The Samurai, the Servant and the Demon: A Folklore adversary for "When the Last Sword is Drawn"

"The smoke curled slowly in the still air of the woodland clearing. There was the scent of freshly-caught fish, cooking on an open fire. The samurai’s servant, Akira, turned the freshwater fish on the wooden spit, the fire occasionally crackling and sending a shower of sparks into the evening sky.

Across the clearing, the demon eyed the fire, enviously. The demon drew its grey tongue over its lips, salivating at the thought of the feast it might be able to enjoy in just a few minutes. Akira was sure that if his master, Kazuko, lost the duel, the demon would be consuming more than just the huge river-fish which Akira had caught that afternoon.

Kazuko levelled his sword at the demon’s throat. His hand was steady and he bent slightly bent forward in a stance long-practised in his family dojo. Despite his skill at sword fighting, Kazuko’s heart was racing. Kazuko watched the demon draw an over-sized, enormous sword with a single, crimson-red, muscled hand. In the demon’s other hand was an immaculately wrought katana - a trophy from another, older duel - but wielded as easily as if the sword was made of fly-wood, like a child’s toy.

As Kazuko circled around the clearing, the dust rose from his bare feet. He was quick on his feet. But was the demon faster?"

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As I mentioned in my last Blog post, I’ve spent much of my wargaming time this year building up Japanese terrain and painting miniatures for a skirmish ruleset, set in 17th Century Japan.

We’ve now played about a dozen or more games set in a Japanese historical background, but I wanted to expand the scope to create some games based on historical ukiyo-e prints and the rich tapestry of Japanese myths, folklore and legends. 

The Christmas break has given me the chance to do some painting for the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge, and this has been the first submission I've entered in the Challenge so far.

In a woodland clearing one evening, a samurai and his servant prepare for a duel against an Oni, a Japanese demon...  

Oni are depicted in Japanese folklore as being a supernatural form of ogre or demon, known for their fierce and bloodthirsty nature. They have a propensity for murder and brutal behaviour, frequently terrifying the heroes of folk tales and serving as a villain in kabuki drama. Japanese demons even have an appetite for human flesh, although we can guess that the Oni in this blog post might have first been attracted by the scent of cooking fish.

I wanted to equip the Oni with two swords, one a huge (normally two-handed) no-dachi and the other a katana. The Oni and the swords are from the wonderful Dixon Miniatures range of 28mm “Legends of Japan”, sculpted by Mark Copplestone in the late 1980s. Adding the swords into the Oni’s sculpted hands required a bit of brass-rod pinning, really to try and ensure that the swords could be 'held' steady and would not come adrift in hours of gaming.

The samurai is from the former Games Workshop range of Samurai, now sold by Wargames Foundry. I love these sculpts - created by Aly Morrison in 1984. They have, to my mind, stood the test of time very well.  I had the great pleasure of chatting to Aly about the figures a few years back.  I remember that one of his guides in sculpting the range were the ukiyo-e woodblock prints of artists such as Utamaro, Kunichika, Utagawa and Yoshitoshi. Which makes the range perfectly suited for the ‘feel’ of the game I’m looking to try and create.

I didn’t make any changes to the samurai, or his trusty servant (from Perry Miniatures). But I did scratch-build a small campfire on which a large freshwater fish could be cooking. I used a few scraps of wood, and a selection of 3D printed fish, one of which I could skewer on a brass-wire spit over the camp fire. I also added a few spare fish to base of verdant, broad leaves - cut from the meal foil from a wine bottle.  A small sprinkle of fiery-painted sand and foam completed the embers and small flames of the smoky fire.

My time is a bit restricted for painting at the moment.  So wargames which have a low figure count are definitely something which I'm enjoying at the present time.  With this in mind, our games of "When the Last Sword is Drawn" have featured duels, smaller engagements, and companies of half a dozen figures or so on each side.   Combined with a smaller wargaming table, the emphasis has been on opposing forces which are very easy to assemble and paint.  

The larger trees in the photos for this blog post were plastic bonsai, bought from an aquarium supplier in the 1990s and brushed-up this year to serve in our skirmish games.  The smaller trees are some very useful 3d prints - certainly something which we didn't have access to in the 1990s!

And, to follow the character cards I prepared for the "Characters of Laarden" a few years back, here some cards themed around the characters in this blog post but tailored for the rules in "When the Last Sword is Drawn".  Hope you enjoy the cards - they're very frivolous, but have proved to be fun in the games we've played.  

And I hope you can join me for more about Japanese skirmish wargames in another blog post in about a week's time.

