The book that started me off

The Brontës started it all. 

Freestyle roleplaying, fluff writing, imagi-nations, fan fiction, and my own love of toy soldiers and gaming. 

Blame them for this blog.

The real culprit is the late Pauline Clarke, whose other books I really should read sometime. But I've never quite been able to get over this one. It remains, far and away, my favorite children's novel.

With Armies in Plastic Waterloo figures.

It also got me into blogging. I idly googled it several years ago and turned up the Man of Tin blog; Mark continues to be inspired by the Brontë "juvenilia," their earliest writings about their brother's toy soldiers, and uses them in his own small imagi-nations games. I followed Mark's blog and became increasingly involved with his "light" style of gaming, in part because I was, at the same time, running simple games for kids at work. We introduced each other to some of the modern fiction inspired by the Brontës' shared world or "paracosm," Clarke's being the first. (Its original British title is The Twelve and the Genii.)

Because the soldiers were hand-made from wood, they were individual, and the children could tell each apart and give it a name and character. Branwell and Charlotte chose Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington, while Emily and Anne eventually named theirs after Arctic explorers Parry and Ross. Other characters received quirky names like Butter Crashey and Stumps; Bonaparte was renamed to Sneaky. They spent their formative years creating a shared universe for their characters, creating an entire alternate history in which the Napoleonic Wars are fought several decades ahead of schedule. The soldiers sailed to Ashanti in Africa (then being explored by the British, though not conquered until 1873 by Wolseley); fought the French and the Ashanti; founded cities and ultimately countries; fought wars, held elections, crowned kings; published histories and magazines actually written, in scale, by the children:

They may be too small to read, but Amazon has made
Branwell's writings available as an ebook.

That's the background. The story goes like this.

8-year-old Max Morley and his family have just moved to a house in the Yorkshire countryside not far from Haworth, the home of the Brontës as children. He discovers a set of twelve century-old wooden toy soldiers in the attic.

At about the same time, his family stores in the attic artifacts brought from West Africa by their great-grandparents, who were missionaries to the Ashanti. The artifacts are a stool purported to be a throne, a model canoe, and a drum.

This will all be relevant to the story, I promise. The drum first, because Max sets up the soldiers and plays it for them to march to. To his surprise, they literally come alive before his eyes and, well, march - for a handful of seconds before turning wooden again.

Max is a cautious, mature lad. He experiments with the soldiers and the drum, and while the rest of the family is out, gets them to open up to him. To his surprise, they claim to have been to Ashanti, which is why they recognize the drum. Their leader, Butter Crashey, aged 140, proposes to explore the house under Max's protection. Max, enchanted, agrees.

Max doesn't play with the soldiers, as such. He follows them as they do what toy soldiers would do (I can't help thinking that the makers of Toy Story read this book at some point, because the opening sequence with the green army men is almost this chapter writ on the screen). They climb down a stairwell on a rope (a ball of string tied up by Max); wade through a carpet like high grass; swarm up a curtain cord like the rope of a ship; march up and down on a piano to play music; eat some of Max's food; and are accidentally scattered when the rest of the family return. One, Stumps, is lost in the confusion.

Max subconsciously guides the soldiers, almost without realizing. When he finds Stumps the next night, he rescues the small soldier literally by thinking about it. Wouldn't it be nice if Stumps would climb the creeper that goes up by his window, Max imagines, instead of just grabbing him up and carrying him back to the attic - and as he does so, Stumps runs for the creeper. By this time, Max has recognized his responsibility for the soldiers, and accepted their title of "genius" for his imaginative role. They explain that they were long ago guided by four other Genii - Brannii, Tallii, Emmii, and Annii...

Max, the soldiers, and the three Ashanti treasures. A golden version
of this stool was the sacred throne of the Ashanti, and precipitated the
final war there when an idiot English diplomat demanded to sit on it.

I find it difficult to capture the sheer charm of this book. There is simply so much to unpack.

