The five ragged veterans who now ride for Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair, master of Blackthorn Hall, are among the last remnants of the old 27th Virginia Cavalry still willing to answer the call of a Saint Clair. All are armed with pistols, partly because carbines, ammunition and decent equipment became scarce during the final months of the war, and partly because each has spent so long fighting at close quarters that a revolver now seems a more natural companion than a rifle. They are not young men, nor particularly respectable ones, but they remain dangerous, loyal in their own fashion and deeply attached to a regiment that officially ceased to exist long ago.

The five ragged veterans who now ride for Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair, master of Blackthorn Hall, are among the last remnants of the old 27th Virginia Cavalry still willing to answer the call of a Saint Clair. All are armed with pistols, partly because carbines, ammunition and decent equipment became scarce during the final months of the war, and partly because each has spent so long fighting at close quarters that a revolver now seems a more natural companion than a rifle. They are not young men, nor particularly respectable ones, but they remain dangerous, loyal in their own fashion and deeply attached to a regiment that officially ceased to exist long ago.

Abner Taliaferro

Abner Taliaferro had been a small farmer before the war, owning just enough land to consider himself independent and just little enough to lose nearly all of it while he was away fighting. He joined the 27th Virginia Cavalry early and quickly earned a reputation as a steady man who could be relied upon when more enthusiastic soldiers had exhausted their courage. Taliaferro was never particularly interested in speeches about glory, but he believed in his regiment, trusted his officers and remained in the saddle long after common sense suggested that he should have gone home.

By the end of the war he had lost his farm, two brothers and most of his faith in grand causes, although he never lost his attachment to the men with whom he had served. When Lucien Saint Clair began quietly gathering former members of the 27th around Blackthorn Hall, Taliaferro was one of the first to appear. He claims that he came because he owed the Saint Clair family an old debt, although those who know him suspect that the sight of familiar uniforms and old comrades was enough.

Taliaferro carries two battered pistols, both older than some of the men now claiming to be cavalrymen, and has the irritating habit of cleaning them while other people are attempting to have serious conversations. He says little, complains frequently and remains one of the few men in the posse capable of recognising when a situation is about to become a disaster, although experience has taught him that recognising this fact and avoiding it are entirely different skills.

Silas Pendleton

Silas Pendleton had been a horse trader, gambler and occasional thief before joining the 27th Virginia Cavalry, and military service did little to improve any of those qualities. What it did reveal was that Pendleton possessed exceptional nerves in a close fight and an instinctive understanding of horses, making him far more useful to the regiment than his civilian reputation might have suggested.

Pendleton preferred pistols even during the war, arguing that if a man needed to shoot farther than thirty yards he had probably failed to get close enough. He became notorious for riding into skirmishes with a revolver in each hand, a habit that produced several wounds, one missing fingertip and a collection of stories that Pendleton has improved steadily ever since.

After the surrender he drifted through Virginia making money wherever opportunity allowed, which generally meant gambling, horse dealing and activities best described as unofficial redistribution. Lucien eventually found him in a county jail and paid his outstanding debts, fines and several expenses that the local sheriff had invented on the spot.

Pendleton has been loyal to Blackthorn Hall ever since, although he insists this has nothing to do with gratitude and everything to do with the quality of Lucien’s whiskey.

Thomas Beverley

Thomas Beverley came from a family of modest Virginia landowners whose property lay close enough to Blackthorn Hall that the Beverley and Saint Clair families had known one another for generations. Beverley joined the 27th Virginia Cavalry alongside two cousins, both of whom were dead before the final year of the war, leaving Thomas with a bitterness that never entirely faded.

He was a competent cavalryman but became particularly effective in the confused fighting that characterised the regiment’s later campaigns, when formations broke down and small groups of riders operated almost independently. Beverley learned to fight from hedgerows, barns, lanes and ruined farm buildings, relying on patience and a pair of pistols rather than heroic charges.

The postwar years suited him badly. The family property was sold to cover debts, his surviving relatives scattered and Beverley spent much of the next decade moving between temporary jobs and arguments with men he believed had benefited from the defeat of the Confederacy. Blackthorn Hall offered something he had not possessed for years, namely a place where the old regiment was still remembered and where nobody suggested that he should forget the past.

Beverley rarely smiles and has little interest in Lucien’s occult interests, although he has learned that asking too many questions at Blackthorn Hall generally produces answers he would rather not hear.

Josiah Cabell

Josiah Cabell had been one of the youngest men in the 27th Virginia Cavalry and was barely old enough to shave when he first joined the regiment. What he lacked in experience he compensated for with enthusiasm, horsemanship and a reckless conviction that bullets were a problem mainly affecting other people, a belief that the war corrected without entirely curing the recklessness.

Cabell survived several actions in which older and supposedly wiser men did not, eventually becoming an accomplished scout and messenger who could move rapidly across difficult country and had an uncanny ability to find gaps in enemy patrols. He developed a preference for pistols because they interfered less with riding and because, as Cabell still explains, anything that cannot be settled with six shots probably requires leaving.

After the war Cabell attempted several respectable occupations with uniformly poor results, including farming, clerking and working for a railway company. None lasted long, partly because he disliked authority and partly because civilian life seemed painfully slow after years spent riding through gunfire.

When rumours reached him that men of the 27th were once again gathering at Blackthorn Hall, Cabell arrived within the week. He now behaves as though the intervening years were merely an extended period of leave and appears remarkably unconcerned by the fact that some of the men he remembers dying have also begun returning to duty.

Nathaniel Randolph

Nathaniel Randolph was never a wealthy man, but he came from an old Virginia family proud enough to behave as though poverty was simply another inherited tradition. He enlisted in the 27th Virginia Cavalry with his own horse, a serviceable pistol and a coat his mother had altered from an older relative’s uniform.

Randolph developed into a stubborn and dependable cavalryman whose greatest talent was simply remaining in the fight. He was wounded repeatedly, lost three horses and once returned to the regiment after being officially reported dead, an administrative error he found highly amusing at the time and considerably less amusing now that Lucien Saint Clair has begun taking a professional interest in such matters.

After the war Randolph became a wandering farmhand and occasional deputy, never staying anywhere long enough to establish new roots. The old regiment remained the strongest connection he had to anything resembling home, and the Saint Clair name still carried considerable weight with him.

Randolph is the most openly uneasy about what is happening at Blackthorn Hall. He has seen lights in the family cemetery, heard horses moving beyond the stable walls and recognised at least one face among Lucien’s followers that he distinctly remembers helping to bury.

Despite this, he remains, because as Randolph explains whenever the question is raised, a man should not abandon his regiment merely because some of it has become difficult to kill.

Together, Taliaferro, Pendleton, Beverley, Cabell and Randolph form the hard core of Lucien Saint Clair’s growing force at Blackthorn Hall, men bound less by politics than by memory, comradeship and an inability to leave the old regiment entirely behind. They still wear what remains of their cavalry clothing, still argue over campaigns fought years earlier and still fall naturally into the habits of men who once depended upon one another for survival, while their pistols remain close at hand whenever Lucien requires something more persuasive than conversation.

What none of them fully understands is exactly what Lucien intends for the remnants of the 27th Virginia Cavalry, although all have begun to suspect that he is interested in restoring rather more than its name. Strange riders have been seen around Blackthorn Hall after dark, old saddles have disappeared from the stables and there are increasingly familiar faces among men who should have remained in Virginia soil. For the five veterans, however, the answer is simple enough, because if the 27th is riding again, then they intend to be there when it does.

My second Dark Confederacy posse has its roots firmly planted in the old Virginia aristocracy, although in this case it is very much the sort of aristocracy whose neighbours learned that an invitation to dinner was best accepted before sunset. At its centre is Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair, master of Blackthorn Hall, an old plantation lying among the wooded ridges and rolling farmland of Virginia, where the Saint Clair family had accumulated land, influence and enemies for generations.

The Saint Clairs traced their American ancestry back to the colonial period and regarded themselves as Virginians first and almost everything else a very distant second. Generations of the family had served as lawyers, magistrates, militia officers and politicians, while younger sons had traditionally entered the army or found some other suitably respectable occupation involving horses and firearms. Blackthorn Hall reflected that history, with family portraits covering its walls, weapons from earlier wars hanging above fireplaces and a library containing several generations of correspondence, military journals and books that became considerably more unusual the farther one ventured towards the locked cabinets at the rear of the room.

Lucien grew up surrounded by stories of family service and developed particularly strong connections with the 27th Virginia Cavalry (Author’s note: I know there were only 26 Virginian Cavalry Regiments in the “War of Southern Independence”), with relatives, neighbours and family retainers serving in its ranks during the war. Blackthorn Hall became an unofficial stopping place for officers and men whenever circumstances allowed, its stables supplying fresh mounts while its cellars and kitchens supplied those things that cavalrymen generally considered equally important. Lucien never forgot the sight of Confederate horsemen gathering beneath the trees before riding away, nor how many of those familiar faces never returned.

Although wealthy enough to avoid much of the hardship experienced by ordinary soldiers, Lucien was no coward and remained closely associated with the regiment and its veterans. The war nevertheless affected him profoundly, as casualty lists steadily removed relatives and childhood friends while the world into which he had been born collapsed around him. When peace finally came, Blackthorn Hall remained standing, but its fields were neglected, its fortune diminished and many of the chairs around the Saint Clair dining table permanently empty.

Lucien increasingly withdrew into the family library, where an earlier interest in history and antiquarianism gradually moved towards spiritualism, folklore and considerably darker subjects. He became fascinated by the possibility that death might not represent the absolute boundary that conventional religion and science assumed, and his considerable remaining wealth allowed him to acquire obscure manuscripts, forbidden texts and strange objects from dealers throughout America and Europe. Visitors became increasingly rare, servants began finding excuses to leave Blackthorn Hall and strange lights were occasionally reported in rooms that had supposedly been locked for years.

Behind the house, beyond an avenue of ancient oaks, lay the Saint Clair family burial ground, surrounded by a large wall and dominated by weathered monuments carrying names familiar from almost two centuries of Virginia history. Among them were several comparatively recent graves belonging to men who had ridden with the 27th Virginia Cavalry, including that of Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair and his beloved charger, Beauregard. one of the family’s great Confederate heroes and a celebrated cavalry commander whose exploits had become part of Saint Clair legend.

Lucien began spending more and more time there after dark.

Precisely what he discovered among those graves remains uncertain, although Blackthorn Hall’s remaining servants became accustomed to seeing their master walking towards the family plot carrying books, lanterns and occasionally objects that respectable gentlemen had little reason to possess. There were nights when unusual lights could be seen between the headstones and mornings when the earth around particular graves appeared to have been disturbed despite there being no evidence that anyone had entered the cemetery.

Lucien himself dismisses such observations as the imagination of superstitious servants, although he has never provided a particularly satisfactory explanation for why several old cavalry saddles have recently disappeared from the Blackthorn Hall tack room.

