A Campaign Is Born

As a child, growing up and living in rural England during the 60`s and 70`s, I always had a love and appreciation for English history... especially houses, castles, forts, and places associated with the English Civil Wars.

This coupled with my love for `low` fantasy role playing games has led me (finally, in my maturing middle age) to start a new modelling and table top wargame project in 10mm scale; and I shall keep an accurate account of my endeavours, from the drawing board to the finished results of each stage of development - the collecting and the modelling, to the table top itself.

The campaign I envisage creating will cover a fictitious satellite period of history, loosely covering the years leading up to and including The Civil Wars in English (Scottish of course) and Ireland; but with many quasi Medieval and Renaissance/Elizabethan fantasy/semi historical Dungeons and Dragons elements and generic make belief thrown into the cauldron for good measure.

I suppose my idea is to create a sort of atypical Dungeons and Dragons campaign world in which I can play with my painted collection of 10mm figures, but this will be set in a much later period than is usually associated with this style of game. I see a fantasy world... very closely resembling our own real world of late 16^th   to mid ^17th century, where superstition, ignorance, and the notion of devils and demons not only existed in the minds of the people of the time and deeply influenced their insular prejudices and fears – but I want to create a fantasy place where these things actually exist (or existed) on a very real level.

I want to take advantage of the differences between the real world of today and the strange, almost alien place it was several hundred years ago. The fens, marshes and moors which covered much of Europe at the time are ideal breeding grounds for goblins and pukka, the Marches of Wales and the Highlands of Scotland in turn become a hotbed for witches, warlocks and a whole menagerie of monsters and make belief creatures of fiction, and the mist shrouded mountainous realm of Ireland (even today) has ever been the home of extraordinary, larger than life heroes... where legends abound and the barely perceived line between the seen and the unseen is an extremely thin veil.

Bear with me... keeping in mind this blog is new, my campaign is new, my models are still mostly unpainted; and therefore blog content will start out fairly sparse to begin with. But I will faithfully attempt to document my campaign and the growth of my miniatures collection from start to finish. You may not find many battle reports of my games (those are for another project, and will be revealed in subsequent novels which I intend to publish over the next few years) and the bulk of this material will be reserved for a more weightier format than a blog... however, I will include a lot of atmosphere and theme filler and sundry material which will NOT be included elsewhere in any form. This blog will complement my other endeavours, and will serve two purposes: (A) to showcase my growing collection of 10mm miniatures, and (B) will become a diary, in a sense, where I can watch my ideas develop and expand as I go along.

One final note: anyone following this blog will notice from time to time that entries are changed (reflecting my growing, changing and maturing world). Elements will vanish over time as I replace the real life scaffolding o 16th 17th century history with my own more fantastical ideas of my own. For example, although I have King Charles 1st and Oliver Cromwell firmly set in my mind; these facsimiles may well be replaced with my own character names as I come up with more suitable ideas . Similar things will happen throughout as my `baby` comes alive and enthusiasm and inspiration ferments.

If, over the following months, this blog helps other gamers in any way, or inspires others to create a new campaign for themselves, then I  will have succeeded in my task.