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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

1. scenarios from a book;
2. equal point battles;
3. set up everything you've got;

The first is a scenario, either from a book of scenarios, from a historical scenario that looks interesting, or from a magazine. Take, for example, the following. A stream with steep banks bisects the width of the table. A road exists from Point A, where your force enters, parallel and close to the stream, down most of the length of the stream, to Point B, where there's a bridge, and then off the far end of the table. The scenario is to cross the stream. It is the American Civil War and you have no pontoons. Nobody knows if the stream is fordable, the other side is too close to let you scout, but the banks are too steep for artillery. The other side holds the far side of the stream in some force; you can see clumps of infantry, and from the occasional shellburst you know there's artillery around somewhere. The road is quite good, but the ground is otherwise broken, uneven and difficult to move over. You have a rumor of a ford some distance off the far end of the table. What do you do?

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;

There are three basic map moving systems: area movement (also box-to-box movement, which is merely a variation of that); hex movement (usually played on a map from a boardgame); and measuring movement on a map (infantry and artillery move 1"; heavy cavalry moves 1.5"; light cavalry moves 2"; wagons move 1" but only on roads). This latter requires a grid on the map so you can call out that something is in that particular neck of the woods, but you don't say what it is until they confront each other (naval games are good for this).

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.

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).

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.