Sea elves or high elves

Recently persuaded to support further exploration of an otherwise non-canonical blood bowl team I have set sails for Ulthuan, a land where puffy shirts may well be in vogue...

Sea elves are a funny team, and luckily one can cover the high elf list with the same miniatures in terms of positions: 2 throwers, 2 catchers, 4 blitzers and the rest linemen. This meant I did not have to put the knife down and start again or add to my original plan.

These minis are not giants. In a size creepy world such as this, they strike me as refined and elfishly lean in a way that a few wood elf teams that one can purchase are simply not.

Colour suggestions welcome. Don't say white.

Bully boy

This piece is... Well, I would not say that I actually like it, and there are several reasons.

1. It is feckin huge.

2. It has a tail. Yes, I could have fixed that, but it does.

3. It is a 'comission' and will probably murder som of my players in the near future.

So normally this would not be on here. It is not my 'style', and I mostly just cobbled together some bits and bobs and used a truly fugly head to replace one that was actually worse.

Book review: Gilead's blood

Much like the previous piece of classic fantasy pulp fiction reviewed on here ("Zavant"), the first book (out of three, I think) about Gilead the elf is not a novel, but a collection of short stories.

These stories are told as 'yarns', or 'legends' if you will, and that is generally always a good way to frame tales like these, as they often do not handle scrutiny very well... So too these stories, as some become almost too intangible and expressionistic to really enjoy, while others seems to involve Gilead slaying hordes of foes, and one is a somewhat poor fry up of "Seven Samurai" (Or "13 assassins")...

I am getting ahead of myself. Gilead the elf is a tragic hero, a melancholy, dysfunctional shell of a man, robbed of his twin, his heritage, other elves to pally around with, etc. It does not spoil things in major ways to reveal that Gilead, the son of an elven lord somewhere in the old world, loses his twin brother, and with him the will to live, and becomes as if half dead. It all works very well, and the character is quite believable and well written, so that the reader understands WHY Gilead is off swinging his sword at anything that seems to need it, relentless and with an obvious deathwish.

Well, it is not quite clear how Gilead got to be SO lethal, but this is a legend, so...

Gilead travels the Old World with his last remaining and ever loyal retainer Fithvael, now in search of other elves, but mostly finding problems and disappointments. Their relationship is interesting, part Crockett and Tubbs, part Batman and Alfred. Homoerotic? I would not say that. Not because the sometimes obvious dificulty in how to handle sex and sexuality in GW books rears its ugly head again, but because Gilead is more akin to a patient, a terrible burden to Fithvael that he carries out of feelings of duty, guilt and responsibility, with perhaps just a ghost of affection for what Gilead was or could have been.

The stories are largely well written, engaging and exciting, with one possible exception that seemed like one had to be chemically enhanced to enjoy it to the max, and the last (and sadly longest) story that just came out a bit predictable and lame.

I liked the book, mainly for the melancholy, and I tend to like that sort of thing, but that does not mean I like ALL the tales of tragedy, vengeance and so on in these books, and it could have easily been handled too crudely to win me over. But it did, and I will probably read more of Gilead, hoping that they have the same strange and terrible beauty to them.

Over all I give it a four out of five. It may not entirely earn it, but it was better than some of the three's, and I enjoyed it.