Abstract

This article examines narrative gaming as an emergent process created through the interaction of game mechanisms, player agency, uncertainty and interpretation. Moving beyond the proposition that character backgrounds and fictional context create player attachment, it argues that narrative can be generated by the game system itself when mechanics produce meaningful decisions, uncertainty creates consequential outcomes and players interpret those outcomes as events within an unfolding story. Narrative gaming is therefore considered as both an art and a science. Its scientific dimension lies in the deliberate construction and testing of probabilities, incentives, constraints and consequences, while its artistic dimension emerges through player interpretation, shared authorship and the accumulation of meaning during play. Particular attention is given to uncertainty, productive failure, demonstrated character, narrative memory and the interpretative responsibilities associated with historical gaming. The article argues that effective narrative design does not require designers to prescribe stories in advance. Instead, designers create conditions within which stories can emerge through interaction between players and systems. The strongest narrative games are consequently those in which mechanisms become sufficiently integrated with the imagined world that players remember decisions, characters and events rather than the numerical processes that produced them.

Keywords: narrative gaming, miniature wargaming, emergent narrative, game design, player agency, uncertainty, historical gaming, procedural narrative

Synopsis

The Art and Science of Narrative Gaming develops an argument begun in earlier discussions of character backstories, player attachment and narrative engagement in miniature gaming. Those discussions established that giving characters identities and histories can encourage players to see miniatures as something more than anonymous playing pieces. This article deliberately moves beyond that argument. Its central proposition is stronger: narrative is generated by the game system itself when mechanics create meaningful decisions, uncertainty produces consequences, and players interpret those consequences as events.

Narrative gaming is consequently examined not simply as gaming to which a story has been added, but as a distinctive form of interactive narrative creation. The designer does not occupy the same position as the author of a conventional story because the designer cannot determine exactly what will happen once play begins. Instead, the designer creates a framework of possibilities, restrictions, incentives and consequences within which players make decisions. The objective is therefore not to write the story beforehand, but to design circumstances capable of producing stories.

This relationship provides the distinction between the art and science identified in the title. The science of narrative gaming lies in constructing and testing the mechanisms that govern play. Probability, movement, combat, morale, resource management, objectives and other mechanisms establish what players can attempt and what consequences may follow. These systems can be analysed mathematically and tested experimentally through repeated play. The artistic dimension begins when those mechanisms acquire meaning within the imagined world of the game. A failed activation is mechanically a result produced by a rules system, but players may remember it as the moment when an exhausted officer hesitated, misunderstood an order or lost his nerve.

Uncertainty occupies a particularly important position within this process because narrative gaming requires outcomes that cannot be known completely beforehand. Randomness alone does not create narrative, since an arbitrary result disconnected from player choice may actually weaken the experience. Uncertainty becomes narratively productive when it follows a meaningful decision. Players choose whether to accept a risk, the game system resolves that uncertainty and the resulting consequences alter the situation they subsequently confront. Narrative therefore develops through a continuing relationship between choice, uncertainty, consequence and interpretation.

Failure becomes equally important because unsuccessful actions can generate rather than terminate stories. A failed charge, broken spell, missed shot or morale collapse forces players to reconsider their intentions and respond to circumstances they did not anticipate. Effective narrative systems therefore allow failure to change the problem confronting the player rather than merely stopping an attempted action. Plans collapse, new decisions become necessary and the resulting chain of consequences creates events that neither designer nor player could have predicted completely.

The article also extends the earlier consideration of character backstories by distinguishing between assigned character and demonstrated character. A biography can establish that a character is brave, cautious, ruthless or loyal, but these remain assigned characteristics until play creates situations in which they can be tested. A supposedly courageous officer who repeatedly retreats may acquire a very different reputation from the one originally intended, while an insignificant figure that repeatedly survives dangerous situations may become one of the most memorable characters in a campaign. Narrative identity consequently accumulates through play rather than remaining fixed by background material.