What is certain is that Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair is no longer simply an eccentric Virginia gentleman with an unhealthy interest in the occult. He has become a necromancer of considerable ability and the centre of a new Dark Confederacy posse, drawing around him former soldiers, desperate gunmen and men whose loyalty to the old cause survived considerably better than the cause itself. Some follow him because of the Saint Clair name, others because of his money, while a few seem to have known Blackthorn Hall and its master for much longer than their appearance should reasonably permit.

Visitors occasionally remark that the Saint Clair family plot contains rather more empty spaces than it once did.

Lucien merely smiles, pours another glass of Bumgardner’s Pure Old Rye and changes the subject.

Writing background stories for a Dracula’s America posse might appear, at first glance, to be an unnecessary addition to a miniature wargame. The figures have statistics, weapons and abilities, the rules provide scenarios and campaign mechanisms, and everything required to play is already present. Yet this treats the game purely as a mechanical contest. Dracula’s America: Shadows of the West was deliberately designed as something broader, a Gothic horror skirmish game set within an alternate version of the nineteenth century in which small groups of distinctive individuals struggle within a developed fictional world.¹ The relatively small number of figures involved makes characterisation particularly valuable because players are dealing with individuals rather than anonymous battalions or regiments.

This is one of the principal reasons I have increasingly found myself writing backstories for my Dracula’s America posses. They are not simply decorative pieces of fiction added after painting is finished. They change the way in which the miniatures, the posse and ultimately the game itself are perceived. A figure identified only as a veteran with a rifle remains essentially a collection of game statistics. Give him a name, explain where he came from, describe why he follows the posse leader and provide some small element of his previous life, and the same miniature acquires an identity. Once that has happened, what occurs to him during a game begins to matter in a different way.

There is a substantial body of game studies scholarship supporting this distinction between simply manipulating game components and becoming engaged with the fictional situation those components represent. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman argue that meaningful play develops through the relationship between player actions and the larger system within which those actions acquire significance. They also identify narrative, simulation and social interaction as important ways through which games generate meaning.² A miniature wargame can therefore operate simultaneously as a tactical system and as a narrative environment. The dice determine whether a character survives a gunfight, but the narrative determines why the player cares whether he survives.

This distinction becomes especially important in skirmish games. In a large historical battle the destruction of an infantry battalion may be important because of the tactical consequences of losing several hundred represented soldiers. In a game such as Dracula’s America, the loss of a single miniature can represent a significant proportion of the entire force. The original rules envisage posses containing no more than about a dozen individual models, reinforcing the importance of individual characters rather than mass formations.³ When a miniature has acquired an identity through previous games and through a developed background, its loss may consequently possess narrative as well as tactical significance.

The player is no longer merely thinking that a rifleman has been removed from the table. It might instead be Malachi Graves losing one of the increasingly battered veterans who has followed him halfway across the American West, or Lucien Saint Clair watching another member of his resurrected Confederate following disappear beneath a hail of gunfire. The mechanical event has remained exactly the same, but its meaning has changed.

Gary Alan Fine identified this process remarkably early in his study of fantasy role playing communities. He examined role playing games as social worlds within which players collectively construct and maintain shared fictional realities through interaction.⁴ Although a miniature skirmish game differs considerably from a conventional role playing game, the principle remains applicable. The rules establish boundaries and mechanisms, while the participants determine what events occurring within those boundaries mean. A failed shooting roll can simply be a failed shooting roll, or it can become the occasion when a supposedly deadly gunslinger emptied his revolver at an approaching zombie and somehow missed every shot. The latter is much more likely to be remembered.

Backstories provide the framework within which these accidental events can be incorporated into an emerging narrative. This is important because tabletop narratives differ from novels or films. They are not entirely predetermined by an author. The player may establish a character’s past, personality and motivation, but the subsequent interaction between player decisions, game mechanisms and opponents determines much of what follows. In this respect the game produces what might be described as an emergent narrative. The story is not simply being told before play begins but is being generated through the act of playing.

I may therefore decide what a character did before the first game, but I cannot determine what happens once that figure reaches the tabletop. Dice, cards, opponents and my own occasionally disastrous decisions take over. What begins as written background becomes a continuing biography produced through play. This distinction is important because it prevents backstory from becoming merely another form of fiction writing attached to a game. Its purpose is to establish the beginning of a character’s story rather than determine its conclusion.

This is particularly appropriate to Dracula’s America. Its setting already depends upon the collision of history, alternative history, the Western and Gothic horror. Dracula rules the United States, supernatural factions operate within recognisable nineteenth century surroundings, and historical imagery is continually mixed with the fantastic.⁵ Writing backgrounds extends the same process. A Dark Confederacy posse can be anchored in the historical Confederacy and the aftermath of the American Civil War while introducing necromancy and resurrected cavalrymen. A Church of Dagon posse can draw upon Lovecraftian horror while still consisting of individuals who possess occupations, relationships and motives appropriate to its imagined Western setting. The background therefore establishes connections between the broader fictional world supplied by the rules and the particular collection of figures standing on my table.

There is also an important relationship between narrative and engagement. Gordon Calleja argues that involvement in games is multidimensional, incorporating not simply manipulation of game systems but spatial, shared, affective, narrative and ludic forms of involvement.⁶ He uses the concept of incorporation to describe a stronger condition in which the game environment becomes integrated into the player’s experience of play. Although Calleja developed his model principally in relation to digital games, the underlying concept is useful for understanding tabletop gaming because it emphasises that engagement does not arise from game mechanisms alone.

This is where writing backstories becomes particularly useful. Naming characters and providing them with histories increases the opportunities for narrative and emotional involvement without changing a single rule.⁷ The weapon ranges remain the same, movement remains the same and the probabilities governing combat remain the same. What changes is the player’s relationship with the pieces being moved. The miniature becomes connected to a larger imagined world and to events that occurred in previous games.

The distinction between immersion and engagement is also worth considering. Immersion is sometimes used rather loosely in discussions of games to describe almost any situation in which players become absorbed in what they are doing. Calleja argues that the concept is more complicated and proposes a model incorporating several different forms of player involvement rather than treating immersion as a single psychological condition.⁸ This is particularly useful for miniature gaming because players continually move between different forms of engagement. One moment I may be calculating movement distance or considering the probability of a successful attack, while the next I am considering whether a particular action is appropriate for the character involved.

Narrative therefore does not require the player to forget that a game is being played. Indeed, much of the pleasure comes from moving between these different perspectives. The player can simultaneously understand that a miniature has certain statistics and regard that miniature as representing a particular character. Tactical calculation and imaginative involvement are not mutually exclusive. They can operate together.

Backstories also contribute to continuity between games. This may be their greatest value in campaign play. Without narrative, a campaign can easily become a sequence of linked tactical encounters in which experience, injuries, equipment and casualties are carried from one game to another. Those mechanisms certainly provide continuity, but a developed narrative gives that continuity additional meaning. An injury becomes part of a character’s history. An opponent responsible for killing a valued member of the posse becomes a rival. A recruit arriving halfway through a campaign can be given a reason for joining. An unlikely survivor begins to acquire a reputation.

The rules provide the events, while the players turn those events into history.

Fine’s discussion of gaming as a shared social world is again useful here because the fictional reality of the game is maintained through the interaction of its participants.⁹ Events acquire significance because players remember them, discuss them and incorporate them into later play. A character who has repeatedly survived dangerous situations may consequently acquire a reputation that has no formal existence within the rules. Other players know who he is because they remember what happened previously.

This also explains why it is unnecessary to produce elaborate biographies for every figure before beginning play. Too much predetermined history can become almost as restrictive as having none at all. A useful background establishes identity, motivation and relationships while deliberately leaving room for the tabletop to determine what happens next. The purpose is to create enough narrative structure for later events to possess meaning without writing the ending before the game has begun.

In practical terms, a few paragraphs may therefore be more useful than several pages. A character needs enough information to explain who he is, where he came from, why he belongs to the posse and perhaps what he wants. Everything after that can emerge through play. The first game adds another piece of history, the second adds another, and before long the character possesses a biography that neither the player nor the game designer could have predicted.

There is a further social dimension. Backstories give opponents something with which to engage. When both players know that one particular miniature is the notorious gunslinger who survived three previous encounters, attacking him becomes more interesting. When a necromancer has repeatedly escaped capture, his appearance on the table acquires significance before the first activation occurs. Gaming worlds are socially maintained rather than existing solely in the imagination of an individual participant, and their stories are strengthened when they become shared experiences.¹⁰

This helps explain one of the peculiar pleasures of miniature wargaming. Players frequently remember stories long after they have forgotten the result. The precise victory point total from a game played several years ago may disappear completely, while everyone remembers the cavalryman who charged through a hail of fire, the preacher who refused to die, or the supposedly terrifying monster that spent most of the battle achieving nothing useful whatsoever. Narrative provides a structure through which the randomness inherent in many games is converted into memorable experience.

There is consequently no conflict between narrative and game mechanics. The two work best when they reinforce one another. Salen and Zimmerman emphasise that meaningful play emerges from relationships between player actions, outcomes and the wider game system.¹¹ Narrative can add another layer of significance to those outcomes. The rules create uncertainty because players cannot completely control what happens, while the narrative gives those uncertain consequences meaning precisely because they cannot be predetermined.

A character who survives because the author decided in advance that he must survive is merely part of a story. A character who somehow survives six games despite repeated attempts by opponents to kill him has acquired a legend.

That, ultimately, is why I write backgrounds for my Dracula’s America posses. Painting the figures creates the physical collection and the rules make it possible to use them on the tabletop, but the background transforms them into something more than playing pieces. It provides a starting point from which the unpredictable events of each game can develop into an ongoing story. This does not require players to become actors, conduct lengthy role playing sessions or subordinate tactical play to storytelling. It simply adds another level of engagement.

A Dark Confederacy veteran who survives because of an improbable card draw remains exactly the same miniature with exactly the same statistics, but he is no longer quite the same character. He has acquired another incident in his history. After several games these incidents accumulate, relationships develop, grudges appear and personalities emerge that were never deliberately written in advance. At that point the posse has moved beyond being a painted collection selected from an army list. It has developed its own history.

For a game such as Dracula’s America, where Gothic horror, alternative history and cinematic Western action already depend so heavily upon atmosphere, that seems entirely appropriate.¹² The backstory does not replace the game. It gives the game something to continue.

Footnotes

1. Jonathan Haythornthwaite, Dracula’s America: Shadows of the West: A Wargame (Oxford: Osprey Games, 2017).
2. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
3. Haythornthwaite, Dracula’s America.
4. Gary Alan Fine, Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), particularly the discussions of collective fantasy, game structure, frames and the reality of fantasy.
5. Haythornthwaite, Dracula’s America.
6. Gordon Calleja, In Game: From Immersion to Incorporation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 35–54.
7. Calleja, In Game, 113–134.
8. Calleja, In Game, 17–54, 167–180.
9. Fine, Shared Fantasy.
10. Fine, Shared Fantasy.
11. Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play.
12. Haythornthwaite, Dracula’s America.

