Risen Sun update

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Bushido: Risen Sun is the third edition of Bushido the game. Over the last six years we have, with the help of the players, identified elements of the game we can improve upon and profiles that aren’t so popular with players. The errata has grown in this time to become unwieldy and many of the traits have become obsolete or unused. So it’s time for a revamped and freshened up version of the rules. We have been working on the changes for over a year, but we know that games become truly great once the players have their say, so we want you to help make this the best edition yet. More on that below, first lets look at some of the changes...

All one mechanic

One of the hardest parts of Bushido to get used to was the combat dice mechanic, due to its differences to other opposed or target tests. Now everything uses the same mechanic:

Roll your dice, pick the highest, up to 2 dice (That were not 1s) add +1 each to the total.

That’s it, nothing different for Ranged or Melee exchanges. This keeps things simple and means you never have to worry about using the “Wrong” method of adding them. This has some interesting effects, such as Fear tests for 2 Ki models become much easier to pass, so we upped most fear values by +1. Also Opposed Ki feats, while having powerful effects, were seen as too unreliable by many players and now picking on 1 Ki models means you can often get these feats to work, even more so now that some models can boost their Ki stat, just like boosting any other stat.

We removed many traits from the game

Some simply weren’t used like Retreat or were condensed into other traits (Weak Mind and Strong Mind are now just Spirit and can take negative values, Flight and Leap were almost identical so are both now just Cloudwalk) however this simplification is not a “Dumbing down” as the game actually ended up with more traits than we started with! Many of these are future proofing for releases later on so you can look for hints on new models based on traits in the rulebook ;) others were simply unique effects that a lot of models had, making these traits instead seemed logical.


They have been updated to the new edition and some less used profiles were given a little boost to help them see the table more. Equally, some ubiquitous models may have seen a Rice increase or toning down. When you look at Rice Costs, you’ll see most models have approximately doubled in cost. This allows for more fine tuning of rice costs and as we left most of the special cards at the same cost (Or increased them by less than double) they are now much cheaper and still help fill the last few points in any list. Overall your Warband size should not change too much from your New Dawn Warband.

Most of the factions stayed largely the same but I will highlight some changes here:

The Prefecture of Ryu is now the faction that is most like an army. They have lots of Command, Order, Leadership and other traits so as long as you have officers, the grunts will over-perform. The trick against them is to disrupt this command network and target their isolated models. Many of the higher-ranking samurai have had tweaks to make them stand out. Aiko is now the great Imperial Blademaster, Katsumoto’s battlefield leadership skills are amazing and, my favourite change, Lady Oka has abilities based on her role as an ambassador and negotiator for the clan.

The monks of the Temple of Ro-Kan have had a melee upgrade; they now have the Kata trait which allows them to count 1s in a melee exchange as 1s rather than discarding them. This is a great advantage allowing them to reliably score the average roll and mitigating some bad luck and also really helps on tie-breaks.

The Ito Clan and the Descension (Formerly Tengu Descension) have both changed in similar ways and are probably the factions that changed the most. The Tengu tactics on the table are first and foremost based on manoeuvrability and speed but a few of their profiles had huge amounts of wounds and the highest Armour values at the time. We have reduced a lot of Tengu armour values and the base wounds of a (Small-base) Tengu are 5. They have had many changes to help make up for this but the most noticeable one is all Tengu now have Move 5. Tribesmen, fittingly kept their 6 wounds as their base value and many have Tough and Armour which is still a great combination for them. The Ito similarly had their base wounds reduced to 5 for small based models, 6 for medium based Hebi. Armour values were reduced to a maximum of 2 (Only 2 Ito had Armour 3 anyway) and also have their Move values increased to 5. Hebi models all have Move Boosts available now and their other abilities were toned down (Jump-up instead of steady for example) this allowed for a significant rice cost reduction meaning Ito Warbands often have enough for one more model than an equivalent New Dawn list. Ito also had their Theme lists looked at, The Blessed was by far the better theme for any kind of list, now it’s still good for Hebi based combat, Shisai based opposed Ki and control lists but for raw melee and poison output, you can’t beat Lords of Izu and I expect to see more human based Ito melee lists now. Also…  Yatsumata! 

Oni now have 12 Wounds and Indomitable, Buto have Endurance. These changes are due to their base “Chassis” having 3 melee dice. This is fine for their output but it’s just a little too easy to reduce their dice too low with modifiers and kill them. It’s just a small change but it makes a huge difference. 


This is a huge document with hundreds of profiles and though our army of loyal Retainers have been playing every faction and reading all the profiles we know there will still be errors hidden away more stealthily than the ninja of the KKZ.

So please post on the forums HERE


Email: jason@gctstudios.com

We need you to point out: 

·       Spelling and punctuation errors

·       Things that have not been updated properly

·       Wording issues

·       Missing things

·       Confusing rules text

·       Balance issues

·       Anything else you don’t like

Please point out things that you think may be on purpose, just in case it’s an error. As the text says this is a first draft so if you don’t like some change to your faction, this is your chance to change it. For balance issues you are more likely to get changes if you play it so battle reports and reasons why this is an issue go a long way. Trust me if you have an opinion on something I have likely heard it from the playtesters soif you want to change it, play it.

We will issue a new set of PDFs early-mid January and at the start of February and I will make posts to correct big things on the forums between PDF releases. BonesCon will have a Bushido event using the new rules and there should be a final draft before going to print.

This version will see a new printed Rule Book and faction decks for every faction and one for Ronin (Ronin also includes special cards that were called the “Generic cards” now Ronin Special Cards). Of course that’s not all and we will be surprising you with more cool stuff for Bushido now and going forward.