On a more serious note - I said it in the Discord, but my writing style for this short story project thing was heavily inspired by your work, especially Mound Duty (and the rest of Shift Twentieth, also know as The Best Spinoff I Will Fight You On This). A lot of my eye for the weird comes from Pratchett and Tom Holt and Robert Rankin - the usual suspects - but your work here really inspired me to find the beauty in people who have very rundown and ugly surroundings.

But yeah.

Shift Twentieth is Best Spinoff.

The point of clowns is to make people laugh, right? In this, Uncle Chuckles is doing his job as a clown. Just because he's been cursed with eternal failure doesn't mean he can't be funny doing it, right?

He's suffered so much that he's starting to think that it's gotta be supernatural, when really? It's just us. Us humans. Every time...

...but does it have to be?

Yeah, the idea hit me when I finally got round to reading the lore for Blood Bowl itself. Originally, the Blood Bowl world was very much akin to the Warhammer Fantasy world - lots of war and fighting and so forth. One day some dwarves stumbled across the tomb of an ancient forgotten chaos god called Nuffle whose texts sent the dwarf scholars trying to decipher them completely round the twist. You will note that Nuffle is one possible way of pronouncing NFL. This is deliberate.

Eventually, the now totally dribblingly insane dwarves produced a viable rulebook, which was useful because the orcs were attacking outside. They agreed to solve the battle through the use of a game, and thus the game spread out across the Old World, raising Nuffle to prominence and lowering the standing of the other Chaos gods.

In this story, part of Nuffle's madness infected the travelling circuses and other forms of entertainment that might threaten the dominion of Blood Bowl over the hearts and minds of the masses. One of them tried to game the system by forming a Circus of Blood Bowl... and this drew the gaze of Nuffle. The leader of the circus, an old-school clown called Uncle Chuckles, was cursed to forever fail, forever be a source of ridicule for daring to try and cheat a god.

So he made the best of it.

And thus Uncle Chuckles' Dismal Circus was born.

(Uncle C and the Useless Circus is a spinoff franchise that does a lot more touring. =] )