Abstract

This essay examines how combat trauma can be represented in wargame design without reducing complex psychological experiences to simple morale penalties or diagnostic categories. It argues that meaningful modelling should distinguish immediate stress from accumulated strain while incorporating cohesion, trust, experience, recovery, leadership, and significant events. Psychological consequences should persist across engagements where they influence subsequent decisions, allowing military formations to develop through their individual histories. Such an approach introduces path dependence, nonlinear behaviour, organisational memory, and uncertainty into campaign systems. Ultimately, modelling trauma demonstrates how wargames can represent military units as changing human organisations rather than collections of static capabilities.

The book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character by Jonathan Shay prompted me to think more seriously about how combat trauma might be modelled within wargames. The essay that follows was stimulated by Shay’s work and by the broader questions it raises about the psychological consequences of combat and how these might be represented on the tabletop. Given the close relationship between the two, I have chosen to post the essay alongside my review of Shay’s book, allowing the review and the resulting exploration of wargame design to be read together.

Introduction

Wargames are necessarily abstractions because no rules system can reproduce the complete physical, psychological, social, and moral experience of warfare, and even the most detailed simulation remains a deliberately constructed representation of selected aspects of reality. Nevertheless, every wargame incorporates assumptions about human behaviour whether those assumptions have been consciously examined by the designer or merely inherited from earlier rules. A unit that continues fighting until it reaches a predetermined casualty threshold, a soldier whose effectiveness remains unchanged throughout repeated engagements, or a formation whose psychological condition is restored through a successful morale test all represent particular interpretations of how human beings behave under extreme conditions.

The relevant question for wargame design is therefore not whether psychology should be modelled, since psychology is already present in almost every rules system through morale, suppression, cohesion, leadership, fatigue, activation, command, and reaction mechanisms. The more important questions concern which psychological processes should be represented, the level at which they should operate, the period over which their consequences should persist, and whether their inclusion materially alters the decisions that the game is intended to explore.¹

Combat trauma presents an especially difficult problem because conventional wargames usually represent the psychological consequences of combat through immediate battlefield mechanisms in which soldiers receive fire, take casualties, lose leaders, become isolated, or encounter unexpected threats and consequently become suppressed, disordered, hesitant, or routed. Such mechanisms can be entirely appropriate for representing immediate battlefield behaviour, but they become less satisfactory when games follow the same soldiers and formations through prolonged periods of combat.

Psychological consequences do not necessarily begin and end within the temporal boundaries of an individual engagement. Stress may be immediate, accumulated strain can develop over repeated operations, relationships can be damaged by casualties or leadership failures, and particular experiences can retain significance long after the physical circumstances that produced them have disappeared. Modern psychological research similarly distinguishes between immediate stress reactions, post traumatic disorders, grief, and moral injury rather than treating them as manifestations of a single process.²

The design problem is therefore substantially more complicated than adding a Trauma statistic or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder characteristic to a unit profile, because such an approach risks reducing a complex range of responses to a negative modifier while confusing clinical diagnosis with simulation design. A more useful approach models the circumstances through which psychological burdens develop, the factors that moderate their effects, the relationships damaged or strengthened by experience, and the consequences that persist across time.

This has implications extending beyond psychological modelling because combat trauma exposes broader weaknesses in traditional approaches to morale, experience, casualties, campaign progression, player knowledge, leadership, simulation validation, and the representation of military organisations themselves. It demonstrates the importance of persistence, uncertainty, relationships, nonlinear effects, and path dependence, while also suggesting that military formations should not be understood merely as collections of present capabilities but as historical organisations whose current behaviour may be shaped by what has previously happened to them.

The Limitations of Traditional Morale

Most wargames already contain some form of psychological model, although it is generally described as morale. A unit comes under fire, takes casualties, loses a commander, encounters a frightening threat, or becomes isolated and is subsequently required to test its willingness or ability to continue functioning. This approach remains valuable because tactical games cannot reasonably reproduce every cognitive and emotional process affecting individual soldiers, and morale therefore provides a convenient abstraction through which fear, exhaustion, confidence, uncertainty, training, leadership, cohesion, and self preservation can be converted into observable battlefield behaviour. Historical studies of combat have repeatedly demonstrated that military effectiveness cannot be understood simply through weapons, numbers, and casualties, and that cohesion, leadership, morale, fatigue, and perceptions of danger strongly influence combat behaviour.³

The problem occurs when a mechanism designed to model immediate battlefield behaviour is expected to represent psychological processes operating over substantially longer periods. Immediate shock is not identical to accumulated combat strain, accumulated strain is not automatically equivalent to psychological trauma, and exposure to traumatic events does not itself establish the presence of a psychiatric disorder.⁴ A soldier who temporarily freezes during intense shelling may recover quickly and experience no significant continuing effects, while another may function effectively throughout the engagement only for psychological consequences to appear afterwards. A third may remain operationally effective throughout prolonged combat while accumulating burdens that influence later behaviour.

Traditional morale systems are principally concerned with immediate performance, asking whether a soldier continues firing, whether a platoon advances, whether a battalion holds its position, or whether a formation obeys an order. Modelling combat trauma introduces the additional question of the longer term human cost involved in repeatedly maintaining that performance, a distinction that is crucial because military effectiveness and psychological wellbeing do not occupy opposite ends of a single scale. Combat experience can improve tactical judgement, threat recognition, fire discipline, use of cover, and the capacity to continue functioning under dangerous conditions, while repeated exposure to death, responsibility, exhaustion, fear, and loss can simultaneously impose increasing psychological burdens.⁵

A system in which experience simply produces progressively better morale therefore captures only part of the relationship between exposure and performance.

Trauma Is Not a Morale Penalty

The most obvious design response is to create a Trauma characteristic and increase it as soldiers experience combat, with higher trauma producing increasingly severe penalties to morale, activation, shooting, movement, or command. The attraction of such a mechanism is obvious because it is easy to administer, but its conceptual weakness is equally important because psychological reactions to warfare are neither uniform nor reliably linear. Individuals exposed to similar circumstances may respond differently, while the same individual may respond differently depending upon previous experience, social relationships, leadership, exhaustion, expectations, and subsequent events. The relationship between combat exposure and later psychological consequences is therefore probabilistic and conditional rather than mechanically deterministic.⁶

Jonathan Shay’s analysis of Vietnam veterans is particularly useful for the wargame designer because it places psychological injury within social and moral relationships rather than reducing it exclusively to an individual’s response to danger. His comparison between the experiences described by veterans and the portrayal of Achilles emphasised the consequences of bereavement, anger, revenge, betrayal, damaged authority, and the destruction of previously accepted moral relationships.⁷ Although subsequent scholarship has expanded and challenged aspects of Shay’s interpretation, particularly in relation to the developing concept of moral injury, the design implication remains important because psychological harm cannot adequately be represented through fear alone. Contemporary moral injury literature similarly emphasises that guilt, shame, betrayal, damaged trust, social alienation, and perceptions of moral transgression may be significant independently of the immediate fear associated with physical danger.⁸

A soldier experiencing accumulated strain may become cautious, another may become more aggressive, another may continue performing extremely effectively while becoming increasingly distrustful of commanders, and another may become unusually protective of the surviving members of the group. Yet another may become more willing to accept personal danger, which means that reducing all of these possibilities to a single morale penalty removes precisely the behavioural variation that makes the subject significant.

A stronger design principle is therefore to model trauma through changing relationships, vulnerabilities, and conditions rather than universal penalties.

Stress, Strain, Trauma and Moral Injury

For design purposes it is useful to distinguish immediate stress, accumulated strain, potentially traumatic experiences, and moral injury. Immediate stress belongs primarily to the tactical battlefield, where artillery fire, casualties, close combat, isolation, surprise, sudden threats, confusion, and uncertainty can temporarily interfere with effective performance. Conventional suppression and morale systems are generally capable of representing these consequences.

Accumulated strain operates over longer periods because repeated danger, insufficient sleep, physical exhaustion, continuous operations, casualties among comrades, inadequate nutrition, uncertainty, and insufficient recovery can increase psychological and physical burdens. Research examining military cohesion and stress has similarly found important relationships among stressful circumstances, strain, cohesion, organisational disintegration, and perceived performance.⁹

Traumatic experiences add another dimension because exposure to death, serious injury, or threats to life is central to contemporary diagnostic understandings of psychological trauma, while military experience also includes events whose significance arises from the meaning attached to them rather than simply the physical danger they present.¹⁰ The concept of moral injury is particularly relevant in this regard because Litz and his colleagues developed an influential model in which potentially morally injurious experiences could involve perpetrating, witnessing, failing to prevent, or becoming aware of conduct that seriously conflicts with an individual’s moral expectations. Psychological consequences could include guilt, shame, withdrawal, difficulties in self forgiveness, and altered understandings of the self and others.¹¹ Subsequent research has considerably expanded the literature while also demonstrating that moral injury remains conceptually distinct from PTSD even though the two may coexist.¹²

More recent scholarship has also returned attention to the social and organisational dimensions of moral injury, particularly the way leadership behaviour, institutional failure, perceptions of betrayal, organisational context, and the response of leaders following difficult events can influence psychological outcomes.¹³ This distinction has considerable importance for wargaming because battlefield rules normally categorise events according to physical consequences, whereas psychological significance does not necessarily follow the same structure.

A shell may cause casualties, a casualty may reduce strength, a dead commander may reduce command efficiency, and a captured objective may increase victory points, yet the psychological significance of those events may differ greatly from their immediately measurable military effects. The death of an established comrade may have consequences different from the death of a recent replacement, accidentally killing civilians may produce very different effects from killing enemy combatants even though the mechanical result in each case may simply be another casualty, and being ordered to abandon wounded soldiers may have relatively little immediate effect upon firepower while seriously damaging confidence in command.

The design implication is therefore that games concerned with psychological consequences need to distinguish between danger, loss, responsibility, relationship, and meaning.

Cohesion and the Unit as a Social Organisation

Traditional wargames frequently conceptualise military units as collections of capabilities, with movement, weapons, protection, training, morale, and command describing what a unit can do. Psychological modelling reveals another dimension because a military unit is also a social organisation in which cohesion, shared identity, confidence in comrades, leadership, and mutual support can influence both combat effectiveness and responses to stressful circumstances.¹⁴ Research involving military populations has repeatedly identified associations between cohesion, morale, leadership, stress, and mental health, although the precise causal relationships are complex and should not be reduced to a universal protective formula.¹⁵

This creates difficulties for casualty based morale systems because removing three figures from a twelve figure platoon is normally treated as equivalent regardless of the identities of those figures. From the perspective of numerical strength, such abstraction may be entirely appropriate, but from the perspective of group relationships it can be misleading because the death of a recently arrived replacement is not necessarily psychologically equivalent to the death of a long serving member of the group. Similarly, the death of a commander may represent more than the loss of a leadership bonus if that commander has become an important focus of trust and group identity.

Campaign design can therefore distinguish between physical strength and social structure without requiring individual psychological profiles for every miniature. A designer might instead identify a small number of significant relationships, such as an established leadership relationship, a veteran core, or particularly important members whose loss has consequences beyond their combat capability. The important theoretical principle is that removing material capability is not always equivalent to removing organisational value.

