Carrying on from my Orc team post this article looks at building the new Blood Bowl Season 2 Imperial Nobility team from the new sprues in the boxed game.

The assembly instructions are typical GW layout, exploded numbered diagrams, indicating which pieces at which step. Although there is a lack of optional parts for the Nobility. Blood Bowl doesn’t use many figures, and playing in a league encourages naming and training individual team members. So its a little disappointing when compared to the Orcs that there isn’t any optional parts to help avoid having two of each model, as you get two identical sprues. Speaking of sprues, this time I remembered to take a picture:

Here is the instruction sheet, two things of note are the incorrect naming of the Imperial Nobility Blitzer – the instructions would have you think you don’t get any in the box. Secondly there is actually an optional component; part #16 of the Blitzer, the chest eagle. You can leave this off your Blitzer if you wish as there is a nicely detailed armour plate that gets hidden by the eagle (the inside cover of the rulebook thought this too).

The Nobility were easy to assembly on the whole. There was a couple of models whose legs took a moment to work out just what was the correct position. However you should always dry fit your models before gluing them together anyway. This helps to work out how they should fit together in the first place before covering the joint, model, yourself, and the worktop in glue 😉

Here are the first 6 models of the team built as per the instructions. From left to right – Bodyguard, Bodyguard, Lineman, Lineman, Thrower, and Blitzer.

There is an easy way to tell the models apart, just count helmet feathers.

• No helmet, with a small wing on left shoulder (I suppose this is optional) – Thrower.
• Helmet with 2 feathers mounted from behind a small shield – Lineman.
• Helmet with 3 feathers mounted from behind a small shield, and a large wing on right shoulder (I suppose this is optional too) – Bodyguard.
• Helmet with 4 feathers mounted from behind a skull, eagle chest plate (optional) – Blitzer.

I mentioned earlier that I liked that the Orc team could be all made a little unique, so I thought I would try that with the Nobles. I couldn’t think of a way to easily swap parts with the female Lineman, as she is scaled noticeably smaller than the males. So I just tried to alter her pose a little without having to do a lot of cutting or sculpting. The best I could come up with was to move the tankard from her belt to her hand.

I adjusted the angle of her forearm very slightly when glued to the upper arm, to make it look a bit more natural holding the tankard.

The other alternate Lineman had his body swapped for the fat bodyguard. I swapped the hands too, as the Bodyguards tend to have knuckle dusters. I was just going to swap the models’ right hands but I then noticed that they have different sized hands. So I then ‘had’ to swap the left hand too. This required a little cutting of the Bodyguard’s arm, which I did at the elbow. I then just glued the Lineman hands on to the Bodyguard’s arms.

I also carefully sliced off the smoking pipe from the Lineman’s head just to try and make them look slightly more different. Here are the finished Lineman alongside the original two.

With the Linemen done I moved on to the Bodyguards. The first alternate Bodyguard was just the result of the Lineman/Bodyguard body swap. The Lineman body, with the Bodyguard’s head, hands, and winged shoulder armour. The second alternate Bodyguard used the body of the Blitzer, and again I cut the hands off to swap between the models.

The image below shows the cuts made on the Bodyguard model (left) and the Blitzer (right).

And again with the hands swapped over, and some greenstuff sculpting/gap filling to create my alternate Blitzer (left) and Bodyguard (right).

The addition of the ‘3 feather helmets’ and the winged shoulder armour complete the alternate Bodyguards. Shown below are the two original Bodyguards on the left and my completed alternate versions on the right.

You’ve basically seen how my Blitzer was assembled, in the same pics as one of my Bodyguards, so here are the two Blitzers. Original left, and alternate right. I’ve kept the eagle chest plates, as once painted up, I’m hoping they’ll stand out on the field as my Blitzers.

I had a couple of possible ideas for the alternate Thrower, which would have changed how all of the above would have turned out. However I spotted this on the Blood Bowl Community FB group and thought I had to make my own. So thank you Piotr for the inspiration (the wife is an English teacher, and she loved it – enough to play BB? well we’ll see).

I had the the idea of using an Orc skull from the GW skulls box (affiliate links: TO, GG, EG) and going for the ‘Alas poor Orcrik’ pun. However, I liked the size of the human skull in the hand better. The hand had the ball removed by clipping away most of the ball, and carving out the remainder with a knife, and a mould line removal tool. Just changing the ball for a skull and turning the head slightly wouldn’t make enough of an alternate model for me, so I looked around for different GW empire heads, and found this one on ebay.

So with the ball/skull swap, along with the head swap here is Hamlet my alternate Thrower. He just needed a little greenstuff work around the neck.

Here are the two team Throwers. Original on the left and alternate on the right. I really like how the single feather plumed hat fits the conversion and the rest of the team.

And so we end up with a picture of the whole team, that’s a lot of feathers!

I am struggling to put together a roster that I like for these guys, the Bodyguards and Blitzers clock up the points really quickly, and I only have 4 cheap linemen to fill out the team with. So my team can only squeeze in 2 re-rolls:

A blank roster can be downloaded from the GW downloads site. Direct roster link here.

I still have the Ogre big guy, and the star player Griff Oberwald to build. Facebook also provided some inspiration for the Ogre to fit in with the team better too, so I look forward to having a go at converting him too.

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• The Outpost Bloodbowl page.
• Element Games Bloodbowl page.
• Goblin Gaming Bloodbowl page.