Ronin / Black Ops Project

This is what sparked it off!

I've been really pleased with my output over the last couple of months, especially as the first half of the year was a bit of a slow burner and didn't really get anywhere. The Fistful of Lead Reloaded inspiration appeared as if by magic and gave me a real drive to get some decent terrain completed for a change, rather than another 'ooh shiny' attempt to paint some little lead people. The end result is a stack of Old West buildings, together with trees, hills and railway tracks that will also double up for games in the Back of Beyond. On top of that, I've enjoyed several games of FFOLR both at the club and at home, with the Warfare participation game to look forward to as the big finale to the project.

Now that the Old West stuff is nearly complete, for the moment at least, my thoughts have been turning to what to do in the next six weeks or so in the run up to Christmas. This isn't a lot of time and I'll have a lot of work to do, so it will have to be a very limited project with a minimum of figure painting involved. I also really enjoyed making the mdf laser cut buildings for the Old West project, so the opportunity to make some more for a different genre would be a big plus. Ideally, I'd also like to be able to re-use whatever terrain I make for more than one period or set of rules. This narrows things down a bit and has given me a clear direction in which to head.

The big idea is to double up my existing but stalled project for Ronin with the latest new set of rules Black Ops, combining the terrain but painting separate parallel forces of figures, the former from the Perry Miniatures Samurai range and the latter from the Copplestone and EM4 Future Wars range. I have all of the figures I need for Black Ops but have decided to use the Perry figures for Ronin, as the Northstar and Foundry figures that I originally collected don't really have the all important inspirational oomph. The terrain will utilise the Sarrissa Precision Japanese building kits that I gathered together for Ronin last year, together with some other more modern stuff from Timeline Miniatures and elsewhere.

This is all a bit nebulous at the moment but I have put in an order for some sohei warrior monks, Ikko Ikki, ninja and samurai in everyday clothing from Perry Miniatures today. This will be enough for two decent sized buntai already, one a Koryu martial arts school and another a community of sohei warrior monks, with the ninja as Swords for Hire or a stand alone assassination unit. There's plenty of scope to build on this basic framework, so some bandits or samurai may well be added to the set up later on, along with some peasants and civilians. In the meantime, I'll start on the figures for Black Ops, with two rival teams of intelligence agents or criminal gangs and a SWAT team of special force operatives as the first units to get cleaned up and based...

...it's also a good excuse to watch lots of Luc Besson and Akira Kurasawa films!