The same principle applies to replacements because a platoon reduced from thirty soldiers to eighteen and subsequently restored to thirty by the arrival of twelve replacements has regained its numerical establishment without necessarily regaining its previous organisational condition. The survivors possess shared experiences that the replacements do not, existing relationships have been removed, new relationships must develop, and the experienced survivors may possess improved battlefield competence while simultaneously carrying accumulated exhaustion and grief.

Restoring numbers therefore does not automatically restore the formation, a distinction that has implications extending beyond combat trauma to replacement systems, command succession, unit reorganisation, veteran formations, training, and campaign progression.

Leadership, Trust and Betrayal

Leadership provides another example of how psychological modelling challenges conventional assumptions because most wargames treat leadership as inherently beneficial, with commanders adding to morale, generating command points, allowing rerolls, improving activation, or extending command radii. This is mechanically convenient but theoretically incomplete because leadership is not merely command capacity; it is also a relationship between leaders and those expected to follow them.

Competent and trusted leadership can strengthen confidence, cohesion, and resilience, while poor leadership can contribute to uncertainty, resentment, and organisational deterioration. Research among deployed military personnel has found relationships among perceptions of leadership, cohesion, morale, and psychological outcomes, while the developing moral injury literature increasingly recognises leadership and institutional context as important variables.¹⁶ Shay attached particular importance to perceived betrayal by legitimate authority under circumstances involving serious consequences for those subject to that authority.¹⁷ Modern moral injury scholarship does not restrict the concept to this formulation, but leadership betrayal and organisational failure remain important areas of investigation.¹⁸

For design theory, this suggests that leadership should sometimes be modelled through trust rather than solely through command effectiveness. A commander who repeatedly commits an exhausted unit to unsuccessful attacks should create consequences extending beyond the consumption of command points, while a formation promised artillery support that repeatedly fails to arrive may become less willing to rely upon similar assurances. Likewise, a player who abandons a subordinate unit because its sacrifice produces a favourable victory point calculation may have made an entirely rational decision within the existing game system, although soldiers experiencing the decision from within that simulation might interpret the same event very differently.

Campaign systems can therefore allow Trust to change through competent leadership, shared danger, reliable support, adequate rest, successful casualty evacuation, and the fulfilment of commitments, while apparently unnecessary losses, abandonment, contradictory orders, repeated failure, broken promises, or perceived misuse can damage it. Low trust need not produce a universal morale penalty because it might instead affect willingness to undertake particularly dangerous tasks, acceptance of ambiguous orders, recovery following setbacks, or dependence upon local rather than higher authority.

The result is a more sophisticated command model in which the leader ceases to be a mobile positive modifier and instead becomes part of a relationship possessing a history.

Experience and Strain Can Develop Together

Traditional campaign systems tend to reward survival because characters acquire experience, units become veteran, veterans obtain improved statistics, and formations that survive repeated engagements usually become increasingly effective. This produces an obvious progression mechanism but risks turning veteran units into progressively more powerful versions of their inexperienced predecessors.

Combat trauma suggests another possibility in which experience and accumulated strain can increase simultaneously. Repeated combat can improve tactical judgement, weapon handling, observation, use of terrain, and the ability to distinguish genuinely dangerous threats from battlefield noise, while at the same time increasing physical exhaustion, exposing soldiers to further loss, and creating additional psychological burdens.¹⁹ These characteristics do not need to cancel each other because they represent different dimensions of experience.

Experience might improve tactical performance while Strain alters reactions to particular events, Cohesion might remain high even when Strain increases, and Trust might deteriorate while battlefield competence remains excellent. A formation can therefore become more effective and more vulnerable simultaneously, representing an important theoretical movement away from single axis progression.

Instead of units moving steadily from poor to good, inexperienced to veteran, or fresh to exhausted, several independent but interacting variables can describe their development, producing veterans who are different rather than simply better. This distinction is valuable beyond trauma modelling because campaign games frequently suffer from positive feedback in which successful units gain advantages, those advantages produce further victories, and victories produce still greater advantages. Allowing experience to generate benefits while prolonged operations impose different costs can moderate runaway progression without resorting to artificial balancing mechanisms.

Persistence and Multiple Timescales

Combat trauma draws attention to another fundamental design problem because consequences operate across different timescales, while many wargame systems impose an implicit temporal boundary in which suppression exists during the battle, casualties continue into the campaign, victory points survive until the end of the scenario, and almost everything else effectively disappears. This produces an arbitrary distinction based less upon historical processes than upon which mechanisms designers have traditionally chosen to record.

Psychological consequences demonstrate why persistence deserves greater theoretical attention because immediate fear may last seconds or minutes, physical exhaustion may persist for hours or days, reduced cohesion following heavy casualties may continue across several operations, damaged trust can persist until leadership changes or subsequent events repair the relationship, and some consequences may become increasingly significant with repeated exposure.

The designer should therefore consider not merely whether an event has an effect but how long that effect remains relevant. A useful general principle is that a game variable should persist for approximately as long as the phenomenon it represents materially influences the decisions being modelled, a principle that applies equally to ammunition, fatigue, mechanical reliability, intelligence, supply, disease, political support, command relationships, and morale.

Combat trauma therefore reveals a general weakness in systems that treat every consequence as belonging to the same temporal scale.

Path Dependence and the Memory of the Game

Persistence leads directly to path dependence because two formations may possess identical present strength while arriving at that condition through very different histories. One platoon might have suffered steady casualties over several months and incorporated replacements gradually, another might have suffered catastrophic losses during the previous engagement, a third might have avoided severe casualties but undergone weeks of continuous operations without adequate rest, and a fourth might remain physically strong while having lost confidence in its commander.

If their current weapon strength, manpower, and conventional morale ratings are identical, many wargames will treat them as effectively interchangeable, whereas a path dependent model recognises that their present state depends partly upon the routes through which they arrived there.

This is one of the most important theoretical implications arising from trauma modelling because history itself becomes a game variable. The campaign does not merely record results; previous events influence the mechanisms producing future results. A failed attack matters not simply because casualties were sustained but because confidence may have declined, the death of a commander matters not merely because a command bonus disappears but because established trust has been disrupted, and a period of rest matters not simply because physical strength is restored but because accumulated strain may decline. A successful operation can strengthen confidence while simultaneously increasing exhaustion.

The campaign therefore acquires memory, creating a deeper connection between simulation and narrative because the story produced by previous games ceases to be decorative background and instead becomes part of the causal structure governing subsequent play.

Nonlinear Behaviour

Trauma modelling also exposes the limitations of linear modifiers because wargames frequently rely upon additive systems in which veteran status provides a bonus, leadership provides another bonus, casualties create a penalty, and fatigue creates another penalty before the arithmetic determines the final probability. Human behaviour is often less conveniently linear because accumulated strain may produce little observable effect until another significant event occurs, strong cohesion may protect a unit against some forms of stress while making the loss of a particularly important member more consequential, and high trust may allow troops to accept extraordinary demands while perceived betrayal by the same trusted commander may produce greater consequences than disappointment with a leader who was never respected.

Stress, cohesion, strain, disintegration, and performance have consequently been examined in the psychological literature as interacting variables rather than independent additive quantities.²⁰ This suggests that designers should consider thresholds, interactions, conditional effects, and triggers rather than relying exclusively upon permanent modifiers.

A unit with high strain need not receive minus two on every action because high strain might instead alter what happens when another significant event occurs. An experienced and cohesive platoon may operate extremely effectively until a particular loss disrupts the relationships sustaining that performance, producing nonlinear behaviour without requiring complicated mathematics and creating more causally meaningful outcomes because consequences develop from combinations of circumstances rather than arbitrary penalty accumulation.

Emergent Behaviour Rather Than Diagnostic Tables

One temptation when modelling psychological consequences is to create tables of behavioural disorders in which one soldier becomes fearful, another aggressive, another withdrawn, and another unreliable. Such tables can generate variety, but the results frequently have little relationship to the experiences that supposedly produced them.

A stronger design approach produces behaviour emergently. A unit repeatedly left without promised support may become reluctant to conduct unsupported attacks, a formation whose casualties are consistently recovered may develop stronger expectations concerning the recovery of wounded comrades, soldiers who have repeatedly suffered severe losses while attacking prepared positions may become increasingly cautious when ordered to repeat the experience, and a unit serving successfully under the same commander may develop high trust so that the subsequent death or perceived betrayal of that commander has consequences because of the relationship already established.

Behaviour therefore emerges from history rather than being assigned randomly, which also helps distinguish randomness from uncertainty. Randomness is one means of creating uncertainty, but uncertainty does not require arbitrary outcomes because a system in which relationships, accumulated experiences, hidden thresholds, and conditional triggers interact can remain difficult to predict even though its consequences are causally connected to previous events.

This is particularly useful for psychological modelling because it avoids the implication that extreme responses simply appear because an unfortunate die roll has produced a colourful table result.

Recovery Must Be Part of the Model

A trauma system concerned only with deterioration is incomplete because military organisations have repeatedly attempted to manage combat stress and exhaustion through rotation, rest, medical support, training, leadership, social support, replacements, and periods away from immediate danger. The effectiveness of these measures varies according to time, military organisation, available resources, and circumstances, but their existence demonstrates that strain is not simply an irreversible accumulation.²¹

Recovery should therefore become a meaningful campaign process in which rest away from immediate danger may provide more effective recovery than remaining in forward reserve, returning to familiar comrades may have different consequences from transfer to a new formation, competent leadership may facilitate organisational recovery after a disastrous engagement, and replacement may restore manpower while initially disrupting established cohesion.

The distinction between replacement and recovery is particularly important because replacement is primarily administrative, whereas recovery can be physical, psychological, and organisational. Once this distinction is incorporated into the rules, players gain reasons to rotate units before they are physically destroyed, creating a command problem in which a formation may still be capable of fighting even though continuing to employ it is no longer the best long term decision. The player must then decide whether the immediate operational requirement justifies the possible future cost, a problem that is potentially more interesting than another morale test.

Modelling Moral Consequence Without Creating a Diagnostic Game

Moral injury presents particular design difficulties because its significance depends upon interpretation, which makes a table awarding Moral Injury Points whenever civilians are killed or prisoners abandoned conceptually crude and ethically questionable. Such a mechanism assumes that an event has identical psychological meaning for everyone involved and reduces complex moral experience to another resource counter.

A stronger model begins with expectations because military organisations and groups develop assumptions about legitimate conduct, loyalty, authority, responsibility, treatment of comrades, civilians, prisoners, and the enemy. These expectations vary across historical cultures and should not simply reproduce contemporary assumptions.²² An event can become significant when behaviour conflicts with an established expectation, with consequences represented through changes in Trust, Cohesion, Strain, or relationships rather than through the declaration of a clinical diagnosis.

This distinction is important because the wargame designer does not need to decide that a soldier has developed moral injury. The designer can instead represent the possibility that perceived betrayal has damaged trust, that responsibility for a particular event has increased strain, or that participation in an action conflicting with group expectations has altered future behaviour. This is a game model of consequences rather than a psychiatric diagnosis.

