Part 3 of Naval Rules
So where are we? We're combining two sets of rules, Seekrieg 4 and Battle Stations. Actually we're combining more than that. Torpedoes have to be factored in, and those are always a pain.
What is the gunnery procedure?
First we measure the range from the bridge of the firing ship to the closest point of the target. We check table H-2 of the Seekrieg 4 rules. Cross-reference that with table I-1 to get the number of shells hitting the target.
Second we go to the hit table in Battle Stations. We have the starting value of the ship from its type (Old Pre-dreadnought, for example, is 01). We throw one pair of decimal dice to see where the shell lands. If there's another hit, we throw 1d10 and add the value to the first for that hit.
Third, we go to table R2 of Seekrieg for penetration, but check armor type on table Q1.
Fourth, we read off the value of the hit and mark off the appropriate damage.
What is the torpedo procedure?
This comes from a set of rules I pulled out of a magazine. First, we throw 3d6 and score a hit on an 18 or 19 after applying modifiers. Second, we throw 1d100 and it is a dud on a score of 1-21. We then throw 1d6 to see where the torpedo hit on the ship. We then go to the ship chart determined for Battle Stations and mark off the appropriate places. Remember, these rules are for 1895-1912.
On each turn after the torpedo hit we check for progressive flooding. It could get worse, it might not. This should really be a function of crew training (anyone who has ever read in The Shattered Sword about the Japanese damage control procedures would cry).
What Then?
Some ships sink, others limp away with damage. Our surviving ships then shoot at each other again. Repeat as often as needed.
What of Movement?
Let's keep it simple. Use General Quarters 2. And that includes the turning rules. Or, if you want real simple, let's use Avalon Hill's Jutland turn and move indicators.
Will it work?
I don't see any insuperable obstacles. And this can all be done on a tabletop so nobody has to grub around on their hands and knees and use poor eyesight.
Back to story writing.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Friday, December 08, 2006
Naval Rules...Part 2
What follows presumes you don't want to use a computer to do all of this.
What are the fundamental issues of naval combat. The simplest is that if you let the water in the ship will sink. What can do this? Holes in the hull, they decrease the reserve buoyancy of a ship. Reduce it to less than zero and the ship becomes one with the bottom of the ocean. This is such a simple concept that everyone except the State of Washington EPA can understand it (they were ruled negligent in making a bridge sink, but that's another story).
So we need to calculate the reserve buoyancy of a ship. This is a long and laborious process for a set of wargaming rules. So instead we pick a value that is easily calculable, say the volume of the hull or of a box the hull would fit in. Everyone should be able to calculate length x width x depth (from waterline to keel). If you can't, you're hopeless. Go pay good money to learn what your school should have taught you, hire a lawyer, and sue the school district for misfeasance or something.
How does the water get in? Obviously, holes in the hull, but also captain's will let in water to keep the ship on an even keel. What causes those holes? Torpedoes, shells, and rams. We'll rule out the latter, these aren't galleys.
But what about shells? What about fire, the most dreaded ship killer around? KMS Bismarck sank, in large part, because the Germans scuttled a wreck (by the way, what does it say about the self-confidence of a Navy that designs ships with scuttling charges?). The British had shot the German battleship to pieces with their 14" and 16" guns (though the 8" guns also employed helped, too). The IJN Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu were gutted by fires from bomb hits, but all three carriers had to be sunk by torpedoes from other Japanese ships? The German battlecruiser Lutzow at Jutland sank, in large part, because two 12" hits from HMS Invincible let some 600 tons of water into the hull, initiating bulkhead collapse and progressive flooding that doomed the German ship. But 22 other hits had an impact, too. At the same battle the SMS Seydlitz took 21 major caliber hits, and a torpedo, and was still (barely) afloat at the end of the battle.
It is customary in naval rules to assign shells a point value. What is interesting is that this is generally by weight, as handy a number as any. It can't be by explosive effect. A 15" shell contains less than 200 pounds of explosives, making them, in effect, smaller than a 200 pound general purpose bomb. But when you explode it inside a ship you knock down bulkheads, and if the shell goes off close enough to the waterline (as happened with the Lutzow) you get water flooding into the ship.
So, for quick references, shells are worth their weight in poundage. Ships are worth their weight in hull volume. But, and this is a big but, a shell hit, say, on the searchlight platform, while bad for the crew manning the searchlights, doesn't effect the watertight integrity of the ship. Thus we need a modification factor of some kind to account for this. We need to see where the shell hits, and go from there.
Now 30 years ago there was a set of rules called Battle Stations that did just that. It was written by somebody who, I believe, had damage control experience. It was ideal for actions where a player ran 2-4 ships. You had all the things you needed for a superior naval gaming experience (as we found out in the dozen or so Battles of Bunghole Strait). The authors even had the modifiers so you didn't have to worry about a hit on the steam whistle causing the ship to flood.
The only thing I had a quibble with (after a lot of experience with the rules) was the gunnery. It was range estimation, and that is an acquirable skill. Of course there are tricks you can do to improve your accuracy. A friend, playing Fletcher Pratt, used to bring a camera to 'take pictures' of the fighting. It also had a range finder good to less than 1". Another guy I knew was a Master Carpenter, and could accurately guesstimate ranges out to 50', and usually be off by no more than 1-2". And there are people I know who are like me, with one or more eye unable to acquire that accuracy, and not about to crawl around on the floor (our knees can't take it). So we need something else.
A side note - professionals had 9', 11' and 15' rangefinders, why should we rely upon our own eyesight? I know, it's more "fun". But let's look for an option.
Enter Seekrieg, I forget which edition. You factor in all sorts of things, and kabango, a table tells you how many hits. You throw the dice, see how many hits you managed, and then roll dice to see what got hit.
Gee, we've gone full circle. Instead of developing a set of rules, we now have the rudiments of a combination of two sets of rules for gaming.
Now for the alternate idea. You go buy a copy of Fire When Ready, and you let the computer do everything. A bit abstract, and you don't know what each shell does, but fun. And did I ever tell you what happened when we reduced the training levels to 1-2? It seems an 18,000 ton pre-dreadnought battleship makes a dandy ram, especially when you run it into a light cruiser.
That's a story for another time. In Part 3 we'll look at exactly how to merge the two rules to produce something playable.
What follows presumes you don't want to use a computer to do all of this.
What are the fundamental issues of naval combat. The simplest is that if you let the water in the ship will sink. What can do this? Holes in the hull, they decrease the reserve buoyancy of a ship. Reduce it to less than zero and the ship becomes one with the bottom of the ocean. This is such a simple concept that everyone except the State of Washington EPA can understand it (they were ruled negligent in making a bridge sink, but that's another story).
So we need to calculate the reserve buoyancy of a ship. This is a long and laborious process for a set of wargaming rules. So instead we pick a value that is easily calculable, say the volume of the hull or of a box the hull would fit in. Everyone should be able to calculate length x width x depth (from waterline to keel). If you can't, you're hopeless. Go pay good money to learn what your school should have taught you, hire a lawyer, and sue the school district for misfeasance or something.
How does the water get in? Obviously, holes in the hull, but also captain's will let in water to keep the ship on an even keel. What causes those holes? Torpedoes, shells, and rams. We'll rule out the latter, these aren't galleys.
But what about shells? What about fire, the most dreaded ship killer around? KMS Bismarck sank, in large part, because the Germans scuttled a wreck (by the way, what does it say about the self-confidence of a Navy that designs ships with scuttling charges?). The British had shot the German battleship to pieces with their 14" and 16" guns (though the 8" guns also employed helped, too). The IJN Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu were gutted by fires from bomb hits, but all three carriers had to be sunk by torpedoes from other Japanese ships? The German battlecruiser Lutzow at Jutland sank, in large part, because two 12" hits from HMS Invincible let some 600 tons of water into the hull, initiating bulkhead collapse and progressive flooding that doomed the German ship. But 22 other hits had an impact, too. At the same battle the SMS Seydlitz took 21 major caliber hits, and a torpedo, and was still (barely) afloat at the end of the battle.
It is customary in naval rules to assign shells a point value. What is interesting is that this is generally by weight, as handy a number as any. It can't be by explosive effect. A 15" shell contains less than 200 pounds of explosives, making them, in effect, smaller than a 200 pound general purpose bomb. But when you explode it inside a ship you knock down bulkheads, and if the shell goes off close enough to the waterline (as happened with the Lutzow) you get water flooding into the ship.
So, for quick references, shells are worth their weight in poundage. Ships are worth their weight in hull volume. But, and this is a big but, a shell hit, say, on the searchlight platform, while bad for the crew manning the searchlights, doesn't effect the watertight integrity of the ship. Thus we need a modification factor of some kind to account for this. We need to see where the shell hits, and go from there.
Now 30 years ago there was a set of rules called Battle Stations that did just that. It was written by somebody who, I believe, had damage control experience. It was ideal for actions where a player ran 2-4 ships. You had all the things you needed for a superior naval gaming experience (as we found out in the dozen or so Battles of Bunghole Strait). The authors even had the modifiers so you didn't have to worry about a hit on the steam whistle causing the ship to flood.
The only thing I had a quibble with (after a lot of experience with the rules) was the gunnery. It was range estimation, and that is an acquirable skill. Of course there are tricks you can do to improve your accuracy. A friend, playing Fletcher Pratt, used to bring a camera to 'take pictures' of the fighting. It also had a range finder good to less than 1". Another guy I knew was a Master Carpenter, and could accurately guesstimate ranges out to 50', and usually be off by no more than 1-2". And there are people I know who are like me, with one or more eye unable to acquire that accuracy, and not about to crawl around on the floor (our knees can't take it). So we need something else.
A side note - professionals had 9', 11' and 15' rangefinders, why should we rely upon our own eyesight? I know, it's more "fun". But let's look for an option.
Enter Seekrieg, I forget which edition. You factor in all sorts of things, and kabango, a table tells you how many hits. You throw the dice, see how many hits you managed, and then roll dice to see what got hit.
Gee, we've gone full circle. Instead of developing a set of rules, we now have the rudiments of a combination of two sets of rules for gaming.
Now for the alternate idea. You go buy a copy of Fire When Ready, and you let the computer do everything. A bit abstract, and you don't know what each shell does, but fun. And did I ever tell you what happened when we reduced the training levels to 1-2? It seems an 18,000 ton pre-dreadnought battleship makes a dandy ram, especially when you run it into a light cruiser.
That's a story for another time. In Part 3 we'll look at exactly how to merge the two rules to produce something playable.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Just What We Need Is...
...another set of naval rules (Part 1).
I've long been dissatisfied with most naval rules I've tried. I'm torn between the duties of an Admiral, in which case I don't care about specific damage to a ship, or I revel in specifics of each round fired that hits. It isn't helped by John Campbell's book: Jutland, an Analysis of the Fighting. Mr. Campbell utilizes gunnery logs and dockyard reports to track the damage to each ship as it occurrs. It's stuff like this that makes me want to revel in the messy details.
On the other hand, when you're Sir John Jellicoe and you're handling the entire Grand Fleet, you don't care that HMS Superb took a hit on the compass platform, unless it causes a disruption in the line or forces Superb's speed to fall off. For that sort of thing the rules General Quarters are idea.
Now friends know I have a fascination for World War 1 (some have called it a sick fascination). But this war spelled the end of the old way of doing things, and ushered in a completely new era, complete with a new religion (socialism/bolshevism) whose basic tenets must be taken on faith (because the evidence does not support them). In 2006 we are still dealing with the repercusions from some of the decisions made between July 28th, 1914 and November 11, 1918.
One of the outgrowths of this fascination is a close study of naval operations in that period. And in particular, what happened on the late afternoon and evening of May 31, 1916 (the Battle of Jutland). Hasty decisions, or non-decisions influenced naval operations in December of 1942 (Battle of the Barents Sea), and the autumn of 1982 (the Falklands War). And one of the most interesting aspects is what made three British battlecruisers explode and sink?
I've dug into this, following what I could. The Internet has helped, especially the reports of diving expeditions on the wrecks. What follows is what I've been able to piece together and represents my conclusions:
Examination of testimony and the damage to the wreck of HMS Indefatigable suggests the following:
...another set of naval rules (Part 1).
I've long been dissatisfied with most naval rules I've tried. I'm torn between the duties of an Admiral, in which case I don't care about specific damage to a ship, or I revel in specifics of each round fired that hits. It isn't helped by John Campbell's book: Jutland, an Analysis of the Fighting. Mr. Campbell utilizes gunnery logs and dockyard reports to track the damage to each ship as it occurrs. It's stuff like this that makes me want to revel in the messy details.
On the other hand, when you're Sir John Jellicoe and you're handling the entire Grand Fleet, you don't care that HMS Superb took a hit on the compass platform, unless it causes a disruption in the line or forces Superb's speed to fall off. For that sort of thing the rules General Quarters are idea.
Now friends know I have a fascination for World War 1 (some have called it a sick fascination). But this war spelled the end of the old way of doing things, and ushered in a completely new era, complete with a new religion (socialism/bolshevism) whose basic tenets must be taken on faith (because the evidence does not support them). In 2006 we are still dealing with the repercusions from some of the decisions made between July 28th, 1914 and November 11, 1918.
One of the outgrowths of this fascination is a close study of naval operations in that period. And in particular, what happened on the late afternoon and evening of May 31, 1916 (the Battle of Jutland). Hasty decisions, or non-decisions influenced naval operations in December of 1942 (Battle of the Barents Sea), and the autumn of 1982 (the Falklands War). And one of the most interesting aspects is what made three British battlecruisers explode and sink?
I've dug into this, following what I could. The Internet has helped, especially the reports of diving expeditions on the wrecks. What follows is what I've been able to piece together and represents my conclusions:
Examination of testimony and the damage to the wreck of HMS Indefatigable suggests the following:
- one or more hits on the Indefatigable that cause some damage. This is conjecture, but evidence from SMS von der Tann appears to indicate several hits.
- a hit aft below the waterline that caused catastrophic flooding. Captain Sowerby, Captain of HMS Indefatigable, survived briefly, being supported in the water by two survivors from the spotting top. He told them he thought the ship had been torpedoed. There were no submarines in the area, and the run time of torpedoes from the inception of the action would not support a torpedo attack from the von der Tann or any other German vessel. Examination of the remains of the wreck suggests that there is no bottom aft part of the ship.
- the Indefatigable was seen (and photographed) sinking by the stern and heeling sharply to port. At the time the picture was taken the water was up to the third funnel and the bow was sharply in the air.
- a final pair of hits on the fore part of the ship, possibly including A Turret, which set off a catastrophic explosion (which is what everyone focuses on).
Examination of testimony and the damage to the wreck of HMS Queen Mary suggests the following:
- · a hit on the left barrel (at the muzzle!) of Q Turret. This put the gun out of action. The right gun fired 17 more rounds before the ship was sunk.
- · a hit aft near the 4" gun battery (confirmed by testimony from gun turret PO).
- · a hit on the 4" gun battery near the bridge, that appears to have flashed down to the 4" gun magazine, setting that off, and setting off the 13.5" magazines just forward of them (for A and B turrets). This destroyed the ship forward of the second funnel. This comes from an analysis of the pattern of damage visible around the wreck on the bottom of the North Sea. At the range the fatal shells were fired there appears to be little chance for a penetration of the armor for A and B Turrets.
- · a final hit as the aft part of the ship was sinking that penetrated the magazine for Q Turret. Unless there was an unknown fire raging amidships, this would explain the final explosion.
Examination of testimony and the damage to the wreck of HMS Invincible suggests the following:
- · a hit penetrated Q Turret, setting fire to the ready-use ammunition. There was a survivor from Q Turret, and this hit was observed from the spotting top.
- · red hot fragments from this hit may have penetrated the magazine for P Turret, setting off the final explosion.
- · Alternatively, several people thought the same salvo that hit Q Turret also penetrated the 6" armor over the trunk to P Turret and caused the fatal explosion. Post WW1 analysis has supported this theory, though examination of the wreck is inconclusive, other than that it was P Turret's magazine that exploded.