This process leads to the concept of shared authorship. The designer creates possibilities, the scenario establishes circumstances, players make decisions and the resolution mechanisms introduce consequences that nobody controls completely. Narrative belongs to the interaction between all of them. Miniature gaming makes this process especially visible because the tabletop itself changes as the narrative develops. Figures move, units suffer casualties, buildings become contested, objectives change hands and carefully arranged formations collapse into the physical evidence of everything that has occurred.

Historical gaming adds another dimension because the mechanisms used to create narrative also interpret the past. Rules determine what players can do, what difficulties they encounter and what behaviour the system rewards. Historical rules are therefore not neutral mechanisms. A game concerned with morale presents a different interpretation of battle from one concerned primarily with casualties, while a game representing territory as empty space awaiting occupation communicates something very different from one recognising existing communities and relationships with Country. Narrative design consequently carries an ethical as well as a mechanical responsibility when games represent historical conflict.

The article finally considers narrative gaming as a form of memory creation. Players frequently forget exact modifiers, movement distances and numerical results while continuing to remember the last stand, the disastrous charge, the unexpected survivor or the character who somehow accomplished the impossible. These memories demonstrate the point at which mechanics have been transformed into narrative.

The strongest narrative games are therefore not necessarily those containing the greatest quantity of written fiction, background material or predetermined story. They are those whose mechanisms repeatedly create meaningful situations worth remembering. When players cease discussing the die roll and instead discuss what happened to the character, unit or expedition, the mechanism has fulfilled its narrative purpose.

This argument provides the foundation for a further examination of designing rules specifically for emergent narrative. Having established how narrative arises from the interaction of mechanics, agency, uncertainty and interpretation, the next question is how designers can deliberately construct rules, scenarios and campaign systems that encourage memorable stories while preserving the freedom of players to create outcomes that nobody, including the designer, could have written in advance.

Article

Narrative gaming is sometimes described as though it were simply gaming with a story attached. Under this interpretation, the rules provide the game while background material, character biographies, campaign histories and scenario introductions provide the narrative decoration. Such a distinction is convenient, but it misunderstands what occurs when players interact with a well designed tabletop game. Narrative is not merely something written before play begins, nor is it confined to the account that might subsequently be written about what happened. It can emerge from the interaction between rules, players, probability, physical representation and the imagined world that gives those mechanisms meaning. A successful narrative game therefore occupies an interesting position between art and science. Its designer constructs systems intended to produce particular kinds of situations, but the players transform those systems into experiences whose precise course cannot be predicted in advance.¹

This argument moves beyond the proposition that backstories encourage players to become attached to their miniature characters. Background remains important, particularly because it provides identity, expectation and context, but narrative gaming becomes considerably more interesting when narrative is understood as something generated during play. The central proposition is therefore stronger: narrative is generated by the game system itself when mechanics create meaningful decisions, uncertainty produces consequences, and players interpret those consequences as events. This places the rules at the centre of narrative creation without suggesting that the rules alone constitute the narrative.

The distinction is particularly important for miniature wargaming because the tabletop possesses qualities that can easily be overlooked when games are considered purely as collections of mechanisms. A model is simultaneously a playing piece and a representation. A ruined building is both terrain that restricts movement and an imagined place within which events are occurring. A casualty marker can record a mechanical condition while representing exhaustion, fear, injury or death. Players continually move between these levels of understanding, often without consciously recognising that they are doing so. David Banks has identified representation, consequential human decisions, adjudication, immersion and bespoke design as significant characteristics of wargaming, an approach that emphasises the relationship between the formal structure of a game and the human activity occurring within it.²

The science of narrative gaming lies principally in the construction of the system. The art emerges from what people do within it.

Designing Possibility Rather Than Plot

The distinction between narrative gaming and conventional storytelling begins with authorship. An author normally determines what happens within a written narrative. Characters may appear to make choices, but ultimately those choices remain under authorial control. A game designer occupies a fundamentally different position because control must be surrendered once play begins. Rules establish possibilities and restrictions, but players decide which possibilities they will pursue, while the resolution system and the actions of other participants ensure that the consequences cannot be completely predetermined.

