Samurai Night Fever II: The Rules

Wrath of the Khans Rules and outline.

Ok, here's the rules and outline of the tourney. For those of you who played in the first SNF you'll find them familiar. I've liberally stolen stuff from Paul Hannah's 'Skulls of Tamerlane'* tourney from last year and from the tweaks Neldoreth has done to the system.

"Thanks guys for your hard work!"

The Basics

1. All games are played on 2x2 boards with armies based on 40mm frontages (that is 15mm standard).

2. All armies must have the following keyword in their title; 'Japanese', 'Chinese', 'Korean' and 'Mongol'.

OR

May be a legitimate, listed enemy of one of those armies.

Players are reminded this is an Asian themed tourney and as such should adhere to the spirit of the tourney and bring an Asian army. As this is an inclusive, easy going game, nobody will be turned away providing their army meets either criteria. 

Armies with options are NOT allowed to change between games. That would most certainly tone down the terror of rule 5, wouldn't it?

3. The moderator is Shogun of both Time and Space. Both he and those he appoints as loyal Rules-Samurai will have final say in rules questions. Kvetching is very dishonourable.

4. Rules used will be DBA 2.2 in all cases except as listed below.

5. All games will be played on pre-determined terrain. There will be 8 distinct maps, all representative of decisive or interesting battle of Asian history. These maps attempt to reflect a variety of terrain and climates.

Players will dice using their armies aggression ratings to determine defender/aggressor.

Players will choose the terrain assignment blindly and randomly before each match.  

6. Winners of each match are determined by the rules. Scoring for the tourney will be tracked in Bushido Points (BP's) and be scored as follows:

Killing the Enemy** General: 3BPs

Sacking Enemy Camp or BUA: 2BPs

Winning the match: 1BP

Enemy Element Killed by General:1BP***

All are cumulative.

7. Winner with the highest BP score will be awarded the +5 Katana of Mightiness. 

The player with lowest BPs gets the Wakizashi  of Atonement.

That covers most of it. I'm always interested in feedback and ideas to make this fun and outrageous tourney.

*In which my hapless Cilician Armenians were chewed up quite thoroughly.

**Do I really need to put 'enemy' in this list? Perhaps , yes I do.

***That is- in direct front edge to front edge contact. Not supporting, not overlapping or buttocksing.

I suppose shooting counts. If you are brave enough to enter with a Bw General, you deserve all the kudos you can get.

Wrath of the Khans

FallCon 2010 will see the return of Samurai Night Fever. Now with 300% more light horse!

This year 'Samurai Night Fever II: The Wrath of the Khans' expands the tournament to encompass all those wonderful horse armies of the plains. Previously, an army was eligible if it had 'japanese' or 'samurai' in the title or was a legit, listed enemy of one of these armies.

Lord Saketumi, Early Samurai Bow General

Now, the keywords are; 'japanese', 'samurai', 'mongol', 'korean', and 'chinese'. Armies that include those words in their names or are legitimate enemies of them. Books II, III and IV only. Sorry Shang Dynasty, but I had to make the call some place.

And let's try to keep things 'east of the Urals', ok? If you try to convince me to let you play Teutonic Knights or some other sort chainmailed euro-army I will use my Toshiro Mifune grade scowl on you , humiliating you in front of the cool DBA players who brought awesome Asian armies to the tourney.

fear the scowl.....

Sound good? I hate compiling lists.

The FallCon first Friday DBA tourney has the tradition of being easy-going, n00b friendly and a little odd. I'm pleased to continue this tradition. Rules will be posted later and will be pretty simple; kill the enemy general, sack the camp, rout the army. For those of you who are so inclined and require a textual basis for this, I will be posting more concise paragraphs at a later date.

So, get painting! If you need some resplendent inspiration, here's another video from Altan Urag, not just my favourite Mongolian Folk-Rock band, they've been stuck in my head and in my MP3 player.

This is a little more moody and less bloodthirsty than the last one I posted. While you listen go over to Neldoreth's site and read about his Mongol project: http://www.hourofwolves.org/?view=articles&which=mongolProject

Dr. Hoo.

Love the BBC?

Love those wacky Saxons?

You can't get much better than this series.

A History of the World in 100 0bjects.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sl6dt

It's 15 minutes that will grow your brain. It also features Seamus Heaney on Beowulf. Heaney has done easily the best translation on the work. Shivery good stuff.

I've been in a more reading, less painting phase. So not much right now to show for my efforts. I have almost finished Piggott's work on Pre-Historic India. (whew..)

Pictures and other stuff related to Samurai Night Fever II: Wrath of the Khans will be next up.

Until then,

-S

Warrior Women!

Blog action has been pretty slow round these parts... And heres the reason:

Together with my partners Neldoreth and Pattus Magnus, we've launched our new miniatures company, Trey Corbies.

Our new site is at http://www.treycorbies.com/

As you may have surmised the new company encompasses a complete line of Scots-Irish warrior women in life-like and exceedingly portable 15mm.