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"When the Last Sword is Drawn": a Japanese-themed skirmish wargame

 

Over the past ten months, I’ve been continuing to work on our rules for “...with Flashing Blades”, and also have been exploring a quite different version of those rules which is set in Tokugawa Japan. The rules are tentatively called “When the Last Sword is Drawn” - maybe a bit of a mouthful, but based on a wonderful Japanese movie from 2002.

Whatever the rules end up finally being called, the core theme of the skirmish wargame is gaining honour by faithfully serving a Daimyo, Lord or Lady through a series of skirmishes and other conflicts.  Other themes have also appeared during the games we have played: deceptive appearances, family obligations, imagined slights and vicious revenge.  

I’ve really enjoyed the journey so far of creating another small-scale game which is a really interesting counterpoint to “...with Flashing Blades”. Certain common rules mechanisms appear in both sets of rules, but the themes are quite distinct and the two games play differently. For example, the swordplay in the Japanese version game is deadlier than “...with Flashing Blades”, which I feel fits the environment in which protagonists are fighting with razor-sharp katanas at close quarters.

I’ve also enjoyed rekindling a fascination and love for wargames with a historical and legendary Japanese background. It’s been fifteen years since I last painted up figures for this theme, and returning to paint noble samurai, disgraced ronin and wandering rikishi has been a sheer delight.

I hope to share more images of “When the Last Sword is Drawn” here, on the Blog, in the next few weeks. This blog has been neglected for the last year and a half, mainly as I’ve been been working on “...with Flashing Blades” and “When the Last Sword is Drawn” - painting figures, creating terrain, and also taking the games around to friends’ houses, various games days and smaller wargames shows. However, I have very much missed blogging and sharing ideas here. Although I think Twitter is a useful social media for keeping in touch with wargaming (and other) friends, I do struggle to keep track of older postings.  Blogging seems a lot easier in that regard.

So, with the New Year around the corner, I’ll leave you all with some images of the figures I've painted and games of “When the Last Sword is Drawn” we enjoyed in 2022.

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“With Flashing Blades” – Recommendations for Background Books

Since my last Blog post, a couple of people have asked me about reading and viewing material which might accompany the game which Nick, Rich and myself have been working on.  I thought it might be fun to mention some of the books I’ve been reading as background and inspiration for “With Flashing Blades”.  Like any list, this is not comprehensive.  The literature for swordsmanship, duelling and swashbuckling of all kinds is huge, and spans different genres from historical fiction to swords-and-sorcery, and from the supernatural to science fiction.  Here, I’ve confined my list to the books which I personally found useful as encouragement for the game.

Another couple of small caveats:  I’ve not listed any historical sources here.  I’ll prepare a Blog post in a week or so on that subject, looking at some of the background to early 17th Century France and also the ‘Schools’ of swords-handling, duelling and fencing which I found really interesting in the context of working on the game.  I have also limited this blog to written material.  A future Blog post will contain all the film and TV inspiration, including that theme tune!  

So let’s start with the grand-daddy of them all, “The Three Musketeers” by Alexandre Dumas.  I thought I knew this book, but I’d never read it before as a complete novel.  As I read it from cover to cover for the first time last month, I was really surprised.  It is not the book I thought I was going to read.  The actual sword fighting is infrequent in the book, and takes place quickly over very few pages.  I’ll not give too much away (just in case you, dear Readers, have not read the book), but it is not one of those novels where there is a sword-fight every twenty pages.  What is, however, very much present is intrigue.  There are plots, plans, stories, developments and yet more intrigues on top of all that.  When you read the novel, all the various plots hang together very well and the central arch of the story is not difficult to follow.  This is not “The Name of the Rose” or an Agatha Christie novel – the intrigue, though deep and pernicious, never obscures the story in which the lives of our heroes is unfurled. 

And, while we’re speaking of heroes, it surprised me that huge chunks of the book are placed in the in upper echelons of society.  We are frequently present in the world of the King, the Queen, the Cardinal and the Duke of Buckingham. Dumas loves to name-drop the titles of Dukes, Counts, Duchesses and nobles generally.  The actions of the musketeers frequently revolve around noble and royal characters, not the opposite.

Dumas also loves place-name dropping.  Much more familiar to his 19th Century French audience than to me in 2021, there is a litany of French street and place names, including prisons, palaces, market places and execution sites.  Some we know (La Bastille), but some are much more unfamiliar.  I thought that a map would be helpful in reading the book, and I found myself reaching for a guidebook of Paris in the early chapters.  You don’t need to do that, but it’s fun to have alongside you as you read the novel.

Finally, a huge shout-out to one of the Audible audiobooks of the “The Three Musketeers”.  I was reading the Penguin Classics version of the book, and chose the accompanying Audible version, narrated by the well-known actor, Paterson Joseph.  The narration by Paterson is a total delight. 