The same caution applies to PTSD because the American Psychiatric Association defines PTSD according to specified symptom clusters, duration, exposure requirements, and functional consequences, meaning that exposure to battle does not itself constitute diagnosis.²³ A wargame mechanism in which a failed die roll announces that a miniature has developed PTSD therefore creates a false equivalence between clinical assessment and random game procedure. Terms such as Stress, Strain, Cohesion, Trust, Exhaustion, Grief, and Recovery are considerably more defensible because they describe variables relevant to player decisions without claiming clinical authority that the simulation cannot possess.

Consequences Rather Than Penalties

This leads to another broader design principle because wargames commonly represent undesirable conditions through penalties in which fatigue reduces movement, suppression reduces shooting, casualties reduce morale, and psychological strain could easily become another entry in the same sequence. Not every consequence, however, needs to make a unit universally worse because accumulated experience and strain may instead produce asymmetric behavioural changes.

A cautious veteran formation may become difficult to surprise while being reluctant to conduct exposed movement, strong attachment among surviving members may improve cohesion while making additional casualties particularly significant, and distrust of higher command may reduce compliance with risky orders while increasing local initiative. These are not straightforward advantages or disadvantages because their value depends upon circumstances.

This makes them more interesting as game mechanisms because they create tactical problems rather than merely reducing numerical efficiency. The distinction between penalty and consequence is therefore important because a penalty tells the player that the unit has become worse, while a consequence tells the player that the unit has changed. The latter is particularly appropriate for campaign games because it allows formations to develop distinct identities without requiring extensive special rules.

Player Knowledge and the Omniscient Commander

Psychological modelling also exposes the excessive information available to many wargame players because players often know exactly how many casualties their forces have suffered, the precise morale level of every unit, the location of every commander, the probability associated with every test, and the exact amount of punishment a formation can absorb before breaking. Historical commanders rarely possessed such certainty.

The problem becomes particularly obvious when psychological conditions are represented numerically because if a player knows that a unit possesses seven Stress Points and automatically breaks at ten, psychological uncertainty has disappeared and strain becomes another resource that can be consumed optimally. Hidden information offers an alternative because the player may know that a battalion has endured prolonged operations, suffered important casualties, and received inadequate rest without knowing exactly how it will respond to another severe event.

This can be represented through hidden thresholds, uncertain recovery, cards, qualitative status categories, or information available only when particular circumstances trigger a reaction. The broader theoretical principle is that the simulation may know more than the player, allowing the internal system to contain exact values without displaying them. Players should receive approximately the information that a commander in the represented circumstances could reasonably assess rather than automatically receiving every mechanical quantity used by the model.

This principle has applications well beyond psychological modelling, including logistics, intelligence, enemy strength, equipment reliability, command friction, and political support.

Trauma and Player Agency

Perhaps the strongest reason to model combat trauma is its capacity to change player decisions because good mechanisms generate choices. If trauma simply requires another post battle die roll, it adds administration without necessarily adding meaningful simulation, but if accumulated strain influences whether the player commits a veteran unit, rotates it, withdraws it, reinforces it, changes its commander, or gives it time to recover, psychological consequences become part of command.

Traditional wargames frequently encourage efficient consumption of military formations because casualties become resources exchanged for objectives, and if twenty casualties secure an objective worth more victory points than those losses cost, the decision is rational according to the game. This is not necessarily unrealistic because military commanders do sometimes have to accept losses to achieve objectives, but the problem is that games often define the costs too narrowly.

An assault may capture the objective while exhausting the formation required for the next operation, a successful defence may preserve the tactical position while destroying confidence in leadership, and continually using veteran troops because they possess the best combat ratings may produce immediate success while progressively damaging their future effectiveness. Psychological persistence therefore widens the decision space without requiring the designer to instruct players to behave compassionately, because the system simply needs to ensure that human consequences can become military consequences.

This creates a useful distinction between prescriptive morality and systemic consequence because rules need not tell the player which decision is morally correct, but they can ensure that decisions have effects extending beyond the immediate exchange of casualties and objectives.

Feedback Loops

Combat trauma also demonstrates the importance of feedback because traditional mechanisms are frequently sequential, with fire producing casualties, casualties causing a morale test, morale producing retreat, and the process then effectively resetting. Human organisations are more recursive because casualties can reduce cohesion, reduced cohesion can make subsequent losses more significant, loss of trust can reduce willingness to accept dangerous orders, poor performance can cause commanders to exert additional pressure, and that additional pressure can further damage trust.

The system therefore contains positive feedback capable of accelerating deterioration, while other processes create stabilising feedback through effective leadership, rest, successful operations, social cohesion, adequate support, and recovery. This suggests that design sophistication depends less upon the number of mechanisms than upon the quality of the relationships among them, since a game with six interacting variables may generate richer behaviour than one containing thirty independent modifiers.

Complexity should therefore be understood functionally rather than simply measured by the volume of rules, with the most useful complexity emerging from interaction rather than accumulation.

A Practical Integrated Model

The theoretical argument can be converted into a relatively economical game structure in which six variables are sufficient for many campaign level games. Immediate Stress represents suppression, fear, shock, confusion, and temporary battlefield disruption, changing rapidly and belonging largely within the tactical engagement. Accumulated Strain records the longer term burden produced by repeated exposure, exhaustion, loss, insufficient rest, and other persistent pressures. Cohesion represents the strength of relationships within the group and its capacity to function collectively, while Trust represents confidence in immediate leadership and, where appropriate, higher command or institutions. Experience represents battlefield competence acquired through survival, training, and previous operations, while Recovery represents the capacity to reduce accumulated strain and rebuild organisational effectiveness through rest, leadership, security, time, and social support.

Significant Events can then connect these variables. The death of a trusted commander might affect Cohesion and Trust, a disastrous unsupported attack might increase Strain and reduce Trust, and a successful operation under severe conditions might increase Experience and strengthen Cohesion while simultaneously increasing Strain. A period of effective rest might reduce Strain without removing Experience, while replacement might increase numerical strength while temporarily affecting Cohesion.

The variables therefore describe different dimensions of the formation and should not simply be added together into one final morale score because the relationships among them constitute the model.

Implications for Simulation Validation

Introducing psychological mechanisms also changes how wargames should be validated because it would be unrealistic to demand exact predictive probabilities for complex psychological responses across different periods, cultures, military organisations, and individuals. Validation should instead examine patterns, asking whether repeated exposure without sufficient recovery generally increases vulnerability, whether effective cohesion sometimes moderates the consequences of stress, whether heavy replacement can restore strength without immediately restoring cohesion, whether experience can improve tactical performance while strain also increases, whether poor leadership can damage trust, and whether formations with different histories behave differently even when their numerical strength is similar.

These are more defensible validation questions than asking whether exactly a particular percentage of soldiers should fail a specific test. Simulation theory makes an important distinction between verification and validation because verification concerns whether a model has been implemented according to its intended conceptual structure, whereas validation concerns whether the model provides a sufficiently credible representation of reality for its intended purpose.²⁴

The distinction is essential here because a trauma mechanism might be mathematically flawless while resting upon poor psychological assumptions, whereas a deliberately simple mechanism may be entirely suitable if it generates the patterns and decisions relevant to the purpose of the game. Monte Carlo testing can assist with verification and behavioural analysis because large numbers of trials can identify runaway deterioration, unexpected probability distributions, excessively rapid recovery, universal collapse, or veteran units becoming mechanically useless after predictable numbers of scenarios.

Monte Carlo methods cannot establish whether the psychological theory behind the model is valid, which means quantitative testing must be combined with historical evidence, psychological research, comparative case studies, expert judgement, and explicit examination of assumptions. The broader lesson for wargame design is that mathematical precision is not equivalent to model validity.

The Limits of Quantification

Combat trauma also exposes a fundamental problem in simulation because wargames transform qualitative phenomena into quantitative mechanisms in order to make them operational within a rules system. Morale becomes seven, Cohesion becomes four, and Stress becomes eight, yet these numbers remain representational devices rather than direct measurements of reality.

A unit with Cohesion 8 is not objectively twice as cohesive as one with Cohesion 4 simply because the rules use those values. The numbers exist to produce differences in game behaviour, a distinction between measurement and representation that becomes especially important with psychological mechanisms. A Stress score does not clinically measure stress and a Trust score does not objectively quantify human confidence; both are components of a model whose usefulness depends upon whether they generate plausible patterns of behaviour and meaningful player decisions for the purpose of the game.

False precision should therefore be avoided because more detailed numbers do not automatically produce better simulations.

Scale and Decision Relevance

Not every wargame needs a trauma system because a tactical game representing forty minutes of combat may reasonably restrict psychological modelling to immediate suppression, morale, command, and cohesion when long term trauma lies outside its temporal and conceptual boundaries. A platoon campaign following individual soldiers across months presents a very different situation in which relationships, experience, accumulated strain, leadership, casualties, replacement, and recovery may materially affect the decisions being explored.

Operational games can represent comparable processes at formation level because divisions repeatedly committed to combat without adequate rest can experience declining effectiveness even when replacement systems maintain nominal establishment. Strategic games might represent the institutional dimension through manpower systems, rotation policies, medical services, leadership culture, reinforcement quality, political pressure, and the management of exhausted formations.

The correct level of modelling therefore depends upon decision relevance. Historical phenomena do not need to appear in rules simply because they existed, but they should be modelled when their inclusion changes decisions relevant to the purpose of the game. This provides an important restraint against unnecessary complexity because the design question is not merely whether trauma was historically important, but whether representing its consequences improves the particular simulation.

Ethical Considerations

Combat trauma also requires a degree of ethical restraint because the subject concerns experiences that have caused substantial and continuing suffering to real people. Treating psychiatric conditions as colourful random events or humorous disadvantages would therefore be inappropriate in a serious historical simulation, although automatically omitting psychological consequences also carries assumptions.

A campaign in which soldiers can continue fighting indefinitely provided that physical casualties are replaced implies that human beings effectively return to their previous condition once manpower totals are restored. That is itself a model of war, and psychological mechanisms can challenge this assumption by demonstrating that survival does not necessarily mean remaining unchanged.

The purpose should not be to produce a catalogue of psychiatric symptoms or to pretend that a game can reproduce the lived experience of trauma. Instead, the aim should be to recognise human consequences where they affect military behaviour and command decisions, with responsible abstraction remaining essential throughout.

Wider Implications for Wargame Design Theory

Although combat trauma provides the immediate case, the theoretical implications extend considerably further because military formations are historical systems whose present condition can depend upon previous events. Consequences can operate across multiple timescales, relationships among variables can matter more than isolated characteristics, human behaviour can be nonlinear, uncertainty does not require arbitrary randomness, advantages and disadvantages can coexist within the same characteristic, and players do not necessarily need access to every variable known to the simulation.

Replacing physical resources does not automatically restore organisational condition, and mechanisms should generate decisions rather than merely additional calculations. Most importantly, a unit should not always be understood as a snapshot of current capabilities because it can instead be treated as a path dependent organisation whose current behaviour is partially determined by the sequence of experiences through which it reached its present condition.