This suggests that the narrative game designer should not attempt to write a story that the players are expected to reproduce. The designer should instead construct circumstances from which stories can emerge. The difference is substantial. A scenario stating that Captain Mercer will defend the bridge until overwhelmed has already decided what Mercer does. A scenario giving Mercer responsibility for holding the bridge while providing compelling reasons why retreat might nevertheless become attractive creates a narrative problem. The first presents a predetermined event. The second creates a decision.

Jeremiah McCall’s concept of the historical problem space provides a particularly useful framework for understanding this distinction. McCall argues that historical games can be examined as systems in which player agents possess roles and objectives within environments whose characteristics enable some actions while restricting others. Players respond to these circumstances by developing strategies and making choices.³ Although McCall developed the framework primarily to analyse historical games, the underlying principle has much wider relevance to tabletop design because it locates meaning in the relationship between agency, objectives, environment and constraint.

The designer consequently creates pressures rather than plots. Scarcity, conflicting objectives, uncertain information, limited time, casualties, terrain and asymmetric capabilities create circumstances requiring decisions. The important consideration is not merely whether these mechanisms generate tactical problems, but whether the decisions they create possess sufficient meaning to become narrative events.

A commander who abandons wounded soldiers to secure an objective has made more than a tactical calculation if the game has given those wounded soldiers significance. A witch who expends her remaining magical power to protect another member of her coven has done something more interesting than spending a resource point if relationships between those characters have previously been established. A cavalry commander who orders one final charge is creating narrative when that decision emerges from circumstances at the table rather than from instructions printed in the scenario.

The important design principle is therefore not that a narrative game requires more written story. It requires more meaningful choice. McCall’s framework is useful precisely because it treats the player as an agent confronting a structured problem rather than as an observer following a predetermined historical narrative.⁴ The same principle can be deliberately employed by designers who want stories to emerge from play.

Rules as a Language

Game mechanisms are frequently discussed in terms of realism, balance, simplicity and playability, yet rules also possess a narrative function because they determine which aspects of an imagined world are important enough to model. A game in which ammunition is unlimited says something different about combat from one in which ammunition must be husbanded. A system in which morale occupies a central position creates a different interpretation of battle from one dominated by casualty removal. Neither approach is automatically superior, but each directs attention towards particular explanations of why events occur.

This is especially significant in historical gaming. Rules cannot reproduce the past in its entirety because every simulation requires selection and abstraction. Philip Sabin has emphasised the value of conflict simulation as a means of exploring historical processes while simultaneously recognising that games depend upon simplified models of complex realities.⁵ The designer therefore decides which relationships deserve representation and which can safely disappear.

The rules are consequently not neutral containers into which historical information is poured. They participate in interpretation.

Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric provides one way of understanding this relationship. His argument, developed principally in relation to digital games, proposes that processes and rule systems can communicate propositions through the relationships they establish between actions and consequences.⁶ Thomas Ambrosio and Jonathan Ross have demonstrated the relevance of this approach to board gaming through their analysis of Labyrinth, showing how the structure of a game can place participants within a particular interpretation of political and military problems rather than merely presenting that interpretation through accompanying text.⁷

Narrative designers should therefore ask what their mechanisms are saying.

If cowardice and courage are mechanically identical, character may remain largely cosmetic. If wounded companions can be abandoned without consequence, loyalty exists principally in the background material. If supernatural corruption supposedly threatens a character but produces neither temptation nor meaningful consequences, corruption becomes atmosphere rather than an active element of play. Rules become narratively powerful when the behaviour encouraged by the system corresponds with the world the game claims to represent.

This does not mean that every narrative concept requires a separate rule. Such an approach would produce cumbersome systems incapable of distinguishing the important from the trivial. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman have argued for understanding games as systems in which meaning emerges from relationships among rules, player actions and outcomes.⁸ The more useful principle for narrative design is therefore selective mechanical emphasis. The designer identifies the pressures central to the intended experience and gives those pressures consequences.

