Starting the Samurai Terrain Collection

 If I'm going to play games set in Feudal Japan, I should have some terrain that looks the part. Six or eight months ago I bought a few MDF kits from Things From The Basement here in the US, and today I've got two of them - if not "finished," at least in playable shape.

 

 

First up, a truly towering torii gate; these gates are placed at the entrance of Shinto (and some Buddhist) shrines to mark where the mundane world and the sacred space of the shrine meet. This one's a full 6" tall.

Next to it is a kit that Things From The Basement lists as "Prayer Wheels" and while prayer wheels are a thing that exists in Japanese Buddhism, they don't really look like this. This arrangement looks more akin to how offerings of sake are placed at Shinto sites as an offering to the spirits, or kami.  

The red was all done with spray paint, while the bases were sprayed black and sponged with browns and grays for stone work. The roof tiles are corrugated paper painted black and drybrushed with gray. 

Nothing fancy, but off to a good start! My initial plan with these was to incorporate them, along with a temple kit, into a single 12" square terrain tile, maybe with some trees, but I think this particular torii is simply too big - it towers almost 2 full inches over the roof of the temple!  So let's treat these as scatter instead. 

 

Miniatures Acquired: 186

Miniatures Painted: 195

Terrain Acquired: 2

Terrain Painted: 8

Scatter Acquired: 8

Scatter Painted: 12

Test game: Osprey's "Ronin"

 I had some free time this afternoon so I decided to squeeze in another game before the weekend ended. I've painted a fair few samurai and other Feudal Japanese miniatures this year, and I've been itching to get them on the table for a proper samurai game. I had a pair of 100-point "Buntai" lists drawn up for Osprey's "Ronin," and decided today was the day.

 A pretty simple meeting engagement to get a feel for the mechanics of the game - a Takeda Clan samurai and his ashigaru bodyguards are waylaid at a river crossing by a gang of bandits. 

 The Takeda won priority, and one of the spear-armed ashigaru moved forward; the bandit archer snapped off a shot, stunning him. Both buntai moved forward, the bandit and ashigaru musketmen exchanging ineffectual shots. During the action phase, the bandit archer fired a second shot, putting a light wound on the ashigaru he'd previously stunned. 

 The bandit second-in-command charged forward, and the two ashigaru spearmen moved forward to meet him. The melee was on!

 Here's where I got a taste of the "combat pool" mechanic - each figure has a combat pool, and when melee begins draws any combination of Attack and Defense tokens up to that number. They then use these to attack, enhance their attacks or improve their defense. Normally, you'd be playing against someone and you'd keep what you were drawing for your pool a secret, resulting in there being a bit of a gamble to each combat - you have to wager on what your opponent has in mind and how aggressive or conservative you want to be. Some of that's missing trying to play it solo, unfortunately, but them's the breaks.

Unfortunately for the bandit second in command, he gambled poorly.

 At that point, both buntai were fully committed; the spearmen moved on to engage other low-ranking bandits, while the Takeda samurai faced off with the bandit leader.

 The more heavily armored samurai buntai made pretty short work of the bandits, with the ashigaru archer and musketmen finishing off their counterparts and the spearmen carving their way through the other bandits with ease, receiving only light wounds in return. 

 With a final sweep of his sword, the samurai cut the bandit leader down, and was free to continue on his way.

 

It was a pretty quick game, only about an hour, maybe an hour and twenty minutes, and that's with double-checking the rulebook every few minutes. I feel like I got the hang of the mechanics pretty quickly, especially melee combat and the system of enhancing rolls, which are potentially not the most intuitive since it's not the same across initiative, attack and defense.

I did realize right at the end that I'd forgotten that musketfire largely ignores armor, which may or may not have made that big of a difference in this game, but will be something to keep in mind next time. 

I should get some terrain rolling for the next time I want to play Ronin as well. I do have an MDF temple from Things From The Basement to work on one of these days... Possibly in September, since I really should spend Augut focused on getting things ready for Zombie RV at Wargames Among the Warplanes next month.

FINISH HIM!

 A few more Crooked Dice martial artists finished this week. We have a very humid week ahead of us, so I might not be at my painting bench too much - even in the basement, just sitting there painting, I start getting sweaty and there's no place I can conveniently plug a fan in to keep the air circulating. 

First up, two copies of "End Level Boss A," painted as the characters Scorpion and Sub-Zero from the "Mortal Kombat" video game and expanded media franchise. Both characters used the same model, just palette-swapped, in the original video game, hence using two copies of the same figure! Scorpion is depicted with pupilless white eyes in most media as a nod to him being undead, and I copied that on to my paint job here. 

 

I also finished "Street Fighter A," which I painted as the villainous Chong Li (played by Bolo Yeung) who went up against Van Damme in 1988's BLOODSPORT. 

