Rubbish Patreon Continues to be Rubbish (also, thoughts on narrative in miniatures wargaming)

Man, I am not at all surprised by how many of my patrons have cancelled their support recently. This place has been rubbish.

I wanted to assure those of you who remain that I am still not dead. In fact, after taking a while to find my mojo recently, I'm making tremendous progress on Midnight Dark, turning it from the crappy Google docs document you've all seen into a shiny new layout for publication.

I'm currently on about page 33 of what is, currently, 69 pages of rules. I'm working on the setting text (fluff) and developing a narrative and I'm going to come to that in a moment. I've got a nice default layout (I think) which mimics the style taken on previous games whilst having its own unique look.

Zero Dark and Infinite Dark came in at 94 and 98 pages long, respectively, and it's looking like Midnight Dark will break three figures on content. And that's despite dropping the default font size to Calibri 10.

Anyway, I thought I'd be constructive in my posting for once and talk about narrative in miniatures wargames a bit.

It is always strange to me that the undisputed father of miniatures wargaming, HG Wells, who was a legendary spinner of speculative fiction, never saw the potential for speculative content in his book, Little Wars, the first manual of miniatures wargaming. In fact, not only did he not see the room for speculative content, but he didn't even see much room for narrative beyond the events playing out on - in his case - the playroom floor.

Speculative miniatures wargaming has a patchy and uncertain history but it seems indisputable that, as Dungeons & Dragons emerged from miniatures wargaming and the Chainmail fantasy system, which was itself inspired by the tales of JRR Tolkein and The Lord of the Rings, that by the early 70s people were already doing speculative wargaming and, more importantly, were threading the events on the tabletop into more complex narratives that spilled over into the early roleplay games.

It was Warhammer 40,000 (isn't it always?) that really cemented the importance of narrative context into commercial miniatures wargaming. But despite that, and despite the fact that the roleplay worlds of Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms and World of Darkness proved that an interactive relationship between players and setting was good for business and growth, Games Workshop continued to expand the borders and content of their setting without ever considering letting the narrative evolve.

There was a commercial ideology within the business at the time that the setting was there to inspire - and inspire it did! - but that an evolving narrative ran the risk of placing players onto rails they didn't want to follow. And when they cautiously dipped their toes into the idea (anyone remember the 13th Black Crusade campaign?) the player feedback was unanimously negative.

Well, of course it was. The only piece of narrative development they permitted was that Eldrad Ulthran, a fan-favourite character, died and everything else stayed the same!

Meanwhile, other companies in the same market were exploring the role of narrative more actively. Privateer Press, Wyrd Games and Corvus Belli are all notable for having speculative settings that have running narratives. In these settings there are events that change the balance of power. Named characters die or even change sides. Unit or regiment types and even whole factions may shift in or out of use and community interaction directly guides priorities. And there is a very specific, commercial justification for this when it comes to both games design and miniatures sales.

Changes in rules, army composition or options have a direct impact on the play experience. If rules of any sort are creating a poor experience then it's good to change them, but changing them also acts against players' suspension of disbelief to some extent, disengaging them from the experience of participation in an epic conflict and lampshading the fact that it's just a game of toy soldiers. But cocooning the changes in a veneer of in-universe justification has the opposite effect. By being part of the change - by being there to see the rules shift from option A to option B - players find themselves drawn more into the experience of the universe rather than pushed out of it.

Even more commercially, it's a way to contextualize customer buying habits, reprioritization of R&D work and, of course, justify SKU drop-outs. If the questions is "Why don't you still sell Character X?", it's more immersive and customer-friendly to say "Because they died defending the walls of Urbis Absurbus from the ravening hordes of Gorgonia" than to say "Because the miniatures design sucked so no one bought it".

And when Character X gets a cool new re-design, you can re-release them to public acclaim alongside the story that their mangled body was discovered in the ruins of Urbis Absurdus and rebuilt with the finest technomagical upgrades!

GW paid attention to this (eventually) and that's how we ended up with Primaris space marines and plastic Primarchs (13-year-old me weeps to have missed it).

But that's not the only kind of narrative in miniatures wargaming. Whilst the meta-narrative has its role to play, players have long been captivated by the more immediate narrative of their characters and their army. There's a reason we call a long-form D&D game "a campaign". And campaigns are one of the most frustrating subjects in miniatures wargaming.

On the one hand, everyone likes the idea of their individual battles meaning more than just bragging rights and whose round it is at the bar afterwards. But campaigns are deeply frustrating things to try to play. People sign up in excitement at first, but drift away when they fail to dominate. A handful of players with a string of victories quickly pull ahead. Or, in something wider still, players conspire to manipulate the results of a campaign for reasons separate to the campaign's own narrative (I hasten to add that conspiring within the narrative is to be encouraged).

Bloodbowl and Necromunda famously suffered (and continue to suffer) from this problem. Frostgrave and Stargrave addressed some of the issues by dramatically downplaying the benefits of victory whilst letting the narrative move forward all the same. But that inevitably robbed the games of some of the original appeal

The solution that Battle Systems and, indeed, Precinct Omega took was to shift campaign play to co-op and solo wargaming, which allowed a campaign to progress at the needs of the players and for the composition of actual player groups to grow and shrink without impacting on the tabletop experience.

All of this has been instrumental in informing my approach to narrative in the Horizon Wars universe. Right at the start, I laid out a timeline for the narrative that ran from Operation Plantagenet and the British invasion of France right up to the Galactic Diaspora and fall of the Solar Hegemony. And thanks largely to this community I pushed it even further out to the human and posthuman colonization of the galaxy.

My plan since then has been to use the narrative of the individual games, supplements and player dialogue to "fill in the gaps". And this is what I'm now working on with Midnight Dark. Almost ten years on since I first wrote the setting for Horizon Wars the world's political and technological landscape has changed and this is a great opportunity to review the satire of the original through a different lens. I'll be honest: it's quite hard to stop the story becoming too dark. When you're talking about a global nuclear catastrophe and the collapse of civilization as we know it, it's not easy to stay humorous. Even more so when your source material is the international growth of neofascism.

Fortunately, the idea of a Great Reset has already been tabled by a certain bunch of red-hatted loons, and I intend to pick up that ball and run with it. If you've ever looked at the direction of the modern world and thought "wouldn't it be better if we just blew it all up and started again?" well, it may turn out that your thoughts are echoing into a surprisingly-proximate future.