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Background for Hemlock

Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 3:47 am
by GalakStarscraper
Best background submission and picture for this star player will be posted here.

Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 3:50 am
by GalakStarscraper
Galak Footnote: Hemlock was a key player for the Slashers before turning freelance.

Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2009 1:49 pm
by UncleBob
In those times when the Lizardmen hadn’t been big on the Blood Bowl scene, Hemlock, a Skink Catcher, was one of the great stars of the Slashers. He was an extremely flexible and nimble player who gave every tackler a hard time to secure him. Hemlock always seemed capable of getting out of every tight spot and the only way to neutralize him was to make sure that his pulse had faded (sort of hard to check with cold-bloods). Then the Lizardman boom came and hundreds of young, skilled Skinks swarmed the Blood Bowl pitch. In a very short time, old Hemlock was forgotten and out of the game. His style was called old fashioned, he didn’t seem that fresh anymore and his fee, based on his achievements and experience, couldn’t compete with the freshmen who were playing for virtually nothing. Hemlock withdrew from the game, lived reclusively, got depressed in those lonely years and became addicted to sugar. What, as we know, runs havoc with a Lizardman. One might think this is just another sad and depressing story about a sorted out veteran player but Hemlock’s story had a rather absurd twist to it.
After too much sugar-canes Hemlock got rather sick with the same bleak view every day and somewhere in his cold-blooded thoughts emerged the idea to put an end to it all. Hemlock dragged his bloated body to the next pond and was determined to drown himself. The one thing, probably due to too much sugar, he forgot was, that Skinks are amphibious and he spent three, rather boring weeks sitting on the bottom of the pond waiting for Sotek to lift him up into the sky. After those three weeks Sotek did come to him, but in a vision of glory, a vision of Hemlock cunningly side stepping around players, a vision of Hemlock dominating the pitch, a vision of Hemlock wielding a dagger! Gripped and revitalized by his vision, a new Hemlock emerged from that pond, filled with an ecstasy so that his first impulse was to rename himself into Hemcalibur (for what silly reason ever), but after the first bliss had vanished and his thoughts came back in order, the path in front of him was clearly to be seen. He quickly got back into shape, the three weeks on the bottom of that pond had done him good, and within a week all the abilities that once had made him great were oiled, functioning and ready for action again. Once a solution is found it seems so obvious and, of course, the only thing Hemlock lacked was a stinging sensation. Hemlock picked up the dagger skills quickly, and just as quickly he returned to the pitch. And all the vision of glory and domination that came to him in that pond turned out to be just too true. Gosh, players everywhere hate that little dashing, ricocheting and stinging Skink that glues so eagerly to his victims until one of them is in serious pain, and most of the times, it ain’t Hemlock.

Posted: Fri Nov 13, 2009 9:23 am
by valentsigma
HEMLOCK :

A lot has been said and written about the Ancestrals. Who they were, what were their intentions, what happened to them, and, above all…..was Nuffle one of them?

We know very little about our favourite sport’s holy god, but it is clear that he is as old as the Ancestral, and Hemlock is proof of it.

Our story starts in long forgotten times, when the Ancestrals were still close to the world, and Blood Bowl was still a new and young sport…..sport? NO, Blood Bowl was the ultimate act of worship and respect to the great god, Nuffle, and, as such, only the greatest heroes and priests could take part on it.

Every priest from the old races trained their champions to reach the victory in the rites, and one of the great Slann Mage Priests, the almost omnipotent Lord Kroak, was totally obsessed with the creation of a Champion who would win Nuffle’s blessing for Kroak (and why not, good profits in the bets around Nuffle’s rites).

For decades he bred different eggs, crossed them, cast different spells on them, but he Could never reach that ultimate result he was looking for, until one day when, as it sometimes happens in science and magic, random events gave Kroak the final solution.

Centuries have passed and Blood Bowl and Nuffle had been forgotten, but, Lord Kroak, as good Slann, had all the patience in the world, and almost all the time in the universe in his hands, and there was something that was telling him Blood Bowl would eventually come back (and that something was his magic. Thanks to it he had seen the future, though he always swore he never used these visions when betting). That was why he kept on investigating until he reach that special bred of eggs.

Chameleon skinks had made their first appearance centuries ago, but this new bred Kroak reached was different. This time, Kroak had painted the eggs with a magical liquid of his creation that contained the essence of Blood Bowl (actually it was a magical liquid that could absorb the Blood Bowl playing skills of people close to it, starting with Kroak’s memories of past games), and Kroak hoped that this bred’s skinks could be the ones he had been waiting for so long.

Kroak had planned to hide these eggs inside the wallet of every important Blood Bowl team in the world so they could absorb the team’s knowledge, but his plans went wrong.

The eggs were hidden in a subterranean cave in his temple, but all of them but one were destroyed in the attack of a Skaven assassin who fled with the last egg to the Old World through the labyrinthic tunnels of the underworld.

Two days later, the Slann Mage Priest unleashed the cataclysm that destroyed most of the Dwarfs and Skaven Kingdoms (Kroak was of such a baaaad humour), and the egg was lost for centuries in the subterranean debris.

The eggs, thanks to Kroak’s magic unguent, remained unharmed for centuries, and absorbed all the Blood Bowl knowledge around it all that time…..The problem was that it absorbed the Blood Bowl knowledge coming from the goblins and skaven living in the depths around it!!!!