Examination of the official ship orders highlights the emphasis in the BCF on rate-of-fire. One gunnery officer (HMS Princess Royal) said that it was well-known that their shooting was "execrable", but they would overwhelm the Germans by a deluge of shells. There were two schools of thought in the Royal Navy (and other navies): the "big blow", and the "deluge of fire". The former led to larger and larger calibers, and the effects of a few 15" hits certainly bore out the ideas. Director control was absolutely necessary for this to work. Those who believed in the "deluge of fire" wanted all guns manned and ready at all times, and as the range closed you would get your hits by sheer volume. The Germans on SMS Seydlitz were proponents of this as they fired their main battery as fast as they could, and even manned their 5.9" guns and had those engage the British line whenever possible, leading to unnecessary casualties in those crews.
HMS Lion had a new Fleet Gunnery Officer assigned in March, and he insisted on the proper handling of shells on that hsip despite a diminution in the rate-of-fire. It is tragic that he did not have this influence on the rest of the Battlecruiser Force. His views probably had a lot to do with the survival of HMS Lion. The flash fire that reached the magazine happened several minutes after the hit on Q Turret (they had time to flood the magazine). It appeared to come from electrical cables that had their own (unguarded) path to the magazine. A further complication is that to speed up the handling of the powder bags, the crews of the handling rooms took the bags out of their protective containers before passing them up the trunk to the turret. This was observed in B Turret on Lion and A Turret of New Zealand. These bags leaked, producing a thin matting of cordite grains on the floors of the turret and the handling room. The image of a powder train leading to the magazine is inescapable.
Hood's Third Battlecruiser Squadron, fresh from Scapa Flow, did not have that rate-of-fire madness, apparently in part due to the views of the Senior Gunnery Officers at Scapa, and in part to Commander Danreuther, whose experience at the Battle of the Falklands had convinced him that accuracy was more important than volume (that December afternoon HMS Invincible had fired 65% of their 12" ammunition, and Danreuther came under severe criticism from Jackie Fisher and others over how few hits he obtained - it should be noted that in December of 1914 HMS Invincible did not have director fire). Commander Danreuther was known as a convert to the "big blow" school, and was assiduous at practicing his gunnery, and with his third salvo landed two hits on Lutzow! There is evidence from the Germans that the gunnery teams on HMS Invincible put at least three more hits into the Lutzow in the next two minutes before the ship was lost (that works out as five hits in six salvos fired in less than eight minutes, impressive shooting).
Monday, November 27, 2006
"Just a little writing..."
I guess I've finally arrived as a writer. The other day at work I was doing some copy editing while on my break, and I had someone come up and inquire what I was doing. I explained, and one thing led to another. That's when he popped his "brilliant" idea:
"I have this terrific idea for a book that will sell a million copies. I just need somebody to write it down for me. I'll split the money with you."
I've talked to people at various writer's conferences, and I've chatted with people online. This is far more common than non-writers realize. In a way it's flattering, but in a way....
They say 4 out of 5 people have a story in them. Only a few of us, though, have the time and patience to learn the teachable elements of the craft (Elizabeth George maintains that while talent is God-given, craft can be taught). Earlier I alluded to where ideas came from. Without getting too snarky, ideas are everywhere. Let's look at a few:
So, thank you, I'm sure you have a great idea, and I hope it works out. I have enough of my own to keep working for a while.
I guess I've finally arrived as a writer. The other day at work I was doing some copy editing while on my break, and I had someone come up and inquire what I was doing. I explained, and one thing led to another. That's when he popped his "brilliant" idea:
"I have this terrific idea for a book that will sell a million copies. I just need somebody to write it down for me. I'll split the money with you."
I've talked to people at various writer's conferences, and I've chatted with people online. This is far more common than non-writers realize. In a way it's flattering, but in a way....
They say 4 out of 5 people have a story in them. Only a few of us, though, have the time and patience to learn the teachable elements of the craft (Elizabeth George maintains that while talent is God-given, craft can be taught). Earlier I alluded to where ideas came from. Without getting too snarky, ideas are everywhere. Let's look at a few:
- somebody Turtlewaxed a floor before killing a man on that floor - this made the blood easier to clean up (luminol still found traces though);
- maids don't always vacuum under a bed. In a seaside town in Washington a dead body was stashed under the bed in a motel;
- a body was found lying on a heating duct - evidence on the scene suggested the person had been killed somewhere else and deliberately left there (the heating duct will complicate time of death calculations, which are based on temperature);
- a large manufacturing firm, in an effort to save money, decided to print their checks on 20# stock white paper they picked up at an office supply store (the potentials for fraud are incredible);
- a couple bought a piece of property with an mine shaft on it - they discovered that there were over 22 bodies at the bottom of the mine shaft; evidence in the skulls suggested all had been shot and their bodies dumped there;
- a body dumped into cold water was preserved so well the forensic pathologist could still determine critical pieces of information about the deceased that led to an arrest.
So, thank you, I'm sure you have a great idea, and I hope it works out. I have enough of my own to keep working for a while.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Random Topic Wandering
It's been more than two weeks. I've been busy, and I've been doing some reading. So, in no particular order, some items from the "busy" pile.
What have I been reading? Well, The Godfather Returns is out in paperback, and thus in my price range. It assumes that you've seen both movies and read Mario Puzo's The Godfather. The writing isn't the same quality as Puzo's, but different authors have different ways of doing things. It really tries to bring the story into the 1960s, and, for the most part, succeeds. I hope it doesn't try to incorporate anything from the movie The Godfather, Part 3. Hmm, what else? I think the book needs a little more focusing, especially for those who didn't see the movies.
Last weekend I put on a game of King's War. I also bought a pack of Venexia Miniatures (www.venexieaminiatures.com), the first figures I've bought in quite a while. King's War is fun to play, and hopefully close to the period in terms of effect. It actually is a variable-length-bound game; you literally don't know when the turn will end (or the game). The result is chaos, and as the commander you run around trying to manage it.
I've been toying with the same concept for an ACW adaptation. I think one of the differences is that a player can advance while still disorganized (up to a point), and you can accept more disorder to avoid retreating. In some ways the ACW is easier to do as both sides were organized and led in much the same way. In some ways the ACW is harder to do as everyone has an opinion on how things went, and why. Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton give the feel of an ACW battle, and I think that's more important to put into a game than a precisely calculated interaction of the weapons. I should be trying out the rules soon.
I modified Volley & Bayonet (2nd Ed. - Age of Frederick playtest version) slightly to do Marlburians. See elsewhere for the details. Suffice to say the early linear period has a fascination all its own. You can do a battle with 20,000 combatants in a couple of hours, get a result that looks like something you read in the history books, and it can even be fun. I've mounted a bunch of my Napoleonics for V&B, and when I get my gaming table moved and set up on the other side of the house I'll rebase the rest of them. I loved playing 1:60 Napoleonics when Empire 1 and Empire 2 were available, but I really like what Frank Chadwick has done with V&B.
An aside - when you want to bring Napoleonic gamers together for a big game (such as the Borodino Project), isn't it interesting that they end up using a modified version of Empire 2? It says something, doesn't it? Incidentally, I thought the two best modifications of the Empire system were Garde du Corps, and Houserules Napoleonic II. Of the two, HR2 was perhaps the best. It's only glitch was the command sequence of passing on orders, but a little rewriting took care of that. GdC's flaw was the formation modifiers for melee, and how you could "win" the melee, but get a "draw" result.
What about stories? Well, I continue to plug away on Firestar. I went down a wrong road for about 1.5 chapters, and I've learned that when I bog down, and just can't write, it isn't writer's block (because I can write other things), but instead it's my subconscious telling me I'm going in the wrong direction. The trick, then, is to back up and try again, looking for that other direction.
But about Firestar, I've workshopped the first two chapters, and smoothed things out. When I finish chapters 14 and 15 it'll be time to resubmit to the agent. By then I'll have the whole thing worked out enough that if he asks to see it all I can do that with few problems.
Oh, and real life intruded. A word to the wise. If you want to get out from under on your timeshare, good luck.
It's been more than two weeks. I've been busy, and I've been doing some reading. So, in no particular order, some items from the "busy" pile.
What have I been reading? Well, The Godfather Returns is out in paperback, and thus in my price range. It assumes that you've seen both movies and read Mario Puzo's The Godfather. The writing isn't the same quality as Puzo's, but different authors have different ways of doing things. It really tries to bring the story into the 1960s, and, for the most part, succeeds. I hope it doesn't try to incorporate anything from the movie The Godfather, Part 3. Hmm, what else? I think the book needs a little more focusing, especially for those who didn't see the movies.
Last weekend I put on a game of King's War. I also bought a pack of Venexia Miniatures (www.venexieaminiatures.com), the first figures I've bought in quite a while. King's War is fun to play, and hopefully close to the period in terms of effect. It actually is a variable-length-bound game; you literally don't know when the turn will end (or the game). The result is chaos, and as the commander you run around trying to manage it.
I've been toying with the same concept for an ACW adaptation. I think one of the differences is that a player can advance while still disorganized (up to a point), and you can accept more disorder to avoid retreating. In some ways the ACW is easier to do as both sides were organized and led in much the same way. In some ways the ACW is harder to do as everyone has an opinion on how things went, and why. Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton give the feel of an ACW battle, and I think that's more important to put into a game than a precisely calculated interaction of the weapons. I should be trying out the rules soon.
I modified Volley & Bayonet (2nd Ed. - Age of Frederick playtest version) slightly to do Marlburians. See elsewhere for the details. Suffice to say the early linear period has a fascination all its own. You can do a battle with 20,000 combatants in a couple of hours, get a result that looks like something you read in the history books, and it can even be fun. I've mounted a bunch of my Napoleonics for V&B, and when I get my gaming table moved and set up on the other side of the house I'll rebase the rest of them. I loved playing 1:60 Napoleonics when Empire 1 and Empire 2 were available, but I really like what Frank Chadwick has done with V&B.
An aside - when you want to bring Napoleonic gamers together for a big game (such as the Borodino Project), isn't it interesting that they end up using a modified version of Empire 2? It says something, doesn't it? Incidentally, I thought the two best modifications of the Empire system were Garde du Corps, and Houserules Napoleonic II. Of the two, HR2 was perhaps the best. It's only glitch was the command sequence of passing on orders, but a little rewriting took care of that. GdC's flaw was the formation modifiers for melee, and how you could "win" the melee, but get a "draw" result.
What about stories? Well, I continue to plug away on Firestar. I went down a wrong road for about 1.5 chapters, and I've learned that when I bog down, and just can't write, it isn't writer's block (because I can write other things), but instead it's my subconscious telling me I'm going in the wrong direction. The trick, then, is to back up and try again, looking for that other direction.
But about Firestar, I've workshopped the first two chapters, and smoothed things out. When I finish chapters 14 and 15 it'll be time to resubmit to the agent. By then I'll have the whole thing worked out enough that if he asks to see it all I can do that with few problems.
Oh, and real life intruded. A word to the wise. If you want to get out from under on your timeshare, good luck.
Monday, November 06, 2006
Rejection...again (11/6/06)
Another rejection letter, this time from Tor Books. I wrote elsewhere that there is a gradation of rejection letters. This was the straightforward one that tells you nothing: "this does not fit our current list". What can I draw from that?
Actually there were two rejections. "Dover Street Bridge" came back on the same day, making it a 2 for 1. "The plot is too weak". A little more informative on what was essentially a mood piece. At least the referred me to their website: http://www.weirdtalesmagazine.com
-----
That's enough stewing. What's next? This has concluded the agents I had personal contact with (other than Steve and Firestar. Time to hit Ralan and see what I can scare up.
Another rejection letter, this time from Tor Books. I wrote elsewhere that there is a gradation of rejection letters. This was the straightforward one that tells you nothing: "this does not fit our current list". What can I draw from that?
Actually there were two rejections. "Dover Street Bridge" came back on the same day, making it a 2 for 1. "The plot is too weak". A little more informative on what was essentially a mood piece. At least the referred me to their website: http://www.weirdtalesmagazine.com
-----
That's enough stewing. What's next? This has concluded the agents I had personal contact with (other than Steve and Firestar. Time to hit Ralan and see what I can scare up.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Monthly Status Report
Jeeze, I last did status reports when I had the 8-7:30 pm shift for a large company. I know it was supposed to be 8-4:30, but we had this project, see, and the rules went out the window (including kindness, civility, and respect for ones peers). Plus the Project Manager was more than a little out of his depth (can we say Challenger Deep is less shallow than other spots in the ocean?). But anyway, that memory aside, here is where we are.
Novels
Firestar - I am working my way through chapter 14 of a rewrite of Firestar. Corey is considering resigning from the Navy. Her Family is encouraging this, but not with the overt hostility she had before. I just cut 8 pages of pursuit out of the story. Instead I'm going to layer in some background. Part of the reason for the rewrite is I'm trying to take Corey in another direction. This is the third rewrite (top to bottom) of the story. When I finish it goes off to Steve Mancino. I will be taking chapter 2 with me on Monday night to Woodinville.
Setosha, Lexeon, Boabdil - pulled out from the Families Arc, but I haven't done much beyond that. I did trim Lexeon down quite a bit to focus the attention. This is where I got Boabdil.
Different World - I read the beginning 14 pages at Phinney Ridge Scribblers last week. I expect some interesting feedback, I already have what they said that night and have incorporated it. I'm still stuck on chapter 5, but mainly because I haven't tried to write more. I took out a whole chapter earlier about visiting a Bavarian timeline.
Three Valleys - Sammi - I am up through chapter 22. Sammi is settling on her boyfriend. The next chapter is the "Formal" (in our world, the prom). This will cement her decision.
Devlin's Story - Chapter 54 is awaiting editorial response. Chapter 55 is mostly in the can. Chapter 56 will be Thanksgiving at Evan's folk's in the Keys. 57 will be a fast-forward, to get to 58, when Evan first pitches in the Majors. Then will come the wrapping up. Projected, 60 chapters. This is really easy to write.
Crosstime Cop - still no word from Tor Books. Time for an inquiry. I've completed a top to bottom rewrite, and am now dropping in bits and pieces based on feedback. Rewrote Chapter 16 to show more development in Marge (mentioned it to Darlene, Laura and Sarah - they were very positive). Am considering other Marge stories. I can't show previous stories, because we know the characters survived.
Counterfeit Line - I've done nothing with the story. Steve Mancino's comment is still valid: I need more "sense of wonder/shock" when Gina realizes where she is. After that, time to ship it out again.
Kassandra's Song - time to ship it out again.
Short Stories
Still no word on Dover Street Bridge. Time for an inquiry. I touched up The Dragon Commission, and now have to find a home for it. And I did a quickie (I meant that word) in the same mode as Sammi and Devlin: Improving Office Morale. Currently pulling down a 9.41 with 38 votes on SOL. The initial impressions are the important ones. Got one comment - he liked the tone. I have a follow-on in mind already.
Ideas
I got an idea from Dealing with the Devil, a story set in Nick Scipio's Summer Camp universe (though not by Nick). Hayley Devlin gets murdered, or somebody like her, and the detective has to figure it out. The gimmick is that it happens on an alternate reality where magic works, and gives me a fantasy/cop story.
Overall
Time to get off my duff and sent some things out. Time will be a crunch. Priority must go to Firestar for development work.
Jeeze, I last did status reports when I had the 8-7:30 pm shift for a large company. I know it was supposed to be 8-4:30, but we had this project, see, and the rules went out the window (including kindness, civility, and respect for ones peers). Plus the Project Manager was more than a little out of his depth (can we say Challenger Deep is less shallow than other spots in the ocean?). But anyway, that memory aside, here is where we are.
Novels
Firestar - I am working my way through chapter 14 of a rewrite of Firestar. Corey is considering resigning from the Navy. Her Family is encouraging this, but not with the overt hostility she had before. I just cut 8 pages of pursuit out of the story. Instead I'm going to layer in some background. Part of the reason for the rewrite is I'm trying to take Corey in another direction. This is the third rewrite (top to bottom) of the story. When I finish it goes off to Steve Mancino. I will be taking chapter 2 with me on Monday night to Woodinville.
Setosha, Lexeon, Boabdil - pulled out from the Families Arc, but I haven't done much beyond that. I did trim Lexeon down quite a bit to focus the attention. This is where I got Boabdil.