 These will eventually see action on the table in future games of "A Fistful of Kung Fu."

In other news, my picking up entirely too many plastic zombies from my friend Dave has been delayed by his attending Gen-Con and coming home to find his dryer had given up the ghost, so I'm still in the green! I did pick up a couple of vintage "Clan Wars" samurai figures cheap at one of my local game stores who are still clearing out stock from a previous owner. I was looking at the Reaper paint rack and I think some of those colors were discontinued before I reentered the hobby in 2014...

 

Miniatures Acquired: 186

Miniatures Painted: 195

Terrain Acquired: 2

Terrain Painted: 8

Scatter Acquired: 8

Scatter Painted: 10

 

Zombie RV: Game 2 "Enter the Ninja"

Following Sandra's death at the cabin, Hector, Mark and Dave soon picked up a new survivor. A man dressed in a white ninja outfit with a sword slung across his back. The man refused to speak, communicating his needs solely through gestures. Mark soon gave him the name "Dudikoff" in reference to the ninja gear. Dudikoff's silence soon proved frustrating however, and before long Mark was shouting at the ninja to say something, anything. 

As the crew pulled on to a city street that looked promising for supplies, Mark and Dudikoff were keeping their distance from one another.

 

The group began to fan out, with Mark scaling the OTB and Dudikoff entering and climbing the stairs to the roof of the dispensary. Dave lined up a few lingering zombies and squeezed the trigger on his shotgun - and discovered he was out of ammo.

 More zombies were soon congregating, and Dave and Hector were in the middle of it - at least until Dave ducked into the dispensary and out the back door, leaving Hector to fend his way down the street alone.

 Mark and Dudikoff investigated two possible supply caches and came up empty, while Dave worked his way around and up on to the roof of the liquor store, finding a small cache of supplies there. 

 As Hector fought his way towards the last supply cache (in the bed of a crashed pickup truck), Dudikoff leapt across rooftops and jumped down, katana at the ready, on to one of the zombies that threatened him.

 Not to be outdone, Mark jumped down to start swinging his wrench at zombies as well.

 Leaping over a crashed car, Hector checked the pickup truck and found...nothing! 

"Let's get out of here," he said, eyeing the growing zombie horde. Dudikoff nodded, cutting his way free from a swarm of the undead.

 Dave was already running for the RV.

 Dudikoff jumped over zombies, and Mark and Hector tried to make it, but the swarm was just too densely packed; for every zombie they killed, two more shambled in.

The two survivors ducked into the RV and threw it into gear. "Looks like it's just you and me, Dudikoff," Dave said.

"You know, Michael Dudikoff wore a black ninja suit in the American Ninja movies," the ninja replied gruffly. "The white ninja look comes from Franco Nero in the movie Enter the Ninja."

"You could talk this whole time?" 

"Hai." 

"Should... I start calling you Franco?"

"No, Dudikoff is fine." 

Return to Frostgrave

 I drove out to Set's for a game of Frostgrave today - and right into a storm! I knew rain was in the forecast and we were supposed to get about 2 inches of rain over the course of the day, but it was dry and the sun shining when I left my house. I forgot, of course, that Lewiston is its own micro-climate unlike a half-hour south where I live. Halfway there, I started thinking, "Wow, the sky's sure looking dark..." and then got hit with rain coming down harder than anything I've driven through in years. And then the emergency alarm went off on my phone; I pulled over because it was raining too hard to see, and I see that the alarm is a tornado warning! 

Hoo, boy.

But I made it to Set's unharmed, and look at that table!

 We had a four player game - myself, Set, Chris and Brad - with a central premise of, we've been hired to clear out this hobgoblin-run forced labor camp and free the human slaves, especially a farmer's family that was freshly abducted and kept in a magically-locked cage in the center of the table along with the hobgoblins' accumulated loot. Freeing the slaves on the chains took a series of attack rolls (magic weapons cutting through the chains automatically) to cut slaves free. 

To complicate matters, every three turns a wyvern would swoop in to collect lumber harvested by the slaves, and potentially attack us. 

The magically-sealed cage would realistically require our wizards to work together to break the wards. 

We all spent our first few turns working on cutting slaves free and moving wizards up to the central cage to work on breaking the seals. 

On turn 3, both Chris and myself rolled a "1" when the wyvern appeared, and each of us had to nominate one of our figures for the dragon to attack. One of my newly hired thieves ended up in its mouth.

 Eventually the truce broke - well, I broke it. I noticed Chris lining a lot of figures up to swoop in and seize treasure once the magical cage was opened, and decided to attack. It, uh, didn't go great for me. Because everyone Chris had in place to seize treasure...was also in place to attack me, and then Set's warband jumped on me as well for being the aggressor. One after another, my crewmembers fell until just my knight, Shojo, was left on the table. Gina texted me around that time about whether I'd be able to pick dinner up for her on my way home (weather permitting), and I decided that it was time for me to bow out and make the long drive home (and pick up food). 

