I’m not really surly but it is Pirate weekend (Pirate talkin’ was actually Thursday but a lot of the festivities show up on the weekend) and I thought it fitting. Especially because I was combing through my collection looking at Pirate-themed gaming options when I stumbled on my copy of Merchant & Marauders.
This old Z-man game got a lot of attention and was well liked by my group but it disappeared and never came out again. Looking back through the box, I realized why.
Buried in the box like forgotten treasure was my unfinished painting attempt to get the ships pimped out. The result was a bunch of half-finished ships that sat languishing in the bottom of the box. Being half-finished, I didn’t want to play the game (and it would be hard since I painted over the player colors) and so everything sat tucked away.
So I pulled everything out and slapped some more paint down. I have a ways to go still but I used the airbrush to finish the base coat of sails for a lot of the half-done tall ships. I’ll take stock and see if I can’t finish this years old project and get it to the table again. Yarr!
That ain’t all! What are Pirates without Ninjas!
This is a bit convoluted so strap in. We’re about to shoot through the rapids of my stream-of-consciousness: I bought the Infinity Miyamoto Musashi figure before I knew much about army building in Infinity. The model was listed under “Yu Jing” (the faction I play) on several online retailer sites and once I saw the sculpt, I knew I needed it, even though it is the older version of the model.
I quickly found out that some “shit” went down in the world of Infinity and the JSA, Japanese Sectorial, split off from Yu Jing and now a bunch of models aren’t legal, including Musashi here. No matter, sculpt is awesome and was quite easy to paint up and look passable for the studio edition.
I don’t like to have just “things” sitting around, like my cool but useless Musashi model. I need function to go with an ever-so-pleasing form so I started thinking, ‘what if I threw Musashi into Test of Honour?’ He could be from the future…
Boom. There he is. Miyamoto Musashi from the future. Maybe he was sent back in time to stop the catalyst of the Yu Jing domination of his people some 700? years later. If that was so, what if the Yu Jing knew of Musashi’s gambit and sent an ally of their own to stop him.
Ninjas!?! Shit son, this just got real! Now my other favorite Asian Stereotype model from Infinity is in Test of Honour. I could see a whole campaign revolving around this concept.
Or maybe I didn’t have anywhere to place the models while I was cleaning things up and put them on my Test of Honour terrain because it was there and it all just looked damn cool. We’ll never truly know. All I know is Miyamoto Musashi was a badass in his day and part of me is now wondering if he was badass because he was secretly from the future…