has begun with a thrilling double header day yesterday, featuring new team The Golden Songbirds playing a newcomer Human squad, Monty’s Black Knights, and the Sylvanian Spare Parts starting their climb against the returning Hungrywinners, the Skaven. The Undermountaineers and Hungrywinners have been redrafted, while everyone else picked new teams, mostly because Blood Bowl has a huge variety of fun teams to try and lots of people wanted to try new things.
The teams for the season are the Black Knights, a human squad that notably lacks an Ogre but instead came basically feature complete with 3 RRs, an Apothecary, and almost all the Positionals they want, the Golden Songbirds and Spare Parts, who I got to write the fluff for as the Songbirds are the Rotating Stunty for the season and the Spare Parts are my team, the Gorgoroth Geniuses, a fully accredited team sponsored by excellent and completely legitimate Dawi businessmen and haberdashers (Chaos Dwarf team), the Marienburg Legitimates, a Dark Perfectly Ordinary Elf squad sponsored by the Marienburg Maple Importers’ Guild, which is absolutely not a front for organized crime, the Skull Throne Valkyries, a Khorne Team led by Valkia herself as she tries to find new hobbies to vent her endless rage (by generating more rage), and the aforementioned Hungrywinners and Undermountaineers. The teams and cup have a bit more of a dark feel to them, being full of undead, Khornates, hat-loving capitalists, and Legitimate Businesselfs.
My first game against the Hungrywinners began with Orson and Talyssa the Golems introducing the team to a fellow they often corresponded with, the pre-eminent Dr. Fronkelheim of Sylvania. As well as giving them an illuminating (to Orson and Talyssa) lecture on the intersection of biogenetic transmogrification and kung-fu treachery (even if he lacked a zest for the latter), he asked if the team had ever considered experimental modifications and upgrades. He is a 130k Inducement (The Hungrywinners being a returning team had a TV of 1380k, while my fresh team was 1000, so I had a lot for bonuses) who provides d3 random players with one Random mutation skill for the match. Afterwards, you roll d6 for each player. On a 1, they’re wounded by recovering from the experiment and out next match. On a 2-5, they lose the skill and revert to normal. On a 6, they keep it. Forever. For no SPP, no counting as if they’ve leveled, though it raises their TV by 20k. After demonstrating Fronkelheim’s Patented Monstrous Manipulator formula on Unu the Zombie, Regina the Ghoul excitedly volunteered for the same procedure in hopes that MAD SCIENCE doping could lead the team to victory. She and Unu rolled Big Hand for the game, eliminating penalties for trying to pick up the ball while marked or in bad weather.
They also managed to trick the infamous Ivan ‘The Animal’ Deathshroud into showing up to play for them, via implying Skaven were a subspecies of dwarfs, and/or could tell the murderously skillful Skeleton Champion where there were more dwarfs. He hates dwarfs, you see. He’s an S4 super-lineman with a ton of utility skills for 190k. He’s great. As the team took the pitch, the stands seemed oddly empty, save for swarms of timber-wolves as per usual for Sylvania. The announcer also made the mistake of saying something ominous, causing the Sylvanian weather to react appropriately as the CRACKTHOOM of Sylvanian thunder sounded and the skies opened up to pour down on both teams. Regina flexed her enormous grabbyclaw, sure this was going to be HER TIME. It was not. But hey! It was a good plan. Low attendance match, sadly, as the Spare Parts haven’t built a following yet and the Skaven rolled a 1 on fan attendance.
Shortly after kickoff, as Skaven were running every which way and preparing to score (as is their way) and their new Rat Ogre Legbiter began his game-long feud with Doi the Zombie by balking at orders to bite a rotted leg. However, the rats were not prepared for Bogdan, who often demonstrated unfortunate levels of diffidence and destructive habits during the pre-season, but had clearly begun to pull it together. The werewolf quickly shoved a Gutter Runner into the waiting jaws of the dugout timber wolves, wounding the rat and taking him out of the game. Featherblight the Thrower managed to get the ball just before Legbiter messed up again, falling over attacking Doi while two Gutter Runners were based pre-dodging. One of them fell to a tremendous blow by Ivan, removing him from the match. Two of three Gutter Runners out by turn 2 is uh, not a great situation for Skaven. Soon enough, Bogdan’s frenzied shoving slammed another one off the pitch and into the wolves, as is the way of nature. All 3 Gutter Runners were eliminated with Badly Hurts by the end of the first half.
