Nippon Castle for Warhammer – Part II: From Real History to Fantasy Table

While I haven’t updated the blog in a bit, I have been plugging away and highlighting my progress on the Nippon castle for Warhammer Siege but also could be used with the rules for Warhammer Historical Siege and Conquest.

One of the things I’ve been trying to reconcile is that it’s not an Asian/Oriental/Japanese castle, but a castle set in the mythical Warhammer world. Those are two very different things, but it seems I have a hard time separating it!

As such, the walls and castle are very symmetrical, which is very unlike a traditional Japanese castle, which snaked back and forth with large sprawling grounds and multiple walls and moats. Since gunpowder was not widely used in medieval Japan, castles were for the most part made of wood and with very large moats. This had the practical effect of said castles taking up a very large amount of ground.

What I created, however, is a conceit to the physical limitations of building a castle at 28mm scale and my gaming table, which is 5x6 in terms of feet. It fits, but even with centering it in the middle of the table there isn’t a ton of room on the edges (note it’s not centered in the photos below). While rules exist for playing siege games across the editions, I’m planning on using the siege rules for 3rd Edition, warts and all.

One benefit of using the 3rd Edition rules for Siege is this lack of space is accounted for with Remote, Encamped, and Ready zones that are part and parcel of the rules. For those not in the know, these rules formed areas outside of the tabletop where action took place — essentially “off table” as it were.

As is depicted above you can see the corner towers are all complete now, along with the previously completed corner wall sections.The tops of all four towers are removable to facilitate the placement of war engines and miniatures as needed.

After I took these photos I began the process of gluing down stones an gravel in preparation of painting in the not too distant future. I'm also in the process of determining what the "inner" courtyard will look like so stay tuned.