The adult supporting character who teaches the children about the Brontës is himself an authority on them; he is a parson, of the same parish that Patrick Brontë held sway over during the Brontes' childhood, and like Patrick Brontë has three daughters and a son. He points out that the soldiers, all individuals, yet take on aspects of their "creators." Branwell's own Sneaky is mischievous and moody, but was the first to wake; Charlotte's Duke of Wellington is the strong, silent heroic type she loved in her stories; Gravey is unhappy and easily bullied, like Emily. He also counterpoints the religious parallels of the story - at one point the Twelves are guided on their journey by a "pillar of fire" - a bicycle lamp. In an afterward, American author Katherine Paterson (known for the religious themes in her books) notes these especially; Branwell in his stories depicts himself and his sisters as giant gods from the Twelves' point of view, and Max's ability to guide the soldiers via his own thoughts is akin to God's omniscience. One wonders what the Reverend Patrick Brontë might have thought of his children's self-identification. 

"Max thought he would like to protect all the creatures, and wondered who did. His duty now was to protect Stumps."

There is an element of "imagi-nations" and fan-fiction that prefigures that of the 21st century. I can only imagine what the real Duke of Wellington would have thought of the Brontës' version of him - though in their stories he remains conqueror of Napoleon, he also becomes conqueror of Africa. Perhaps they were inspired by his conquest of India? 

There is also discussion of the joy of play:

"And there are two more letters, one saying that there will always be wars while human nature is what it is, and why shouldn't boys play with soldiers?"

'Boys will be boys,' it says, 'and girls will join them in such military games, whether they are Branwell Brontë  and his sisters, or the children who buy lead or bright plastic soldiers today. Battle, struggle and adventure against enemies are part of the pattern of living, it seems, and much as we all now hate war, they look as if they will go on being. Until men are perfect in humanity they will fight.'" This seemed a solemn letter and there was a pause.

This is interesting given the bloody adventures the soldiers once had (which they repeat with relish to Max) and the ones they go on under his direction. As a child, this guided my own play in the garden - to an extent, because I was a pretty literal thinker and it wasn't until adulthood that I read the original stories and really grasped how the Brontë children created the world that their soldiers lived in.

In the soldiers' own dialogue, Clarke quotes Branwell's own descriptions of the soldiers, for example in a sequence where Butter Crashey, their leader, describes their characteristics to the eager, curious Max. He speaks here with Branwell's voice, reflecting his and their "genesis" in Branwell's own writing.

Branwell's first story about the soldiers, The History of the Young Men, written when he was not quite thirteen, contains all the gruesome violence and fantastic impossibility you might expect of a modern bad-fanfic writer, the sort to be mocked by fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 today. The soldiers (all thirteen of them) defeat in pitched battle, indeed outright massacre, a Dutch garrison of 400 on Ascension Island, at a cost of seven dead to themselves. You can hear the boyish glee as Branwell describes the slaughter (of women and children). They later defeat an Ashanti army of 13,000.

Straight out of a "Boy's Own" imagination.

Six of the dead are next made alive again by Cheeky the surgeon. A bit of magical thinking here, yet the seventh is still missing and cannot be found. Real life, I suspect, took a hand here, in the same way that real objects come to life in the minds of the Twelves and their Genii. (For example, Stumps describes the curved plumbing trap beneath the kitchen sink, where he shelters, as a "great white creeper, in the crook of which he was safe"). When Frederick dies permanently, he is replaced by Stumps, who was found again. They are mysteriously described as "two people in one," and Branwell's notes indicate that names and characters of several of the soldiers were simply changed. Stumps is a viewpoint character and Max's own favorite because of his mysterious background, and because he is used to getting lost and found again.

Many stories of this nature, of course, focus on the secret of magic, tiny people, or both. Katherine Paterson compares this book to Mistress Masham's Repose by T.H. White, in which Lilliputians are discovered by a child in 1940s Britain, and notes that because the protagonist is less responsible than Max, and nearly gets the Lilliputians discovered or lost, her story is funnier and scarier. A modern classic along these lines is The Indian in the Cupboard, in which plastic figures come to life; their "owner," Omri, learns very quickly that the figures are real, historical people who can die if he is not careful, but his friend Patrick never quite gets this, treats them as toys regularly, and nearly gets them or himself killed more than once. This series is sometimes terrifying, and becomes more "adult" as it goes on.

The Return of the Twelves is different in that the Twelves are regarded in-universe as toys. They are still people, of course, but Max subconsciously plays with them, and their inherent nature as creations of creative literary minds is always at the fore of the story. It is magical realism that differentiates this story from most "tiny people" stories - it's more about the power of imagination to make things real, perhaps in the same vein as The Velveteen Rabbit.

