At the risk of looking like I'm Blog-spamming this is the second part of a sequence of blogs about setting up a custom roster league based around the Necromunda fluff.

In the last blog I set out some steps required for me to produce my custom rostered league. The first of which was 'To figure out how to set up custom rosters on FUMBBL' and it is this process I am going to talk about in this post. Hopefully some others my find this useful.

As I said before please do slap me if I say anything that is wrong or just stupid, the primary objective here is my own learning of the custom roster and league systems so feedback is appreciated.

First problem is finding a link to setting up custom rosters. I could not find a link anywhere that said 'create custom roster' (was I naive to look for such a link?) on my home pages or the FUMBBL front page, but a quick Google search led me to this post by Christer which includes this link to Ruleset Management.

After clicking on the link I was presented with the following



Clicking on 'Create Ruleset' brings up a dialog box asking you to name your ruleset. The first one I created was named using a string of random letters. This was a mistake as I can find no way of deleting or renaming a ruleset once it has been created and now this test ruleset with its nonsensical name is sitting at the top of my list of rulesets looking out of place and annoying!

Once the ruleset is created and named you arrive at a screen containing several tabs, the first 3 allow you to fiddle with some of the rules in the client.



Most of the options seem well explained on the page (with the exception of some of the skill progression settings that I will need to try and figure out later, but know enough to know that I didn't want to change them for my current project).

I kept most of the standard settings but decided to add some of the more common rule tweeks in the Client Options tab:

Fouling has +1 to armour roll
Claw does not stack
PO only affects armour roll
Right Stuff prevents tackle on blocks

Remember to click the save button on each tab to update the ruleset with the new settings before moving on. A red star next to an option indicates it has been changed since the last time you saved.

I later discovered that it is important to record the ruleset id number so you can create a league using that ruleset. This number can be found in the URL of the page you are currently on which should end ruleset?id=XXX where XXX is the ruleset id. Write this number down somewhere as you will need it later!

Clicking on the 'Rosters' Tab brings up a set of radio buttons that control which roster sets the ruleset can use along with a list of rosters on the right hand side.



I set all to 'yes' initially so I could look through the LRB6 and stunty rosters to see how they are set up, plus it allows me to easily find and copy the sprites for those rosters.

However, the key feature here is setting Custom to 'yes' and clicking save adds two links to the bottom of the list of rosters on the right hand column of the page:



(Note - House Orlock is the first of my own custom rosters, more on this roster in a later blog)
The 'Add Existing Roster' allows you to search and add custom rosters that other people have made e.g. Secret League rosters.

Clicking 'Create Roster' pops up a dialog box to name the new roster then you are taken to a page where the roster options can be set. The page is split into three sections, the first is general settings for the team:



Mostly self explanatory, the playable setting seems to be set to No only for star player lists.

Necromancer will allow a team to raise dead in the manner of the CRP Necromancer team, the Undead setting I think is just for the Stakes skill (although this also appears in the positions page, it does seem to always match the setting on the team page... anyone?) Not that this will be an issue for the first stage of this project as I am not producing any Undead teams.

The 'Raised Position' appears to be the roster position that the Necromancer OR Nurgle's Rot skill will create. The list for this gets populated once you have created some positions for your roster.

The Stats and Info appear on the team creation page for the team.

Remember to click on Save to update and changes - as before a red star indicates unsaved changes

The second section is for the team logo:



Theses are the images that represent the team e.g. in gamefinder. They can be dragged and dropped from your desktop as the dialogue says. However, they must be the correct size i.e. 192x192, 128x128 etc and there will need to be a separate file for each size. Also these images get uploaded to your gallery and must be approved as usual by an admin before they will appear to any other users.

Remember - no GW IP images (Yes in my excitement I forgot this and tried to upload a GW image, apologies admins, Christer et al)

The final section of the page includes the link to add positions to your roster



The 'Add Star Player' will have to wait for another time, stars seem to be listed in separate rosters then linked from each roster that uses them, however I do not seem to be able to link to the existing CRP or Stunty star player lists, I think I'll have to create a custom star player roster, which is fine as I wouldn't want to use the normal stars for this project anyway.

Clicking on 'Create Position' opens up another dialogue box to name the position and then navigates to a page with all the options for the positionals you wish to create.

Again this page has 3 sections, the first are the general settings for the positional



Again it seems mostly self-explanatory. 'Team with Position' appears to be for star player pairs like Brick Far'th and Grotty (perhaps some fun could be had with this setting for other players...). The 'Short Name' is the code that appears on the abstract icons for the position. Type is either Normal or Star, again for the star player lists I guess. Undead seems to be a copy of the same setting in the team page. Secret weapon roll - Default is automatic sending off as in CRP but can also be set to other values such as used in Stunty.

All changes must be saved as usual.

The second section is to do with the icons and player portraits



The icon files I will leave to a later blog as this one is getting a bit too massive. If this is empty I think you will still be able to use the roster just using abstract icons instead. The player portraits have the be 95x147 px. As with team images they can be dragged and dropped which uploads them to your gallery for approval by an admin before they will work.

The last section allows you to pick skills for your player from a drop down menu.



Click done when finished. Then if you navigate back to the team page your player should have appeared in the list at the bottom



Note: clicking 'remove' will delete the position but you will need to reload the screen to see the change.

Well this has turned into a bit of an epic How To on custom roster creation. Hopefully it will be useful to others (unless this info already exists somewhere that everyone else knows about...).

I think I have successfully covered the objective for this stage of my project which was 'To figure out how to set up custom rosters on FUMBBL'.

Next step from my original list is 'To create some custom rosters to represent the 6 lower houses of Necromunda (those that are playable in the original game)'

I also have to add some further stages:


6. To figure out how to set up Star Players in FUMBBL custom rosters
7. To create some star players for the Necromunda theme

Now I'm off to play with some rosters!