Steam Workshop Mods are fun to play with given all the cool tools/toys you get.
However... sometimes... Sometimes you do a misinput when playing a modded game of The Empire in Total Warhammer 3 and accidentally confederate a legendary lord of a different faction.
Which then triggers a snowball effect of seeing how far you can push this avalanche...
Which then of course leads to you triggering an end game crisis, so you decide to shatter the remaining strands of canonicity with the an all out final siege on the chaos dwarves.
It would have been Nagash, but I paid the maneater ogres to make his unlife miserable and he fled into the ocean after all the remaining undead factions refused to be auto confederated by him.
Something something "somehow better written than The End Times" joke here.
The crowd was deafening in the way only several tens of thousands of people could be, or possibly several dozen very loud cats right next to your ear as you try to enjoy a nice bit of chicken.
They had already been seated for nearly an hour, and the cheerleaders were getting tired. They could only juggle swords and breathe fire and perform complicated acrobatics for so long, and the crowd was already on their second or third round of watery beer, and wanted to see more violence than the fully-armoured cheerleaders could muster (the full armour came about from a strike regarding an attempt to put them in too-revealing uniforms while still performing the dangerous stunts aforementioned, and the cheerleaders, like most people, liked keeping their body parts attached to the rest of them).
It was all deliberate though, the Managers had planned out the opening ceremonies of every game precisely. Keep the crowd entertained and pull in a few more miscellaneous coins from additional merchandise purchases, and only start the game when the fans were in a near-riotous stage, which made the game all the more entertaining and kept them running to the snack stalls in every pause of the game to sate their now-voracious appetites (being angry in a hot stadium did that to one's caloric intake). It also added to the spectacle of when the teams were introduced. As they would be now.
Trumpets blared and drums pounded in the theme music of the visiting team, the Kasbak Freehold Thunder-Hammers as they ran onto the pitch while the cheerleaders made their ways to the side-lines. The Thunder-Hammer fans —Thammers—roared as if on cue (which they were: a small goblin in the front row in team colours lifted a large sign that said "cheere ye, cheere ye") as their blue-and-white bedecked favourites made two rows and faced the mass of blue that were their fans, and began their as-carefully-as-three-dozen-overmuscled-and-not-quite-enough-brained-men-could-choreograph chant. It featured mostly yelling at the tops of their lungs, pounding their chests, and stomping. The fans repeated the chant barely a millisecond behind the team, creating a rather interesting spectacle, similar to how a parent and child practise saying the same words at the same time but the child is a little behind the beat.
The KFTH slammed their fists into the ground, a very suitable finish for a team comprising mostly of orcs, two trolls, and a half-dozen dwarfs, all of whom see punching the ground as very intimidating. Especially when you leave dints in the turf. The Thammer crowd roared its support, and the team trundled their way to the sidelines, where they partook in copious amounts of swearing at each other and fans while drinking enough fluid to drown a very large fish. That was as much part of the spectacle as the chant was, symbolizing to fans their eagerness to play and to win.
The crowd began to murmur in a terrifying cohesion as the trumpets held a quiet but long note like a hose that wasn't turned fully off. It slowly grew with the drums building up an off-kilter rhythm, culminating in three dis-chords that the crowd shouted along to. These three chords of questionable musical composition (any music teacher could talk at length about how the chromatic progression rife with minor sevenths, minor seconds, and tritones made it an instant failure of any music theory exam) repeated with the crowd's participation as the Markoth City Partizans took to the pitch. The Partizans didn't have a chant that the team performed, but the thirty thousand fans had more than made up for it by forcing a melody and lyrics onto the "Three Chords of Doom" that was their official theme music. It went roughly along the lines of:
"Partizans will not die!
We will kill you!
Death to the opponent!
Kill! Kill! Kill!"
(It cannot be said that the fans had more poetic ability than the players, who at least had the excuse of multiple head injuries)
Instead of a war chant, the Partizans assembled in a square formation at centre field and stomp rhythmically, raising their fists alternatively with each stomp.
Once the fans' homemade chant died into more rabid cheering, the team sent to their side of the pitch, and the officials appeared. They had no fanfare, as no one much liked the officials except the Officials Guild, who ensured they at least got paid regularly. Once the officials dispersed to their places on the pitch, the head referee, in this case a slightly pudgy yet athletic man with the name "Onager" stitched onto his linen doublet, stood officially at centre, with a hands-behind-back-and-legs-slightly-apart stance that all head referees were taught in the Official Official's Handbook provided by the Officials' Guild.