As the Twelves explore Max's home, then set out across the wide world (read: a few miles of country to Haworth), the world around them so small and innocuous to Max and his siblings becomes vast and adventurous. A small but burbling creek becomes a vast river; a field of wheat is a jungle or forest; a roller-skate becomes a gun-carriage; a piece of string becomes a rope; a bag of marbles becomes cannon balls (which are hurled at a large, brown furry monster which turns out to be friendly and leads the Twelves through its underground lair - a rabbit); tiny chicken feathers become ostrich plumes for decorating hats.

Twelves on the march through a field.

Unlike in similar stories, the Twelves never see or recognize these for what they are. Part of the charm of stories like The Littles by John Peterson, The Borrowers by Mary Norton, and some "mouse world" books and films like The Rescuers and Chip'n'Dale's Rescue Rangers are that they display great ingenuity in using human castoffs to make vehicles, homes, furniture, and all sorts of equipment. I loved all of these as a child for this very reason. The difference between them and the Twelves is that the Twelves are from a world of their own, and they see everything not as what it is, but as what it actually would be to them. They are people, measured against themselves rather than the normal-size humans of the story, who to them are monsters in the fantastic and awesome sense of the word.

There is great inspirational value in this book, not just for wargaming but roleplaying too. It's taught me to see almost anything I look at as a seed for adventure. RPGs like Mouse Guard and Army Ants in which animal characters have their own societies and weapons, but live in a world scaled for much bigger creatures, have incredible potential scope. I can develop stories for these games just by going outside and lying down - and children do just that in this book, glimpsing through the grass the forever adventurous Twelves.

Convention Gaming and Trying DnD5E

 I went to Supercon yesterday, a local geek convention that I usually try to make. Last time I got to go as an exhibitor, at the library system's table, and even demonstrated a couple simple wargames. They didn't do that this year. So for me, this was a shopping trip at a markup, and an opportunity to game. In previous years, there were wargame and boardgame demos set up (mostly Games Workshop), but the gaming this year was a mix of family boardgames, videogames and Dungeons and Dragons. No miniatures gaming.

I partly went to get some dice and a tray. It turns out 8mm dice are not made in bulk by the suppliers I found, so that idea for using my not-quite-12mm unit markers is out. Perhaps I'll buy the 16mm markers and use 12mm dice.

I never have sat down for DnD 5th edition, but the con was an opportunity to play at a table for the first time in forever. I was surprised at how easy the pregenerated character sheet was to read and play - I probably could have run Free Kriegspiel with it:

The GMs were able to run adventures mostly off the cuff. The players were able to just adventure, with, as a commenter pointed out on an earlier post, the nuts-and-bolts of the game safely out of view. Spells weren't described, only the name providing any context, but most weren't combat spells that would require you to know how much damage they did.

There were some nuts-and-bolts, of course. DnD is mostly a skirmish game, and most adventures are mostly about fighting.

My character's at the back, with the excuse that
she's standing on the steps to get overhead line-of-sight.

The stereotypical starter adventure starts with a bit of scene-setting, continues with a march to the scene of adventure, optionally has a puzzle or roleplaying in the middle, and ends with a fight. So the two adventures I played in went. The first one did have an interesting puzzle that I might have to swipe for my own adventures, and the minis were pretty cool, especially given my increasing Paperboys collection. I may need to buy some:

Flat plastics from Arcknight Miniatures. I like the clear bases!

I've learned that character improvement is a useful motivator for bringing players back to the table. I leveled up my character between adventures with help from another player, which turned out to be a good thing in the next adventure. I used a new spell (Sleep) to neutralize an enemy that, under the circumstances, probably would have killed the party otherwise. It was only icing on the cake that our job was to capture this fellow alive. The disadvantage was that we weren't using minis this time, just a map and what is called "Theater of the Mind." A good GM can paint a picture in the mind's eye - I'm not quite there yet.

Another useful thing about DnD is, of course, the gamemaster, who was able to adjudicate rules without resorting to the rulebook. Players (especially new ones) always come up with unusual ideas and actions, and the GM can rule on things the designers never thought of - or things they did, if he's in a hurry and doesn't want to look things up.