Rules then become a vocabulary through which players create events.

Uncertainty as the Engine of Story

Chance occupies an unusual position within narrative gaming. Traditional narrative conceals much of its uncertainty because the author already knows what will happen, whereas games require uncertainty precisely because players must believe that their decisions matter. Cards, dice and other random mechanisms introduce possibilities that neither designer nor player completely controls.

Greg Costikyan has argued that uncertainty is fundamental to games because it creates the tension between player intention and an outcome that remains unresolved. Importantly, uncertainty need not be confined to random numbers. It may arise from hidden information, another player’s intentions, imperfect knowledge, resource limitations or uncertainty concerning the consequences of a decision.⁹ This broader understanding is especially valuable for narrative gaming because it separates meaningful uncertainty from mere randomness.

Poorly employed randomness can damage narrative because events cease to appear connected to player decisions. Excessive randomness reduces agency until participants become spectators watching a sequence of arbitrary outcomes. Yet the complete removal of uncertainty can be equally damaging because perfect predictability converts potentially dramatic situations into exercises in calculation.

The scientific problem is therefore partly one of probability. Designers determine distributions, modifiers, thresholds and frequencies. They can calculate how often particular outcomes should occur and test whether mechanisms produce results within an acceptable range. Peter Perla’s study of wargaming stresses the importance of the relationship between game design, decision making and the representation of conflict, while Banks similarly argues that consequential player decisions and adjudication are among the distinctive characteristics through which wargames operate.¹⁰

The artistic problem is deciding what those probabilities should feel like.

A ten per cent chance of catastrophe may be mathematically small while remaining psychologically enormous if a valued character is at risk. A fifty per cent chance of success may feel generous when nothing important is being wagered and terrifying when an entire campaign depends upon the result. Probability acquires narrative meaning through context because players assess a numerical possibility in relation to what they believe might be lost.

This explains why memorable gaming stories so often involve unlikely events. Players remember the exhausted survivor who somehow held the doorway, the inexperienced soldier who defeated the enemy champion or the supposedly invulnerable monster destroyed by an improbable sequence of events. These moments are memorable because the players understand that another result was possible.

The unexpected event alone, however, is not the story. The story arises from the relationship between expectation, decision and consequence. The player chose to take the risk, the system established uncertainty, probability produced the result and the players supplied its meaning.

Emergent Narrative and Shared Authorship

Tabletop narrative is unusual because authorship is distributed among several participants and mechanisms. The designer establishes the framework, the scenario establishes immediate circumstances, players contribute decisions, and the resolution system introduces consequences that nobody entirely controls. Narrative therefore emerges from an interaction rather than from a single authorial source.

Anne Marie Hagen’s examination of narrative within matrix gaming demonstrates that narrative can function as an active component of play rather than simply as a retrospective description of what happened. Her analysis shows players using narrative to organise arguments, establish positions and make sense of developing circumstances.¹¹ Narrative in such circumstances is not merely the product left behind by play. It is part of the process through which play proceeds.

Miniature gaming provides an especially visible form of shared authorship because the imagined narrative is continually represented through physical changes on the table. Figures move, formations break apart, buildings burn, characters fall, objectives change hands and reinforcements arrive. What began as a carefully arranged battlefield gradually becomes a physical record of decisions and consequences.

The game table therefore performs two functions simultaneously. It represents the present state of play while preserving traces of the narrative that produced that state.

A unit standing alone on a hill may be tactically significant because it controls an objective, but its narrative significance depends upon how it arrived there. Perhaps three other units were destroyed protecting its advance. Perhaps its commander ignored orders. Perhaps an unexpected card allowed a desperate movement. Perhaps the opponent believed the hill irrelevant until it was too late. None of this meaning resides inherently in the miniature. It has accumulated through play.