Different World - I read the beginning 14 pages at Phinney Ridge Scribblers last week. I expect some interesting feedback, I already have what they said that night and have incorporated it. I'm still stuck on chapter 5, but mainly because I haven't tried to write more. I took out a whole chapter earlier about visiting a Bavarian timeline.
Three Valleys - Sammi - I am up through chapter 22. Sammi is settling on her boyfriend. The next chapter is the "Formal" (in our world, the prom). This will cement her decision.
Devlin's Story - Chapter 54 is awaiting editorial response. Chapter 55 is mostly in the can. Chapter 56 will be Thanksgiving at Evan's folk's in the Keys. 57 will be a fast-forward, to get to 58, when Evan first pitches in the Majors. Then will come the wrapping up. Projected, 60 chapters. This is really easy to write.
Crosstime Cop - still no word from Tor Books. Time for an inquiry. I've completed a top to bottom rewrite, and am now dropping in bits and pieces based on feedback. Rewrote Chapter 16 to show more development in Marge (mentioned it to Darlene, Laura and Sarah - they were very positive). Am considering other Marge stories. I can't show previous stories, because we know the characters survived.
Counterfeit Line - I've done nothing with the story. Steve Mancino's comment is still valid: I need more "sense of wonder/shock" when Gina realizes where she is. After that, time to ship it out again.
Kassandra's Song - time to ship it out again.
Short Stories
Still no word on Dover Street Bridge. Time for an inquiry. I touched up The Dragon Commission, and now have to find a home for it. And I did a quickie (I meant that word) in the same mode as Sammi and Devlin: Improving Office Morale. Currently pulling down a 9.41 with 38 votes on SOL. The initial impressions are the important ones. Got one comment - he liked the tone. I have a follow-on in mind already.
Ideas
I got an idea from Dealing with the Devil, a story set in Nick Scipio's Summer Camp universe (though not by Nick). Hayley Devlin gets murdered, or somebody like her, and the detective has to figure it out. The gimmick is that it happens on an alternate reality where magic works, and gives me a fantasy/cop story.
Overall
Time to get off my duff and sent some things out. Time will be a crunch. Priority must go to Firestar for development work.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Imaginary Units (Imaginary Countries - 2)
Along with imaginary countries, there's the pleasures of creating imaginary units with fictional identities. At least at first. After a few trips to the gaming table you find that your little collection of pewter (never lead) or plastic begin to acquire reputations and traditions. Worse (or better) they live up to them.
Take a unit of mine. They are Marlburian English (not British until 1708). They have blue cuffs, blue waistcoat, blue stockings, and gold/yellow lace/buttons. I used a Dixon 15mm figure for them (as I did all my English foot). In a playtest of my rules Sun King they proved to be a staunch and particularly deadly unit. The player controlling them has a penchant for names, and christened them Lord Lovaduck's.
They continued this sterling performance when I changed to Pat Condray's rules, and showed it again when I switched all of my Marlburians over to Volley & Bayonet (go to http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mcnelly/vnb.htm for everything you want to know about these wonderful rules). So through three different rules, and 14 years, this unit has been an outstanding one. And I never gave it higher morale or any other perks (though when I took them away from Sun King I removed their pikes).
There's another, even better example, though. I painted up a 6-casting regiment of lobsters for the English Civil War. I used them as the ultimate reserve: i.e. their job was to turn a defeat into a draw, or a victory into a triumph. Under Bill Protz's rules The Wargamer's Guide to the English Civil War they tended to grow stronger as the battle progressed and they won successive clash after successive clash, each time raising their morale. The ultimate moment was when they were charged by Scottish Lancers during a grudge match, and left roadkill behind them. They were so effective they were dubbed the Portable Black Hole by the people I gamed against.
After several years with Bill's rules I wrote my own pike and shot rules, King's War. I don't use the same morale system that Bill uses, so I was curious how they would do. In their first combat they were outnumbered by 50%. They forced the enemy unit to retreat, capturing their colors, and then pursuing them (difficult for cuirassier to do in King's War). They caught the unit with the pursuit, forcing a second melee, and routed them. And then in the next battle, against cuirassier this time, did the same thing.
Sometimes units get undeserved names. My friend Jeff had a Napoleonic cavalry unit that he painted with red Moroccan boots. They got dubbed the Pink Booties. A regiment of his hussars was dubbed The Colorful Highwaymen. Another friend painted some Prussian 1813 grenadiers in 6mm. Their white plume has led them to being called the Ice Cream Boys (their baptism of fire was one of total immersion when they got massacred by an Austrian grand battery).
Sometimes the unit has a good name, and an unfortunate reputation. A friend painted the 11th US Infantry from 1813 in the gray coats they wore at Lundy's Lane (and from which the West Point cadets drew their own gray coats). In the historical battle the British commander, watching the 11th approach, thought they were militia as US militia wore gray (and regulars wore blue). But when they wheeled into line and opened a punishing fire into his ranks, he said "Those are regulars, by God!" Mike painted them up, and they were an absolute disaster. They repeatedly broke in battle. Finally, in disgust, he sold them to another player, where they became a crack unit. Go figure.
One of mine was the Cuirassier d'Or with their gold-plated cuirasses. The memories of their craven performances on battlefield after battlefield is still painful. After a while I stopped using them.
Probably the best unit that has passed into gaming lore locally is the King David's Hussars (painted up as the British 15th Hussars). This 4-figure unit once had to face four regiments of opposing hussars that were committed against it one at a time. Each time King David's lost one casting, but they broke all four regiments. Another time they charged the 1st Battalion of the Grenadiers of the French Old Guard. They left an exit wound 4 castings wide in the grenadiers, rode through them, meleed (and lost) to a brigade of opposing dragoons, losing half their numbers, and while retreating caught the grenadiers from behind, removing 2 more castings from them. The owner doesn't want to increase their numbers as it "might dilute their quality". Woof!
Creating an imaginary country (see previous post) allows you to create new units. In my Grand Duchy for my pike and shot boys I have the New Red Regiment, which is always deployed to the right of the Old Red Regiment (the old/new refers to how long I've had them). The Old Reds are obviously more left than the New Reds. I have the Mistress's Regiment (done in pink) with a picture of a bed on their colors (the neat thing is that as the current mistress falls out of favor she might, if she was good enough, get a different regiment while the new mistress assumes the title/duties of Colonel-in-Chief of the Mistress's Regiment.
Names can be found wherever you look. My English Marlburians, for example, have d'Escoigne-d'Escoigne (from the Scarlet Pimpernel), the Hundred Acre Woods Foresters (from Winnie the Pooh), Lord Rakehell's (the generic dashing and mysterious nobleman from countless romances), Lestrade's Regiment (from Sherlock Holmes), McAlpin's Fusiliers (from the Irish folk song about the navvies who labored in England), and so on. The countless parade of red coats is broken only by H.M.O.R.L.E.B. 5th Fusiliers (Her Majesty's Own Royal, Loyal and Excessively Brave 5th Fusiliers) from the Hoka series of stories. My Spanish (Walloon) regiments include Dulcinea de Tolosa (from Don Quixote).
German is a good source for names, if only because of the way the names are pronounced. One gamer has a Swiss unit in German Colonial Service, Klicken-Klocken Regiment. This is tame compared to another German Colonial regiment (in his feared Zepplin Infantry) - von und zu Trinksblut und Eissenessen (from the Charles Grant book on wargaming).
The point is that names can be found nearly anywhere. These are your units, and you should have fun with them. This is supposed to be recreation, after all.
Along with imaginary countries, there's the pleasures of creating imaginary units with fictional identities. At least at first. After a few trips to the gaming table you find that your little collection of pewter (never lead) or plastic begin to acquire reputations and traditions. Worse (or better) they live up to them.
Take a unit of mine. They are Marlburian English (not British until 1708). They have blue cuffs, blue waistcoat, blue stockings, and gold/yellow lace/buttons. I used a Dixon 15mm figure for them (as I did all my English foot). In a playtest of my rules Sun King they proved to be a staunch and particularly deadly unit. The player controlling them has a penchant for names, and christened them Lord Lovaduck's.
They continued this sterling performance when I changed to Pat Condray's rules, and showed it again when I switched all of my Marlburians over to Volley & Bayonet (go to http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mcnelly/vnb.htm for everything you want to know about these wonderful rules). So through three different rules, and 14 years, this unit has been an outstanding one. And I never gave it higher morale or any other perks (though when I took them away from Sun King I removed their pikes).
There's another, even better example, though. I painted up a 6-casting regiment of lobsters for the English Civil War. I used them as the ultimate reserve: i.e. their job was to turn a defeat into a draw, or a victory into a triumph. Under Bill Protz's rules The Wargamer's Guide to the English Civil War they tended to grow stronger as the battle progressed and they won successive clash after successive clash, each time raising their morale. The ultimate moment was when they were charged by Scottish Lancers during a grudge match, and left roadkill behind them. They were so effective they were dubbed the Portable Black Hole by the people I gamed against.
After several years with Bill's rules I wrote my own pike and shot rules, King's War. I don't use the same morale system that Bill uses, so I was curious how they would do. In their first combat they were outnumbered by 50%. They forced the enemy unit to retreat, capturing their colors, and then pursuing them (difficult for cuirassier to do in King's War). They caught the unit with the pursuit, forcing a second melee, and routed them. And then in the next battle, against cuirassier this time, did the same thing.
Sometimes units get undeserved names. My friend Jeff had a Napoleonic cavalry unit that he painted with red Moroccan boots. They got dubbed the Pink Booties. A regiment of his hussars was dubbed The Colorful Highwaymen. Another friend painted some Prussian 1813 grenadiers in 6mm. Their white plume has led them to being called the Ice Cream Boys (their baptism of fire was one of total immersion when they got massacred by an Austrian grand battery).
Sometimes the unit has a good name, and an unfortunate reputation. A friend painted the 11th US Infantry from 1813 in the gray coats they wore at Lundy's Lane (and from which the West Point cadets drew their own gray coats). In the historical battle the British commander, watching the 11th approach, thought they were militia as US militia wore gray (and regulars wore blue). But when they wheeled into line and opened a punishing fire into his ranks, he said "Those are regulars, by God!" Mike painted them up, and they were an absolute disaster. They repeatedly broke in battle. Finally, in disgust, he sold them to another player, where they became a crack unit. Go figure.
One of mine was the Cuirassier d'Or with their gold-plated cuirasses. The memories of their craven performances on battlefield after battlefield is still painful. After a while I stopped using them.
Probably the best unit that has passed into gaming lore locally is the King David's Hussars (painted up as the British 15th Hussars). This 4-figure unit once had to face four regiments of opposing hussars that were committed against it one at a time. Each time King David's lost one casting, but they broke all four regiments. Another time they charged the 1st Battalion of the Grenadiers of the French Old Guard. They left an exit wound 4 castings wide in the grenadiers, rode through them, meleed (and lost) to a brigade of opposing dragoons, losing half their numbers, and while retreating caught the grenadiers from behind, removing 2 more castings from them. The owner doesn't want to increase their numbers as it "might dilute their quality". Woof!
Creating an imaginary country (see previous post) allows you to create new units. In my Grand Duchy for my pike and shot boys I have the New Red Regiment, which is always deployed to the right of the Old Red Regiment (the old/new refers to how long I've had them). The Old Reds are obviously more left than the New Reds. I have the Mistress's Regiment (done in pink) with a picture of a bed on their colors (the neat thing is that as the current mistress falls out of favor she might, if she was good enough, get a different regiment while the new mistress assumes the title/duties of Colonel-in-Chief of the Mistress's Regiment.
Names can be found wherever you look. My English Marlburians, for example, have d'Escoigne-d'Escoigne (from the Scarlet Pimpernel), the Hundred Acre Woods Foresters (from Winnie the Pooh), Lord Rakehell's (the generic dashing and mysterious nobleman from countless romances), Lestrade's Regiment (from Sherlock Holmes), McAlpin's Fusiliers (from the Irish folk song about the navvies who labored in England), and so on. The countless parade of red coats is broken only by H.M.O.R.L.E.B. 5th Fusiliers (Her Majesty's Own Royal, Loyal and Excessively Brave 5th Fusiliers) from the Hoka series of stories. My Spanish (Walloon) regiments include Dulcinea de Tolosa (from Don Quixote).
German is a good source for names, if only because of the way the names are pronounced. One gamer has a Swiss unit in German Colonial Service, Klicken-Klocken Regiment. This is tame compared to another German Colonial regiment (in his feared Zepplin Infantry) - von und zu Trinksblut und Eissenessen (from the Charles Grant book on wargaming).
The point is that names can be found nearly anywhere. These are your units, and you should have fun with them. This is supposed to be recreation, after all.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Imaginary Countries
Most of us who game with miniatures have seen it. Your Napoleonic British Infantry are beset on all sides by the Nasty Evil French (TM) and are forced to recoil. An onlooker studies this, and offers one of two gems: "The British did not lose a tactical engagement in the Napoleonic Wars", or "The 214th Foot never would have recoiled in that situation". Having pontificated to their own satisfaction, they weigh anchor and ponderously move off to view another game.
Of course the 214th Foot never would have recoiled...or would they? It's not written in any of the histories, but a lot of the histories available to the casual historian/gamer don't cover much earlier than 1792. How does he know what happened to the 214th Foot in, say, 1743? Or 1708? The answer is that he probably doesn't. Besides, how does he know that's the 214th Foot? Perhaps it is the Duchess of Periwinkle's Own.
The troops we put out there represent historical units. To the best of our ability we research their uniforms and paint them in what we think was available on the day. We are aided by uniform guides, deserter reports, regulations, and so on. And we discover that some of these might not reflect what was worn on campaign, and so some of us throw in the touches to show that these are troops on campaign, not back home on the parade square. Some of the touches I've seen have included patches on the knees and elbows, the occasional different color breeches, fading some of the coats, and making others a little more dramatic, and the occasional hat that isn't quite regulation. Some gamers (I, myself subscribe to this) have a rule of thumb: the greener the unit, the more likely its uniform will be regulation. The ones to watch out for are the ones who look ragamuffin. Those are veterans who have been up to the pointy end of the stick a few times.
Now the other cure for the pontificating spectator is to create an imaginary country. Then you can icily inform him that he is watching the Duke of Creosote's Own, not the 214th Foot, and the chances of war have caught up with them.
Wargaming is replete with a lot of imaginary countries. There are two groups on Yahoo that spend time with the concept: Old School Wargames, and Society of Daisy. Both follow a similar approach. You pick a period, you raise some historical units but give them fictional names, and you go forward from there.
I've created a couple of different imaginary countries, the Electorate of Hesse-Bindlestiff, set in the 18th Century, and a Napoleonic country, Gottingen-Hoff. The process was different, but the essentials were the same.
Gottingen-Hoff came about from a night creating a map. I don't remember too much about that night, but tequila was involved. That might explain the glaciers next to the coral reefs. But the country was sort of a France, complete with Revolutionary Council (but much more benign than the historical France). I chose France not because of a liking for Napoleon, but because the doctrine the army used happened to fit the way I game, very aggressive and very fluid.
Side-bar: a number of years ago my friend Jeff and I were visiting a local hobby store. They had a game of Napoleon's Battles going on, and we were invited to take part. This was the Battle of Teugen-Hausen in 1809 (a historical battle). Jeff was given some French, and I was given a corps of Austrians. This particular group of gamers were 'average' gamers: i.e. there was the enemy, you march right up and smite him. Jeff didn't do that. Amidst many screams he paused, brought up a second division, and outflanked the Austrians at the same time that he assaulted them frontally. They'd never seen this before, and were amazed how even in Napoleon's Battles he swept the ridge with ease.
In my case, I came up through some woods, put scouts out, saw all the French in the world ready to pounce on me, and instead of pitching in and getting my troops gloriously slaughtered, turned around. The French player pursued, and I smacked him back with a counterattack from Hussars and Grenzers. That gave me a headstart, and I got clean away.
Fast forward a couple of months. The Northwest HMGS put on Enfilade, and the guys who played Napleon's Battles that day were doing Wagram. I was called and offered a corps of Austrians as I am a "nice cautious Austrian commander". For some reason this sends my gaming buddies into paroxysms of laughter. I declined.