Bogdan also proved himself The Playmaker that day, grabbing the ball like a good boy and scampering to the endzone for a defensive touchdown. Meanwhile, Talyssa and the Skaven star Thutch Ashenspine, Hero Rat, ended up in an endless wrestling match where he repeatedly took down the mighty Flesh Golem even when Dauntless would fail and he’d roll -2db. He was never able to injure her, but that little guy is dynamite. It’s like having goddamn Queek Headtaker on the pitch; Thutch has Fend, Block, and Dauntless. And Kick. He is a linerat and yet the little dude is blessed by both the Great Horned Rat and Nuffle both. During the second half, as I was driving up the pitch, Thutch dodged away to challenge Ivan by himself. He rolled a 6 to Dauntless. A 6 to block. Two 6s to break armor. A 6-5 to Casualty. Ivan failed his Regen roll (I haven’t made a single Regen roll in any of my practice games and I’m not about to start now!) as Coach Dimestrescu was unable to figure out how to stitch him up and had to turn him over to his insurance company, who assured him dwarfs were clearly behind his defeat. Somehow. HE KNEW IT.
Still, despite a heroic run by Featherblight to interfere, Bodgan slammed Featherblight into the waiting jaws of the timberwolves and ran it in for his 2nd TD. He inflicted 3 casualties, on 2 Gutters and a Thrower, and scored twice. Hero woof. The problem is those cas didn’t get him SPP because they were all crowd surfs. If I’d rolled the blessing that got you SPP for crowd surfs, I’d have been able to get him two skills out of one game. During the final drive, however, Regina failed to pick up the ball at a critical moment, bad bounces sent it into range of the rats and away from the scrum, and Bodgan messed up a block and caused a Turnover at a bad time. Look, he’d been a good boy all match. He could mess up once. As a treat. Thutch Ashenspine, Hero Rat, managed to get-get the ball and run it in on turn 8 for a TD, ensuring the Skaven didn’t get shut out. Seriously, can nothing stop that little bastard!?
After the match, the Spare Parts gained their first non-timber-wolf fans from their performance, beginning to get the attention of fans of dog shows and people looking for an opportunity to put the boot in on players who get flung into the crowd (a surprisingly large demographic of Blood Bowl fans). More amazingly, the insane whims of the priesthood of Nuffle that decide MVPs by throwing a dart at a board while blindfolded landed on the actual MVP, Bogdan, getting him 4 more SPP. He picked up Block, determined not to mess up when blitzing again. Even more amazingly, while Unu’s hand rotted off and had to be replaced with a normal hand (a simple stitching job that didn’t really hurt him at all, or maybe it did, we don’t know, he’s a zombie) Regina rolled a 6! She kept the Big Hand permanently. It may not have done much this match, but now she was set up to steal in the future. It’s not the best Mutation; Two Heads or Extra Arms would be better, but by god I’m not complaining about ‘you can pick up without penalty when trying to pluck the ball in a scrum’ on a primary ball handler who comes with Dodge. Now, she will have to avoid the vengeful boots of people eager to put down a unique unit to become a hero.
The other major event of the match was the Ref. The man took down 3 Blood Bowlers at Kickoffs, and almost sent Orson off for being an abomination but was convinced not to by discourse on the nature of evil and created beings (6 on Argue the Call). It was later discovered that a Witch Hunter had infiltrated the game as referee, investigating the huge number of dead referees in games against the Hungrywinners previously, and just gone kinda Ghostbusters on the Spare Parts most of the match.
Night's Ham Stock 