Once Onager was in this stance, the captains of both teams came to meet him. The KFTH had Berhard Pavyn, the Partizans had Loeghr Falhalf. Fanfare continued as Onager held up the Official gold coin to determine who would receive the ball first. He carefully made a show of showing it off to the crowd and captains, despite the fact it was merely the size of a cat's paw print, and then hefted it into the air with lethal amounts of backspin.
"Crown!" Falhalf shouted. As the home-team captain he had the right to choose which side he wanted the coin to show upon landing. The coin didn't listen half the time.
"Shield," Onager said with pomp. "The Thunder-Hammers will choose to receive or kick."
No one in the crowd heard a blessed thing, but helpful eagle-eyed fans in the front rows held up homemade signs with crude crowns and shields on them to indicate to the seething masses above them what was occurring.
Pavyn considered his options. "I think we shall kick," he said after a sufficiently pregnant pause. Signs were lifted, crowd cheered and shouted.
"The Thunder-Hammers shall kick the ball!" Onager bellowed officially. Both captains then made their way to their teams and relayed the pertinent information.
On the KFTH side, the coach, a particularly rotund orc named Khaligorn was ferociously scribbling at his large slate with a chalk.
"We gotsta move fast! The Partz are good at runnin, and we have to get to where they goin faster then they do! And when we gets there, we hits them harder then they hits us!" He began pouting to the surrounding players. "Loustin and Harrok will be at the edges, Pavyn near left, Joggban far right. Golshak, Urrig, and Pagh take centre! I want the trolls taking up the rear in case their runners and blitzers break through! The rest of you know your places! Gayns! Kick and run a boar's leg after!"
Bealdric Gayns nodded with careful emotionlessness, then began muttering as soon as he ran into the pitch and out of Khaligorn's hearing.
"Boar's leg! He's lost it! I'm basically playing a blitzer! Yes I can run and block halfway decent, but be a spare blitzer?! Madness I say! This has to be a false play to make me look intimidating and lead their runner into Loustin and Joggban. It's the only way!"
By the end of this short monologue Bealdric was at his position, roughly twenty years behind centre, where Onager officially handed him the official game ball, and stood with his official stance a few feet away, whistle in his lips ready to blow the official start of the game.
Bealdric lined up his kick, gauging the weight of the ball and tried to see where the Partizans had placed their receiver/runner. He also tried to calculate where the boar's leg run would take him, and specifically which of the Partizans' ogre blockers he would be concussed by in the next half-minute.
He steadied himself.
He released the ball gently while taking a soft jump forward, his right leg starting it's pendulous swing.
He connected with the ball.
Onager blew his whistle with all the officially he could push from his lungs.
The ball arced at a perfect 62 degree angle over centre.
FINALLY...he's done 😅 37hours over the last month but I'm so happy with his cloak and the nmm. Maybe at some point in the future I'll go back and update his face, but I still love how he turned out.
—The difference of the name depends solely on whether they are of the forest dwelling kind (fauns) or mountain dwelling kind (satyrs). Both have the feet and horns of goats, and sometimes the faces as well. They are agile and more than willing to use their horns, making them a very popular choice for blitzers as they can hit and run with terrifying efficacy.
One of the rarest species to play Warball, werewolves can take three forms: fully human, fully wolf, or a mixture of both. The transitioning between forms is relatively easy, but can be briefly disorienting and so transformations are usually done in safe environments and not often on the move or in action. Their rarity means that their culture is rather mysterious, though it is known that they live in large family units and are on the whole less frightening than they are often believed to be, but this does not stop thousands of rumours and horror stories which keep them from establishing more civilized contact with other species. On the pitch their speed, agility, strength, and ferocity is highly prized and the few werewolf players that have reached the pro leagues enjoy substantial paycheques, while teams without them will politick heavily to try and gain them.
My first shot at a species bio, just picking a species that isn't likely going to feature much just to flex some worldbuilding muscles and keep this blog actually active.
Sprites/pixies/fairies/gnomes: All technically different species but no one much notices the difference. They are representative of the four elemental spirits: sprites are air, pixies are water, fairies are fire, gnomes are earth. Each has the ability to transform into an elemental animal: butterflies, carp, salamanders, and moles respectively. They do not feature much in Warball, but they are sometimes called in by teams to use surreptitious magics to affect the other team.
Let me know how this sounds and if I should add/change/remove some things, cause I love making up more lore!