I love Audible generally, and Mr Joseph’s narration was one of the finest narrations I’ve heard on the site.  He has a real ear for French names, and really evoked the sense of place with each of the names of the people and places being pronounced. I was really thrilled to learn (from a Twitter post) that Paterson regarded his work on the Audible narration of "The Three Musketeers" as one of his best pieces of work.  I think its amazing and, if you have any interest at all in Dumas’ novel, I would strongly recommend you give Paterson’s Audible narration a try.

From Dumas’ classic, the next suggestion I have on my list is the canon of books by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, featuring Captain Alatriste.  I came to these books the long way around.  I first read Pérez-Reverte’s books in the 1990s and early 2000s, starting with the complicated (but remarkable) “Club Dumas”.  This book, incidentally, has a rich seam of connection to Dumas and “The Three Musketeers” (no spoilers, folks), but that was rather lost on me at the time, as the book is really about the supernatural, or – more accurately – the possibility of the supernatural. 

From there I read Pérez -Reverte’s other books, including the most excellent “The Fencing Master”.  Don Jaime, the main character of the book, is one of my literary heroes, especially as I have got older.  His sparse, austere and controlled lifestyle in Madrid as a 19th Century fencing master is something I’ve often thought about, particularly as an antidote to the uncontrollable and byzantine mess of my normal family life! I really enjoyed the book when I read it in 2003, and I enjoyed re-eading it last year in the depths of the pandemic.  

But I digress.  All of these books just prepared me for Pérez-Reverte’s “Alatriste” series of books.  Several of my friends recommended the “Alatriste” series to me (thank you!), and I have not been disappointed.  Captain Alatriste is the hero of the series, being a battle-scarred and indefatigable veteran of Spain’s wars of the early 17th Century.  Perhaps inevitably for a literary hero, Alatriste finds that fighting the French and Dutch in Flanders to be less dangerous than navigating the treacherous alleys and squares of Madrid, Seville and Toledo.  The books are narrated by a wonderful character, Inigo Balboa, a young companion and sometimes-manservant.  Unlike Dom Jaime in “The Fencing Master”, Inigo gives depth and humanity to Captain Alatriste's journeys, and I feel Inigo as a narrator adds to the stories considerably.

All of the Alatriste books I have read are fun and worthwhile.  So far, I’ve really enjoyed “The Purity of Blood” the most, but I have yet to tackle “Pirates of the Levant”.  Recommended reading and very much in the right vein for “With Flashing Blades”.

And finally, two left-field inspirations.  “With Flashing Blades” is set in Paris, in 1622, a city with a good claim to being the centre, or one of the centres, of the world at that time.  Thinking about the 'place' of the city in a game might seem a little bit abstract.  While we wanted to make our game of “With Flashing Blades” to be a miniature wargame (and “not a roleplaying game”), I did also want to think about how we could make the idea, and the themes, of a city come to life in a small table-space. 

In that context, I’d like to recommend two wonderful books, from very different genres.

“Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino is a tour de force about the potential of the city as an experience.  Is it literature?  Is it philosophy? Is it a mediation?  Or perhaps it's a mystery?  Who knows?  Not me, for sure.  But I loved every page and some of the images conjured by Calvino in the novel are simply spell-binding.  “Invisible Cities” is not the city of “With Flashing Blades”, but it might hopefully help us capture some of the chaotic fun and confusion of setting a game within our chosen city of 1622 Paris.

And last but never least, is a slim booklet which I bought through Drive Thru-RPG.  If you've never come across Chris Kutalik’s “Fever Dreaming Marlinko”, you are missing out. 

Chris’s book is small in size (only 68 pages), but it's a masterpiece.  “Fever Dreaming Marlinko” is a roleplaying guide to the strange city of Marlinko, and serves as a ‘city adventure supplement’.  You don’t need to be a fan of role-playing games, or play the Labyrinth Lord system to be inspired by Chris’ book. 

Funny, rude, dramatic and constantly inventive, it’s a terrific example of how to create a city which really feels like it exists as a backdrop to the gaming action.  If we can do anything like this in “With Flashing Blades”, we would be very pleased. 

So that's my very personal list of books which have inspired me in playing and helping develop "With Flashing Blades". I am sure Nick and Rich will have their own to add to the list, perhaps in a future episode of the TooFatLardies Oddcast.

I hope you can join me for the next Blog post, when I'll either be posting about converting and painting figures for "With Flashing Blades", or blogging about the films and television inspirations behind the game. Until next time, dear friends!