Back to imaginary countries. We're creating Saxe-Schweinrot, a minor German principality mired in the early 18th Century (the colors include a red pig rampant on a field of greens (apple in mouth optional)). The Prince has been to Versailles, or as he puts it "I've been over to the future, and it works!" He has a palace, a princess, perhaps a mistress (almost required), a palace guard that spends all of its time coming to attention and saluting, but has no combat value, and an army that he rents out at reasonable rates.
The army is the key thing for imaginary countries. Unless you're going to draw a map (use Campaign Cartographer if you do), you don't need the rest. Settle on a color scheme. 18th Century choices include Prussian Blue, Austrian White, Russian Green, British Red, or some variation of those. The French, for example, wore an off-white, while the Dutch, in the early 18th Century, went with undyed wool. And you'll need flags (why you have a drawing program on your computer). Elaborate hand-painted flags were the norm in this period. Remember, as long as you can paint the army consistently you don't have to be too crazy. I mentioned the above countries as you can paint the units up in historical uniforms, swap out the color stand for your made-up flags, and there you are.
So Saxe-Schweinrot is going to be, oh...French/Austrian in color (colored dyes are so expensive), which means white uniforms. But you like the idea of units dressed other than in white. You have pink, green, a medium blue, and so on. Great! Those are foreign regiments in the service of your country, though in your imaginary world those are units raised in minor countries in your service.
Now you spend a few minutes coming up with names for the regiments, and, more importantly, your generals. Here is where you mine books and other places. Tradition almost demands that you keep to a theme, and that if you use foreign names, you make sure there are some jokes involved. You don't have to explain the jokes, but they're part of the fun. An example: I lifted Major General Stanley from The Pirates of Penzance from Gilbert and Sullivan, and after he had considerable success (and captured the town of Umbrage in one game) he became Lord Stanley of Umbrage (for having successfully taken umbrage). See what I mean about puns and jokes? Other names I've seen on the battlefield: Marquis of Frothingrage, General Findandrun, Sir Hugh Hellforleather the famous cavalry commander, and so on.
Now you add some history to your army. You're in an imaginary part of Europe, so that means you can ignore the parts of European history that you don't like. This is what's so good about the 18th and 19th Centuries! There were a lot of tiny little states populating Germany, and yours can be one of them. And as you fight battles with your new army you will have units that distinguish themselves (and gain battle honors), and others that are best left in garrison to face down the populace). One acquaintance went so far as to make 6"x6" flags to decorate the walls in his gaming room, and as units gained experience and honors, attached little streamers with the name of the battle on the streamer.
All right, you've built your army, you have a history, maybe you even have a map. Now we get to campaign with them. And you can either find a willing and nearby opponent (I was lucky that way), or you can build what I ended up doing after I moved to the Midwest, building a second and competing army, complete with fake history, flags, and so on. Either way works, and the campaign system you'll use is for another time.
Most of us who game with miniatures have seen it. Your Napoleonic British Infantry are beset on all sides by the Nasty Evil French (TM) and are forced to recoil. An onlooker studies this, and offers one of two gems: "The British did not lose a tactical engagement in the Napoleonic Wars", or "The 214th Foot never would have recoiled in that situation". Having pontificated to their own satisfaction, they weigh anchor and ponderously move off to view another game.
Of course the 214th Foot never would have recoiled...or would they? It's not written in any of the histories, but a lot of the histories available to the casual historian/gamer don't cover much earlier than 1792. How does he know what happened to the 214th Foot in, say, 1743? Or 1708? The answer is that he probably doesn't. Besides, how does he know that's the 214th Foot? Perhaps it is the Duchess of Periwinkle's Own.
The troops we put out there represent historical units. To the best of our ability we research their uniforms and paint them in what we think was available on the day. We are aided by uniform guides, deserter reports, regulations, and so on. And we discover that some of these might not reflect what was worn on campaign, and so some of us throw in the touches to show that these are troops on campaign, not back home on the parade square. Some of the touches I've seen have included patches on the knees and elbows, the occasional different color breeches, fading some of the coats, and making others a little more dramatic, and the occasional hat that isn't quite regulation. Some gamers (I, myself subscribe to this) have a rule of thumb: the greener the unit, the more likely its uniform will be regulation. The ones to watch out for are the ones who look ragamuffin. Those are veterans who have been up to the pointy end of the stick a few times.
Now the other cure for the pontificating spectator is to create an imaginary country. Then you can icily inform him that he is watching the Duke of Creosote's Own, not the 214th Foot, and the chances of war have caught up with them.
Wargaming is replete with a lot of imaginary countries. There are two groups on Yahoo that spend time with the concept: Old School Wargames, and Society of Daisy. Both follow a similar approach. You pick a period, you raise some historical units but give them fictional names, and you go forward from there.
I've created a couple of different imaginary countries, the Electorate of Hesse-Bindlestiff, set in the 18th Century, and a Napoleonic country, Gottingen-Hoff. The process was different, but the essentials were the same.
Gottingen-Hoff came about from a night creating a map. I don't remember too much about that night, but tequila was involved. That might explain the glaciers next to the coral reefs. But the country was sort of a France, complete with Revolutionary Council (but much more benign than the historical France). I chose France not because of a liking for Napoleon, but because the doctrine the army used happened to fit the way I game, very aggressive and very fluid.
Side-bar: a number of years ago my friend Jeff and I were visiting a local hobby store. They had a game of Napoleon's Battles going on, and we were invited to take part. This was the Battle of Teugen-Hausen in 1809 (a historical battle). Jeff was given some French, and I was given a corps of Austrians. This particular group of gamers were 'average' gamers: i.e. there was the enemy, you march right up and smite him. Jeff didn't do that. Amidst many screams he paused, brought up a second division, and outflanked the Austrians at the same time that he assaulted them frontally. They'd never seen this before, and were amazed how even in Napoleon's Battles he swept the ridge with ease.
In my case, I came up through some woods, put scouts out, saw all the French in the world ready to pounce on me, and instead of pitching in and getting my troops gloriously slaughtered, turned around. The French player pursued, and I smacked him back with a counterattack from Hussars and Grenzers. That gave me a headstart, and I got clean away.
Fast forward a couple of months. The Northwest HMGS put on Enfilade, and the guys who played Napleon's Battles that day were doing Wagram. I was called and offered a corps of Austrians as I am a "nice cautious Austrian commander". For some reason this sends my gaming buddies into paroxysms of laughter. I declined.
Back to imaginary countries. We're creating Saxe-Schweinrot, a minor German principality mired in the early 18th Century (the colors include a red pig rampant on a field of greens (apple in mouth optional)). The Prince has been to Versailles, or as he puts it "I've been over to the future, and it works!" He has a palace, a princess, perhaps a mistress (almost required), a palace guard that spends all of its time coming to attention and saluting, but has no combat value, and an army that he rents out at reasonable rates.
The army is the key thing for imaginary countries. Unless you're going to draw a map (use Campaign Cartographer if you do), you don't need the rest. Settle on a color scheme. 18th Century choices include Prussian Blue, Austrian White, Russian Green, British Red, or some variation of those. The French, for example, wore an off-white, while the Dutch, in the early 18th Century, went with undyed wool. And you'll need flags (why you have a drawing program on your computer). Elaborate hand-painted flags were the norm in this period. Remember, as long as you can paint the army consistently you don't have to be too crazy. I mentioned the above countries as you can paint the units up in historical uniforms, swap out the color stand for your made-up flags, and there you are.
So Saxe-Schweinrot is going to be, oh...French/Austrian in color (colored dyes are so expensive), which means white uniforms. But you like the idea of units dressed other than in white. You have pink, green, a medium blue, and so on. Great! Those are foreign regiments in the service of your country, though in your imaginary world those are units raised in minor countries in your service.
Now you spend a few minutes coming up with names for the regiments, and, more importantly, your generals. Here is where you mine books and other places. Tradition almost demands that you keep to a theme, and that if you use foreign names, you make sure there are some jokes involved. You don't have to explain the jokes, but they're part of the fun. An example: I lifted Major General Stanley from The Pirates of Penzance from Gilbert and Sullivan, and after he had considerable success (and captured the town of Umbrage in one game) he became Lord Stanley of Umbrage (for having successfully taken umbrage). See what I mean about puns and jokes? Other names I've seen on the battlefield: Marquis of Frothingrage, General Findandrun, Sir Hugh Hellforleather the famous cavalry commander, and so on.
Now you add some history to your army. You're in an imaginary part of Europe, so that means you can ignore the parts of European history that you don't like. This is what's so good about the 18th and 19th Centuries! There were a lot of tiny little states populating Germany, and yours can be one of them. And as you fight battles with your new army you will have units that distinguish themselves (and gain battle honors), and others that are best left in garrison to face down the populace). One acquaintance went so far as to make 6"x6" flags to decorate the walls in his gaming room, and as units gained experience and honors, attached little streamers with the name of the battle on the streamer.
All right, you've built your army, you have a history, maybe you even have a map. Now we get to campaign with them. And you can either find a willing and nearby opponent (I was lucky that way), or you can build what I ended up doing after I moved to the Midwest, building a second and competing army, complete with fake history, flags, and so on. Either way works, and the campaign system you'll use is for another time.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Supply and Your Miniature Army
I was once accused of wanting to track every biscuit issued to the army. Well, yes, mea culpa. I got interested in how to feed an army when I read two seminal works: George Washington's Expense Account, and Supplying War. There was a line in the former that captured the spirit of Washington's expensing: "Dinner for one army". And the latter is a history of the difficulties in feeding an army.
For anyone who has ever been on an expense account, Washington's Expense Account is priceless. If you recall your history, Washington turned down a salary and offered to serve if Congress merely reimbursed him for his expenses. Sounds like quite a deal. The salary established for Commander of an Army, as established by the Continental Congress was $6,000/year. After 8 years the government would have owed him $48,000. Instead they reimbursed him over $250,000. He used 22 of the 23 principles of expense accounting. In 1790 they refused to do that and insisted on paying him a salary as president. The book is simply an annotated copy of the expense report first published in the 1830s.
The latter book, by Martin van Crefeld, doesn't go into great detail, but he gives enough starting with the basics: a man consumes 1 pound of food and 1 pound of water each day (this is a rough average). A horse consumes 10x that, and can't eat meat (in the American Civil War fodder was the largest item shipped on the railroads). A 2,000 man regiment eats a ton of food and consumes a ton of water each and every day, even when sitting in a camp. An army corps, minus any horses, consumes 12.5 to 16 tons of food and a similar amount of water, each day.
Now various things can be substituted for the food, and wine or beer is often served in place of water as the alcohol will kill the bugs you'll otherwise find in the water (this was the origin of 'the flux' so often mentioned by travelers -- even as late as the 1950s it wasn't unusual for somebody to take a few days to 'acclimate' to the local bugs, and that was in the US!). The soldiers won't eat grass, but you can drive beef along with the army, and in Marlburian times soldiers would go out and harvest the fields to get grain for bread.
Now you can come up with a formula for all of this, and write a computer model to do the actual supply. Or you can look for simplifications. I did that with an area/box-to-box movement system for the Charaoenea Campaign (and the only serving US Army officer in the gaming group ended up using the logistics knowledge gathered by his scouts for intelligence purposes). It's contained in an article I wrote entitled (not surprisingly) Supply and Your Miniatures Army. There is, however, a simpler and more elegant method. This is the supply method found in the boardgame Frederick the Great, originally by SPI, but then bought and marketed by Avalon Hill.
You create a depot. This takes a minimum of 10 strength points (2,500 men/SP). It takes you a full turn to do that. After that you must trace a supply line of 6 hexes (Prussian) or 5 hexes (French/Austrian/Russian) to that depot to be considered in supply. And the depot must have at least 1 SP with it at all times to 'work'.
This simple system meant logistical considerations dominate the game. When I gamed with some people using other maps we added a twist, roads. There are two types of roads available, the macadamized roads denoted by a solid line, and the more typical tracks marked as a dashed line. The latter merely negates the effects of terrain. The former does that, and costs 1/2 of a movement point to move along. Thus a depot on a macadamized road can supply a force 10 hexes away on that road.
The immediate effect was to make roads very important. Just that little change meant that players focused on crossroads and campaigns went up and down the major roads...just like they did historically.
Then we got a little more clever. A river running through/along a hex could be treated as a road. Downstream was a macadamized road, upstream was a track. This meant that areas with roads and rivers became easier to move through.
There was one more wrinkle. A friend pointed out that there were some areas where the foraging needed to support the depot just wasn't there (south of Berlin, for example). We tried various things, and then just arbitrarily designated some areas as that way. That further limited our routes and campaigns, but it made sense when we did a campaign in Italy. There isn't much grazing in the Alps.
This simple rule gave us supply rules that were easy to remember, accurate to a first cut, and influenced the campaign. When we went to the ACW, you put in a railhead, and that was your depot (railroads extend your forage infinitely to the rear). And when we gamed in Ancients we used area movement and a rough form of the supply rules outlined in the article that's available from me for the asking.
Troops fight better when they've had a hot meal. Now you can provide it for them.
I was once accused of wanting to track every biscuit issued to the army. Well, yes, mea culpa. I got interested in how to feed an army when I read two seminal works: George Washington's Expense Account, and Supplying War. There was a line in the former that captured the spirit of Washington's expensing: "Dinner for one army". And the latter is a history of the difficulties in feeding an army.
For anyone who has ever been on an expense account, Washington's Expense Account is priceless. If you recall your history, Washington turned down a salary and offered to serve if Congress merely reimbursed him for his expenses. Sounds like quite a deal. The salary established for Commander of an Army, as established by the Continental Congress was $6,000/year. After 8 years the government would have owed him $48,000. Instead they reimbursed him over $250,000. He used 22 of the 23 principles of expense accounting. In 1790 they refused to do that and insisted on paying him a salary as president. The book is simply an annotated copy of the expense report first published in the 1830s.
The latter book, by Martin van Crefeld, doesn't go into great detail, but he gives enough starting with the basics: a man consumes 1 pound of food and 1 pound of water each day (this is a rough average). A horse consumes 10x that, and can't eat meat (in the American Civil War fodder was the largest item shipped on the railroads). A 2,000 man regiment eats a ton of food and consumes a ton of water each and every day, even when sitting in a camp. An army corps, minus any horses, consumes 12.5 to 16 tons of food and a similar amount of water, each day.
Now various things can be substituted for the food, and wine or beer is often served in place of water as the alcohol will kill the bugs you'll otherwise find in the water (this was the origin of 'the flux' so often mentioned by travelers -- even as late as the 1950s it wasn't unusual for somebody to take a few days to 'acclimate' to the local bugs, and that was in the US!). The soldiers won't eat grass, but you can drive beef along with the army, and in Marlburian times soldiers would go out and harvest the fields to get grain for bread.
Now you can come up with a formula for all of this, and write a computer model to do the actual supply. Or you can look for simplifications. I did that with an area/box-to-box movement system for the Charaoenea Campaign (and the only serving US Army officer in the gaming group ended up using the logistics knowledge gathered by his scouts for intelligence purposes). It's contained in an article I wrote entitled (not surprisingly) Supply and Your Miniatures Army. There is, however, a simpler and more elegant method. This is the supply method found in the boardgame Frederick the Great, originally by SPI, but then bought and marketed by Avalon Hill.
You create a depot. This takes a minimum of 10 strength points (2,500 men/SP). It takes you a full turn to do that. After that you must trace a supply line of 6 hexes (Prussian) or 5 hexes (French/Austrian/Russian) to that depot to be considered in supply. And the depot must have at least 1 SP with it at all times to 'work'.
This simple system meant logistical considerations dominate the game. When I gamed with some people using other maps we added a twist, roads. There are two types of roads available, the macadamized roads denoted by a solid line, and the more typical tracks marked as a dashed line. The latter merely negates the effects of terrain. The former does that, and costs 1/2 of a movement point to move along. Thus a depot on a macadamized road can supply a force 10 hexes away on that road.
The immediate effect was to make roads very important. Just that little change meant that players focused on crossroads and campaigns went up and down the major roads...just like they did historically.
Then we got a little more clever. A river running through/along a hex could be treated as a road. Downstream was a macadamized road, upstream was a track. This meant that areas with roads and rivers became easier to move through.