Now, the fighting took up the bulk of both sessions, and part of the problem was that there were six or seven players in the adventures. (DnD has a "sweet spot" of four plus GM.) There's always a "hurry-up-and-wait" aspect to combat in war games of any sort, and DnD has a bad reputation in this area. But the low complexity of the rules and the table banter helped quite a bit, and reminded me why I enjoy this sort of play. There are plenty of historical RPGs out there - even variants of Dungeons and Dragons itself. Some of the methods - particularly the Move/Action/Bonus Action mechanism that players choose from on their turn - may work for the skirmish wargames I'm planning.

I'll have to check out DnD again.

My colonial collection, Part 1: Egyptians

While the first wargaming books I read were Little Wars and Charge!, my first experience of actually collecting and playing with historicals was the Sword and the Flame. This was largely driven by my discovery of Major General Tremorden Rederring's Colonial Wargames page. These are not that first collection of minis, which is still lying unpainted in a box somewhere. These are (a small fraction of) my collection of minis gradually bought from a painter on Ebay a few years back. I picked up Egyptians, Mahdists, British, Zulus, and a bunch of assorted Napoleonics in 1/72 scale, as well as German Schutzetruppe from someone else.

I immediately popped the colonial figures off their painting/unit bases that they had for shipping, and put them on pennies for easier play with TSATF. I made the possible mistake of doing the same thing with the Napoleonics, long before I discovered Featherstone's later "unit" rules in which casualties are not removed but regiments have hit points instead (see Natholeon's blog for some excellent versions in various periods) - this makes the units neater, nicely regimented (heh) and more like playing pieces for use with rulesets like Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame. Unfortunately, this particular lot are on 60mm-wide bases, which requires 3-inch squares, so 12x8 on this particular board they're sitting on. Cordery's Napoleonic rules will be even trickier, as units have two bases apiece to help make different formations of line, column, and square. So I'm a bit torn over these chaps. There is even a River War variant of Black Powder available, though this lot would only make up about two brigades for that game.

Ultimately, I think I'll break up the Egyptians as I've done with other Colonials. That'll enable me to play a few different skirmish games, TSATF of course but also The Men Who Would Be Kings which has differing unit sizes for different troop types. And I can still play gridded games, just with smaller troop numbers. Though reduced sizes of Paperboys figures may work too - Zulus and Boers (which I haven't got at all) are available now.

48 cavalry; 12 more are off camera.

Bashi-Bazouks.

Camelry.

Lancers.

96 infantry.

Infantry closeup.

Artillery.

Closeup on a Krupp and crew.

Officers.

In TSATF, this comes out to five 12-man cavalry squadrons and five 20-man infantry companies. A "rounded" force in TSATF is four companies, two squadrons and three guns, which would be matched against around twice their number of Mahdists. Which I'm pretty sure I have for the next post in this particular series. TMWWBK is on a somewhat smaller, more detailed scale, but requires fairly small forces. A typical 24pt "Field Force" (the standard game size) might have four 12-man infantry units and two 8-man cavalry units, and the game can be played with units at half strength, too.

I think I'm giving myself a desire (or excuse) to read The Men Who Would be Kings again... have only skimmed it since I bought my new copy.

Rules tinkering, rambling, and game-space tinkering too. Also rambling...

 I experimented yesterday, all too briefly, with a "solo ECW" article from a volume of Wally Simon's essays. Unfortunately, it was a bit rambling; it reminds me distinctly of Donald Featherstone, in fact. Like Featherstone, Simon was a charming, friendly sort of writer, but also like Featherstone, he tended to ramble. The articles, while they are mostly about rules mechanisms and their modifications, are also  reminisces of who knows how many decades of play and camaraderie. Featherstone doesn't write much about his opponents, but in Simon's writing you can hear the banter across the table. And like Featherstone, the rules are often spread across a chapter, and missing important elements. 

I'm not saying he's a bad writer, but it's not always easy to follow the rulesets he writes. Mostly because he often focuses on specific elements, often of someone else's rulesets. Or an entire article will be on different methods of counting initiative (I'll come back to this one when I get around to my Picacho Peak game). Or a pleasant, but rules-lite recounting of crewing an X-class submarine made out of a batch of chairs in Paddy Griffith's living room, which reminds me of Jim Wallman's equally cramped Tank Duel. In that one, players sit or crouch together in the relative positions of a tank crew, and have to stay there while operating a tabletop tank. I intend to run it for my own group the moment the pandemic's over and I don't have to worry about infecting a bunch of gamers old enough to be my father. I think kids would get a real kick out of it too.