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"With Flashing Blades" - Crossing Swords in Paris

Since May this year, I’ve been working on a discrete project which is a lot smaller than my current Laarden 1688 obsession. It’s far from being a complete project - in fact its barely started - but I thought it was a good time to mention it here on the Blog.

Paris, 1622 - City of Glitter and Treachery

Back in 2019, I talked with my good friend, Nick Skinner, about developing a skirmish game based on the adventures of the “Three Musketeers” from the pages of Alexandre Dumas. We thought that the exploits of Athos, Porthos, Aramis, d’Artagnan, Milady, Rochefort and Cardinal Richelieu were perfect material to be transformed with the treatment of Lard. 

By one of those unexpected coincidences, another good friend of ours, Martin at Warbases, also mentioned about that time he was hoping to find some rules which were suitable for the period to accompany Warbases' fine range of miniatures (which were inspired by one of the excellent, recent TV dramatisations of Alexandre Dumas’ books).

We've barely started on the rules and play-testing, but it’s an exciting time - stepping out into Paris of the early-seventeenth century to cross swords with a multitude of rivals, enemies, factions and adversaries. We’re hoping for a game which is very portable - with our first play-testing being on a board 18 inches (about 48cm) square - and with a low figure count, possibly only a dozen figures a side.

Hopefully, history will not be forgotten as we travel the dusty roads of Champagne and the Île-de-France. I've been reading through manuals and treatises on the different schools of fencing from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hopefully, we can introduce rules for various schools of swordsmanship into our games - whether they are the Italian Schools of Bologna or Venice, the evolving styles of fencing with rapiers, or the styles of fencing practiced in the Salle d’Armes of Paris established by notorious gentlemen of the blade following the examples of François Dancie or Girolamo Cavalcabo.

And, with luck, the single-based figures can also be recruited for use into larger-skirmish games of "In the Buff" or "The Pikeman's Lament".

As for the figures, I thought 28mm worked best, using a mixture of Les Mousquetaires du Roi and the Garde de Richelieu from Warbases and Brigade Games, with some extra figures from Dixon Miniatures, Wargames Foundry, 1st. Corps and the lovely 1898 Miniatures range. As there'll be fewer figures on the table, it should also allow us the scope to create some fun conversions, vignettes and green-stuff lunacies.  Here's two converted figures from a favourite miniature in Dixon Miniatures' wonderful "Grand Alliance" range.

I've experimented in basing the main characters on circular MDF bases of 30mm or 35mm. I think they look good on the slightly larger sized base and it makes them easier to handle.  The larger bases can accommodate small blood markers depicting when a character is wounded - something useful to track in a small scale skirmish game.  To try and make these characters distinctive, I've swapped the right arms, added green-stuff lace, and created some special casualties for the characters (including silly things like a green-stuff dropped key to the Royal Chambers of the Louvre Palace).

As we're dealing with a small skirmish, I thought it was worth adding plenty of casualty figures for not only characters, but also the henchmen and ruffians on the tabletop.

In the fighting and duelling, we've been trying out rules for stumbling swordsmen and dropped weapons.  No one makes figures or bases for these, so I felt like making my own, together with some figures for prone swordsmen.  The two prone swordsmen below were converted form 1st. Corps casualties, with swapped-out Redoubt Miniatures' heads with green-stuff ruffs and cloaks.

Storing the stumble and dropped weapons bases on a magnetic board makes them easy to bring out for each game.

I've added common soldiers, ruffians, henchmen and civilians to the project.  I've experimented with adding these to 20mm or 30mm square bases (with rounded corners). These store really nicely in foam trays.  The Dumas novels are packed full of intrigue, disguises, spies and agents - so there's plenty of opportunity to assemble a cast of citizens which can fit into any Parisian location.

The threatening figure of the jailer in the front rank is a lovely Heresy Miniatures figure, which sadly now seems to be unavailable.  Somewhere, I have his partner-in-crime wielding a poker ... but I'm not sure in which box it's in....!  The other figures, below from left to right, are a Citadel Miniatures ratcatcher (with a Redoubt Miniatures head-swap), a lovely Warbases plague-doctor and a dagger-throwing Midlam Miniatures assassin.

Finally, and with a nod to future games, I could not resist painting up Louis XIII and Anne d'Autriche.  These Warbases miniatures painted up beautifully.  Any resemblance to Alexandra Dowling and Ryan Gage is ... well, I may have to paint up another pair of figures to get it just right!

I'm not at all sure what the final rules will look like, so all this might change...  So far we've been experimenting with a few, core characteristics.  And, of course, that's a chance for some more very self-indulgent cards to place at the players' disposals.

That's all for now, but hopefully in future posts I can post a few pictures of the games we've been playing, and explore our Paris of 1622 in a little more detail.  Hope you can join me for that next time.

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