There was one more wrinkle. A friend pointed out that there were some areas where the foraging needed to support the depot just wasn't there (south of Berlin, for example). We tried various things, and then just arbitrarily designated some areas as that way. That further limited our routes and campaigns, but it made sense when we did a campaign in Italy. There isn't much grazing in the Alps.
This simple rule gave us supply rules that were easy to remember, accurate to a first cut, and influenced the campaign. When we went to the ACW, you put in a railhead, and that was your depot (railroads extend your forage infinitely to the rear). And when we gamed in Ancients we used area movement and a rough form of the supply rules outlined in the article that's available from me for the asking.
Troops fight better when they've had a hot meal. Now you can provide it for them.
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Scouting
Continuing the theme of campaign games, let's look at scouting. What is it, what's the purpose, and how to do it.
Scouting allows players to use hidden movement. Hidden movement replicates one of the features of a real campaign: you don't know what's out there, or where it is. This allows surprise, daring maneuvers, and the like. Armies have devoted whole formations to battlefield intelligence. This was one of the reasons why there were 31 regiments of Chasseurs a Cheval and 8 of Hussars in Napoleon's army. This is what Jeb Stuart spent most of his time doing for the Army of Northern Virginia. It was why Frederick the Great stopped raising heavy cavalry and began raising 10 squadron strong hussar regiments. And it was why the Russians raised hussars (their Cossacks weren't very good at finding things, only at keeping the enemy from finding things, the other half of the scouting equation).
Scouts are spread all around the army; some (the rear) are a security cordon, but most are probing forward, looking for traces of the enemy. They check the posts, read the newspapers, look for dust and horse droppings, and so on. And when they find the enemy they try to drive them off, driving them back on their supports until they find infantry. This is what happened at Brandy Station in 1863. Union cavalry was finally stopped, but they ran into infantry from Dick Ewell's corps, which was the first hint the Army of the Potomac had that Lee was on the move.
Most gamers like the smaller actions, the skirmishes and outpost actions. Small parties of troops try to drive each other back, horses rearing, sabers slashing, pistols and carbines banging in the morning air. It makes for a fun game. And it easily replicates what happened in real life.
Doing that on the tabletop, or more properly on the map, is a bit harder. You can't game out every contact. I tried it once. We assiduously laid out every contact we had, and found we spent most of our time adjudicating those contacts. A lot of them were of troops just staring at each other, noting uniforms, and reporting the contact. We all agreed that it was great in theory, but it wasn't anything we wanted to try again. We needed a table of some kind.
Quite a number of years ago the ACW rules On to Richmond were published by The Courier magazine. In the back were a set of rules for a campaign game. And featured in the rules was a scouting method that was easily transferred to nearly any campaign game.
Scouting and Screening is conducted by cavalry. A cavalry brigade may scout into hex adjoining theirs. A cavalry brigade may produce up to 4 patrols. Players must designate which units are scouting/screening which hexes. Note that patrols only cross rivers at bridges.
The referee rolls on the table below to determine what each patrol sees. Note that if there is no enemy within 4 hexes the patrols will report no contact. Within 4 hexes the patrols might see things that aren't there. If opposing patrols are in the same hex a "patrol action" will be fought, and the winning side will then conduct scouting while the defeated side will report seeing nothing, both sides will report the skirmish, and which opposing units were in it (they noted the uniforms).
die nothing present light troops present formed troops present
0 nothing seen nothing seen nothing seen
1 nothing seen nothing seen patrols seen
2 nothing seen patrols seen formed cav
3 nothing seen formed cav formed cav
4 patrols seen formed cav formed troops
5 patrols seen formed troops formed troops
6 formed cav formed troops formed troops
7 formed troops formed troops formed troops
definitions:
nothing seen just that
patrols seen enemy patrols spotted, uniform details upon request
formed cav non-screening enemy cavalry seen
formed troops troops in rows with standards and artillery seen
Troops spotting formed troops will give a rough count of the number of troops present (referee will report this). The higher the number, the more accurate the report is.
Patrol Actions are skirmish between opposing patrols. To conduct a patrol action the referee totals the number of patrols for each side in a hex, and adds the throw of 1d6. The higher number wins. If the numbers are tied, the referee rolls again until he has a winner. He reports to each side that there was a clash, and furnishes uniform details of the units in the clash. The winning side then conducts scouting, while the losing side is told they saw nothing.
This above system will produce a lot of misinformation! That's its purpose. It is up to the player to sort the wheat from the chaff (most intelligence failures are in interpretation). Players (just like real generals) often act upon inaccurate information.
So try it in the next campaign. It will add an element of uncertainty not found in a lot of boardgames (except the double-blind ones). It will make for some unexpected battles, which is one of the fun elements of a campaign game.
Continuing the theme of campaign games, let's look at scouting. What is it, what's the purpose, and how to do it.
Scouting allows players to use hidden movement. Hidden movement replicates one of the features of a real campaign: you don't know what's out there, or where it is. This allows surprise, daring maneuvers, and the like. Armies have devoted whole formations to battlefield intelligence. This was one of the reasons why there were 31 regiments of Chasseurs a Cheval and 8 of Hussars in Napoleon's army. This is what Jeb Stuart spent most of his time doing for the Army of Northern Virginia. It was why Frederick the Great stopped raising heavy cavalry and began raising 10 squadron strong hussar regiments. And it was why the Russians raised hussars (their Cossacks weren't very good at finding things, only at keeping the enemy from finding things, the other half of the scouting equation).
Scouts are spread all around the army; some (the rear) are a security cordon, but most are probing forward, looking for traces of the enemy. They check the posts, read the newspapers, look for dust and horse droppings, and so on. And when they find the enemy they try to drive them off, driving them back on their supports until they find infantry. This is what happened at Brandy Station in 1863. Union cavalry was finally stopped, but they ran into infantry from Dick Ewell's corps, which was the first hint the Army of the Potomac had that Lee was on the move.
Most gamers like the smaller actions, the skirmishes and outpost actions. Small parties of troops try to drive each other back, horses rearing, sabers slashing, pistols and carbines banging in the morning air. It makes for a fun game. And it easily replicates what happened in real life.
Doing that on the tabletop, or more properly on the map, is a bit harder. You can't game out every contact. I tried it once. We assiduously laid out every contact we had, and found we spent most of our time adjudicating those contacts. A lot of them were of troops just staring at each other, noting uniforms, and reporting the contact. We all agreed that it was great in theory, but it wasn't anything we wanted to try again. We needed a table of some kind.
Quite a number of years ago the ACW rules On to Richmond were published by The Courier magazine. In the back were a set of rules for a campaign game. And featured in the rules was a scouting method that was easily transferred to nearly any campaign game.
Scouting and Screening is conducted by cavalry. A cavalry brigade may scout into hex adjoining theirs. A cavalry brigade may produce up to 4 patrols. Players must designate which units are scouting/screening which hexes. Note that patrols only cross rivers at bridges.
The referee rolls on the table below to determine what each patrol sees. Note that if there is no enemy within 4 hexes the patrols will report no contact. Within 4 hexes the patrols might see things that aren't there. If opposing patrols are in the same hex a "patrol action" will be fought, and the winning side will then conduct scouting while the defeated side will report seeing nothing, both sides will report the skirmish, and which opposing units were in it (they noted the uniforms).
die nothing present light troops present formed troops present
0 nothing seen nothing seen nothing seen
1 nothing seen nothing seen patrols seen
2 nothing seen patrols seen formed cav
3 nothing seen formed cav formed cav
4 patrols seen formed cav formed troops
5 patrols seen formed troops formed troops
6 formed cav formed troops formed troops
7 formed troops formed troops formed troops
definitions:
nothing seen just that
patrols seen enemy patrols spotted, uniform details upon request
formed cav non-screening enemy cavalry seen
formed troops troops in rows with standards and artillery seen
Troops spotting formed troops will give a rough count of the number of troops present (referee will report this). The higher the number, the more accurate the report is.
Patrol Actions are skirmish between opposing patrols. To conduct a patrol action the referee totals the number of patrols for each side in a hex, and adds the throw of 1d6. The higher number wins. If the numbers are tied, the referee rolls again until he has a winner. He reports to each side that there was a clash, and furnishes uniform details of the units in the clash. The winning side then conducts scouting, while the losing side is told they saw nothing.
This above system will produce a lot of misinformation! That's its purpose. It is up to the player to sort the wheat from the chaff (most intelligence failures are in interpretation). Players (just like real generals) often act upon inaccurate information.
So try it in the next campaign. It will add an element of uncertainty not found in a lot of boardgames (except the double-blind ones). It will make for some unexpected battles, which is one of the fun elements of a campaign game.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Campaigns
To change the subject, let's consider why on earth anyone would want to put on a campaign game. And to do that, let's look at the three ways people game:
That's Burnside's Bridge from the Battle of Antietam, exactly as General Burnside saw it. Good luck.
The second is an equal points battle. There is a long rant on the Yahoo Ancient Tactics board about how a Macedonian army is useless in DBM, and how historical tactics don't work. First, that's because people play DBM as a game that happens to use figures that look like ancients. Thus they do things in the game that wouldn't make sense on a real battlefield, but make plenty of sense within the game system. An example is the attack on the enemy's camp that seems to happen in every battle (I know it doesn't happen in every battle, just in every battle of DBM I've ever seen).
My own experience with equal points battles is that they are useless. The whole point of strategy is to bring a superior force to bear on the battlefield. That isn't much fun because both sides like to think they have a chance. But it's the historical reality. I saw this plenty of times one year when playing equal point battles from Dull Thud of Impact, a.k.a. Shock of Impact ('dull thud' is what I call it). Part of that was the group I gamed with, though.
The trouble is, equal point battles produce ahistorical match-ups (my Mauryan Indian Army once had a thin time of it when faced with Crusaders). They produce endless equivocating: do I take three more skirmishers, or do I take an extra heavy cavalryman? And they promote ahistorical tactics (Burgundians don't do well against a Khmer army with its horde of elephants that hold off the gen d'armes in the jungle).
The third type of game is where everyone lines up everything they have and go at it. This usually produces a head-on clash with no tactics. And some people paint faster than others, so somebody could end up with twice as many troops as their opponent. Being one of those people (at one time), I once made an agreement with a friend to limit what we painted to what we could both fit in a certain sized container. We both developed new ways of stacking the troops in the container.
The rationale for a campaign game is to produce battles that have meaning beyond that evening's game. You might send that brigade of heavy cavalry in to smash the enemy, but if you lose a lot of them you won't have the heavy cavalry at a later battle. This makes people a little more cautious. I once refereed the Charoenea Campaign of 338 BC, when Philip of Macedon united Greece by force of arms; the Macedonian commander liked to attack with Philip and Alexander in the front rank to get that extra punch. Both Philip and Alex were killed in the campaign. That prevented a Persian campaign and the spread of Hellenism throughout the Near East.
What do you need for a campaign? Not that much, it turns out. Let's look at the "classical" requirements (the ones experience says are always needed). These are:
Scouting is where you need the possibility of mis-information. One side might enjoy a scouting advantage over the other (they have Jeb Stuart, General Lasalle or Commodore Goodenough). The other side can simply send out so many patrols that they can punch through the screen and get accurate information. A referee is handy for this sort of thing.
There will be times when nobody wants to fight an action that's been generated. This is where a boardgame CRT (Combat Results Table) is handy. Simply input all relevant factors, throw a die, and you get a result. Agreeing on those factors can be a problem, though.
Supply is the least interesting part of a campaign, and one of the most vital. There are ways to simplify supply. People who are interested can contact me about my article "Feeding Your Wargames Army". I came up with a system that works. An alternative system is to abstract things slightly, and when a force isn't in supply they suffer attrition. This is what happens when you use the Frederick the Great system.
Setting up a tabletop encounter means having access to maps. If you're using a hex system, take all of the immediately adjoining hexes and collapse them into the hex where you have context. I did this once in a highly successful King's War game. If you're using area movement/box-to-box, then generate a map using, say Warfare in the Age of Reason. This gives you interesting battlefields without much trouble. And if you're measuring distances on a map just lay down a template centered on the point of contact and you have your battlefield, for good or ill. Then deploy and have at each other, realizing that the strategic context provides the victory conditions (it is surprising how many gamers forget that).
Afterwards, of course, you have troops fleeing the battlefield, losses to account for (figure half of the casualties come back the next day), and so on. The losing side has to retreat, of course, and if the winners are in good enough shape, they'll pursue (they usually don't). The losers might or might not be in shape to recover and fight again for a while (especially if using a boardgame like Frederick the Great mixed, say, with the tactical rules Volley & Bayonet. There disorder is a real concept. And, before anyone asks, I did do that quite successfully.
This overview should be enough to get you interested in trying campaigns. In the future I'll write more, going into more detail about this fascinating part of the gaming hobby.
To change the subject, let's consider why on earth anyone would want to put on a campaign game. And to do that, let's look at the three ways people game:
- scenarios from a book;
- equal point battles;
- set up everything you've got;
That's Burnside's Bridge from the Battle of Antietam, exactly as General Burnside saw it. Good luck.
The second is an equal points battle. There is a long rant on the Yahoo Ancient Tactics board about how a Macedonian army is useless in DBM, and how historical tactics don't work. First, that's because people play DBM as a game that happens to use figures that look like ancients. Thus they do things in the game that wouldn't make sense on a real battlefield, but make plenty of sense within the game system. An example is the attack on the enemy's camp that seems to happen in every battle (I know it doesn't happen in every battle, just in every battle of DBM I've ever seen).
My own experience with equal points battles is that they are useless. The whole point of strategy is to bring a superior force to bear on the battlefield. That isn't much fun because both sides like to think they have a chance. But it's the historical reality. I saw this plenty of times one year when playing equal point battles from Dull Thud of Impact, a.k.a. Shock of Impact ('dull thud' is what I call it). Part of that was the group I gamed with, though.
The trouble is, equal point battles produce ahistorical match-ups (my Mauryan Indian Army once had a thin time of it when faced with Crusaders). They produce endless equivocating: do I take three more skirmishers, or do I take an extra heavy cavalryman? And they promote ahistorical tactics (Burgundians don't do well against a Khmer army with its horde of elephants that hold off the gen d'armes in the jungle).
The third type of game is where everyone lines up everything they have and go at it. This usually produces a head-on clash with no tactics. And some people paint faster than others, so somebody could end up with twice as many troops as their opponent. Being one of those people (at one time), I once made an agreement with a friend to limit what we painted to what we could both fit in a certain sized container. We both developed new ways of stacking the troops in the container.
The rationale for a campaign game is to produce battles that have meaning beyond that evening's game. You might send that brigade of heavy cavalry in to smash the enemy, but if you lose a lot of them you won't have the heavy cavalry at a later battle. This makes people a little more cautious. I once refereed the Charoenea Campaign of 338 BC, when Philip of Macedon united Greece by force of arms; the Macedonian commander liked to attack with Philip and Alexander in the front rank to get that extra punch. Both Philip and Alex were killed in the campaign. That prevented a Persian campaign and the spread of Hellenism throughout the Near East.
What do you need for a campaign? Not that much, it turns out. Let's look at the "classical" requirements (the ones experience says are always needed). These are:
- a map movement system including hidden movement;
- scouting;
- a way to handle non-tabletop actions;
- supply;
- setting up a tabletop encounter;
- the aftermath of a battle;
Scouting is where you need the possibility of mis-information. One side might enjoy a scouting advantage over the other (they have Jeb Stuart, General Lasalle or Commodore Goodenough). The other side can simply send out so many patrols that they can punch through the screen and get accurate information. A referee is handy for this sort of thing.
There will be times when nobody wants to fight an action that's been generated. This is where a boardgame CRT (Combat Results Table) is handy. Simply input all relevant factors, throw a die, and you get a result. Agreeing on those factors can be a problem, though.
Supply is the least interesting part of a campaign, and one of the most vital. There are ways to simplify supply. People who are interested can contact me about my article "Feeding Your Wargames Army". I came up with a system that works. An alternative system is to abstract things slightly, and when a force isn't in supply they suffer attrition. This is what happens when you use the Frederick the Great system.
