With a period of extended leave coming up through all of April to deal with a family issue, I need a distraction and when Warlord released the Wars of The Samurai supplement book for Pike & Shotte I grabbed a copy. I've been fascinated by Japanese culture for a few months, starting with the release of the Shogun show on disney+ and then watching a lot of Japanese Minimalisim/meditation videos on YouTube, the practices of which I've been incorporating into my daily life (or trying to, at least).
I was thinking of doing a 28mm Japanese army using Warlord plastics, but then these 10mm models from Wargames Atlantic caught my eye:
That's nearly 700 models, more than enough for possibly two complete armies. But which rule set? I got a copy of Pike & Shotte but being honest, I'm not a big fan of these rulesets as I find them very hard to parse down due to the layout of the book. It's not exactly intuitive, and so I looked once again at an old GW game, Warmaster, which has been kept alive thanks to the gaming community and the Warmaster Revolution ruleset.
I remember playing this when at GW and I loved it - plus it was quite easy to get huge armies on the tabletop thanks to the scale and ease of painting. No tricky details to be picked out, and a unit could be completed in an hour. The rules and army lists are free to download so I've done that, but then taken it to the next level and had them printed out in a bound book.
Sadly, they won't look quite like the above pics, instead they will be spiral bound, but man, do those look good. Perhaps a future project...?
There are rules and army lists for a Nippon force included so I'll be using these to form my army. Possibly two armies dependant on how the models actually break down.
Note, there is only 1 line for Samurai infantry, however the box set comes with troops armed with bows so I think these will have the Attacks value 4/2 (roll 2 dice for shooting) and Points value 95. Same special rules as Samurai.
So, that's the models and rulebooks sorted. I've also ordered a ton of mdf bases, 40mm x 20mm, which is the standard for Warmaster, as well as some 40mm rounds for the Generals and 25mm rounds for heros. I also ordered some Pendraken metal 10mm Ninjas to bulk out the armies.
And to help with the background, I havea copy of the Nippon book created for The 9th Age community driven Warhammer project. Again, coming printed in A4 and spiral bound, but I do love the look of a hardback book, don't you?
Next post should be some unboxings and I might launch a dedicated YT channel as well. I'll think about that, as April is going to be a weird month.
