So, whats this REBBL thing all about?

So, whats this REBBL thing all about?

I've been thinking about writing this for a while and Majorbyte giving our subreddit a major overhaul gave me the perfect opportunity, however, I've been thinking about it for so long, there's a whole butt-ton of words floating round fighting to get out, which means the run-on sentences I'm famous for (and that Bleeding Hippy gives me crap for) so fair warning.

REBBL stands for the Reddit Eternal Blood Bowl League, but thats not what we've always been known as. Long before even I joined (in the days of BB1) we were simply the REL, the Reddit Eternal League which served American coaches, ran by a lovely chap named Voondaba (who is actually back now and will probably correct everything I get wrong in this section, which he's more than earned the right to). Voondaba couldn't keep up with the requirements of running a league due to the dreaded Real Life, when somethings gotta give time-wise, it's always gonna be your hobby, right? (more on this later). This left the league in the tender, loving care of a fellow named Gamba, who promptly set about preparing the league for the release of Blood Bowl 2 at which point he created a separate conference, the GMan (literally Gamba Man) which was set up to serve European coaches. At this point he decided to rename the League itself REBBL, so that there wouldn't be any confusion.

"So Metal, where do you come in?" I hear you ask. Well, I joined just after picking up Blood Bowl 2, having been a Table Top player extensively in my youth, but never being able to get into BB1 due to the graphics/user interface. Back in those days, I was just a coach, playing the Skaven team "The Greenbay Packmasters" and the league was small back then, like 40 total coaches across both conferences. This might have continued, leading to me never being in a position to write this at all, however, there was some issues made with admin decisions that blew up over Reddit (naturally a bad situation for a league based on Reddit) at which point I contacted Gamba with some suggestions and offered to help out with admin duties. As we talked more about our ideas for the league it became obvious we had similar goals - we wanted to be the best league in the game, focusing on content creation, and a fun, competitive community - essentially we wanted to be everything 12 year old me (and probably everyone else) wanted the first time I held the Blood Bowl TT game in my hands. We spent hours recording recaps, pushing as much content as we could manage and chatting to our coaches via the Discord server I'd set up. We began to expand, even introducing an Australian time zone conference! A word of warning at this point, idle jokes made on Discord can quickly become real additions to the way we do things, the name "The Big O" was actually a joke from one of our coaches when we were batting around the idea (Mystaes, if memory serves).

"OK, so where did all these rookies come from?" Damn, all these questions are surely making this easier for me to keep things in order, thanks! Well, I initially got to know Squiggy via Reddit as he's never been afraid to share his thoughts and opinions on the state of the game there. Eventually he found his way into my Twitch streams and we quickly became friends. Around a year ago, he told me he was having serious PC issues and wasn't able to actually play the game. After digging around in the loft (or attic depending on your location)I found some of my old PC components and after haggling him down from "trying to pay me" all the way to "buy me a pint" I made the trip one city over to where he's based, hooked him up and had a lovely afternoon getting mildly inebriated, during which he explained his idea of setting up a rookie league, which was currently in the middle of its first season with entirely 12 coaches. I mentioned that we were coming to the end of a season and had been trying to run our own rookie conference and we'd be interested in setting up a mutually beneficial agreement where he would run the rookie set up (the man really loves teaching people to play this game!) as a sister league branded as the REBBRL (Reddit Eternal Blood Bowl Rookie League) using our resources and experience to help back up the raw passion for the game his admin team (recruited from his first season of rookies) brought to the table, this meant they had access to the knowledge of all the veterans we had, plus the experience earned by running a league as big as REBBL was getting. This was probably the single biggest change we made anywhere in our history and without bragging, the REBBRL is probably responsible for the retention of over 200 new coaches already, who may have burnt out from such an unwelcoming game (and certain parts of its community \*cough\* COL \*cough\*), as we all know, this game, whilst amazing, isn't friendly to newcomers. For the record, unless I state otherwise, when I say REBBL I mean every coach in both leagues, we are one big, happy family.... that likes to murder each others carefully crafted teams.....

Unfortunately, Real Life reared its ugly head again, this time for Gamba and he found himself unable to keep up with the time investment required to stay on top of the workload we'd built up for ourselves as we continued to grow, despite the new admins we'd started to bring into the fold, either voluntarily or volunteered (seriously, TheRichestTea happened to be in the right place at the right time and got a butt-load of work dumped on him for the honour). Whilst Gamba may have backed away from admin duties, the league continued to grow in the directions he'd started us off in, focusing on content via our sports reporters and a sense of community that comes entirely from our coaches, I'm proud to say that I've met a lot of people I'm happy to consider friends here and you can guarantee that no matter what time of the day or night you log into Discord, you'll find someone to talk Blood Bowl, Sports, TV/Films, Table Top games or whatever else it is thats happening at the time.

The last major decisions we've made was to adopt/create a series of one-day tournaments and to promote our coaches coming up with alternate formats for leagues, to ensure there's always something going on that you can get involved with. Our one-day schedule currently rotates around the HJMC (Huge Jackedman invitational) which was created to honour the death of one of the leagues favourite players, who had become our mascot, this tournament focusses on Big Guys and using them to do as much as possible (touchdowns, passes, casualties, the works), the Chaos Cup, which is a random skils tournament, which is enabled by a special bot created by Schlice, who is an utter maestro at programming and the Cripple Cup, which is a format wherein you cannot fire injured players, leading to teams that get progressively more messed up the more tournaments they play in. These tournaments run in a cycle and are held at varying timezones to try and ensure two regions get "easy" access to them, despite this leading to sleepless nights from me staying up to cover the games! Our side leagues consist of Lineman League - does what it says on the tin, linemen only! Clan League - 5 coach teams compete to be the best over a series of head to head with other clans, playing Blood Bowl in a team environment is a totally different feeling and worth checking out, we also "spiced the punch" by adding special Leader Powers that can change up the draft, bring injured players back to the pitch and more. The REBBRL also has it's own version too! Speaking of the rookie league, they also host "Allstars" - a league designed for retired REBBL/REBBRL teams to test their mettle against each other and allow coaches to remember why they loved/hated their old teams, finally they also have the "One Minute Showtime" league which as the name suggests is a one minute format, however as there is a mix of rookie and veteran coaches, we encourage people to play unusual compositions, to try and level the playing field, popular past teams have included no throw-ra Khemri, no ghoul Undead, a lizard team with one saurus, one kroxigor and a whole army of skinks, a 16 peasant team and more!

So, this is where we are at, just about to start season 8 with over 370 coaches signed up (plus 60 in the REBBRL's "college" league), we have a podcast, weekly video coverage, a caster team dedicated to covering live matches, multiple "fluff" creators (including a Big O AND GMan newspapers!) T Shirts, super limited edition mugs (gotta win those one day events!), an incredible series of hype videos, a ton of streamers who make content, arguably the best prizes of any league, multiple spin off leagues, one day tournaments and a place for pick up "spin" games plus two Discord servers chock full of Blood Bowl enthusiasts - we pretty much have 20% of the active player base, give or take, playing in one of our leagues which makes us the biggest "private" league in the game and now YOU! Welcome to the REBBL coach, I'm looking forward to seeing you on the pitch.

FullMetal