Like Simon and Featherstone, I ramble...

In this case the missing element was morale. The ruleset in question is for a relatively small game, with units represented by a single base. For my quick test run-through, I took two bases of pike, two of muskets, and one of cavalry a side, on a new 2x4 foot folding table I picked up to be able to isolate in the bedroom. I am considering further remote games, you see, and when one must wait for the players to send in their moves, leaving a table set with minis and terrain for days on end, one cannot leave the table vulnerable to pouncing cats.

This was all very well, except for the lighting. Something I hadn't realized about my play in the living room is that I have an overhead light there; I don't in the bedroom. This is not so bad, except that I want to be able to take pictures, or maybe even video (she said, envious of certain youtube channels. Seriously, check out the overhead camera in this guy's battle reports). And the lighting in the bedroom is poor, even in daylight with a window open - and I will be rarely playing in daytime as I'm a night owl.

Rambling again. Back to the playtest. So I ran through the rules. There are six elements to a turn, and more than a few interesting mechanisms in them:

- Active player tosses a D10. When cycle-upon-cycle throws add up to 15, the turn is over, and Victory Points are toted up.

- Active player moves both infantry and cavalry up to ten inches. No mention of terrain modifiers here, though the battle report is set among hills and manors.

- Non-active player fires, but draws a variable number of cards from a "fire deck" first, looking for pairs of Fire and Load cards - each pair allows a single unit to fire. There are also Misfire cards. I tossed a D12, but could have used, perhaps, three suits of cards (or two plus the Jokers). units with casualties roll for morale - losers retreat to a "Rally Zone." Interestingly, pike elements may also fire, on the assumption that they are typical regiments of the period with a 1:2 ratio of pikes to muskets, so the muskets are "concealed" among the pikes and actually fire with near the same chance of hitting as the musketeer elements.

- Active player chooses two units, which fire. (For some reason, he doesn't draw cards.) Confusion was attained by the fact this was also a battle report between the Active player, the Earl of Cratchett, and the non-Active player, Lord Flocke, and at this point the Earl is named as the non-Active player.

- Non-Active cavalry move ten inches. I like this, incidentally - it gives the non-active player another thing to do (something that Wally seems to approve in his other articles) at the same time that it enables the cavalry to move faster than infantry like it should. The entire turn cycle is intriguingly "semi-simultaneous."

- Melees are fought. Losing stands again retreat to the Rally Zone. At this point, all such units roll to see if they return to the field. This feels akin to the rallying mechanism in the Perrys' TravelBattle - losing units retreat to their baseline, then either fail to rally or are retrieved by a command figure. While Heavy and Light Cavalry are listed in the army writeups, as well as a unit armed with swords and bucklers, there is no comment on their impact in close combat - do cavalry roll higher, or get extra dice?

Now here's the problem. The morale-check mechanism for casualties from fire is not there.

And of course I didn't notice this until I needed to roll a morale check. This is, also of course, the reason I ran a hasty small game in the first place - to catch things like that. Or so I reassure myself.

The morale check mechanism for melees is there, but I'm not sure it would apply to the firing phase. Sides add up stands in combat and casualties inflicted (so one stand that inflicts one casualty on its opponent makes two) and multiply this number by a D10. Again akin to Featherstone, where survivors (not casualties) are multiplied by a D6, and the side with a lower number retreats.

In most rulesets, the side that takes casualties by fire rolls alone, against a set number. It didn't occur to me at the time to roll off between units in the same way as melee; at the time I think I felt the fired-on unit would be much likelier to lose (since the firer hasn't taken casualties yet), and this didn't seem realistic. In hindsight, though, I could see it, in part because the Active player gets to fire back, possibly with units that took casualties in the immediate-prior phase, thus enabling the opponent to roll higher. (Is this making any sense?)

See if you can figure out morale from fire-casualties from this!

An earlier article in the book, Encounter at Lennard Manor: Loss Threshold, describes a similar ruleset and melee-morale mechanic, but still does not describe how morale works when units are not in melee.

I may try again, using the same mechanic for firing-morale as for CC-morale. On a 2x4foot table with five bases a side, it goes quickly enough. There are the bones of an interesting and light system here, but as with Featherstone's, I'll have to build on them. Of course that's half the fun!

