Ronin - First Foray into Wargaming (Now w/ the Undead!)

[Metternich]

Great work on those villagers !  I look forward to seeing the Bandit buntai terrorizing them !  (Although the fellow with the hammer looks particularly fearsome)

[Maniac]

Great work on those villagers !  I look forward to seeing the Bandit buntai terrorizing them !  (Although the fellow with the hammer looks particularly fearsome)

If you roll anything like we do, I think it's the bandits who need to fear the villagers! 

[Metternich]

Charlemagne told me that he had a game with his roommate, where the roommate took the Sohei and Charlemagne the Bandits.  So far the Bandits remain undefeated.

[Tibson]

Those are some really nice looking figures.  Keep up the great work!

[Charlemagne]

Thanks much! Pretty soon I'll have some more terrain and some villagers ready to show!

[Seal]

Excellent work! It’s all super impressive 

[Metternich]

You should see his worktable and work-in-progress !  Its like he is reproducing 17th century Japan in miniature, on a one-for-one basis !

[Charlemagne]

Hi everyone, just finished up an Oni and a few villagers, I have a pair of other Oni, more villagers, and expansions to both the bandit and Sohei warbands in the pipeline and many more on the ready rack. I'd love to hear if anyone has any ideas for additions to my Japanese mythology collection, which is currently comprised of (now out of production) Legends of the 5 Rings Shadowlands miniatures (courtesy of Metternich) and some Forlorn Hope "Nippon Orcs" (as Bakemono) along with a couple of Reaper minis entries for Naga and some forest spirits. All ideas welcome!

Also had another fantastic game with Metternich today, after a bloody attempt to defend my Sohei Temple's sake offerings, the only Sohei survivors were the senior Sohei, a regular Sohei and a single initiate, while the bandits made off with only a few casualties (peasants and a single regular bandit) as well as my sake! Thus far bandits are 5-0, being played by both myself and my dad. And the rules claimed the bandits weren't competitive!

[nandrin]

Dear Charlemagne,
would you mind writing your Buntai composition for your bandits down? I am curious how you play them. In our group, we play a lot with Bandits and Sohei and we get a completely different result, as predicted in the rules: Bandits aren´t competitive! I can´t remember any victory for the poor lot, whereas the Sohei proved to be super tough each game, even played by different players and against different factions (we play with Samurai, Kuryu and Ninjas as well).

p.s. Your Oni looks great!

Cheers, nandrin

[Grumpy Gnome]

Brilliant brushwork! Great terrain, great figures. Sounds like lots of fun in the gaming as well.

[Marine0846]

Lovely figures and terrain.
Excellent painting.

[mikos khan]

Well done terrain and the figures are excellent!  I recently acquired the Korean and the Ming Chinese Buntai and was curious to know about anyone's experience playing them against the Bushi or the Sohei.     

[Bravo Six]

Brilliant brushwork!

+1 to that!! 

[Axtklinge]

Lovely work there, congrats!
Both minis and terrain look awesome, and must be a joy to game with.
Thanks for sharing.

[Metternich]

Nandrin,
          I guess you can say that our Bandits aren't quite "canon," and so far we haven't been using Northstar figures to represent them (the Sohei Buntai are Northstar).  The current Bandit buntai includes one Ronin hired sword, but we allow him to be a Senior Ronin (rank 4, with heavy armor and naginata) (note the rules for hired swords indicate that you can't have a Senior Ronin rank 4 until you have hired two Ronins, rank 3).  Without that Senior Ronin  it really wouldn't be much of a contest against the Sohei, given the poor combat capability of the Bandit Leader (ours wears heavy armor and carries a naginata).  The rest of the Bandit leadership consists of 2 Gashira (one Teppo, one Naginata) in medium armor.  The bandits also have 1 archer (medium armor), 1 teppo (medium armor), 2 yari, and 3 peasants with improvised weapons.   Also,  Charlemagne doesn't indicate how near a thing our last game was.  Although in the very last turn my bandits did secure one cask of sake, the Sohei successfully retained the second cask.  It was only by dint of my Ronin earlier having robbed the corpse of a slain Sohei that I won by a mere 1 point (so 6 points to 5).  And his Senior Sohei (tetsubo-armed) stood unscathed at the end of the game, despite having been surrounded (he killed two of his four assailants) and having a teppo fired at him at short range into the melee (a miss against the odds, which almost hit my own surviving peasant).
      Having played several games now, we observe that the naginata is really a "killer" of a weapon, and we don't see why anyone would want to take a nodachi.  (We noted that in En Garde, the equivalent halberd costs more points than a "great weapon").  Does anyone have any Ronin House Rules that give the nodachi greater capability ?  We do use the Osprey Ronin errata for the tetsubo, but the nodachi remains short-changed.  We are noodling around with the idea that: if a nodachi-wielder makes a successful strike on an enemy figure and; there is a second enemy figure in contact with the nodachi-wielder and;  the nodachi-wielder still has an attack left; then the nodachi-wielder may "continue the swing" and also attack the second enemy (expending that additional attack) despite priority.