Let the Blood Dice roll...

One of the pleasures in designing a wargame is being able to create tangible things which add to the fun and theme of the game.

A key themes of the swordplay in “When The Last Sword Is Drawn” is having miniature warriors wielding iconic Japanese katanas, wakizashi, no-dachi and naginatas.  Who doesn't want to have the chance for their miniature heroes to wield an array of sharp edged weapons from Japanese cinema, manga and samurai literature?

To preserve that theme into the game, I wanted each miniature figure wielding a razor-sharp weapon to get to roll a “Blood Dice”.  Only one (or sometimes two) of the sides of the dice has a symbol - being a cinematic blood spatter.

If a miniature in combat rolls the blood symbol on their blood dice, then their opponent has suffered a debilitating cut from the razor-edged blade. The effect of that is to increase the severity of any additional hits on that opponent. The blood dice therefore gives a different dynamic to just inflicting casualties in a combat round.

The more we used the blood dice in the games, the more players seemed to like the effect of the blood spatter face appearing in a cluster of dice results.

I had to work out how to incorporate the idea into the dice I already had in my dice-bag. Of course, I could have just given a differently coloured dice and used “6” for a blood symbol. That’s perfectly serviceable, but seemed to lose a bit of the drama of specifically designed dice.

I therefore bought a few handfuls of blank dice and painted blood spatters on one (or more) of the dice sides. I started with D6s, but also tried D12s (painting two sides), a couple of D8s (painting one side on one, and two sides on the other) and even (purely for laughs) a D4.

I kept the scarlet “blood” paint as thin as possible and lightly gloss-varnished the whole dice to make sure all sides were evenly painted.  Maybe a statistician might report that the micrometer depth of paint on a face of the dice makes a difference to the various rolls in a game, but so far I think that the blood dice rolls have come up as unpredictably as normal dice.

Thirty of so games in, the blood dice have been causing mayhem, as was the intention.

Indulgent?  For sure.  But certainly fun.

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The Limbo of Sorcery: An entry for Challenge XV

Shinkurō, the former ronin, had never heard of "toad magic" until the moment that Lord Ghoda mentioned it. The ancient sorcery that Lord Ghoda claimed he had been studying sounded to Shinkurō like the ramblings of a drunk, at best. Or the ravings of a mad man at worst.

Sorcery and spells to turn a magician into a toad, and to enable to the spell-caster to weave magic and enchantments? It sounded almost heretical to voice the thoughts in his own head, Shinkurō warned himself. What nonsense!

But then, the demon had appeared. A powerful Dai-Oni, armed with a huge war-mallet, javelins and a famous sword stolen many decades before from Lord Ghoda’s grandfather. Against such an adversary, both Shinkurō and his new Lord would be helpless. It was just a matter of time before the demon would overwhelm them both.

At least it had all seemed gloomily inevitable until the moment that the magic transformation which had been promised by Lord Ghoda, actually worked.

It was beyond Shinkurō's belief, but.....it was happening before his eyes. Lord Ghoda’s webbed feet were starting to cast the spell to banish their adversary.

Shinkurō just hoped that the incantation didn’t require fingers.

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Happy New Year, everyone!

Over the last few years, I've taken part in the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge, a global community painting-a-thon over the winter months.  This year is Challenge XV, and along with the other challengers I'm looking forward to three months of frantic painting and blog posting.  

The last couple of Challenges, I've added some figures to my Japanese figures for my game of "When the Last Sword is Drawn", and to get me started, I added a couple more.  

The figures were a lot of fun to do. The demon and rōnin are both Dixon Miniatures sculpts by Mark Copplestone. They’re quite venerable, being first produced in 1984, although I bought them both earlier this year. The gigantic toad is from Crooked Dice, one of a couple of large specimens I purchased last year and hadn’t yet used.

I added some of the GW “Barbed Bracken” to the base of Shinkurō. I admit the spikey leaves do look, if you're a fan of manga, a lot more “Wicked City”, rather than strict Edō-period Japan. But I’ve enjoyed using these plants on various terrain bases, and hopefully I can use more of them as the Challenge progresses.

The bracken painted up very well, even though they are quite “flexible” (a.k.a. “bendy). I coated the plastic with PVA-glue beforehand, to add a little stability. But so far, in the games we have played with terrain and bases featuring barded-bracken, the paint hasn’t flaked off the razor-sharp thorns. A minor miracle worthy of Lord Ghoda himself (in toad-form).

I painted the submission as my entry for "Limbo". How else can one describe an indefinite transition to gigantic toad-form? Knowing this is Limbo also allows me to add a totally indulgent in-game character card for Lord Ghoda in his mythical-Japanese fauna-form, with two slightly more sensible cards for Shinkurō and the demon. If, of course, one can ever claim anything to do with demons is ever sensible or simple.

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