Setting up a tabletop encounter means having access to maps. If you're using a hex system, take all of the immediately adjoining hexes and collapse them into the hex where you have context. I did this once in a highly successful King's War game. If you're using area movement/box-to-box, then generate a map using, say Warfare in the Age of Reason. This gives you interesting battlefields without much trouble. And if you're measuring distances on a map just lay down a template centered on the point of contact and you have your battlefield, for good or ill. Then deploy and have at each other, realizing that the strategic context provides the victory conditions (it is surprising how many gamers forget that).
Afterwards, of course, you have troops fleeing the battlefield, losses to account for (figure half of the casualties come back the next day), and so on. The losing side has to retreat, of course, and if the winners are in good enough shape, they'll pursue (they usually don't). The losers might or might not be in shape to recover and fight again for a while (especially if using a boardgame like Frederick the Great mixed, say, with the tactical rules Volley & Bayonet. There disorder is a real concept. And, before anyone asks, I did do that quite successfully.
This overview should be enough to get you interested in trying campaigns. In the future I'll write more, going into more detail about this fascinating part of the gaming hobby.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Feedback
One of the beauties of publishing online is that you get feedback. Well, you get it if you publish through a publishing house, and you get letters. The most (in)famous feedback that I know of happened to Larry Niven at a Worldcon. A fan cornered him at a party. He had a list of 40 some inconsistencies (8 major) in Niven's Known Space stories, and he wanted Niven, then and there, to resolve them!
Writers crave feedback. If you're honest with yourself, you want comments that will help you get better. If you're in it for the psychological stroking, you want people to tell you how wonderful your writing is (well, you want that if you're honest, too). Someone once said the best criticism was 5,000 words of closely reasoned adulation. That's good for the ego, but does it make you a better writer? On the other hand, the feedback I got for a fantasy story ("trite, disappointing, incompetent armies led by incompetent generals...") hurt. I didn't reply that that particular general was based on the worst aspects of both John Bell Hood and the Italian WW1 Commander in Chief Cadorna(!). Hood was a brilliant division commander; to be depressed, read a history of his 1864 Tennessee campaign. And as for Cadorna...there were eleven battles of the Isonzo between 1915 and 1918. The critic had probably never heard of Cadorna, the Isonzo, Hood, or Franklin (she may have heard of Nashville, and I suspect that at least once in her life she had heard of Tennessee).
So what makes good criticism? A mentor I had once went over a story of mine with a fine tooth comb, commenting on everything from word choice to punctuation to the logic of the plot. It was exhausting, but at the end I knew why I didn't like parts of the story, and I knew how to improve my next one. That's one kind of criticism, the kind you'd get from a line editor, though Bob's comments about my plot and the way I did characterization were not what a line editor would do.
Another kind of criticism is what one another writer (one many times published) gave me. He read the whole story (it was a novel) and came back questioning one of the key concepts (somebody would use access to another timeline to do counterfeiting -- which is how Counterfeit Line got its name). It did seem illogical, and I went to Plan B (he didn't fault the concept of access to an alternate time, he thought that was intriguing). He also didn't fault (most) of how I told the story. He showed me a couple of shaky places, and suggested how I might shore them up.
I did the same for Ted Sanders (writing under the name D T Sanders). While I niggled on his punctuation and some word choice, and did the same with a little of his imagery, I asked a couple of plot related questions that led him to throw out three chapters of his WIP and do some severe rethinking and rewriting. It's only fair, Ted did the same thing to my current WIP, Different World. I've ended up rewriting the whole thing from the beginning and cutting out an entire subplot.
Someone I met online sent me a novel he'd written and wanted my opinion. I wavered between brutal honesty (you can see where I'm going with this) and friendship. I came down in the middle. He had written an 18,000 word novel, and I pointed out this was a novella, or a novelette, and to be a novel should be 60,000 words or more (publishers seem to like first novels to be around 85,000 words). He pleaded that he couldn't expand it any more, so I began exchanging e-mails with him (he lives in the Mediterranean littoral), going over the chapters one at a time. I went over everything I could think of, and included possible plot elements he was tossing off and dropping as he wrote. When I last saw the story he was at 55,000+ words and in the middle of a major rewrite. Oh, and he dropped the first 30 pages (9,000 words) as the story didn't start until after those pages.
Other feedback just adds to the creative juices. For example, I've been getting a series of e-mails from someone who had read (and liked) the Kalliste's Storytime stories. He works in archaeology, and he sent me links to several online scholarly journals amplifying points I'd made from logic. The latest came this morning, and is a collection of papers on dating the eruption of Thera/Santorini, which is a pivotal moment in Kalliste's life. The link is: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/dendro/thera.html. What follows is a brief summary of my notes about Kalliste, the papers linked above offering some support.
When Kalliste was born is left as an exercise to the reader. You can e-mail me your suggestiosn, or put them in the Comments Section (I hope I have it set up right).
It's fun when feedback suggests you got something right.
How should you respond to feedback? Don't argue. Listen, note down what they said, and consider it. You may end up rejecting it entirely, but if you get in their face and argue, that won't help. Remember (and this applies to those giving feedback, too), we are criticizing words on a page. That's all.
Writer's groups offer the most immediate feedback. This is how you learn from one another, but an important point is that you must have some people with some pretty well developed skills so people can benefit. If everybody is at the lowest level of fan fiction writing, nobody's going to be able to say "this is wrong, and here's why, and here's how to fix it". In the better writer's groups you get that.
Writer's groups - should you join an online one? That depends. You should at least try them and see what it's like. At this time I belong to one online group, though I haven't contributed in several months. Most of the feedback I get is either face-to-face, or via attached e-mail.
The most important feedback, of course, is when somebody is willing to give you money for your story. Listen very closely to what that person thinks/wants.
So keep those cards and letters coming in. It helps motivate me, it helps me get better, and all of those other nice things (though I'll brood over the ones I don't agree with).
One of the beauties of publishing online is that you get feedback. Well, you get it if you publish through a publishing house, and you get letters. The most (in)famous feedback that I know of happened to Larry Niven at a Worldcon. A fan cornered him at a party. He had a list of 40 some inconsistencies (8 major) in Niven's Known Space stories, and he wanted Niven, then and there, to resolve them!
Writers crave feedback. If you're honest with yourself, you want comments that will help you get better. If you're in it for the psychological stroking, you want people to tell you how wonderful your writing is (well, you want that if you're honest, too). Someone once said the best criticism was 5,000 words of closely reasoned adulation. That's good for the ego, but does it make you a better writer? On the other hand, the feedback I got for a fantasy story ("trite, disappointing, incompetent armies led by incompetent generals...") hurt. I didn't reply that that particular general was based on the worst aspects of both John Bell Hood and the Italian WW1 Commander in Chief Cadorna(!). Hood was a brilliant division commander; to be depressed, read a history of his 1864 Tennessee campaign. And as for Cadorna...there were eleven battles of the Isonzo between 1915 and 1918. The critic had probably never heard of Cadorna, the Isonzo, Hood, or Franklin (she may have heard of Nashville, and I suspect that at least once in her life she had heard of Tennessee).
So what makes good criticism? A mentor I had once went over a story of mine with a fine tooth comb, commenting on everything from word choice to punctuation to the logic of the plot. It was exhausting, but at the end I knew why I didn't like parts of the story, and I knew how to improve my next one. That's one kind of criticism, the kind you'd get from a line editor, though Bob's comments about my plot and the way I did characterization were not what a line editor would do.
Another kind of criticism is what one another writer (one many times published) gave me. He read the whole story (it was a novel) and came back questioning one of the key concepts (somebody would use access to another timeline to do counterfeiting -- which is how Counterfeit Line got its name). It did seem illogical, and I went to Plan B (he didn't fault the concept of access to an alternate time, he thought that was intriguing). He also didn't fault (most) of how I told the story. He showed me a couple of shaky places, and suggested how I might shore them up.
I did the same for Ted Sanders (writing under the name D T Sanders). While I niggled on his punctuation and some word choice, and did the same with a little of his imagery, I asked a couple of plot related questions that led him to throw out three chapters of his WIP and do some severe rethinking and rewriting. It's only fair, Ted did the same thing to my current WIP, Different World. I've ended up rewriting the whole thing from the beginning and cutting out an entire subplot.
Someone I met online sent me a novel he'd written and wanted my opinion. I wavered between brutal honesty (you can see where I'm going with this) and friendship. I came down in the middle. He had written an 18,000 word novel, and I pointed out this was a novella, or a novelette, and to be a novel should be 60,000 words or more (publishers seem to like first novels to be around 85,000 words). He pleaded that he couldn't expand it any more, so I began exchanging e-mails with him (he lives in the Mediterranean littoral), going over the chapters one at a time. I went over everything I could think of, and included possible plot elements he was tossing off and dropping as he wrote. When I last saw the story he was at 55,000+ words and in the middle of a major rewrite. Oh, and he dropped the first 30 pages (9,000 words) as the story didn't start until after those pages.
Other feedback just adds to the creative juices. For example, I've been getting a series of e-mails from someone who had read (and liked) the Kalliste's Storytime stories. He works in archaeology, and he sent me links to several online scholarly journals amplifying points I'd made from logic. The latest came this morning, and is a collection of papers on dating the eruption of Thera/Santorini, which is a pivotal moment in Kalliste's life. The link is: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/dendro/thera.html. What follows is a brief summary of my notes about Kalliste, the papers linked above offering some support.
When Kalliste was born is left as an exercise to the reader. You can e-mail me your suggestiosn, or put them in the Comments Section (I hope I have it set up right).
It's fun when feedback suggests you got something right.
How should you respond to feedback? Don't argue. Listen, note down what they said, and consider it. You may end up rejecting it entirely, but if you get in their face and argue, that won't help. Remember (and this applies to those giving feedback, too), we are criticizing words on a page. That's all.
Writer's groups offer the most immediate feedback. This is how you learn from one another, but an important point is that you must have some people with some pretty well developed skills so people can benefit. If everybody is at the lowest level of fan fiction writing, nobody's going to be able to say "this is wrong, and here's why, and here's how to fix it". In the better writer's groups you get that.
Writer's groups - should you join an online one? That depends. You should at least try them and see what it's like. At this time I belong to one online group, though I haven't contributed in several months. Most of the feedback I get is either face-to-face, or via attached e-mail.
The most important feedback, of course, is when somebody is willing to give you money for your story. Listen very closely to what that person thinks/wants.
So keep those cards and letters coming in. It helps motivate me, it helps me get better, and all of those other nice things (though I'll brood over the ones I don't agree with).
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Backstory, or Story History
Every story has a backstory, what led up to the moment the story starts. In some cases we don't have to really know what it is because it is explained in the story (Dover Street Bridge, Conning Bubba). In others it has a central impact on the story (any of the Families stories, or Kassandra's Song). And in some, it is the story (Counterfeit Line). So how do we develop one?
In theory the backstory should be dropped into the story in dribs and drabs. This is a lot of work, but is worth the effort. It shows the reader that we are in a different world, and it does so casually. The classic example is Robert Heinlein's "the door dilated". The door doesn't open, it dilates, which means it acts like an iris. Which means the people there found it better to open doors that way than by swinging them open. Right away we get a technical point, a look at the society, and we move the story along, all in three words! Now that is real efficiency.
Usually people are a bit clunkier when putting in the backstory. You don't want to lecture to the reader, or if you do, you must make it necessary within the story for that lecture to be there. In Three Valleys - Sammi, the main character wants to be a teacher. She has to listen to some kids reading their papers about the history of 'First Phase', a colony established in an alternate history in 18,000 years BC (at the height of the ice age). She gets bored with this constant rehashing of what everybody knows, and so loses interest in the details, concentrating on how the students are presenting the material (which is one of the things a teacher is supposed to do). We get some of the history, and then, before I can really lecture the reader, I shift over to technique and presentation. It was clunky, but it got the job done.
In some cases you handle the backstory through flashback. I know there are people who insist you eschew flashbacks. They can't be helped, and you need to learn how to get into them, how to get out of them, and when you need to use them. I know you'll get addicted to them. Resist the urge. Use them only to make a point. For example, in Kassandra's Song, Kit (Kassandra) is worried that she will end up killing the bad guy, not an undesirable outcome. She remembers a similar instance in the 1150s when she murdered an important Venetian who wanted to attack Constantinople. This put off the Fourth Crusade by 50 years, which her foresight saw was a good thing. She's worried that that is the answer to her problem (and she's a cop; she'd rather take him alive and try him). But I handled this in a flashback with a dream thrown in. I handled her murdering an NKVD agent in Berlin in late 1945 as part of that, too.
Above all, DO NOT USE the hackneyed phrase "As we all know...". Why are your characters telling each other things they already know. The ONLY time I've seen it used in a story where I could believe it was a scene in a political thriller. The person talking was the Speaker of the House, and he said "As we all know, there's a barbecue waiting for us. We can either keep debating this issue, or we can vote on it and get to the grub."
So let's look at a backstory in action? In Counterfeit Line I start with Germany, August 1, 1759. We are just outside of Minden, in northern Germany. Lord George Sackville charges the French and dies a heroes death as he shatters the French Army of the Lower Rhine (in our history he was stopped by a courier). The French army is so badly mangled that it is knocked out of the war. Coupled with Quiberon Bay a few months later, it is too much, and France bows out of the Third Silesian War. This frees up reinforcements for Frederick the Great, and....
Lord George had been one of the politicians who helped bring about the American Revolution through proposing a series of taxes on the colonies, and refusing to consult with the colonies for their own defense (he was Secretary of State for the Colonies for a while). Without his intransigence the British let the colonies assume the burden for their own defense, and let them figure out how to pay for it (which they do). The primary spark of the American Revolution is averted, and North America basically remains English.
Fast forward to 1851. The North American colonies become the Dominion of America (like what the Canadians did). Fast forward a few more years (about 44). In a downtown stable in the city of New Essex, a rapidly growing city on Puget Sound in the province of South Columbia, a door in a wall opens, and a detective from 2003, from a history and country where there was an American Revolution, lands in the hay. She finds a mostly Victorian World.
Now when you do things like this you can have some fun. You don't have to be strictly logical because history doesn't always flow through the straightforward path. In mine, Victoria dies from an infection incurred during childbirth. Prince Albert serves on a Regency Council (another relative is the titular Regent) for young Edward VII, who eventually passes away in the 1880s. So I can have a Victorian world, but make whatever changes I want, mostly for plot purposes. One of which was a muting of the health fastidiousness that Victoria promulgated in the 1860s following the death of Albert.
I put a history of how I got to New Essex as an appendix.
In the Families stories I was a little more direct, even though I had a cleaner canvas. The Families were a nearly failed colonization attempt that ended up off-course and having to terraform a planet before settling on it. Their total numbers were reduced to 500 living, breathing people, and a large gene bank that they can use. To build up their numbers, Families Geneticists tinker with the DNA so all female births are triplets, while male births are singles. This is because when the population is reduced that far you need wombs. I drop bits and pieces of this into the story.
What I don't put in the beginning of the story is that there are three other characteristics of the Families: their logical approach to most problems (you just have to figure out where their logic starts from); their ruthlessness when it comes to their own survival; and that they just don't quit. This all has to appear from time to time (sometimes as one character joking to another -- a good way to handle information like this), and sometimes in a character explaining it to someone from outside the culture.
To make the story interesting, I looked at the conservative nature of a culture that has had a close brush with oblivion. Thus I drop in a 'business as usual' bureaucracy (see Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister for examples of this), and a brilliant naval mind (not a 'Tom Cruise' as one person put it; Corey Andersen might be a gifted fighter pilot, but she learns to run fleets, not a single fighter; there is a BIG difference). And thus elements of conflict are brought in, along with the backstory, and we are off on our merry way.
In any Fantasy or Science Fiction story you need backstory. We don't have the luxury of 'contemporary' fiction (a.k.a. literary fiction) where the backstory is just confined to how a single character got into the story. Just as important, but in my mind, not as interesting.
As a side note, building a complete world is a backstory. But that's a completely different post.
Every story has a backstory, what led up to the moment the story starts. In some cases we don't have to really know what it is because it is explained in the story (Dover Street Bridge, Conning Bubba). In others it has a central impact on the story (any of the Families stories, or Kassandra's Song). And in some, it is the story (Counterfeit Line). So how do we develop one?