Yeah, I know too much reading of the Tain before bed.

The whole story is on the Corbies site, so I won't relay it here. But suffice to say, we've created the first and most superb line of miniatures ever devoted to the warrior women of ancient Ireland. By far.

Cheers,

-Sean

Steppe Child

I'm painting Mongols.


You should be too.

Edit:
The video is by Altan Urag www.myspace.com.altanurag
It's a new obsession of mine. These guys are the best.
The visuals are from Bodrov's Mongol from a few years back.
The Hippy watched the clip with me and said 'gaaack! holy blood shed Batman!' or something to that effect. We had watched the movie last fall and had fun with it and forgotten the sanguinous nature of the action until you view it distilled into a few minutes of galloping carnage.
Mongol pix next week!
-S

For Bob

Sure, this has nothing to do with April Fools Day...

For Bob in Edmonton (and everyone else who says nice stuff about my painting) some gratuitous pictures of Erin Gray from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

Ahhh, the 80's

Wilma,

Twiki.

Buck

And while not Erin Gray, this picture sums up my primal ambitions from 1980.

I really sucked at Defender.

The Zhao and Ch'u Show

BASED ON A TRUE STORY!

"He's a plucky crossbowman from the south kingdom of Ch'u. And he's a fierce crossbowman from the northern kingdom of Zhao."

Together they fight the Ch'in.

There!

Done the two uniform prototypes for the Warring States project. I will be doing both the Ch'u list (1x HCh (g) 1x HCh, 1x 3Cv (most likely) 2x 4Sp, 2x 3Wb (dare to die!) 4x 4Cb, 1x 2Ps)

and the Zhao/Chao list (1x HCh(g), 1x HCh, 2x 2Lh (the real reason to do this list), 4x 4Sp, 3x 3Cb, 1x 2Ps.

My enabler and partner in many crimes neldoreth will be doing the Qin/Ch'in and Yueh. It should be glorious.

Here's the Ch'u crossbowman. The scheme will revolve around a light blue and grey uniform with a bronze/brassy armour finish.

Here we see Mr. Zhao. Red and grey clothing with steely armour.

Both are easy paints and should look distinct on the table top.

Renegade Warring States Chinese figs come with either a top knot or a toque. I'm going to try to give all my Ch'u guys the toque and Zhao the top-knot. I really don't have much more to go on other than I think the top-knot looks spanky and the Osprey shows the Zhao guy with a top know. It further more elaborates that the Ch'u were frequently derided by being called 'monkeys with hats' which we must accept as 'fightin' words' from ancient China. So if you wondered if I had some historical back-up, yes I do.

On the whole I am pretty pleased. The skin tone bugged me the most. Obviously we don't want them looking like my Irish, but too exaggerated 'yellow' skin tones will make them look more like The Simpsons than warriors of China. I used Privateer P3 Idiran Flesh as a base. Then used Vallejo Medium Flesh, once over the base, then a second over a GW wash of Sepia (can't live without that stuff). I'd be very pleased to hear your feedback.

Another is the sculpting of the faces, which was brought up by the eloquent and uber-informed vonBerlichengen in the thread on Fanaticus. http://www.fanaticus.org/discussion/showthread.php?t=9365

The Ch'u guy really looks more like an Englishman than an Asian. Look at the nose! A conk that size belongs on Alfred the G.

On the other hand, this guy's very exaggerated 'Asian' features sort of give me a creepy 'Charley Chan' vibe. I've yet to meet anyone with eyebrows like that.

But consider some of the actual terracotta warriors, who have stylized facial features. We might wonder if Renegade was trying to model after that example instead of being rather being dippy.

I haven't met this guy either...

Another pic for those who like that sort of thing...rear view!

Those shoulder plates give them a GW Space Marine feel. (Not that I have EVER painted such a thing...cough...cough...) I like these figs. And should Renegade get their stuff moving and crank out a chariot I will be very happy.

In short I blame neldoreth and Tim in Saskatoon for enticing me and my already weak will into 28mm. I hope N gets his mojo back http://www.hourofwolves.org/?view=newsArchive and gets painting and I can't wait to bring the completed Zhao/Ch'u force out to 'Toon town and devastate Mr Tim's fancy pants fantasy forces with a HoTT morph. (suggestion on that composition welcome as well)

Thanks for reading. Have fun and don't get in the way of the Hadron Super-Collider.

-Sean

Technicolour Reconstructions

A quick post today.

I need to go make supper (curried chickpeas and pappadums!)

and don't have anything too fresh in the painting department.

I came across these colour restorations of Greek sculpture and again was impressed by the vivacity of the colours.

You can read about the exhibit and process here:

http://www.archaeology.org/0801/trenches/colorgods.html

I contrast this with the discussion on Fanaticus regarding Skythian pants and other aspects:

http://www.fanaticus.org/discussion/showthread.php?t=9290

My next hoplite force (probably LHG Thessalians) is going to be packed with bling.

Cheers,

-Sean