This accumulation is one reason campaign gaming can produce particularly powerful narratives. A single scenario begins with characters and units whose significance has largely been assigned by the designer or players beforehand. A campaign allows significance to accumulate through experience. The unit that survived three battles carries those battles into the fourth. The officer who repeatedly failed morale tests develops a reputation that no rulebook needed to prescribe. A minor character who survives improbable dangers can become more important to the players than a supposedly central hero.

Narrative therefore creates its own hierarchy of importance.

The Productive Failure of Plans

Traditional stories frequently depend upon carefully structured causation. Narrative games instead derive much of their appeal from the destruction of carefully structured intentions. Players devise plans because games reward purposeful decision making, yet those plans encounter opposing players, uncertainty and changing circumstances.

Failure is consequently not an interruption of narrative gaming. It can become one of its principal creative mechanisms.

The failed charge, missed shot, broken spell or unexpected rout forces the player to reinterpret the situation. A new decision becomes necessary because the previous decision did not produce its intended result. The resulting sequence creates a chain of causation that neither designer nor player could have written beforehand. Costikyan’s analysis of uncertainty helps explain why this process remains compelling, since the gap between intention and outcome continually generates new problems for players to resolve.¹²

This capacity has important implications for game design. Systems that make failure merely terminal reduce its narrative potential. Systems that allow failure to alter circumstances can generate further play. A failed attempt to cross a river might leave a unit exposed rather than simply preventing movement. A failed magical ritual might attract unwanted attention rather than merely consuming an action. A morale failure might produce retreat, disorder or hesitation rather than simple destruction.

The important distinction is between failure that closes possibilities and failure that changes them. Narrative benefits from the latter because consequences become the starting conditions for subsequent decisions. The player is not simply informed that an action failed, but confronted with a new situation created by that failure.

Failure becomes narratively productive when it changes the question. Instead of asking whether the original plan succeeds, players begin asking what they will do now that it has failed. The story develops through adaptation.

Character Without Biography

Character background can strengthen narrative play, but narrative gaming should not be confused with biography writing. A detailed history does not automatically create a compelling gaming character, while a figure with almost no written background can acquire a remarkably strong identity through play.

The crucial distinction is between assigned character and demonstrated character.

Assigned character exists before the game. The figure is described as brave, treacherous, cautious, loyal or ambitious. Demonstrated character emerges when play provides circumstances in which these qualities can become visible. If a supposedly courageous character is never required to risk anything, courage remains descriptive rather than experiential.

This develops the earlier argument for giving miniature characters backstories without simply repeating it. The purpose of a background is not merely to make players care about a model. Its greater narrative value lies in establishing expectations that play can confirm, complicate or contradict. The background creates a starting identity. The game subjects that identity to experience.

A character described as an experienced gunfighter enters the game carrying expectations of competence. Repeated failure becomes interesting because it conflicts with those expectations. A coward who unexpectedly stands firm becomes memorable for the same reason. Narrative arises in the distance between who the character was believed to be and what happened when the rules exposed that identity to uncertainty.

This distinction is consistent with the broader understanding of games as systems in which meaning is generated through interaction rather than merely supplied in advance. Salen and Zimmerman emphasise that meaningful play depends upon relationships between actions and discernible outcomes.¹³ Applied to character, this means that identity becomes especially powerful when player decisions and game consequences provide evidence of who the character has become.

The miniature becomes a character through accumulated experience.

Narrative Memory

One of the most interesting features of tabletop gaming is the persistence of stories long after the numerical details of a game have been forgotten. Players may forget movement distances, modifiers and even the final score while retaining remarkably clear memories of particular incidents. The last stand remains, the disastrous charge remains and the commander who refused to die remains.

This selective memory should not be regarded merely as an accidental byproduct of gaming. It reveals something important about how players construct meaning from systems. Philip Hammond and Holger Pötzsch’s work on games, militarism and memory demonstrates the broader importance of games as cultural forms through which conflict can be represented, interpreted and remembered.¹⁴ Games do not simply reproduce established memories of warfare because their structures can also participate in constructing and negotiating those memories.

