Preparing the Wrath of Heaven
With a new website comes a new editorial blog. I’ll be keeping you all up to date on the latest news from the magazine, the world of wargaming, and life in general. I’ll share my own thoughts and the occasional entry from friends and colleagues, all eager to share their ideas with our readers.
The focus of my attention of late has been on our game for Salute 2013 (and probably ‘on tour’ for a few shows around the country). This participation game is called ‘The Wrath of Heaven’ and will feature Samurai, Ninja, and Ronin in the style of the best Kurosawa movies. The premise is for it to be a fast, fun and furious game for players taking no more than 45 minutes to an hour. Salute is a definite, as is Partizan 2013, other
shows will depend on whether I can rustle up enough volunteers to help out.
The gargantuan task of scenery building and model painting has been taken on by Christy and Jasper at Karwansaray HQ, the scenery and miniatures at Salute will be their work in the majority. However if we are to properly test the game and take it around other UK shows, we’ll need two sets of scenery. So with a little help I’ll be building my own set, or more accurately adding to my existing Samurai scenery, which has been dusted off after spending a few years in my shed!
To help with the general flavour of what the game should look and feel like, I’ve turned to watching Japanese movies of the period. I’ve been a fan of Akira Kurosawa ever since tracking down a copy of Seven Samurai in
my late teens. The more I watched, the more I realised how western cinema has been influenced by Japanese cinema and Kurosawa in particular. The film Yojimbo was remade into A Fistful of Dollars. Hidden Fortress was influential on the later Star Wars series. However the list of inspirational movies does not end there. Get hold of
a copy of 13 Assassins if you want all out katana action! It had me thinking on how I could make our demo even bigger… Tempting, but I’d risk the ‘Wrath of Christy’ if I asked her to paint 13 Ninja and their 200 (!) opponents [Yes, you would! CB].
We are still very much in the playtesting stage of the game, seeing if the clever ideas in my head actually still look as clever when played out on the table. The hardest part is the initial concept or idea. Once you’re there the rest just has to be written or built and falls into place piece by piece, or it should. So far, so good.
I want the game to have several references to movies. I’d love to build the iconic ruined gatehouse from
Rashomon. The watchtower from Yojimbo is another. Time is of course the big constricting factor, there’s the magazine to prepare, people to contact and real life to get in the way – which it invariably does. No wonder I’ve never gotten around to doing that Arnhem or Pegasus Bridge I’d been planning… ok more dreaming of than planning…
Currently I’ve been converting plastics for our demo. This has been inspired by an idea by Steve of LBMS, who has been converting the Perry plastic Mahdist Ansar to Peltasts (more on that in the next issue). I thought about doing the same for Japanese peasants and bandits, the ideal opposition for our game. I’ll deal with my
conversions and other building projects in my next blog.
Well that’s it for now…
Jā mata ne!
(See you later!)
