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.