Lots of years later, a Group of Bretonnian grave diggers dug out the apparently dead egg, but, as soon as it received the sunlight, it sent a magical call to Lustria. Kroak, mummified as he was, received the signal, and quickly sent a metal picture of the egg to the Coach Priest who trained one of Lustria’s more important Blood Bowl team shouting (mentally and magically shouting at least) “Sign him up, sign him up!!! Pay him whatever he asks!!!”

A lot of people say that Kroak’s mummy haven’t moved for years (obvious…he’s a mummy), but some of them felt a slightly trembling in the bandages…

The Coach Priest recovered the egg, and through magic he ended the egg’s growth, and so Hemlock was born and could see the sunlight after so much time.

Hemlock had some of the most valued Blood Bowl skills. He was fast, agile, he could sneak in the opponents, he knew how to handle and wrestle……When his opponents were smaller than him!!!!

Kroak’s big mistake was thinking that players would be, in the future, the same size as the players he was used to, pigmies, goblins, maybe some fat and slow dwarf….and now, there was a lot of Black Orcs, muscled up humans and heavily armoured dwarfs.

All this had Hemlock frustrated and sad. He felt he wasn’t reaching his full potential, and it was playing against dwarfs where he found the point he was missing.

That was supposed to be Hemlock’s last match, and so he was thinking when he was about to be blocked by a dwarf player who unluckily fell breaking his helmet in thousands of shards that stuck in his eyes and face making him yell in pain and bleed.

This vision awaked something in Hemlock’s mind…..it awaked centuries of Goblin and Skaven hatred for the Dwarfs. Hatred unconsciously absorbed by the egg. As if he was being manned from the outside, he took one of the bigger shards and cut the Dwarf’s throat. Quickly, he run to the next Dwarf player and, thanks to his small size and his big agility, he could sneak past him and stab him in the neck, and then went to another player, and another, and another, cutting hands, tendons, eyes, ultimately taking out 6 Dwarf Players. His team, thanks to the superiority in numbers, pushed forward and won the game.

Hemlock, since then, has become the scalpel in the teams he pays. Using his chameleonic and physical skills, and a dagger specially forged for him by the Coach Priests, he cuts and stabs any opponent in his way.

As Hemlock says, “Even the tiniest knife can cut a vein or a tendon…..and believe me, the most important veins and tendons and as protected as any other…..from me”.

Re: Background for Hemlock

Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2016 8:21 pm
by SlannMann
This is my thoughts for Hemlock :

Back in the year 2490 Hemlock was a member of the Xlanhuapec Slashers, a Lizardman team playing in the mid-level Blood Bowl leagues of Lustria. After the collapse of the NAF, the team's head coach managed to acquire the services of one of the Lustria Croakers catchers and brought him in as an assistant coach. The first job for Dendrobateotl was to train the team in the current rules of Blood Bowl by which the Old World was accustomed to playing, after which he could assess the individual player's strengths and weaknesses. Naturally such an experienced, low strength, fast and agile player was invaluable for the skinks to learn from (despite them having to run through players legs instead of leaping over them!). In particular Hemlock excelled under Dendrobateotl's tutelage. Rising above his skittish team mates in skill and daring, Hemlock eventually became the Slasher's leading skink player and became instrumental in taking the team into the top level leagues.
His success continued but before he got his chance to become a full time independent player for hire, he would be dealt a crushing blow. Hemlock was becoming so successful that an up and coming Skaven player (Hemi's rival and near equal) going by the name Skitter, decided to begin lacing the skink's half time blood oranges with cane sugar knowing how addictive the substance was to the little lizards. Attributing the way his opponents were seemingly playing in slow motion and the rush he would feel on the pitch to feeding off the 'buzz' of the roaring crowd, Hemlock felt he was untouchable and on the verge of true Blood Bowl greatness. That is when the come down hit. After making sure Hemlock had become an addict, Skitter leaked the word out and amongst great scandal Hemlock's contract was terminated, the world of Blood Bowl believing his playing days were over...

Unable to give up playing the brutiful game and needing some way of supplying his sweet dirty habit, Hemi resolved himself to playing in the bottom level leagues of Lustria provided any teams would take him, for very little or no pay. On finding a regular backwater team where they didn't care about his sugar cane addiction, he once again found success but never the same fulfilment or sensation of days past. Dendrobateotl heard rumours about where Hemlock had ended up and where his team were to be playing their next game. After the final whistle, Dendrobateotl presented himself to Hemlock and offered to be his personal coach. He would pull Hemlock out of this sinking bog he was in, cure him of his addiction and help him regain what he had lost. Hemi just kept his head down and shrugged his shoulders. It was then Dendrobateotl spoke about how Hemlock's career had been sabotaged and who the individual responsible was. This time Hemi's head rose and his pupil's narrowed showing a new found drive and cold reptilian focus.
Unlike his former team mate Diegi Maratona, Hemlock was able to rid himself of his addiction and return to the big leagues as a star player for hire (slashing his pay considerably certainly helped his cause). In addition to his old re-polished skills, Hemi added his nemesis Skitter's profession into his own skill set, calling himself the Jungle Runner and carrying with him two nasty obsidian-bladed punch daggers in order to act out his revenge on the Gutter Runner should they ever meet. Until that time, the unfortunate players of other teams make for ideal practice lessons....