Ok then I’m going to set myself up for a fall here by coming out with an idea for some goals for Guild Ball. I touched on this idea in the Weekly Waffle (#18), but I thought it merited a post of its own. I’ve been looking at some of the things that people have been making so far and there are some fantastic ideas out there. My initial plan was to go down the same route of making guild specific versions for each guild. But this is where my lack of imagination kicked in. I could think of ideas for most of the guilds but there were a few that I just couldn’t come up with practical ideas for. And then I had a complete switch in my thinking.
With Guild Ball being such a big game in the Empire of the Free Cities and with the big games having quite a high level of organisation, what if there were semi-permanent pitches, with standard goals. Being a rugby fan I thought that goals based on the uprights used in rugby could be made to work for Guild Ball. This is where things started to come together because I saw some ‘barge board’ add-ons for the 4 Ground Mordanburg buildings. So my thinking was that the Carpenters Guild would have some sort of standard way of making these barge boards. They wouldn’t all be exactly the same because they were handmade but they would follow roughly the same patter. So if as pair of these were made and then turned upside down and hammered into the ground you would have something that loosely resembled a set of rugby post that could be used for goals. In game terms I think this build could fit on a 50mm base so it wouldn’t impact the game mechanics and it would be something I haven’t seen before.
But now that I had the basic idea I started to think about ways to make them more guild specific and this is where things might get a bit more complicated. Each guild has its own symbol so what I needed was some way of adding these symbols to the goals. Now it would be easy just to ‘nail’ the symbol to the uprights but this just felt a bit boring and why do something simple when you can make it un-necessarily complicated. So what if there was some fiendishly complicated arrangement of ropes and pulleys that could be used to hoist the guild symbol up between the uprights. The symbol could then be switched out depending on which team was playing. In hobby terms this would mean that I only need to make to two sets of goals along with the different symbols for the guilds. A look at a few model ship websites and all the bits I would need to do are available so the only limiting factor in this will be my lack of skill.
So what happens next? Well I’ve ordered the barge boards from 4Ground and I’m just waiting for them to arrive. Once they do I will work out if I can actually fit them onto a 50mm base and if I can then we are game on with this idea. Whether or not it works is another thing but I won’t know unless I give it a go. And even if I can’t pull it off I still think it’s a good idea and worth a try.
Stay tuned to see what happens.