In theory the backstory should be dropped into the story in dribs and drabs. This is a lot of work, but is worth the effort. It shows the reader that we are in a different world, and it does so casually. The classic example is Robert Heinlein's "the door dilated". The door doesn't open, it dilates, which means it acts like an iris. Which means the people there found it better to open doors that way than by swinging them open. Right away we get a technical point, a look at the society, and we move the story along, all in three words! Now that is real efficiency.
Usually people are a bit clunkier when putting in the backstory. You don't want to lecture to the reader, or if you do, you must make it necessary within the story for that lecture to be there. In Three Valleys - Sammi, the main character wants to be a teacher. She has to listen to some kids reading their papers about the history of 'First Phase', a colony established in an alternate history in 18,000 years BC (at the height of the ice age). She gets bored with this constant rehashing of what everybody knows, and so loses interest in the details, concentrating on how the students are presenting the material (which is one of the things a teacher is supposed to do). We get some of the history, and then, before I can really lecture the reader, I shift over to technique and presentation. It was clunky, but it got the job done.
In some cases you handle the backstory through flashback. I know there are people who insist you eschew flashbacks. They can't be helped, and you need to learn how to get into them, how to get out of them, and when you need to use them. I know you'll get addicted to them. Resist the urge. Use them only to make a point. For example, in Kassandra's Song, Kit (Kassandra) is worried that she will end up killing the bad guy, not an undesirable outcome. She remembers a similar instance in the 1150s when she murdered an important Venetian who wanted to attack Constantinople. This put off the Fourth Crusade by 50 years, which her foresight saw was a good thing. She's worried that that is the answer to her problem (and she's a cop; she'd rather take him alive and try him). But I handled this in a flashback with a dream thrown in. I handled her murdering an NKVD agent in Berlin in late 1945 as part of that, too.
Above all, DO NOT USE the hackneyed phrase "As we all know...". Why are your characters telling each other things they already know. The ONLY time I've seen it used in a story where I could believe it was a scene in a political thriller. The person talking was the Speaker of the House, and he said "As we all know, there's a barbecue waiting for us. We can either keep debating this issue, or we can vote on it and get to the grub."
So let's look at a backstory in action? In Counterfeit Line I start with Germany, August 1, 1759. We are just outside of Minden, in northern Germany. Lord George Sackville charges the French and dies a heroes death as he shatters the French Army of the Lower Rhine (in our history he was stopped by a courier). The French army is so badly mangled that it is knocked out of the war. Coupled with Quiberon Bay a few months later, it is too much, and France bows out of the Third Silesian War. This frees up reinforcements for Frederick the Great, and....
Lord George had been one of the politicians who helped bring about the American Revolution through proposing a series of taxes on the colonies, and refusing to consult with the colonies for their own defense (he was Secretary of State for the Colonies for a while). Without his intransigence the British let the colonies assume the burden for their own defense, and let them figure out how to pay for it (which they do). The primary spark of the American Revolution is averted, and North America basically remains English.
Fast forward to 1851. The North American colonies become the Dominion of America (like what the Canadians did). Fast forward a few more years (about 44). In a downtown stable in the city of New Essex, a rapidly growing city on Puget Sound in the province of South Columbia, a door in a wall opens, and a detective from 2003, from a history and country where there was an American Revolution, lands in the hay. She finds a mostly Victorian World.
Now when you do things like this you can have some fun. You don't have to be strictly logical because history doesn't always flow through the straightforward path. In mine, Victoria dies from an infection incurred during childbirth. Prince Albert serves on a Regency Council (another relative is the titular Regent) for young Edward VII, who eventually passes away in the 1880s. So I can have a Victorian world, but make whatever changes I want, mostly for plot purposes. One of which was a muting of the health fastidiousness that Victoria promulgated in the 1860s following the death of Albert.
I put a history of how I got to New Essex as an appendix.
In the Families stories I was a little more direct, even though I had a cleaner canvas. The Families were a nearly failed colonization attempt that ended up off-course and having to terraform a planet before settling on it. Their total numbers were reduced to 500 living, breathing people, and a large gene bank that they can use. To build up their numbers, Families Geneticists tinker with the DNA so all female births are triplets, while male births are singles. This is because when the population is reduced that far you need wombs. I drop bits and pieces of this into the story.
What I don't put in the beginning of the story is that there are three other characteristics of the Families: their logical approach to most problems (you just have to figure out where their logic starts from); their ruthlessness when it comes to their own survival; and that they just don't quit. This all has to appear from time to time (sometimes as one character joking to another -- a good way to handle information like this), and sometimes in a character explaining it to someone from outside the culture.
To make the story interesting, I looked at the conservative nature of a culture that has had a close brush with oblivion. Thus I drop in a 'business as usual' bureaucracy (see Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister for examples of this), and a brilliant naval mind (not a 'Tom Cruise' as one person put it; Corey Andersen might be a gifted fighter pilot, but she learns to run fleets, not a single fighter; there is a BIG difference). And thus elements of conflict are brought in, along with the backstory, and we are off on our merry way.
In any Fantasy or Science Fiction story you need backstory. We don't have the luxury of 'contemporary' fiction (a.k.a. literary fiction) where the backstory is just confined to how a single character got into the story. Just as important, but in my mind, not as interesting.
As a side note, building a complete world is a backstory. But that's a completely different post.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Research
A lot of people were surprised to learn that Elizabeth George was a former schoolteacher who lived in Southern California (and now lives near Puget Sound since the State of Washington changed the tax laws to encourage artists). From reading her fiction you would have thought she was British. Ah, the power of research. She traveled to England to research her locales, but that was only after her first two books were published. Prior to that she haunted the travel section of her local bookstores, reading everything she could find. It's no secret that after her first couple of books the tactile feel of her settings increases tremendously.
This was brought home to me some 20 years ago when I visited the Antietam National Battlefield Park, and the Manassas Battlefield Park. At Antietam the northern part of the battlefield was the scene of some of the heaviest fighting on that blood-soaked day. Miller's Cornfield saw several thousand casualties in its 30-acre expanse in the course of some 90 minutes. While tracking the movement of some of the units I was struck by how many times units would pause in the middle of the Cornfield, reorganize for a minute or so, before pressing on. Every map I consulted (and the few photos I saw) could not explain why. And then I visited it in person and saw that there was a slight dip there, maybe a couple of feet lower than the rest of the Cornfield. The incoming fire there had to seem lighter, which is why they paused there.
At Manassas I wondered why Pope's artillery did not blow the Confederates off the face of the Earth, and why Stephen Lee's artillery didn't shatter the Union troops where they were forming up, but only when they advanced. Nobody explained the small patch of woods 150 yards from the Confederate position where the Union troops formed up, and that screend the Confederate position. When I could walk the battlefield I could see it (a recent history does show this now, but it wasn't available in 1986).
I saw the reverse of this when I was reading a popular detective series set in Seattle (by somebody who had never visited that city). She had the main character driving south on Fourth Avenue through the heart of the city. I have yet to see a guidebook that explains that Fourth Avenue is one-way northbound through the central business core of Seattle. And later the main character ran east on James Street (!). When you walk up James Street you feel you need two Sherpas and a mountain goat to assist you (yes, it is that steep). This was corrected after the author visited Seattle.
This highlights the results of personal research. I saw this when I was on Aruba in 2004. We went horseback riding, and I could experience for myself that this was a desert island (cactus and that type of sand you only get with a desert). The travel books may tell you that, but it is one of those things you have to experience.
David Morrell (author of Rambo, First Blood and some 30 other thrillers) suggested that whenever you go anywhere, record your impressions, sight, sound, taste, touch, feel and so on. Then if you set a story there it will show up in your prose.
Nobody said research should be hard, either. Last Spring we did an Alaska cruise; up the Inside Passage to Juneau, visiting Ketchikan, Skagway and Glacier Bay (and Victoria) on our way back. I especially enjoyed those parts of Skagway that they've tried to keep with a Gold Rush feel, the wooden sidewalks, the taverns, and so on. Of course one block away it was the modern world, but for a few yards it was "historical".
Hmm, maybe that's why erotica is so popular to write. Look at all of the research you need to do!
So the next time you travel, after reading everything about the destination you are visiting, get out and walk around. Try to absorb everything you can about the place. You'll be pleasantly surprised at how it populates your stories and gives it that touch of verisimilitude.
A lot of people were surprised to learn that Elizabeth George was a former schoolteacher who lived in Southern California (and now lives near Puget Sound since the State of Washington changed the tax laws to encourage artists). From reading her fiction you would have thought she was British. Ah, the power of research. She traveled to England to research her locales, but that was only after her first two books were published. Prior to that she haunted the travel section of her local bookstores, reading everything she could find. It's no secret that after her first couple of books the tactile feel of her settings increases tremendously.
This was brought home to me some 20 years ago when I visited the Antietam National Battlefield Park, and the Manassas Battlefield Park. At Antietam the northern part of the battlefield was the scene of some of the heaviest fighting on that blood-soaked day. Miller's Cornfield saw several thousand casualties in its 30-acre expanse in the course of some 90 minutes. While tracking the movement of some of the units I was struck by how many times units would pause in the middle of the Cornfield, reorganize for a minute or so, before pressing on. Every map I consulted (and the few photos I saw) could not explain why. And then I visited it in person and saw that there was a slight dip there, maybe a couple of feet lower than the rest of the Cornfield. The incoming fire there had to seem lighter, which is why they paused there.
At Manassas I wondered why Pope's artillery did not blow the Confederates off the face of the Earth, and why Stephen Lee's artillery didn't shatter the Union troops where they were forming up, but only when they advanced. Nobody explained the small patch of woods 150 yards from the Confederate position where the Union troops formed up, and that screend the Confederate position. When I could walk the battlefield I could see it (a recent history does show this now, but it wasn't available in 1986).
I saw the reverse of this when I was reading a popular detective series set in Seattle (by somebody who had never visited that city). She had the main character driving south on Fourth Avenue through the heart of the city. I have yet to see a guidebook that explains that Fourth Avenue is one-way northbound through the central business core of Seattle. And later the main character ran east on James Street (!). When you walk up James Street you feel you need two Sherpas and a mountain goat to assist you (yes, it is that steep). This was corrected after the author visited Seattle.
This highlights the results of personal research. I saw this when I was on Aruba in 2004. We went horseback riding, and I could experience for myself that this was a desert island (cactus and that type of sand you only get with a desert). The travel books may tell you that, but it is one of those things you have to experience.
David Morrell (author of Rambo, First Blood and some 30 other thrillers) suggested that whenever you go anywhere, record your impressions, sight, sound, taste, touch, feel and so on. Then if you set a story there it will show up in your prose.
Nobody said research should be hard, either. Last Spring we did an Alaska cruise; up the Inside Passage to Juneau, visiting Ketchikan, Skagway and Glacier Bay (and Victoria) on our way back. I especially enjoyed those parts of Skagway that they've tried to keep with a Gold Rush feel, the wooden sidewalks, the taverns, and so on. Of course one block away it was the modern world, but for a few yards it was "historical".
Hmm, maybe that's why erotica is so popular to write. Look at all of the research you need to do!
So the next time you travel, after reading everything about the destination you are visiting, get out and walk around. Try to absorb everything you can about the place. You'll be pleasantly surprised at how it populates your stories and gives it that touch of verisimilitude.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
He said, She said
The dreaded conversation tags. They're necessary in a story. After all, how can you tell who is speaking? Um, several ways. Let's look at what not to do, first.
The urge everyone has is to tell how somebody says something. "I don't want to go," Sonia said petulantly. This violates the cardinal rule of storytelling: Show, don't tell." You're telling the reader how she said it. So how should you indicate that Sonia is in a petulant mood? Action.
Sonia threw the book down. "I don't want to go." Better, you have some action that hints at mood. You could be a bit more explicit, such as: Sonia threw herself into the chair, crossing her arms and scowling at the door. "I don't want to go."
This is better because now we're working in a bit of body language. This goes a long way toward 'selling' the scene and the action. There are body movements that seem to be pretty universal, and crossing your arms (and legs) is one that indicates repelling or shoving away. You're creating a wall. But 'throwing' herself in the chair? Let's modify that a bit.
Sonia crossed her arms, her expression defiant. "I'm not going." All right, a little better. Sonia is not longer stating an opinion, she's making a simple declarative sentence. Even better, we now have a second visual, one that is judgmental (defiant). How do we know it is defiant? Here we are skirting close to the edge and interpreting body language for the reader, but all in the context.
What these don't have is the word 'said'. There is nothing wrong with that word, it is probably the most common and useful word when you write. At least it isn't some other word that denotes poor or careless writing. "I'm not going," she stormed. Great line, great visual, but why not show her storming (see above about crossing her arms).
When you're telling the reader how something was said you are far better putting it in context. You have to put in a conversation tag somewhere in the beginning so the reader knows who started the conversation, but you don't have to do much beyond that, provided you make sure the reader can keep it straight.
There are words you can use, replied is one of my favorites; it is as good as 'said', but it indicates a direct response to the person asking a question. But other than that? Murmured, whispered, those work. But they are distinct forms of speech. I've found that if I do use the word 'said', I try to leave it alone after that. I might, occasionally add a word such as 'quietly'. This appears to violate the show don't tell prescription up above, but you can picture somebody dropping their voice when they speak. Other than that I try to avoid modifying things.
The worst are what are known as Tom Swifties. I've mentioned those before. "Get to the back of the boat," Tom said sternly. "The nuclear reactor is fine," Tom said glowingly. This gets back to the old prescription for dealing with adverbs and adjectives: "when you meet one, kill it." You'll clean up your writing tremendously.
As an exercise, write a conversation without using a conversation tag. Write short sentences. You'll find that the conversation is suddenly very quick and can move the story along quite well. The secret, of course, is to try what I pointed out up above: put everything in context. Your writing will seem smoother, and your conversations and dialogue can now advance the plot through those little contextual moments that will slip past the reader.
The dreaded conversation tags. They're necessary in a story. After all, how can you tell who is speaking? Um, several ways. Let's look at what not to do, first.
The urge everyone has is to tell how somebody says something. "I don't want to go," Sonia said petulantly. This violates the cardinal rule of storytelling: Show, don't tell." You're telling the reader how she said it. So how should you indicate that Sonia is in a petulant mood? Action.
Sonia threw the book down. "I don't want to go." Better, you have some action that hints at mood. You could be a bit more explicit, such as: Sonia threw herself into the chair, crossing her arms and scowling at the door. "I don't want to go."
This is better because now we're working in a bit of body language. This goes a long way toward 'selling' the scene and the action. There are body movements that seem to be pretty universal, and crossing your arms (and legs) is one that indicates repelling or shoving away. You're creating a wall. But 'throwing' herself in the chair? Let's modify that a bit.
Sonia crossed her arms, her expression defiant. "I'm not going." All right, a little better. Sonia is not longer stating an opinion, she's making a simple declarative sentence. Even better, we now have a second visual, one that is judgmental (defiant). How do we know it is defiant? Here we are skirting close to the edge and interpreting body language for the reader, but all in the context.
What these don't have is the word 'said'. There is nothing wrong with that word, it is probably the most common and useful word when you write. At least it isn't some other word that denotes poor or careless writing. "I'm not going," she stormed. Great line, great visual, but why not show her storming (see above about crossing her arms).
When you're telling the reader how something was said you are far better putting it in context. You have to put in a conversation tag somewhere in the beginning so the reader knows who started the conversation, but you don't have to do much beyond that, provided you make sure the reader can keep it straight.
There are words you can use, replied is one of my favorites; it is as good as 'said', but it indicates a direct response to the person asking a question. But other than that? Murmured, whispered, those work. But they are distinct forms of speech. I've found that if I do use the word 'said', I try to leave it alone after that. I might, occasionally add a word such as 'quietly'. This appears to violate the show don't tell prescription up above, but you can picture somebody dropping their voice when they speak. Other than that I try to avoid modifying things.
The worst are what are known as Tom Swifties. I've mentioned those before. "Get to the back of the boat," Tom said sternly. "The nuclear reactor is fine," Tom said glowingly. This gets back to the old prescription for dealing with adverbs and adjectives: "when you meet one, kill it." You'll clean up your writing tremendously.
