Samurai Progress

It has been a while since the last update on my 28mm Samurai for Ronin project, but I have not been idle. Since my last post I have finished my first 100 points of two new Buntai.

The first is a second Bushi buntai. This time a very small, elite team.

The Bushi faction restricts the models you can choose pretty heavily. Combined with the high points cost of the models, most 100 point Bushi buntai are likely to be more or less the same. You will have no more than five models, of which only one can be a Samurai. The rest will all be Ashigaru and, although you have some choice of weapons, no more than one can have a teppo (musket) and no more than half can have missile weapons.

There is an alternative option, however, and that is to choose only models of rank 3 or higher which means Samurai and above. With that in mind, my second Bushi buntai is made up of only two Samurai and one Hatamoto* on a warhorse.

 A confrontation between the Ii and Shimazu clans

Technically, this buntai is against the rules as the "what you will need" section at the start of the rulebook says you need 4 - 20 models per side. But I'm not sure this can be considered a hard and fast rule. The same section says you need counters, but if you chose to right down wounds and status changes on a piece of paper it couldn't really be called cheating. In any case, I plan to expand the buntai when I get the chance.

The Samurai are painted red in the style of the Red Devils of Ii Naomasa, who long term readers may remember were the basis for my 6mm Samurai army. The Red Devils are always a popular choice because they were one of the only clans to have anything close to a uniform colour scheme. Ii Naomasa himself was shot by a Shimazu clan sniper at the battle of Sekigahara, so they fit quite nicely with my first bushi buntai.

My third buntai are the Sohei, or Warrior Monks.

The Sohei are pretty good match for the Bushi. Their combat pool and fight values are about the same as the equivalent rank bushi and they have a similar array of weapons. They're more lightly armoured, but trade that for being fearless, which means they can ignore morale checks. They also include some rank 0 models, in the form of the two temple attendants armed with yari (spears). These guys are little more than speed bumps, but only cost eight points each, less than half the cost of the cheapest bushi model.

The models are all from Perry miniatures. I am using the bare-headed monks as Initiates and the one with a covered head as a full Sohei. I have no idea if this has any basis in history, but it's an easy way to tell the apart.

Most of the Monks are equipped with the fearsome naginata, one of those ambiguous weapons that sits somewhere between a pole-arm and a sword. Basically, if a pole-arm has a longer handle than blade and a sword a longer blade than handle, the naginata, like the Dacian falx, sits in between with a blade almost the exact length of the handle. In game terms, the naginata boosts damage (but not as much as a two-handed sword) and initiative (but not as much as a spear) and so is a good compromise weapon.

This picture is from a recent test battle between the Shimazu bushi and the Sohei. The battle was an absolute flat draw, which shows how good a match the two sides are.

More picture as soon as possible.

 *Hatamoto, meaning "men under the banner" where the retainers of a senior Samurai or Daimyo (Warlord). Ronin appears to be using the term to designate an elite Samurai, as they are the lowest rank that can ride a horse.

Painting Table Update - Ronin

I have been wanting to do something with 28mm historical Samurai for a while. I had a accumulated a few Perry Miniatures models, but hadn't figured out what to do with them until Osprey released Ronin as part of its wargames series.

Ronin is designed for small scale skirmishes with 4 to 20 models a side, which means I didn't have a lot of painting to do. But between Chaos Dwarfs, Bushido, Inquisitor, I only just got around to painting them.

The warbands/battle groups in Ronin are called Buntai. So here is my first Buntai.

They aren't supposed to have a very uniform look, but I tried to put a little bit of blue on all of them.

 

The Sashimono (back banners) show that they belong to the Shimazu clan. The Shimazu were based in the far west of Japan in Satsuma, far enough away from the centres of power to develop a few idiosyncrasies. They were one of the first clans to encounter westerners and to use muskets. But in spite of that, at the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, the clan leader Shimazu Yoshihiro turned up carrying a bow, which was considered quite quaint.

The Shimazu were unique among the Samurai in being involved in two overseas ventures. The first was the unsuccessful invasion of Korea in the 1590s. The second was in 1609 when, at the behest of the Shogun, they invaded the independent kingdom of Ryukyu, now the island chain of Okinawa, conquering it and absorbing it into Japan.

Two hundred years after this they were the instigators of the Satsuma rebellion whose history would be mangled by Tom Cruise and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles among others.

These first five are a 100 point Bushi buntai, consisting of three Ashigaru, including one with a teppo (musket), an Ashigaru-Gashira (basically a sergeant) and a Samurai. I'll be boosting it up to 200 points in due course and working on a couple of other Buntai so they have someone to fight. If you look in the background of the top two shots you see the beginnings of the next Buntai.