With COVID restrictions where I live, and the holidays, I got a bit sidetracked from coming back here to post more. However, now that I have a spare moment before I have to rush off once more, I wanted to share something of what I have been working on.
I've been in the process, for several years, of creating a fictional world Imagi-Nations, which then morphed into more of a "What If?" version of a Earth history. I've been back and forth with working on a map that would be the start of a much larger map, and have some delays in trying to tie that all together, given that I want that map to be something I can easily expand upon, down the road.
Another task for this project is creating a "bot" or a system where I can suffer from fog of war, being that I am going play this mostly solitaire, but I did not want it to be simply a series of die rolls off some tables, with little regard for how things might have worked out in the real world. I think I have been able to finally get something I am happy with, for the moment, and will reveal more on this as I get it written down and work up some prototypes of the tools I will need.
In the meantime, I also needed to categorize how I am going to incorporate my myriad collection of miniatures, from fantasy, to sci-fi, and all the historical ages between. So, as I went to bed last night, it hit me as to how I will go about it.
Below is a rough representation of what I am looking at in my mind. I've typed it into Word but, of course, it lost its formatting by virtue of being pasted here. Anyhow, on the far left is the Campaign designation of eras, parenthetically followed by the historical figure ranges useful for gaming the period.
So, the Ancient Era would equate to the Greco-Roman times, along with their allies and opponents. To the right of that I've listed the in-campaign timespan (roughly) and then the approximate years from our own timeline. There's overlap, but again this is all meant to give a rough outline, in order to assist me as I create the various realms, kingdoms, empires, and the like.
Most of where I intend to focus my gaming, collecting, and storytelling would fall in the Late-Recovery to Early Modern Eras, but I also want to be able to step outside this primary timeline and game some things here and there, to give more of a backstory and something of a "real" history to the wheres, whys, and whos, in any given game.
I've gone around and around (and around and around) with the scales of miniatures and rules that I will use (or create), but I think to make things easier to start out, I am going to build the foundation on Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame (for certain this time) and then as the sizes of the battles increase (as to number of miniatures I want to field), then some variation of Hail Caesar and Black Powder. Both of the latter will, as to the nature of all wargamers, be modified with numerous house rules, but in looking at all of the many (many, many) sets of rules that I own (including about three dozen in the past two years) using these as a foundation makes the most sense to me.
This is true given the fact that I want for there to be a single (or as close as I can manage) system of playing out games, instead of having to remember or relearn different systems.
As I want to be able to plug game results back into the campaign easily and as seamlessly as possible, regardless of what period I am gaming, this looks to be doable to me. There's a bit more, given that the Portable Wargames relies on Strength Points to track units, and HC/BP do not remove individual bases, I am going to have to work this out (I've already begun this, as of couple of months ago), but I think there's a way to manage it without too much hassle or math.
It may well be that this effort gets to the point where I will leave Blogger entirely, and invest in my own website, where I can support my campaign by selling items here and there, in addition to publishing short stories, and (if I can ever bring myself to sit and type it all out) novels.
My hope is that not only will I be playing larger games, with hundreds of miniatures, but also play skirmish-sized games similar to Saga in scope, but also even with just a small handful on the table (gladiatorial contests for example).
I can only pray that I have at least another twenty years of life in me, so I can play lots of games against myself.
Mythical (Fantasy) 8000 - 4000B.F. (>5000B.C.)
Pre-History (Hittites/Sumerians) 2500 - 1000B.F. (4100B.C. -1000B.C.)
Ancient (Greeks/Romans) 1000 - 1B.F. (1000B.C. - 500A.D.)
Post-Fall (Dark Ages) 1P.F. - 500P.F. (501-1000A.D)
Early Recovery (Middle Ages) 500 - 900P.F. (1000-1400A.D.)
Late Recovery (Renaissance) 900 - 1100P.F. (1400-1600A.D.)
Early Modern (Gunpowder) 1101 - 1400P.F. (1500-1900A.D.)
Modern (WW1, WW2) 1400 - 1550P.F. (1900-1945A.D.)
Early Technological (Cold War and Post) 1550 - 1700P.F (1945-2100A.D.)
Late Technological (Pre-interstellar) 1700 - 2300P.F. (2100-2300A.D.)
Future (40k, Battletech) 2300 - 40,000P.F. (2300- Distant Future)
Edit: Again, these are rough approximations and I may need to delve into them a bit more, to provide for some differentiation as, obviously, a 1600s firearm will have vastly different characteristics than on from 1879, as will the units wielding them.
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