This approach has obvious applications beyond trauma because a formation’s logistical reliability can reflect earlier supply decisions, confidence in artillery support can depend upon whether promised fire has previously arrived, command relationships can depend upon successful or unsuccessful cooperation, equipment reliability can reflect accumulated use, civilian attitudes can depend upon previous treatment, and political support can reflect earlier casualties and decisions.

The broader lesson is that historical simulation becomes richer when consequences persist wherever that persistence affects future choices.

Conclusion

Modelling combat trauma presents wargame designers with substantial difficulties, but its greatest contribution may be theoretical rather than mechanical. The principal mistake is to treat trauma as another morale penalty because human responses to warfare vary too greatly and depend too strongly upon circumstances, experience, relationships, leadership, exhaustion, moral interpretation, and opportunities for recovery to be represented adequately through a single declining statistic.

The alternative is not to construct a psychiatric simulation but to model the conditions through which human consequences develop and the ways in which those consequences influence later military behaviour. Immediate battlefield stress can remain within conventional suppression and morale systems, accumulated strain can operate across engagements, cohesion can represent the strength and vulnerability of group relationships, trust can connect command decisions with future responses, experience can improve battlefield competence while strain develops independently, recovery can become a meaningful operational resource, and significant events can connect physical circumstances with social and moral consequences without pretending to diagnose psychiatric disorders.

This produces formations with histories in which a veteran unit ceases to be merely a standard unit possessing better statistics. The battles it has fought, the commanders it has trusted, the comrades it has lost, the replacements it has incorporated, the operations it has endured, and the opportunities for recovery it has received all contribute to its present condition.

Two units beginning a campaign with identical statistics can therefore develop into very different organisations. One may become experienced, cohesive, and confident despite heavy losses, another may remain numerically strong while becoming exhausted and distrustful, and a third may possess excellent tactical ability while becoming increasingly vulnerable to particular events because of accumulated experience and loss. The system does not simply classify units as better or worse, but allows them to become different.

This leads to a wider conclusion about wargame design theory because simulation quality does not depend primarily upon how much information a game contains. It depends upon whether the relationships, processes, uncertainties, persistence, and consequences necessary for the decisions being examined have been represented appropriately.

Combat trauma demonstrates this particularly clearly because it reveals something that conventional wargames can easily obscure. The previous battle matters for reasons extending beyond the ammunition expended, objectives captured, equipment destroyed, and soldiers killed, because it also matters that the survivors experienced it. A wargame capable of remembering that history has moved beyond treating military units as collections of current statistics and begins instead to represent them as human organisations moving through time, which for serious campaign design is a fundamental distinction.

Footnotes

1. Peter P. Perla, The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1990), 164–205; Robert E. Shannon, Systems Simulation: The Art and Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975), 2–8.
2. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM 5 TR, 5th ed., text rev. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2022), section on trauma and stressor related disorders; Brett T. Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy,” Clinical Psychology Review 29, no. 8 (2009): 695–706.
3. Anthony Kellett, Combat Motivation: The Behavior of Soldiers in Battle (Boston: Kluwer Nijhoff, 1982), 3–38; Ardant du Picq, Battle Studies: Ancient and Modern Battle, trans. John N. Greely and Robert C. Cotton (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 49–79; S. L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947).
4. American Psychiatric Association, DSM 5 TR, section on post traumatic stress disorder.
5. Kellett, Combat Motivation, 225–309; Ben Shalit, The Psychology of Conflict and Combat (New York: Praeger, 1988), 54–83.
6. Charles R. Figley, ed., Trauma and Its Wake: The Study and Treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (New York: Brunner Mazel, 1985), 3–17; American Psychiatric Association, DSM 5 TR.
7. Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Atheneum, 1994), 3–21, 39–77; Jonathan Shay, “Learning about Combat Stress from Homer’s Iliad,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 4, no. 4 (1991): 561–579.
8. Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair,” 695–706; Sheila Frankfurt and Patricia Frazier, “A Review of Research on Moral Injury in Combat Veterans,” Military Psychology 28, no. 5 (2016): 318–330.
9. James Griffith and Mark Vaitkus, “Relating Cohesion to Stress, Strain, Disintegration, and Performance: An Organizing Framework,” Military Psychology 11, no. 1 (1999): 27–55; James Griffith, “Test of a Model Incorporating Stress, Strain, and Disintegration in the Cohesion Performance Relation,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 27, no. 17 (1997): 1489–1506.
10. American Psychiatric Association, DSM 5 TR.
11. Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair,” 695–706.
12. Frankfurt and Frazier, “Review of Research on Moral Injury,” 318–330; Sonya B. Norman and Shira Maguen, “Moral Injury,” National Center for PTSD, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
13. Sofia Nilsson, “Leadership as Related to Moral Injury in a Military Context: A Systematic Scoping Literature Review,” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 30, no. 2 (2026); Lucian Tatsa Laur et al., “Exposure to Death in Large Scale Combat Operations: Leadership’s Role in Addressing Stress, Grief and Moral Injury,” Military Psychology (2026).
14. Guy L. Siebold, “The Essence of Military Group Cohesion,” Armed Forces & Society 33, no. 2 (2007): 286–295; Griffith and Vaitkus, “Relating Cohesion to Stress,” 27–55.
15. Norman Jones et al., “Leadership, Cohesion, Morale, and the Mental Health of UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan,” Psychiatry 75, no. 1 (2012): 49–59; Jasmin Kanesarajah et al., “Unit Cohesion, Traumatic Exposure and Mental Health of Military Personnel,” Occupational Medicine 66, no. 4 (2016): 308–315; Geoffrey J. Orme and James E. Kehoe, “Cohesion and Performance in Military Occupation Specialty Training,” Military Medicine 185, nos. 3–4 (2020): e325–e330.
16. Jones et al., “Leadership, Cohesion, Morale,” 49–59; Nilsson, “Leadership as Related to Moral Injury.”
17. Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, 3–21.
18. Nilsson, “Leadership as Related to Moral Injury”; Frankfurt and Frazier, “Review of Research on Moral Injury,” 318–330.
19. Kellett, Combat Motivation, 225–309; Shalit, Psychology of Conflict and Combat, 54–83.
20. Griffith and Vaitkus, “Relating Cohesion to Stress,” 27–55; Griffith, “Test of a Model Incorporating Stress,” 1489–1506.
21. Zahava Solomon, Combat Stress Reaction: The Enduring Toll of War (New York: Plenum Press, 1993), 13–46; Kellett, Combat Motivation, 267–309.
22. Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair,” 695–706; Frankfurt and Frazier, “Review of Research on Moral Injury,” 318–330.
23. American Psychiatric Association, DSM 5 TR.
24. Robert G. Sargent, “Verification and Validation of Simulation Models,” Journal of Simulation 7, no. 1 (2013): 12–24; National Research Council, Technology for the United States Navy and Marine Corps, 2000–2035: Becoming a 21st Century Force, Volume 9: Modeling and Simulation (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1997), 68–75.

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Shalit, Ben. The Psychology of Conflict and Combat. New York: Praeger, 1988.

Shannon, Robert E. Systems Simulation: The Art and Science. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975.

Shay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York: Atheneum, 1994.

Shay, Jonathan. “Learning about Combat Stress from Homer’s Iliad.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 4, no. 4 (1991): 561–579.

Siebold, Guy L. “The Essence of Military Group Cohesion.” Armed Forces & Society 33, no. 2 (2007): 286–295.

Solomon, Zahava. Combat Stress Reaction: The Enduring Toll of War. New York: Plenum Press, 1993.

Tatsa Laur, Lucian, Alexander J. Rice, Joscelyn E. Fisher, Mona Al Bizri, James C. West, David M. Benedek, Robert J. Ursano, and Stephen J. Cozza. “Exposure to Death in Large Scale Combat Operations: Leadership’s Role in Addressing Stress, Grief and Moral Injury.” Military Psychology (2026).

Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam is an unusual book to encounter while thinking about wargame design because it is neither a military history nor a book about games. It is a study of combat trauma written by a psychiatrist whose work with American veterans of the Vietnam War led him to compare their experiences with the behaviour of Achilles and other warriors in Homer’s Iliad. Published in 1994, the book became an important contribution to the developing understanding of combat trauma and particularly to what subsequently became known as moral injury.¹ Shay’s influence in this area remains substantial, although later research has broadened and qualified the concept considerably.²

Shay’s central achievement is to move the discussion of combat trauma beyond the simple proposition that soldiers are psychologically damaged because frightening things happen to them. Fear, exhaustion, injury and exposure to death obviously matter, but Shay is equally interested in what happens when the moral framework within which soldiers operate begins to collapse. His Vietnam veterans repeatedly experienced situations in which their expectations concerning leadership, loyalty, justice and acceptable conduct were violated. The resulting damage could involve anger, grief, guilt, distrust and a loss of confidence in institutions and other people. Shay subsequently developed this approach into the concept of moral injury, with particular emphasis upon the consequences of failures by legitimate authority in situations of serious consequence.³

The comparison with the Iliad initially sounds as though it might be little more than an interesting literary device, but it proves to be one of the strongest elements of the book. Achilles is not treated simply as a heroic warrior whose battlefield exploits can be separated from everything around them. Shay instead examines the deterioration of relationships between commander and subordinate, the importance of comradeship, the effects of losing a close companion, the growth of uncontrolled rage and the eventual destruction of normal restraints upon violence. Modern scholarship has continued to recognise the usefulness of Shay’s attempt to use twentieth century combat psychology as a means of reconsidering the behaviour of warriors represented in ancient literature.⁴

This is also where Achilles in Vietnam becomes particularly interesting to the wargame designer. Most rules are very good at modelling weapons and comparatively poor at modelling people. We calculate ranges, rates of fire, armour penetration, movement distances and casualty probabilities with considerable enthusiasm, while morale is frequently reduced to a die roll made after a unit has suffered a predetermined number of casualties. A unit passes and continues fighting, or fails and retreats. Shay suggests that human behaviour in battle is considerably more complicated.

Combat effectiveness depends upon relationships as much as weapons. Soldiers may endure extraordinary danger because they trust those around them, believe that their leaders are competent and regard their actions as having some legitimate purpose. Conversely, combat effectiveness may deteriorate even when casualties remain comparatively light if leadership fails, cohesion collapses or soldiers conclude that the system within which they are operating has ceased to make sense. This distinction is particularly useful for designing morale and command systems because it suggests that morale should not simply be treated as another form of accumulated physical damage.

There is an equally important lesson concerning unit cohesion. Shay places enormous importance upon the small group and the bonds formed between soldiers who depend upon one another for survival. The loss of a close comrade can therefore have consequences considerably greater than the numerical reduction of a unit by one man. For wargame rules this raises an interesting design problem. Ten casualties inflicted individually across ten units need not have the same psychological effect as ten casualties concentrated upon one closely integrated group, while the loss of a commander, respected veteran or other central figure may produce effects entirely disproportionate to the physical loss involved.