WoTR Paperboys

I finished assembling the Wofun Games War of the Roses starter set, and decided to try them out with the starter rules from the Paperboys book they're based on. The rules are gridded, so I tried out one of my new Melee Mats too - they're very nice, and the markings seem to come off easily, which is a good thing. Already wasted one of the four markers they came with, sadly, by leaving it uncapped. Since the bases are 30mm wide and the squares one inch (25.4mm), I marked the corners of two-inch squares in a 7x10 grid.

Setup and Turn 1. Each side has two men-at-arms bases (one of them the commander); four billmen bases, and six archer bases.

Turn 2 and 3. Shooting has short and long ranges - the caveat is that arrows are limited and if you shoot with more than one base in a turn you expend them. You have six "multi-volleys" per game - at this short table-width it turns out not to be a big deal as units will be in combat inside two turns and the game has a fair chance of ending in less than six.

End-game. Combat is basic; units have a variable number of attacks based on level, hitting on 5+. The side that scores more forces saving throws on the opponent. Fail and the base is removed; pass and it is pushed back. The goal is to remove half the opponent's "points" total, each type being worth a differing number; the total in this game is 20 a side. The command base is powerful enough, with four attack dice, for the player to want to use it. But lose it and you lose the game, like the King in chess, and that was what happened here. I put up the Red commander against a weaker billmen base, but lost the combat and failed one of his two saves.

I like this simple ruleset, which is a lead-in to the full rules and represents a single ward or battle of the three normally found in an army of the period. I'll need to play it through a few more times to internalize the rules, but I don't expect that to take long. It's very chess-like, but with different (yet not complex) combat resolution that rewards consideration of risk. I might try it at work when the library's chess club starts up again.

On a related note, I received some nice Lancashire Games unit markers I ordered on a tip from Jonathan Freitag, intending to use them for Test of Resolve with these same figures, in units of two bases. The slide-under bit is smaller than I feared, and is hidden completely under a 20mm-deep by 30mm-wide base. Well and good.

Unfortunately, they don't fit standard 12mm Chessex dice. Though they do fit these smaller ones I have ... but I only have a handful! I have lots of teensy but possibly-too-light plastic dice that may work.

Still More Stuff

 Back when I first started wargaming, I learned that you should NEVER buy a new box of miniatures until you'd finished building and painting what you already had. I don't think any wargamer can say they do that successfully.

I also took a seminar for work yesterday on organizing your work and avoiding procrastination. There were some tips surprisingly useful for gaming projects as well, including links to a book titled Eat That Frog. This basically means to break down your tasks by priority, and do the most crucial ones first. The problem is that gaming is never a priority - it's relaxation. I have plans for gaming at work, but the pandemic's interrupted that.

While I loved assembling Games Workshop's multipart kits back in the 3rd Edition era (They're not nearly as customizable today), I was not much of a painter. Honestly, I hated it, and you can probably tell already I'm easily distracted. The fact that I played Fighting Tigers Space Marines wasn't much help. Though I will admit, if I forced myself to work on a project regularly, it was possible to fall into a rhythm and get through dozens of figures in a sitting when I'd only intended a handful. I mean, I already had the paints out.

Peter Dennis' Paperboys make that easier - you don't have to paint them.

Wofun makes it still easier - you don't even have to cut them out.

That leads to difficulties.

Another wargamer maxim more honored in the breach than the observance is "Never start on a new project before you've finished the first one."

If you've read even a handful of my blog posts, you know that ain't happening either. There are five (count 'em) aborning projects in this photo alone.

1. A small English Civil War army, with which to try:
1. Peter Dennis' and Andy Callan's own beginner rules from his ECW Paperboys book.
2. Wally Simon's even shorter rules from Secrets of Wargame Design.
2. A small War of the Roses army, with which to try:
1. Test of Resolve.
2. Another Peter Dennis/Andy Callan set, played on a gridded board...
3. ...Like the one visible under the figures. There are actually three two-sided boards, 24"x36". Even marked up (with included pens) as two-inch squares to contain the 20mmx30mm bases, this is 12x18 squares, much bigger than the chess boards I initially used. This will enable me better to try some of Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame rules. They advertise as non-staining and easy to clean, which if true will work better than the vinyl I first tried to run DnD on back in the day.

(After a bit of trial and error - pikes are tricky to punch out of plexiglass!)