In historical gaming this creates both opportunities and responsibilities because the remembered game may influence how participants subsequently imagine the historical situation upon which it was based. Adam Chapman’s work on historical games similarly argues for taking games seriously as forms capable of representing and producing understandings of history through their distinctive formal properties.¹⁵ The significance of the game therefore extends beyond whether every individual result accurately reproduces a historical occurrence.

Narrative gaming can function as a form of experiential interpretation, although this should never be confused with direct access to historical experience. Moving a miniature battalion across a table does not reveal what it felt like to participate in battle. A player who manages a colonial expedition does not thereby experience colonialism, while commanding troops in a simulation cannot reproduce the fear, physical suffering or moral circumstances experienced by historical participants.

What gaming can provide is an opportunity to encounter structured problems involving constraints, choices and consequences. McCall’s historical problem space is useful here because it focuses attention upon the possibilities available to historical agents and the structures that restrict those possibilities.¹⁶ A carefully designed game can therefore encourage players to ask why particular choices appeared attractive, why alternatives were difficult and why consequences developed as they did.

The challenge is to create empathy without pretending equivalence.

The Ethics of Narrative Design

Narrative power brings responsibility. This becomes particularly important when games address colonial warfare, civil conflict, genocide, slavery, occupation or other forms of historical violence. A mechanism can unintentionally trivialise events if it converts suffering into a convenient source of victory points without considering what that abstraction communicates.

The problem cannot be solved simply by making games sombre. Nor does respect for historical subjects require the removal of play. The issue is whether the game’s mechanisms, scenarios and framing encourage players to understand historical violence as the product of human decisions and structures rather than treating it merely as colourful scenery.

Historical game designers inevitably select perspectives. Every scenario identifies actors, objectives and measures of success. Every rule decides what matters. Chapman has emphasised that historical games should be understood as forms of historical representation possessing their own conventions and capacities rather than judged simply according to their resemblance to written history.¹⁷ McCall similarly argues that historical games model the past through agents, goals, environments and constraints.¹⁸ Together these approaches reinforce the point that the design of a historical game necessarily contains interpretation.

A game about frontier conflict, for example, changes considerably depending upon whether territory is represented as empty space awaiting occupation or as Country already containing communities, resources, relationships, obligations and cultural meaning. A game that rewards the seizure of territory without representing what occupation means for the people already living there has not avoided interpretation. It has simply embedded a particular interpretation within its mechanisms.

Procedural rhetoric is again relevant because the meaning communicated by a game may arise from what players are rewarded for doing rather than from what the designer states in an introduction. Ambrosio and Ross demonstrate how board game systems can structure political interpretations by making particular relationships between action and consequence playable.¹⁹ The same principle applies when dealing with difficult historical subjects.

Narrative design makes assumptions visible because players encounter them through action.

The responsible designer should consequently consider not merely whether a rule produces plausible results, but what interpretation of the subject is produced by the incentives surrounding that rule. Historical plausibility and ethical representation are related but distinct questions.

The Player as Interpreter

Players are not passive recipients of game narratives. They interpret events continuously, often supplying meaning beyond anything explicitly provided by the rules.

A die produces a number. A card produces a result. Neither inherently contains narrative. Players interpret the result within the fictional or historical situation and explain what has occurred. This transformation from mechanical outcome to imagined event is one of the most important processes in narrative gaming because it allows relatively abstract systems to support much richer fictional explanations.

A failed activation might mean hesitation, confusion, misunderstood orders or exhaustion. A successful saving throw might represent armour, luck, poor enemy shooting or extraordinary courage. Rules frequently leave these details unspecified, allowing players to construct explanations consistent with the unfolding situation.

Hagen’s examination of matrix gaming is particularly valuable because it demonstrates that narrative can structure how players make arguments, position actors and understand events during play.²⁰ The significance of narrative therefore extends beyond the account written after the game. Players continually construct small explanations connecting mechanical outcomes to the imagined world.