The discussion of rage is perhaps even more challenging for conventional game mechanisms. Military rules usually assume that morale deterioration makes soldiers less dangerous because they become reluctant to fight. Shay demonstrates why this assumption is incomplete. Psychological disintegration can sometimes produce withdrawal and paralysis, but under different circumstances it may encourage uncontrolled aggression. A unit suffering severe psychological stress might therefore become temporarily more violent while simultaneously becoming less militarily effective. Such troops might attack recklessly, ignore orders, expose themselves unnecessarily or employ violence that contributes nothing to achieving their tactical objective. That is a far more interesting model than simply applying a negative modifier to a morale test.

Leadership consequently deserves more attention than the traditional command bonus. A commander should not merely provide an additional point on a die roll because leadership influences whether soldiers continue to trust the organisation itself. Poor orders, unnecessary casualties, abandonment and perceived injustice can damage cohesion in ways that cannot be repaired merely by replacing the officer figure. This aspect of Shay’s argument has retained particular importance in later discussions of moral injury, which distinguish between trauma associated primarily with threat and trauma involving moral judgement, responsibility and betrayal.⁵

There are nevertheless significant limitations to the book. Shay is working primarily from clinical experience with American Vietnam veterans and deliberately uses Homer as an interpretive framework. Neither source should automatically be transformed into a universal theory of soldier behaviour. Armies differ enormously according to culture, period, recruitment, training, ideology and expectations of authority. The psychological experiences of an American infantryman in Vietnam cannot simply be projected backwards onto a Roman legionary, Napoleonic grenadier or medieval retainer without considerable qualification. The comparison with Achilles is illuminating precisely because it encourages questions rather than because it proves that combat psychology has remained unchanged for three thousand years.

There is also a danger in taking moral injury too far as an explanatory concept. Subsequent scholarship has developed definitions that extend beyond Shay’s original emphasis upon failures of authority and examine situations in which individuals believe that their own actions have violated deeply held moral standards. Researchers also distinguish moral injury from post traumatic stress disorder rather than regarding the two as interchangeable.⁶ This matters because a wargame designer who turns Shay’s ideas into a universal morale mechanism would be making exactly the mistake that the book should encourage us to avoid. Human responses to combat are conditional rather than mechanical.

For writing wargame rules, therefore, Achilles in Vietnam is most useful as a challenge to assumptions. It encourages the designer to ask whether morale is really being modelled or merely represented by a convenient probability test. It suggests separating fear, cohesion, leadership, exhaustion, grief and aggression rather than hiding all of them inside a single morale value. It also suggests that command failure should have consequences beyond preventing a unit from activating and that the psychological importance of casualties may depend upon who has been lost and under what circumstances.

None of this means that every tabletop game requires a detailed psychological model. Indeed, attempting to represent every element identified by Shay would probably produce an unplayable game. The designer’s task remains one of abstraction. The important lesson is deciding what should be abstracted. If the game is concerned primarily with weapons and manoeuvre, a simple morale system may be entirely adequate. If it claims to represent command friction, unit cohesion or the behaviour of soldiers under sustained combat pressure, however, then Achilles in Vietnam provides a powerful reminder that casualty percentages alone are a very poor substitute for human behaviour.

I found the book particularly valuable for that reason. It does not provide mechanisms that can simply be lifted and inserted into a set of rules, and attempting to do so would misunderstand both Shay and game design. What it provides instead is a different way of thinking about what happens between the neat numerical categories that wargamers naturally create. Soldiers do not merely accumulate casualties until reaching a breaking point. They operate within networks of trust, obligation, friendship, authority and belief, and those relationships can themselves become casualties of battle.

For anyone writing wargame rules, that makes Achilles in Vietnam worth reading well outside its original clinical purpose. It will not tell you whether a morale test should require a seven or an eight, but it may persuade you to ask whether you should be making that particular morale test at all.

Footnotes

1. Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Atheneum, 1994).
2. Victoria Williamson, Sharon A. M. Stevelink, and Neil Greenberg, “Occupational Moral Injury and Mental Health: Systematic Review and Meta Analysis,” British Journal of Psychiatry 212, no. 6 (2018): 339–346; Brett T. Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy,” Clinical Psychology Review 29, no. 8 (2009): 695–706.
3. Jonathan Shay, “Moral Injury,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 31, no. 2 (2014): 182–191.
4. Elizabeth Baynham, “Alexander, Combat Psychology, and Persepolis,” Antichthon 35 (2001): 30–44.
5. Shay, “Moral Injury,” 182–191; Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair,” 695–706.
6. Simon Frankfurt and Patricia Frazier, “A Review of Research on Moral Injury in Combat Veterans,” Military Psychology 28, no. 5 (2016): 318–330.

I seem to have developed a Dark Confederacy problem.

Having finished the posse, including Reverend Malachi Graves, Quantrill, Bloody Bill, the Ragged Veterans, assorted hired guns and the compulsory collection of gentlemen who have failed to notice that they are dead, I looked into the box and discovered that I still have enough figures left to start a small rebellion.

The problem is not insignificant. There is another Necromancer lurking about, along with two Ragged Veterans armed with muskets, several with rifles, two with shotguns, five with pistols and another ten zombies. Apparently, when I decided that I needed a few extras for Dracula’s America, the word few was interpreted rather generously.

There is, however, the beginnings of a sensible solution. I will keep two of the riflemen for whatever terrible idea is beginning to form, while the remaining riflemen can quietly return to the 7th Cavalry box, where they can resume something approaching a respectable military career and, more importantly, stop encouraging me.

That still leaves another Necromancer, two muskets, two rifles, two shotguns, five pistols and ten zombies, which is far too much lead and plastic to put back into storage and pretend that I have somehow demonstrated restraint.

There is really only one logical answer, and that is another Dark Confederacy posse.

After all, it is the Dark Confederacy and this is supposed to be the aftermath of the American Civil War, so surely nobody can object to a little civil war within the Dark Confederacy itself. Reverend Malachi Graves cannot possibly be the only lunatic wandering around the West who believes that the Lost Cause might have gone rather better if somebody had thought to reinforce it with the dead, and somewhere out there another ambitious Necromancer must be reaching exactly the same conclusion.

He already has eleven armed veterans to choose from and ten zombies who are unlikely to complain about the conditions of service, although some of them may have difficulty signing the enlistment papers, particularly those missing fingers, hands or most of their lower jaw. These are merely administrative problems and, given the general standards of the Dark Confederacy, probably not especially serious ones.

The prospect of two Dark Confederacy posses also has considerable appeal, because sooner or later Reverend Malachi Graves and his rival can meet across the tabletop, each convinced that he alone represents the proper future of the Confederacy and each backed by a collection of heavily armed veterans and decomposing supporters. A civil war within the aftermath of the Civil War, fought between rival Necromancers using men who have already died once and therefore really ought to know better, seems entirely appropriate for Dracula’s America.

Best of all, the surplus riflemen can go back into the 7th Cavalry box, while almost everything else finds a home in the new posse, thereby allowing me to claim that this is not another unnecessary miniature project at all, but simply a sensible exercise in stock management.

Waste not, want not, especially when you can raise the dead.

Hopefully some finished tomorrow.

The Dark Confederacy is now essentially complete, but apparently Reverend Malachi Graves has decided that there is no such thing as having too many dubious characters hanging around. The latest additions are three Hired Guns, a Gravedigger, a Stitch Doctor and the gunslinger Eliza Stone. All three fit rather too comfortably alongside Quantrill, Bloody Bill, the Ragged Veterans and the assorted walking dead already serving the cause.

Ephraim Hodge, Gravedigger

Ephraim Hodge spent most of the war digging graves for Confederate soldiers, although exactly how many of his customers were dead before he started digging has always been a matter of some debate. After the surrender he drifted west, following battlefields, epidemics, mining disasters and gunfights with the quiet professionalism of a man who knew that sooner or later everyone required his services. He carries a shovel, a revolver and a tape for measuring bodies, although he rarely bothers with the last of these any more.

Hodge first encountered Reverend Malachi Graves when the Necromancer arrived at a cemetery where Ephraim was working and began undoing several hours of perfectly good burial. Most gravediggers would probably have objected. Ephraim merely negotiated a fee for putting the occupants back afterwards. Since then he has occasionally accompanied Graves and his Dark Confederates, partly for the money and partly because travelling with a Necromancer provides an unusually reliable source of repeat business. His principal complaint is that Graves keeps raising people whom Ephraim has already been paid to bury.

Doctor Thaddeus Vane, Stitch Doctor

Doctor Thaddeus Vane insists that he was once a properly trained surgeon, although nobody has yet discovered where he studied and Vane becomes remarkably vague whenever the subject arises. During the war he served with several Confederate field hospitals, where shortages of medicines, instruments and occasionally qualified medical personnel encouraged a distinctly experimental approach to surgery. Vane discovered that there was very little that could not be repaired with a needle, strong thread, whiskey and sufficient determination.

The end of the war did nothing to improve his methods. Moving west, Vane developed a profitable practice treating gunshot wounds without asking inconvenient questions about how they had been acquired. His patients have included gunfighters, outlaws, deserters and several individuals who were technically dead when they arrived. The last category eventually brought him to the attention of Reverend Graves. The two discovered a considerable professional overlap. Graves provides the supernatural means of getting a corpse moving again while Vane makes certain that all the important pieces remain attached.

Nobody in the posse particularly likes being treated by Doctor Vane. On the other hand, given the alternatives available in the Dark Confederacy, waking up with somebody else’s finger attached is generally considered a successful medical outcome.

Eliza Stone, Gunslinger

Then there is Eliza Stone, a gunslinger who requires considerably less introduction and considerably more caution. She has no particular loyalty to the Confederacy, dead or otherwise. Eliza works for money and has survived this long by understanding that principles are considerably less useful than ammunition when somebody is shooting at you.

Her reputation was made through a succession of gunfights that tended to leave Eliza standing and somebody else requiring the services of Ephraim Hodge. She is quick, thoroughly professional and apparently quite untroubled by the increasingly strange collection of corpses, fanatics and former Confederate killers surrounding Reverend Graves. In the world of Dracula’s America, perhaps that merely demonstrates a healthy ability to adapt.

Graves hired her because she is very good with a gun. Eliza accepted because his money was good and because a Necromancer accompanied by undead Confederate veterans discourages people from attempting to avoid payment. It is a purely professional relationship. At least that is what Eliza says.

So the Dark Confederacy now has its Gravedigger to dispose of the casualties, its Stitch Doctor to put them back together and Reverend Graves to raise them from the dead. Eliza Stone stands nearby with a loaded gun providing fresh material for all three.

It is difficult to imagine a more efficient organisation.

The final two recruits have now shuffled, limped and possibly crawled out of the darker corners of the defeated Confederacy to join Reverend Malachi Graves and his increasingly disreputable collection of lost causes. Both are Ragged Veterans, although neither has much interest in discussing precisely where he served or what he has been doing since the war ended. Given the company they now keep, perhaps it is better not to ask.

