Having been impressed by the custom rosters produced for the Secret League, and desiring to learn how to produce such rosters in FUMBBL, I decided to set myself a (little?) project to produce a set of rosters, with unique sprites and other associated images, and to set up a league using these rosters.

The objective is to learn how to edit the sprites and rosters, upload the required files and set up the league, largely for the hell of learning something new and partly to be able to contribute to managing and setting up leagues in the future. Having started this project and failed to find detailed help material on this process an additional objective is to keep notes on the process, including all my mistakes and potentially putting together a guide to help others avoid the same errors I made.

As with all of this feel free to slap me when I've done something wrong, missed something obvious or otherwise been Really Stoopid through the comments e.g. if there is already help material out there do point me at it!

With this as the plan I had to choose a theme for my custom rosters and league. Initially I thought I'd create some of the 'theory bowl' teams I've been playing around with over the years. However, these are largely just small alterations to the existing rosters and would lack the challenge of having to create whole new sets of images and icons which are some of the skills I was aiming to develop.

Instead I have decided to move the setting for the league away from the fantasy world and drop it into the world of Necromunda. With its developed background there is plenty of fluff to work with in Necromunda, and although it is in the 40k universe the 'feel' of Necromunda, to my mind, fits the concept of Blood Bowl better.

Also I couldn't find any evidence of anyone else developing rosters based on the Necromunda background, so hopefully I'm not stepping on anyone's toes doing this!

All good projects need a banner...



...which I have discovered is actually the wrong size to fit the header on the league page, but perhaps more of that later.

My first tasks are -

1. To figure out how to set up custom rosters in FUMBBL
2. To create some custom rosters to represent the 6 lower houses of Necromunda (those that are playable in the original game)
3. To figure out how to create edit and upload the player sprites and other images for the teams
4. To figure out how to create a league using the custom rosters
5. To figure out how to use FUMBBL test mode to check everything works

I'll give some more information on how each of these stages go in later blogs.

For now wish me luck and any helpful hints, tips, criticisms or helpful pointers are readily received.