It was time. A new season.

In the vast, shattered strongholds of Clan Nosebiter, leagues beneath the surface of the World's Edge mountains, entire battalions of dwarves and hordes of vicious Night Goblins lowered their hammers and knives, gave each other slightly sheepish looks, and began the long trudge back to their respective camps...

Just outside the wreckage of a burning village on the Border Principalities, the Necrarch vampire lord Fintir Gavsraven sighed, checked his pocket watch, and ordered his shambling legions of the undead to return to a small field outside of Reikland, which he'd booked specially in advance for this year's training sessions…

In an underground laboratory brimming with violent green warpstone and acrid smoke, a rat-man sorcerer ran back and forth, chittering with agitation as he tried to make sense of his dark masters' latest demand, 'Mutant With Big-Big Hand And Innate Understanding Of Loose-Knit Caging Manoeuvre'...

An entire forest of peaceful wood elves was without warning swallowed up and regurgitated as a twitching mass of flesh and splintered wood and bone, as the dark gods of Chaos materialised an entire stadium in preparation for the upcoming Chaos Cup…

In the sulphurous ruins of a conference facility just off the Great Eastern Road, a thousand high mages of the Association of Broadcasting Conjurers battled it out with an army of giggling sorcerers from the Necromancers' Broadcasting Circle, trying to win exclusive Cabalvision rights for another year…

In a discreet top room of Von Hinkelstein's Haberdashery and Ironsmith's, the eighteen members of the Referees' Guild gathered to have themselves fitted for new suits of full-plate body armour, with a sense of weary inevitability…

In the streets and alleyways of every town, blue scarves clashed with red banners, beer spilled into gore, and the chant went up, from a million mouths…

BLOOD BOWL! BLOOD BOWL! BLOOD BOWL!