Ikko-ikki or Bandits

Postman Pat brought a nice little box from Black Hat Miniatures containing a selection of their Ronin and armed peasant figures this week. These along with some Ikko-ikki and armed peasants from the Perrys will be used to make a bandit, peasant rebel or Ikko-ikki force to provide an in-house opponent for the Lord of Tea. Or in big battles they are a ready, and expendable, allied contingent. Assuming that is, that I ever find an opposing army of samurai big enough that I require reinforcements.

So I ordered one bag (3 figures per bag) each of Ronin with bow, naginata, yari, katana and no-dachi (big, two handed sword) and four bags of the peasants with bamboo spears, so there'd be enough of them to make a unit/band/mob. So all of my ronin/bandits will be unique figures which suits the irregular aesthetic for such a force

The peasants with bamboo spears have three different figures (one each per bag). They are one piece castings and were pretty good to clean up except for some heavy flash around the ends of the bamboo spears. The bamboo spears are nicely done though. I'm thinking about giving one of them an Ikko-ikki banner.

peasants with bamboo spears

back view of some

The Ronin are all unique figures, wearing an assortment of heavy but old-fashioned laced armour, some newer helmets, lighter armour or no armour at all.

Ronin with yari

Many of the weapons had to be glued on. All of the secondary katanas had to be glued on to their sashes as well.

Ronin with katana and a Perry figure for comparison

The katana armed Ronin had their swords cast onto arms that needed attaching at the shoulders.

Ronin with bow

Ronin with no-dachi. Figure in middle was one piece, figure on left got complicated

The no-dachi Ronin on the left of the picture, who I think looks pretty cool and might become the captain of my band has both hands cast onto the handle of the sword and then you glue the hands onto the wrists. Well, while I was cleaning up some flash the sword handle snapped. So instead of a reasonably straight forward glue job, I now had three pieces to attach to each other, one of them quite small. I also had to be careful to make sure both hands lined up properly so the samurai wouldn't be holding a bent-handled two-handed sword! I think I succeeded.

Ronin with naginata

The naginata were also surprisingly difficult to glue. Mainly just trouble getting a good bond, even with gel superglue. As you can see they gave me three sprues of naginata, so I could have my choice of arming each with a slightly different weapon or arming them identically.

So far this spring I've been stupidly busy on all the nice days, and when I've had hobby time it's been wretchedly cold (even snowing). But this weekend is forecast to provide some fine weather for spray priming, so I can get these chaps and my Museum Miniatures baggage train ready to paint. There's a little one day convention in June that J&M is going to be at, and I'd like to run a game of Ronin if I can. I haven't GMed at a show in a long time!