Introduction

I started writing this post in 2020 but never managed to finish it. The blog just past a quarter of a million page views, so feels like the appropriate time for a post like this. Remember the references are from a couple of years ago! It was probably about the time of the blogs ten years anniversary when I started writing but we have overshot that a bit now.

New year, new Blood Bowl edition, new blog appearance, new coaches and hopefully new readers. 

I was listening to Both Down's latest episode (#116) where they re-introduced themselves. I reflected over the fact I'm one of the listeners that have heard all their introductions and realised I don't think I've done an introduction here on the blog. So, better late than never, right?

I got into the hobby at the end of 5th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle. I really liked dragons and was tricked into buying a friend's Lizardmen army since they were like dragons. I only found out afterwards they were one of the few races/factions that didn't have a dragon steed option for their heroes. Typical. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Sweden, so there was no contact with Games Workshop stores, no hobby stores near by and we were only a small group of friends. Dial up internet was too expensive to be helpful. I don't even know to what extent the forum scene existed back then.

I did collect a lot of Lizardmen, and when trying to get a couple of more pieces I actually ended up buying several entire armies. So, my army was ridiculously large and therefore, I never finished it off. I then got some Wood Elves to try to get myself a sweet dragon, never got it though... 8th edition wasn't kind to Wood Elves so I decided to go for a horde army and I got started with an all night goblin army. 

My Lizarmen were green (as is only right and proper) and so were my Wood Elves so I didn't want to start to paint up hordes of green goblins so they had to be a different colour. I had recently been playing or replaying Fable and there are some magic blue mushrooms in one of the side quests and I decided that eating enough of those had recoloured the skin of my goblins. I had seen a lot of snowy bases recently but it was all patchy sleet not real snow. So I wanted bases that represented snow as I knew it. I'm Scandinavian, I know what I'm talking about when it comes to snow. 

I had done some minor attempts at conversions on my Lizardmen but it was mainly using crew skinks in a normal skink regiment or a terradon rider to crew salamander or similar. I still didn’t like the idea of duplicates, probably from the starter box set having only two different skink poses (and I had two or three Lizarmen halves of that Bretonia vs Lizarmen box starter set). So, I took great care in mixing and matching bits in the newer posable sets and I ended up doing some silly conversions like a saurus with all the bits that had jewellery and then added more embellishments from items like the standard. 

One saurus leg broke off and then, of course, he had to become a pirate. 

However, it was when I started my night goblin army I really got into converting. Yet again I was faced with a starter box with limited poses. I made a post about it breaking down the different resources and what they reused in the box set. I wanted an all night goblin army but I didn’t want it to get repetitive so I started converting goblins and squigs and loved it.

It was at this point I started the blog as well. I was complaining to my friend about the fact that there weren't enough good blogs out there where you could see work in progress of all the cool conversions of peoples armies. I decided I would not be a hypocrite, so I aimed to do a blog to the best of my abilities as close to what I wanted to see in a blog. That’s why I’m more picture focused than text and why I try to include pictures from different angles. I have avoided ads. I held back for a long time against click through to read the rest of the post, but I had to give in because of page load time. I have tried to be very thorough with my tags. I needed a name for the blog and was stumped for ideas. I don’t remember if there had been a lot of snow or if I had done a lot of reference material searches for my snowy bases for my goblins. But it ended up as Snow White Hills and now I’m stuck with it. I don’t hate it, it’s just a bit of a mouth full and doesn’t link to my content. I never miss a chance to overcomplicate things so naturally after the 8th edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle had dropped encouraging larger armies and regiments,  I took the road less travelled:

• I decided to go with an army with cheap units: Orcs & Goblins
• I would limit myself to only the cheaper units in that faction: Goblins
• Furthermore, I would limit myself to only a subset of those cheaper units: Night Goblins
• And finally, I decided I wouldn’t allow any duplicates, even though it would take hundreds of models to build my army.

Easy eh? 

Not too long went by before I started thinking about a goblin name generator. As I was making each model unique, I might aswell make it truly unique by giving each goblin it'a own name.

I wanted it to be genuine and true to the lore, so I was pouring over army books, novels, White Dwarf magazines and articles on the Games Workshop website. I realised at some point while doing this that I might as well take down orc names too. Shortly after I concluded that I might as well do the other races that I come across as well. It was an ongoing project that grew over time and spread to take on more and more races. It still isn’t finished and probably never will be but it is a functional and useful tool I feel. I will continue to tinker and add to it.

I started eying up Blood Bowl again during my time with my night goblins. I had seen it before on the special order section and had ordered some skinks and sauruses for my Lizardmen army as lords and heroes, but I had never really looked in to the rules or the game. I have never been a sports fan. I rather dislike the loud unruly ruckus of a crowd of fans and don't see the appeal of watching people running up and down a field of grass. However, I started to get a bit intrigued by the shorter gameplay and portability of Blood Bowl. I started to be able to take some more time for hobbying again but since I had moved twice since my childhood I had to travel to play games with my friend.

I didn't fully engage with Blood Bowl or get a team going before they killed off the Warhammer fantasy world. I became a refuge. I scrambled to gather bits of lore to feel less lost, this went hand in hand with name gathering for my ever growing name generator project. I was a lost hermit holding on to bits of lore as comfort and a reminder of the world that was. 

When they rereleased Blood Bowl in 2016, it stood out to me. It was set in the same old world I had loved, but existed on an alternate time line. I could go back to the old, comforting lore. I decided this was the time to get into Blood Bowl. It was a bit of a slow start, but as I read more I dove whole heartedly into the world. 

Flash forward to today and I have some big projects on the go, as well as my ever growing name generator. One is a lexicon on the lore, people and establishments Blood Bowl and fantasy world. I'm working on a timeline too but I’m struggling with coding the backend for that one so it has taken a back seat. These projects are not quite far enough for public beta yet, but watch this space. 

I was doing a player cost formula comparison tool but just as I was about to publish that one they released the new Blood Bowl edition leaks making it obsolete. If people are interested I could look into updating it.

And that's about it. I now live in England in Derbyshire and work in Nottingham. 

Well, that was on style with ramblings and length of a Both Down episode (well most Blood Bowl podcasts) so I think this post is a good job well done. 

And it only took 2 years to finish.