As an exercise, write a conversation without using a conversation tag. Write short sentences. You'll find that the conversation is suddenly very quick and can move the story along quite well. The secret, of course, is to try what I pointed out up above: put everything in context. Your writing will seem smoother, and your conversations and dialogue can now advance the plot through those little contextual moments that will slip past the reader.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Word Count
How many words are in a story? That's easy to find, isn't it? In Microsoft Word go to properties, click on the tab, and it'll tell you. Or go to the Tools tab and click on Word Count. It'll tell you the number of pages, lines, paragraphs, characters with spaces, characters without spaces, and words. That's all you need, right?
Er....
Let's start at the beginning. How do you define a word? What is the average length? I'll cheat and tell you to go with the standard format for a story:
These latter people are the most important in the process, at least at this point. They need to know how many pages you're story will take up as it will effect the binding and the amount of advertising they put in the back of the book (that is to make sure everything comes out in a multiple of either 4 or 16, depending upon the type of press). Thus they need to know the number of lines in your story, and how many characters you used. That includes the number of blank spaces between words.
Now after seven chapters of rewrite, Firestar is at some 56,731 words, at least according to Word's tool. It needs 4,477 lines to achieve this. But when I use a standard conversion number I took from the Science Fiction Writers of America's web page (www.sfwa.org), I get 54,120 words. What accounts for the 2,600 word difference? It's in the way words are measured.
The standard typesetter measure is that a word is 6 characters, including spaces. So take the number of characters with spaces and divide by 6, and round off to the nearest 10.
I applied this to a short story I wrote recently (Dover Street Bridge), and then counted the number of words I actually found. The count by using the spaces was off by 3 from the actual number I physically counted. Word's count was 70 higher. Naturally if I was being paid by the word I'd go with the higher count. But honesty compels me to put the smaller count in (and round to the nearest 50) because that count is a sales tool. Honestly. An editor has two stories, one of 2,300 words, and one of 6,900 words. He has a budget. And if he can put in the shorter of the two stories (quality being equal), he will do so because that gives him room for more advertising and costs less for writer's fees. It is a business, after all.
How many words are in a story? That's easy to find, isn't it? In Microsoft Word go to properties, click on the tab, and it'll tell you. Or go to the Tools tab and click on Word Count. It'll tell you the number of pages, lines, paragraphs, characters with spaces, characters without spaces, and words. That's all you need, right?
Er....
Let's start at the beginning. How do you define a word? What is the average length? I'll cheat and tell you to go with the standard format for a story:
- 12-point Courier or Courier New
- double-spaced
- single-sided
- 1" margins all around
These latter people are the most important in the process, at least at this point. They need to know how many pages you're story will take up as it will effect the binding and the amount of advertising they put in the back of the book (that is to make sure everything comes out in a multiple of either 4 or 16, depending upon the type of press). Thus they need to know the number of lines in your story, and how many characters you used. That includes the number of blank spaces between words.
Now after seven chapters of rewrite, Firestar is at some 56,731 words, at least according to Word's tool. It needs 4,477 lines to achieve this. But when I use a standard conversion number I took from the Science Fiction Writers of America's web page (www.sfwa.org), I get 54,120 words. What accounts for the 2,600 word difference? It's in the way words are measured.
The standard typesetter measure is that a word is 6 characters, including spaces. So take the number of characters with spaces and divide by 6, and round off to the nearest 10.
I applied this to a short story I wrote recently (Dover Street Bridge), and then counted the number of words I actually found. The count by using the spaces was off by 3 from the actual number I physically counted. Word's count was 70 higher. Naturally if I was being paid by the word I'd go with the higher count. But honesty compels me to put the smaller count in (and round to the nearest 50) because that count is a sales tool. Honestly. An editor has two stories, one of 2,300 words, and one of 6,900 words. He has a budget. And if he can put in the shorter of the two stories (quality being equal), he will do so because that gives him room for more advertising and costs less for writer's fees. It is a business, after all.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
It Seemed Like a Good Idea
I have a problem with A Different World, and last night helped me solve it. But before we get to that, I have to backtrack a little.
Last night I attended the Woodinville Writer's Group (Woodinville Barnes & Noble, 7:30 to 9:00, second Tuesday of every month). Ted Sanders gave a presentation on starting (and plotting) a novel, and I read about half of Chapter 5 of A Different Worldto the assembled group. I brought along my notes/plot/plot outline for Firestar in case people wanted to discuss other ways of plotting and outlining a book. Ted, though, hit it right on the sweet spot.
After reading Chapter 5, and listening to the rather cogent points about what I had read, I considered a number of issues about the story:
The key thing here is the phrase 'different world'. The theme is that we have a person having to adapt to a new world. She is continually tripped up, not by the new or different things, but by the things she thinks she knows from her own cultural heritage. As she adapts, as she learns, we get to explore the world with her.
In a sub-genre like this, alternate history with free access, we have several issues that have to be addressed. These are (in no particular order):
So what replaces that? Elissa wants to move in with Gina. Her ostensible reason is to look for things to buy that she can sell in our timeline as 'Victorian Replicas' (no fooling, there is quite a market for that). That gives me an excuse to work in some historical bits, have Gina teach Elissa some of the finer points of Victorian behavior, thus bringing them to the reader's attention, and a couple of other things (there was an article in the 1900 L.A. Times about how a woman should board a street trolley!).
Now I need to thoroughly revisit the plot. I know who the murderer is, and I know how he is doing it, I just have to work that into the story. And Gina will be the one who solves it because she is the only one who can put all of the pieces together. Hmm, time to haul out the outline.
But this is an example of how theme permeates everything, and by staying true to a theme a problem (recognized by my subconscious) can be solved.
I have a problem with A Different World, and last night helped me solve it. But before we get to that, I have to backtrack a little.
Last night I attended the Woodinville Writer's Group (Woodinville Barnes & Noble, 7:30 to 9:00, second Tuesday of every month). Ted Sanders gave a presentation on starting (and plotting) a novel, and I read about half of Chapter 5 of A Different Worldto the assembled group. I brought along my notes/plot/plot outline for Firestar in case people wanted to discuss other ways of plotting and outlining a book. Ted, though, hit it right on the sweet spot.
After reading Chapter 5, and listening to the rather cogent points about what I had read, I considered a number of issues about the story:
- I do a lot of duplicating when I tell a story; I don't know why, but even in the jokes and stories I tell out loud I do this.
- I need to find a way to include vital material in each chapter, or in the run-up to each chapter. For example, in Chapter 4 we learn that a "person of interest" is a Level 3 Sex Offender, and Gina has to explain what that means, but without any preparation in Chapter 5.
- the 'voice' of the characters is too similar, and I need a way to distinguish between the Victorian 'voice' and the 'modern' voice.
- I need to seriously rethink the entire theme and presentation of the story.
The key thing here is the phrase 'different world'. The theme is that we have a person having to adapt to a new world. She is continually tripped up, not by the new or different things, but by the things she thinks she knows from her own cultural heritage. As she adapts, as she learns, we get to explore the world with her.
In a sub-genre like this, alternate history with free access, we have several issues that have to be addressed. These are (in no particular order):
- cross-contamination; Gina is over the sickness of new germs, so it is cultural cross-contamination. In Counterfeit Line she makes one change, she inadvertently introduces the brassiere (after trying on a corset). This is deliberate, and gives her a vocation that it was acceptable for a woman to have (clothes and stitching).
- cultural attitudes. This one is trickier. I have to create and showcase a Victorian world, but not quite a straight Victorian world. I have to introduce differences, plausible ones, and slip them in, and make it obvious that these are differences. For example, a lot of the anti-prostitution drive in the Victorian era was from 'cleanliness'. Prostitutes passed on STDs, and public health was seen as a wedge issue (the first of many) that could be used to make people more moral (this led, among other things, to Prohibition in the US, and the current Washington State ban on smoking in public places). People will be more moral and pure because we will ram our vision of those desired traits down their throats. For the purists, this led to the Bolshevik strain of socialism, too. In Counterfeit Line I didn't have to do that as much as Gina was not choosing to live in New Essex.
- the history of New Essex and the Dominion of America. I did this with an appendix in Counterfeit Line, but in DW I'll have to slip it in. And when I get to Body of Evidence I'll have to be even more careful. Fortunately I have a character who is a historian who can drop things in to the story, Elissa.
- resolve the murders at the beginning of the book, and resolve the issues raised in Chapter 4 (jurisdiction).
So what replaces that? Elissa wants to move in with Gina. Her ostensible reason is to look for things to buy that she can sell in our timeline as 'Victorian Replicas' (no fooling, there is quite a market for that). That gives me an excuse to work in some historical bits, have Gina teach Elissa some of the finer points of Victorian behavior, thus bringing them to the reader's attention, and a couple of other things (there was an article in the 1900 L.A. Times about how a woman should board a street trolley!).
Now I need to thoroughly revisit the plot. I know who the murderer is, and I know how he is doing it, I just have to work that into the story. And Gina will be the one who solves it because she is the only one who can put all of the pieces together. Hmm, time to haul out the outline.
But this is an example of how theme permeates everything, and by staying true to a theme a problem (recognized by my subconscious) can be solved.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Friday, September 08, 2006
Back to Writing
After several nearly successive posts about wargaming, back to the primary element of this blog, writing.
I've created a website on MSN Groups called Bruce B Writes. I've been populating it with content, the first chapters of completed novels, notes on other stories, wargame rules, and so on. Hopefully it's better organized and of some use to people interested in what I write. Registration is free. It can be found at: http://www.msnusers.com/BruceBWrites
As for what I'm doing at the moment, I finished outlining Firestar, and thought I'd talk about that. I didn't outline. I didn't believe in it. After all, wasn't it: I,A,1),a) like we learned in school? Then I sat through a couple of sessions on outlining by people who have been very successful. John Saul commented that he writes 70-90 page outlines of his stories. When he's done he just breathes in nouns, verbs, and the like, and he's got a complete novel. Anne McCaffrey said she didn't outline, but had the story in her head. But Terry Brooks (Sword of Shannara), etc.) said he did outline; he had to if he wanted to make sure the story did what he wanted it to.
After talking it over with several other people it dawned on me that I do outline. It isn't the formal outline you learned in school. That was useful exactly once, on a 300 level history exam in college when I outlined my answer, and then started writing it; when time ran out the prof could see the direction I was going, and I only lost 1 point on the answer. My outlining sort of grew out of what I first did with the third book of the Families War novels, Lexeon.
Lexeon, as originally written, was a very complex story (and it still might turn out to be one). It had seven (7) different and major plot threads going (since reduced to 1-2). I had to keep track of them, and tried a spreadsheet in Excel. That was sort of kind of useful, but I went with creating a table in Word (I'm a lot more comfortable in Word) and changing the color of the cell when I was done with that bit. It helped me keep everything straight, and told the story of a war. It wasn't, alas, Corey's story, which is why I've begun breaking it up.
But at the start of every chapter I would list those things that had to happen to advance the plot. And that was my outline. But it wasn't quite what I was after.
I tried the "...and then what happens?" method, and that worked better. In this one you keep asking yourself that question. It's a rough method for working out a plot, and it emphasizes plot twists. Again, it wasn't quite what I was after.
The next day (Maui Writer's Conference Cruise) I hit on what seems to work for me. We were told we were part of a writer's group, we had a complex story, and we had to write a summary, by chapter, of what had happened so people would remember what had happened in the story and give good critique. I did that, and the light went on. I did that for Counterfeit Line, and saw how to shorten/rewrite the beginning. And I found what works (for me).
So I spent several days writing, and rewriting, the outline for Firestar. This is now done to my satisfaction, and I've even found improvements in the story. I was dissatisfied with the end of Chapter 3, feeling that it lost focus. I consulted the outline, and lo! I had an entire new scene to write where Corey explains what she's learned to her fellow pilots. She'll get opposition from them, informed opposition, and have to defend her ideas to people who would have to carry them out. I've written that scene (and rewritten it already) and like how it hangs together, furthers the plot, gets Corey closer to her Must, and even just reads well.
The trick is to learn to do it with another story. Pick one that you like, and go through it summarizing each scene in 1-2 lines. List who is in it, and the physical location. This will let you see the pattern. If the writing is too smooth, then go through it backwards to see how the author did things. When you're done, go over it front to back. You'll see how the plot follows the standard plot outline (problem, complication, resolution that leads to further complication, to further resolution, to the character changing, to final resolution). You'll see how character and plot intertwine with each other, and you'll get a sense of the whole flow.
Then go do it with your own stories.
Then go do it with a story you're starting.
Of course for the latter you should also do the character sketch so you know as much as you can about the character (I did this in Kassandra's Song with Mdm. Arnou, which made her a much better character; I knew what she was going to say, and why she was going to say it the way she was in every scene).
So, now with character sketches and outline firmly in hand, back to Firestar.
After several nearly successive posts about wargaming, back to the primary element of this blog, writing.
I've created a website on MSN Groups called Bruce B Writes. I've been populating it with content, the first chapters of completed novels, notes on other stories, wargame rules, and so on. Hopefully it's better organized and of some use to people interested in what I write. Registration is free. It can be found at: http://www.msnusers.com/BruceBWrites
As for what I'm doing at the moment, I finished outlining Firestar, and thought I'd talk about that. I didn't outline. I didn't believe in it. After all, wasn't it: I,A,1),a) like we learned in school? Then I sat through a couple of sessions on outlining by people who have been very successful. John Saul commented that he writes 70-90 page outlines of his stories. When he's done he just breathes in nouns, verbs, and the like, and he's got a complete novel. Anne McCaffrey said she didn't outline, but had the story in her head. But Terry Brooks (Sword of Shannara), etc.) said he did outline; he had to if he wanted to make sure the story did what he wanted it to.
After talking it over with several other people it dawned on me that I do outline. It isn't the formal outline you learned in school. That was useful exactly once, on a 300 level history exam in college when I outlined my answer, and then started writing it; when time ran out the prof could see the direction I was going, and I only lost 1 point on the answer. My outlining sort of grew out of what I first did with the third book of the Families War novels, Lexeon.
Lexeon, as originally written, was a very complex story (and it still might turn out to be one). It had seven (7) different and major plot threads going (since reduced to 1-2). I had to keep track of them, and tried a spreadsheet in Excel. That was sort of kind of useful, but I went with creating a table in Word (I'm a lot more comfortable in Word) and changing the color of the cell when I was done with that bit. It helped me keep everything straight, and told the story of a war. It wasn't, alas, Corey's story, which is why I've begun breaking it up.
But at the start of every chapter I would list those things that had to happen to advance the plot. And that was my outline. But it wasn't quite what I was after.
I tried the "...and then what happens?" method, and that worked better. In this one you keep asking yourself that question. It's a rough method for working out a plot, and it emphasizes plot twists. Again, it wasn't quite what I was after.
The next day (Maui Writer's Conference Cruise) I hit on what seems to work for me. We were told we were part of a writer's group, we had a complex story, and we had to write a summary, by chapter, of what had happened so people would remember what had happened in the story and give good critique. I did that, and the light went on. I did that for Counterfeit Line, and saw how to shorten/rewrite the beginning. And I found what works (for me).
So I spent several days writing, and rewriting, the outline for Firestar. This is now done to my satisfaction, and I've even found improvements in the story. I was dissatisfied with the end of Chapter 3, feeling that it lost focus. I consulted the outline, and lo! I had an entire new scene to write where Corey explains what she's learned to her fellow pilots. She'll get opposition from them, informed opposition, and have to defend her ideas to people who would have to carry them out. I've written that scene (and rewritten it already) and like how it hangs together, furthers the plot, gets Corey closer to her Must, and even just reads well.
The trick is to learn to do it with another story. Pick one that you like, and go through it summarizing each scene in 1-2 lines. List who is in it, and the physical location. This will let you see the pattern. If the writing is too smooth, then go through it backwards to see how the author did things. When you're done, go over it front to back. You'll see how the plot follows the standard plot outline (problem, complication, resolution that leads to further complication, to further resolution, to the character changing, to final resolution). You'll see how character and plot intertwine with each other, and you'll get a sense of the whole flow.
Then go do it with your own stories.
Then go do it with a story you're starting.
Of course for the latter you should also do the character sketch so you know as much as you can about the character (I did this in Kassandra's Song with Mdm. Arnou, which made her a much better character; I knew what she was going to say, and why she was going to say it the way she was in every scene).
So, now with character sketches and outline firmly in hand, back to Firestar.
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