Today, the Black Library released two new editions of books based on Blood Bowl, Games Workshop’s game of fantasy football. In this case, the fantasy doesn’t involve NFL teams but elves, dwarves, vampires, and other fantastic monsters having over-the-top hyper-violent pun-filled battles in between slaking their thirst on ales like Bloodweiser and Killer Genuine Draft.
This was one of my favorite games back when I worked at the Games Workshop Design Studio in 1989-1900, and I had the honor of helping out Jervis Johnson with the writing on one of the game’s early supplements, The Blood Bowl Companion.
In the early days of the Black Library (GW’s fiction division), founding publisher Marc Gascoigne asked me to pitch him ideas for novels set in GW’s worlds. I tossed him something like ten one-paragraph ideas, and to my shock, he chose the jokey one I’d tossed in for a Blood Bowl novel.
Over the years, I wound up writing four novels, five comic books, and one short story for Blood Bowl. They went in and out of print over the years, but as of today, you can pick up all of the novels and the short story once again.
The Blood Bowl Omnibus contains all four of my Blood Bowl novels: Blood Bowl, Death Match, Dead Ball, and Rumble in the Jungle. An earlier edition of the omnibus came out back in 2007, but that version only contained the first three books, as Rumble had just been released. This is the complete thing, and it weighs in at almost 900 pages.
The only other prose I’ve written for Blood Bowl is a single short story called “The Hack Attack,” which came out back in 2017. It was collected in the Blood Bowl anthology Death on the Pitch in 2018, which has since gone out of print. Today, a new, expanded edition–Death on the Pitch: Extra Time–is out, featuring two new stories added to the bunch.
So, get yourself to your favorite bookseller and stock up on all the funny football mayhem can you manage. You’ll have a ball!