Thaddeus “Old Smoke” McCrae – Ragged Veteran with Musket

Thaddeus McCrae was already considered an old man when the war began, although nobody was entirely certain how old. Before the fighting he had worked as a trapper, market hunter and sometime riverboat hand, drifting wherever there was money to be made and preferably somewhere without a sheriff asking inconvenient questions. His ancient musket was already old fashioned when the first Confederate volunteers marched away, but McCrae knew exactly what it could do and saw little reason to replace a weapon that had successfully settled arguments with bears, thieves and several men whose identities he preferred not to remember.

Rather than serving in the ranks, McCrae spent much of the war attached to small detachments as a guide and scout, slipping through country that younger men considered impassable. He developed an uncomfortable reputation for appearing beside campfires without anyone having seen him approach and for knowing what lay beyond the next ridge even when he had supposedly never visited the district before. After the war he disappeared completely. Years later Reverend Malachi Graves encountered him sitting beside a campfire deep in the woods, looking considerably older but otherwise unchanged. Whatever Graves offered was enough. McCrae picked up his musket, stamped out the fire and followed him without another word.

Amos “Two Graves” Treadwell – Ragged Veteran with Pistol

Amos Treadwell began the war in a considerably more respectable occupation, working as an assistant undertaker in a small Missouri town. Unfortunately for Amos, the war produced rather more business than the local undertaker could handle, and he soon became accustomed to burying men from both sides, frequently several at a time and occasionally while the shooting was still going on. Eventually he decided that carrying a pistol and accompanying irregular cavalry offered better prospects than following them around with a shovel.

The origin of the name “Two Graves” remains disputed. Amos claims it comes from his habit of digging an extra grave whenever burying an enemy, reasoning that somebody usually came looking for revenge sooner or later. Others insist the explanation is much stranger, because Amos Treadwell has himself been officially declared dead and buried twice. The first occasion followed a particularly bloody skirmish during the war, while the second occurred several years afterwards when his body was supposedly recovered following an ambush. Amos refuses to explain either incident and becomes distinctly unfriendly when pressed. Reverend Graves apparently knows the truth, which may explain why Treadwell now rides with the Dark Confederacy carrying his pistol with the comfortable familiarity of a man who has spent rather too much time on both sides of the grave.

The whole miserable collection is now assembled, with Reverend Malachi Graves presiding over Quantrill, Bloody Bill, the Ragged Veterans, zombies and the various other dubious characters who have attached themselves to his cause. As a group they look considerably less like a military formation and rather more like the contents of a cemetery that has developed political opinions. They are battered, ragged, heavily armed and, in several cases, technically dead, which makes them just about perfect for Dracula’s America.

And with McCrae and Treadwell finished, is the Dark Confederacy posse is finally complete?

Maybe, maybe not. Graves is apparently of the opinion that no unholy rebellion can ever have too many questionable employees, and several prospective Hired Guns are currently being interviewed. Among those waiting nervously outside his tent are a Gravedigger, a Stitch Doctor and a particularly attractive looking Gunslinger. Quite what constitutes a successful interview with the Reverend is uncertain, although possessing a firearm, having a flexible attitude towards morality and not asking too many questions about the freshly disturbed graves probably helps.

The Gravedigger seems an especially natural fit for the Dark Confederacy, since Graves generates enough work to guarantee permanent employment. The Stitch Doctor may have an even busier future, given the posse’s enthusiasm for settling disagreements at close range, while the Gunslinger brings the useful professional skill of being able to shoot people without first needing a theological justification. Whether any or all of them receive contracts remains to be seen, although I suspect the employment conditions will be poor and the retirement plan considerably worse.

For now, though, the Dark Confederacy is painted, assembled and ready for the tabletop. Reverend Malachi Graves has his congregation, Quantrill and Bloody Bill have their weapons, the Ragged Veterans have somehow survived another war, and the zombies appear blissfully unconcerned about the entire arrangement. It is a thoroughly disreputable collection of traitors, killers, mercenaries and walking corpses.

In other words, recruitment has been a complete success. For the moment.

The Dark Confederacy has never been particularly fussy about the men who answer its call. Courage is useful, loyalty even more so, while a clean conscience is probably a positive disadvantage. Among the latest veterans to drift into the company are three men whose reputations were made during the Civil War, when each performed deeds that earned him the title of hero. Time, defeat and several years spent in the company of things that should have remained buried have done little to improve any of them.

Captain Silas “Long Shot” Mercer — Rifle
Silas Mercer earned his reputation during the last desperate months of the war, when the Confederate cavalry was increasingly expected to accomplish miracles with tired horses, empty stomachs and ammunition that seemed to exist largely in quartermasters’ reports. During a confused Union attack on a supply column, Mercer found himself cut off with half a dozen wounded men and only a handful of soldiers still capable of fighting. Rather than abandon them, he took up position overlooking a narrow bridge and began picking off anyone attempting to cross.

Captain Silas

For nearly an hour Mercer kept the Federals convinced that a much larger Confederate force held the far bank. By the time they finally pushed across, the wounded had been carried clear and Mercer was already disappearing into the woods. By the following morning the story had improved considerably, and within a month Mercer had supposedly held the bridge single handed against an entire Union regiment. Mercer has never made much effort to correct the account.

Defeat did not sit comfortably with him. He returned home to discover the family farm ruined, his brothers dead and the world remarkably uninterested in the sacrifices of Captain Silas Mercer. He became a hunter, occasional gunman and professional teller of increasingly magnificent stories about the war, although enough witnesses survived to confirm that beneath the boasting there really had been a remarkably brave officer and an exceptionally good shot.

When Reverend Malachi Graves began gathering old soldiers to the Dark Confederacy, Mercer joined without hesitation. He still wears the remains of his officer’s coat and carries his rifle with almost religious devotion, claiming that the South has merely been waiting for men with sufficient patience to resume the argument.

Corporal Elijah “Old Smoke” Ransom — Musket
Elijah Ransom never wanted promotion and regarded becoming a corporal as an unfortunate consequence of surviving longer than the men around him. A Tennessee mountain boy, he had grown up hunting with an old musket long before anyone thought to put him into uniform. While other soldiers complained about their weapons, Ransom treated his battered musket like an old friend and claimed that anything worth shooting was worth waiting for.

Elijah Ransom

His reputation was secured during a retreat when he remained behind with a handful of stragglers to cover the withdrawal of his regiment. Ammunition was running short and Federal troops were advancing through thick woodland towards a ford crowded with retreating Confederates. Ransom moved from tree to tree, firing slowly and deliberately, then disappearing into the smoke before reloading and firing again from somewhere else. His companions did the same, creating the impression that an entire Confederate company still occupied the woods.

The deception bought enough time for the regiment to escape. Ransom was the last man across the ford, still carrying the same musket, although the stock had been cracked and the barrel blackened by powder. Someone later suggested he deserved a medal. Ransom replied that he would rather have some dry socks.

After the war he returned to the mountains and became increasingly solitary. Somewhere during those years he began claiming that dead soldiers sometimes followed him through the trees. Nobody paid much attention until he started naming men buried hundreds of miles away and describing conversations known only to their surviving comrades.

Reverend Malachi Graves recognised something useful in Ransom immediately. The old corporal now marches with the Ragged Veterans, still carrying his battered musket and occasionally speaking quietly to companions nobody else can see. When asked how he knows where an enemy is hiding, Ransom merely shrugs and says that somebody usually tells him.

Sergeant Gideon “Gatepost” Harlan — Shotgun
Gideon Harlan became a Confederate hero almost entirely by refusing to move. During a vicious little engagement largely forgotten by everyone except the men unfortunate enough to have participated in it, Harlan and the survivors of his company were ordered to hold a crossroads while the regiment withdrew. Ammunition disappeared rapidly, officers disappeared even faster, and eventually Harlan found himself commanding a handful of frightened men behind a shattered fence.

When the final Federal attack came, Harlan waited until the enemy was almost on top of them before rising with a captured double barrelled shotgun and leading a counterattack that drove them back long enough for his men to escape. Someone later asked why he had stayed when retreat would probably have saved him a great deal of trouble. Harlan answered that nobody had told him he was allowed to leave.

The story followed him for the remainder of the war, earning him the nickname “Gatepost,” because once Gideon Harlan had been planted somewhere it apparently required artillery to shift him. Harlan survived the war, although civilisation proved considerably more dangerous. He worked as a railway guard, deputy sheriff, bounty hunter and occasional hired muscle before discovering that his particular talents were welcomed by the Dark Confederacy. He asks remarkably few questions about Reverend Malachi Graves, the zombies or the other unnatural things accompanying the posse. After four years of war Harlan concluded that officers were capable of ordering almost anything, so a preacher raising dead soldiers merely represents a slight extension of established military practice. He still carries his battered double barrelled shotgun, rarely speaks and remains exactly where he is told until somebody gives him a convincing reason to move.

Together Mercer, Ransom and Harlan represent three different remnants of the old Confederate Army. Mercer remembers its glory rather better than it deserves, Ransom remembers the dead rather better than he would like, and Harlan simply remembers his orders. Alongside Quantrill, Bloody Bill, Reverend Malachi Graves and the other Ragged Veterans, they make the Dark Confederacy look less like a military formation and increasingly like the sort of veterans’ reunion that sensible people would cross several states to avoid.

Well, Victorious is done and dusted for another year, and I have survived with both my wallet and most of my sanity intact, which I regard as a considerable achievement.

The Tiny Dinosaurs finally had their outing. After all the shrinking, repainting, new terrain and general indignity of being reduced from impressive prehistoric monsters to creatures that could probably hide behind a twenty cent piece, they made it onto the table. They behaved themselves reasonably well, attracted plenty of attention and have now been packed away again. Whether they regard this as hibernation, extinction or simply gross mistreatment by their owner remains unclear.

My grandsons came along to help, which was greatly appreciated. Apart from providing some useful extra hands, they also provided the sort of technical and organisational advice that grandchildren seem increasingly required to give their grandparents. I am beginning to suspect that my principal role at conventions is now to provide transport, while younger and more competent members of the family actually know what is going on.

The books and rules sold well, which was very pleasing, and I also managed to dispose of most of the assorted stuff I had taken along for the Bring and Buy. Anyone who has been involved in wargaming for any length of time knows exactly what stuff means. It is the collection of figures, rules, terrain, games and mysterious boxes that we have absolutely no further use for but have somehow been unable to throw away because they might come in handy one day. This time, quite a lot of it went to new homes.

There was, however, an even greater triumph. I only bought one thing.

Yes, one.

I went to a wargames convention, wandered among traders, second hand bargains, figures, terrain, rules and all manner of shiny temptations, and returned home having purchased just one item. There should probably be some sort of medal for this achievement.

Of course, getting rid of most of the Bring and Buy stuff and then buying something else means the collection has not actually become as much smaller as intended, but that is hardly the point. Progress in this hobby is measured in very small increments.

So Victorious is over, the Tiny Dinosaurs are safely back in their box, most of the surplus stuff has departed, the books and rules found new readers, the grandsons were a great help, and I somehow escaped without bringing home another carload of things I did not know I needed until I saw them.

I am calling that a successful weekend.