I didn't score that much treasure (ironically, Brad's warband swooped in and grabbed much of the hobgoblins' treasure as soon as the cage was deactivated while Chris and I were fighting), I didn't completely free one chain's worth of slaves, and I didn't earn that much XP through spellcasting or my wizard slaying members of other warbands personally. 

So I definitely could have played smarter (and probably less aggressively), but live and learn! I still have to tally up my XP and figure out what kind of treasure I actually got. And see who survived... 

Pop Culture Heroes

 A few more finished figures today, all of them more heroic types based on pop culture from the 1980s and 1990s. Let's run them down from best-recognizable to least, shall we?

First up is "Action Hero B" from Crooked Dice, pretty immediately recognizable as David Hasselhoff in the role of Michael Knight on the TV show Knight Rider. I've never watched the show myself (though I'm generally a fan of the Hoff), so I had to pull up some screenshots for outfit colors.

 Next up, the Muscles from Brussels - a street fighter from a line that Crooked Dice absorbed, which is pretty clearly intended to look like Jean Claude Van Damme. I based the outfit on the one he wears during the dance scene in 1989's KICKBOXER. 

Next, Van Damme returns - this figure, from the same pack as the previous, had a similar look and cut to his outfit as the figure above, so I went for a very different color scheme. Now, we've got Van Damme as Colonel Guile from the 1994 STREET FIGHTER movie. I saw this one in theaters as a kid (which is weird because I was 7 and wasn't a video game player - maybe Dad just wanted to see a Van Damme movie and I was his excuse?) but didn't remember much about it. Watched it last year when the new movie was announced and had a lot of fun with how corny it is.

 

One thing that caught my eye when looking at reference photos for this was that his American flag tattoos are "backwards" from the way they should be facing, which I dutifully recreated here. 

Finally, a Ninja from Reaper's "Chronoscope" line that's been in my project box for years. I opted to paint him as caucasian and wearing a white ninja outfit - thus making him Cole (Franco Nero's character) from the 1981 film ENTER THE NINJA. I might get a second copy and paint him in traditional black with a red belt, to represent Michael Dudikoff's character from the film AMERICAN NINJA.

 So what's the plan for these? Well, I do want to get back to Fistful of Kung Fu one of these days and have actual martial artist miniatures on the table for it. Plus, my local gaming convention Running GAGG has a "Pirates vs. Ninjas" theme announced for next year's show, and I think it'd be fun to put on a demo game there and call my event "Oops, Too Many Ninjas" or something like that. 

 

Miniatures Acquired: 184

Miniatures Painted: 192

Terrain Acquired: 2

Terrain Painted: 8

Scatter Acquired: 8

Scatter Painted: 10

 

Devils on Parade

 I'm prefacing this post with a warning - some of these figures are not just nude, but downright lewd. That's not normally my thing, but I've had them (I think I might have originally bought them to paint up for a friend I ultimately had a falling out with), I started working on them while washes were drying on the last bunch of zombies, and here we are. 

Let's start with the most Safe-For-Work one; this is the "Basement Beast" from Crooked Dice, and as impressed as I generally am with Crooked Dice's commitment to pop culture delving, I never in a million years would have guessed they would make a figure of the titular monster from the movie CELLAR DWELLER. The sculptor really captured John Carl Buechler's monster design from the film; rather than following the color scheme of the movie, I painted it with bright, almost cartoonishly red skin.

 The recipe for the skin color (since I know I'll want to do it again on future figures) is a base coat of Vallejo Game Color "Gory Red," washed with GW "Carroburg Crimson," then highlighted with Reaper "Fire Red" and a final highlight of Reaper "Regulator's Scarlet."

Next up are a pair of "Saucy Succubi" from Heresy Miniatures; they originally came in a three-pack but their sister managed to get dropped, break, and the pieces disappear instantly into the 8th dimension. 

 And now the really risque ones - these are a pack of Succubi from Hasslefree Miniatures, who sadly have stopped trading; I'm hopeful that the molds can get sold on to another manufacturer at the very least, as there's a number of figures in their "Modern Adventurers" range I missed out on and would like the chance to acquire. 

 So what's the plan for this bunch? I'm not 100% sure to be honest. I am giving another look towards Osprey's "When Nightmares Come" solo investigative horror wargame and and thinking about giving that a go, and this would give me a nice chunk of enemies towards a storyline fighting the "Damned" villain faction. 

And! They push me back into the green for a little bit on the tracker.

 

Miniatures Acquired: 184

Miniatures Painted: 188

Terrain Acquired: 2

Terrain Painted: 8

Scatter Acquired: 8

Scatter Painted: 10