Well, this is the first post I’ve made in quite a while. The last few months have been a difficult time for me. I’ve been going through some very unpleasant personal upheaval and it isn’t over yet. One of the things that have helped me to get through this time was throwing myself into a painting project.

I bought this team back in the summer last year. I think that a lot of people turned to hobby projects as a way to help themselves get through lockdown. It actually took me a while before I did so; I didn’t have my paints with me for most of the original lockdown and only got around to retrieving them and starting on some painting around mid-to-late June, once restrictions were starting to relax a little. At the time, I bought four new Blood Bowl teams, but only got around to painting the one. That was a Dwarf team, which I sadly have not yet got around to photographing properly. I hope to get some decent shots soon; another blog post will follow once I do.

The Slann are a bit of an odd team in Blood Bowl. They were officially part of the game in the second edition, although there were never any miniatures produced. They didn’t appear in the game’s third edition, and not long after that came out the Slann in Warhammer were ret-conned to be ancient, fat, sedentary creatures who would not be found doing anything so energetic as playing Blood Bowl. A Lizardman team was released in 2001, but the Slann would not reappear in Blood Bowl until 2010, when a new team was approved for inclusion in the 6th ‘Living Rulebook’. However, LRB6 was never fully approved. Although it was approved by the Blood Bowl Rules Council, the new teams, including Slann, were nixed by the higher-ups due to the fact that there was no intention to release any models for them, so while most of the content of LRB6 was eventually released as the ‘Competition Rules Pack’ (CRP), the Slann were not included. However, since the list had been approved by the BBRC, it became widely accepted within the community and was even endorsed for use by independent tournament organisers the NAF. This semi-official status continued when GW revived Blood Bowl with their 2016 edition and the NAF have released an updated list for the new 2020 ‘Second Season Edition’ of the game. There are still no official models, but several third-party manufacturers have produced ‘Frogmen’ teams of ‘Fantasy Football’ miniatures. This is by far the best such team that I have come across. It’s sculpted by Pedro Ramos, a freelance sculptor from Spain who’s responsible for many of the best third-party teams around.

The team was originally created in a crowdfunding project by ‘J-Bone Industries’. This was essentially a personal project by a fan: he wanted a Slann team and wasn’t overly keen on the ones available, so he got one sculpted and ran an Indiegogo campaign to fund it. After the initial crowdfunder finished, J-Bone sold the remaining stock to Exit 23 Games, which is where I bought the models from. The team is still available for the moment, but I understand that there are no plans to produce any more so once the current stock is gone, that’s it.

So without further ado, here are the Huatl Greenbacks:

As with any Blood Bowl team, the core of the team is the Linemen (or linefrogs). Slann linemen have essentially the same profile as human linemen, with the addition of the Slann signature skills of Leap and Very Long Legs:

A Slann team can have up to four Blitzers. They’re unusual for blitzers in that they aren’t actually any stronger or better at blocking than the linefrogs, but they do have the useful skills Jump Up and Diving Tackle, plus an extra point of Movement Allowance. These are also the only models that aren’t single-part, as they have separate, interchangeable heads. There’s a second sprue of extra heads available, I have used some heads from each on mine, as I wanted to have the players’ eyes visible on all of the models.

A Slann team can also have up to four catchers. Like the blitzers, they lack the usual skills associated with their player type (no Catch or Dodge, for example), but instead have Diving Catch. However, their high agility, when coupled with the Leap and Very Long Legs skills common to the rest of the team, does make them very useful players.

Slann teams can also take a Kroxigor. This model does not resemble a Warhammer Kroxigor, but instead seems to be some sort of toad-ogre (J-Bone describes him as a ‘Big Croaker’). The model comes with an optional tail and also an optional extending tongue, either of which can be used to represent the Kroxigor’s Prehensile Tail skill. Although I like the tongue concept, and it fits better with the frog theme of the model, I didn’t like the look of it much in practice so I used the tail instead.

That’s all the regular players, but the team also comes with some additional sideline models. There’s a head coach (any resemblance to Baron Greenback is entirely coincidental, I’m sure!), an apothecary, a wizard/shaman, the team’s #1 fan, and a referee. The #1 fan model doesn’t represent anything in the game (and I don’t think that the referee does in the current rules either, although some versions of the rules have included a use for a referee marker or miniature), but is still nice to have, and could maybe represent an assistant coach at a stretch.

There were also five star player models to go with the team. They have been given the names (l-t-r in the image below) Buzz, Toador, Kermee, Phibius and Shank. However, they correspond to the five Star Players (besides Morg ‘N’ Thorg) that were available to Slann (and Lizardmen) teams in the CRP era of the rules: Helmut Wulf, Slibli, Lottabottl, Quetzal Leap and Hemlock. Of those five, only two are canonically Slann players (Slibli is a Saurus, Hemlock is a Skink and Helmut Wulf is a human), but here they have all been re-imagined as Frogmen. Buzz is one of my favourite models on the team; I’m really pleased with how he’s come out, especially the goggles.

Part-way through painting this team, I decided to buy GW/Forgeworld’s Zolcath the Zoat model and include him in the team. He’s a new addition to the 2016 edition of the game, and the NAF Rules for Tournaments document that includes the Semi-official Slann list also adds Slann to the list of teams that can hire him. The model isn’t quite the same style as the rest of the team, but that doesn’t matter too much. Although I’ve mostly painted him in similar colours to the rest of the team, I’ve omitted the purple and instead painted the armour plates in a more neutral brown, as he could also be used with the Amazon and Wood Elf teams that I have waiting to be painted.

That’s it for this team. It’s taken me around three months to finish the team, although there have been a couple of factors that delayed them. One was that shortly after finishing the sixteen regular players, I decided that I wasn’t happy with the very quick-and-simple basing style that I was using, not only for this team, but for all of my Blood Bowl models. This necessitated going back and re-basing not only all of the models I had painted so far for this team, but all of the other Blood Bowl models I had painted, around 130 models in total.

The other thing that delayed me finishing this team was that just as I was getting close to finishing, I started painting up a Skaven team at the same time. That team is still in progress, although I do now have all of the regular players done. I hope I manage to finish it before I hit burnout and stop painting things for a while. If so, there should be a blog post on those to follow.