Here's most of the English Civil War starter set - assembling cannon from MDF is a challenge, and I may use guns from the other sets as "light" artillery. There are two extra New Army regiments unmade. I'll also have to pick up a couple more toolboxes from the hardware store to keep them in - luckily, the spaces are deep enough that the pikes won't rise past them.

That's two of the three deliveries I've received so far this week. The third is a copy of For Whom the Dice Rolls by Graham Evans of the Wargaming4Grownups blog. It's attractively designed and an enjoyable read so far. I know little about the war save some of the aviation and some of the folk music that came out of it, and I certainly have no minis. I had half a mind to run it for my club, which among them should have enough early-WWII models and figures to proxy, but one of the members kindly offered a small collection of Spanish Civil War figures I'm now waiting on. As a division level game where the smallest unit is a company represented by a handful of figures, that should be enough to play small games.

Well, with the day off, I know what I'm doing today...

Free Kriegspiel methods

I caught the tail-end of a discussion on Discord recently between several readers of Justin Alexander's Alexandrian blog. The topic was "how to run mass battles in your RPG."

Now, unremembered by many players, Dungeons and Dragons has miniature wargaming in its blood. The trouble is that the immediate forerunners of what became DnD were skirmish games. 

This:

Not this: 

Justin made the point that, in part because of this, players focus on the available rules for mass combat when a big battle comes up in-game, rather than on the singular characters they're running. In fact, a lot of games do. Justin spent a year at one point analyzing DnD 4th Edition for its flaws, chief among which was the "dissociated mechanic."

This refers to any mechanic that pulls you out of the game and makes you forget you're supposed to be roleplaying in a universe not your own. For example, if you know your unit has sixteen hit points and +2 in combat vs. goblins, you're counting those points and modifiers rather than focusing on the fact that your two hundred solders with rusty blades are hungry, tired, and probably would rather not be fighting goblins right now.

Wargaming does this to an RPG because, in the middle of your adventure, you suddenly stop to play a tabletop wargame. Cards do this in some games because you suddenly stop your wargame to play a card game. Magic does this in many roleplaying-game rulesets because, after 100 pages of explaining how ordinary characters do things in the game, you stop learning the rules for the game and spend 100 pages learning how magic-users follow completely different rules.

If you're going to break out the miniatures when your players are leading an army against hordes of the Evil Empire, well and good. But you don't need to change the rules you're playing under.

I used this pic in a previous post about playing wargames with RPG techniques. Let's consider it from the opposite perspective of an RPG using wargame techniques:

If you're playing an RPG set in the Napoleonic Wars, it's probably going to be more Sharpe than Waterloo. If you watch the otherwise excellent Sharpe series, you'll notice that the mass battles the episodes are set against are very much in the background, largely because unlike the producers of Waterloo, the producers of Sharpe never had an entire Russian army to work with. It is a rare episode where more than one hundred soldiers appear. By the same token, Zulu wouldn't have been as effective without an entire tribe of actual Zulu led by an actual descendant of Ceteshwayo, and Gettysburg wouldn't have been nearly as impressive without 5,000 reenactors on the original battlefield. 

So Sharpe, and the above page, represent a far more typical gamemaster who hasn't painted up more than a handful of miniatures, or as in Knights of the Dinner Table, is using M&Ms, cardboard chits, or whatever else he can find on short notice. What is he to do?

Well, he can read the above page, and wing it. That, to me, is pretty much the entire point of a GM.

"You lead your French regiment forward. [French are rapid marchers and change formation quickly] They respond well to your commands. [Landwehr are terrible] Your Prussian-militia allies are NOT looking happy at that [Russians are not very good, but there are lots of them and they don't break] stolid mass of Russians ahead."

"Where are the Cossacks?"

[Cossacks are chicken, but very fast] "Not attacking, but racing around your flanks towards your baggage."

[Cuirassiers are super] "We'll send our cuirassiers after them."

[Except when attacked from behind] They're so slow compared to the Cossacks it's like watching one of those movies where the big guy is telling the little one to 'Fight fair!' The Cossacks are circling behind them and hitting them in their unprotected backsides."

We've just spent thirty seconds using our common sense and knowledge of history, rather than counting modifiers, measuring ranges, and rolling dice for several turns of combat.

That's Free Kriegspiel.