This relationship explains why identical mechanisms can produce very different experiences among different groups. Rules constrain interpretation but rarely determine it completely. Gaming culture, knowledge of the setting, familiarity with the characters and humour all influence the narrative created around the table. One group may interpret an unlikely survival as heroic endurance, another as extraordinary luck and another as evidence that a particular miniature possesses an almost supernatural refusal to die.

Repeated interpretation can itself become part of the campaign world. Once a character acquires a reputation, subsequent events are interpreted in relation to that reputation. A player may begin taking greater risks with a figure known for improbable survival, thereby creating more opportunities for the reputation to be confirmed or spectacularly destroyed. Narrative thus feeds back into decision making.

The rules provide grammar. The players speak the language.

Testing Narrative

If narrative gaming contains a science, it should be possible to test at least some of its assumptions. Playtesting should therefore examine more than mechanical balance.

Designers commonly record whether scenarios are fair, weapons are correctly costed or particular abilities are excessively powerful. These are legitimate concerns, but narrative playtesting requires additional questions. Did players understand why they were fighting? Did their decisions reflect the pressures the scenario was intended to create? Did supposedly important characters actually matter? Did unexpected outcomes generate new decisions or merely frustration? Did players remember particular events afterwards, and were those events connected to the intended themes?

These questions cannot always be answered numerically, but they can still be investigated systematically. Banks argues that wargaming should not be forced entirely into conventional experimental models because doing so risks removing characteristics that make the method distinctive. Instead, he proposes examining the recurring mechanisms through which wargames may produce useful knowledge, including representation, consequential decisions, adjudication and immersion.²¹ A similar principle can be applied to narrative playtesting. Not everything worth examining must be reduced to a single numerical measurement.

A designer might discover that players consistently ignore an objective described as important in the scenario background because the reward structure makes another course of action more attractive. This is not merely a balance problem. It indicates disagreement between the declared narrative and the procedural narrative generated by the rules.

Similarly, players might repeatedly sacrifice supposedly important characters because replacements are cheap and death carries no lasting consequence. No amount of additional background writing will correct the problem if the mechanics continue to communicate that characters are disposable.

Narrative playtesting should therefore examine the relationship between intention and experience. Designers can observe which decisions provoke discussion, which characters acquire reputations, which events players recount after the game and which mechanisms repeatedly interrupt rather than support immersion. Campaign playtesting is particularly valuable because it reveals whether consequences accumulate meaningfully across games or simply reset between scenarios.

The objective is not to guarantee a particular story. Doing so would defeat the purpose. The objective is to construct fertile conditions from which many plausible stories can emerge.

Where Art Meets Science

The distinction between the art and science of narrative gaming is ultimately useful only if the two are brought together. Probability can be calculated, but tension cannot be reduced entirely to mathematics. Scenario balance can be measured, but memorable drama does not necessarily arise from equal forces. Historical evidence can identify what was possible, but design judgement determines which possibilities should become meaningful choices.

The designer therefore moves repeatedly between analysis and imagination.

The scientific impulse asks whether the mechanism works consistently, whether probabilities produce credible outcomes, whether players possess meaningful choices and whether the game behaves under testing as intended. The artistic impulse asks whether those mechanisms create tension, surprise, identification, humour, tragedy or triumph. Perla’s treatment of wargaming as both an analytical and creative activity and Banks’s more recent investigation of its methodological foundations demonstrate why the attempt to divide wargaming neatly between art and science can be misleading.²² The distinctive qualities of the form often arise precisely because formal systems and human judgement operate together.

Neither is sufficient alone.

A beautifully written setting attached to an incoherent system remains a poor narrative game because the mechanisms continually undermine the fiction. An elegant mathematical system without interpretative depth may function perfectly while producing little that players remember beyond victory and defeat.

The most effective narrative systems make mechanics disappear into meaning. Players cease thinking that a model failed an activation test and begin saying that Sergeant Williams froze when he saw what was coming through the trees. They cease remembering that a particular card generated additional movement and instead remember the night the cavalry arrived just in time.

The mathematics has not disappeared. It has done its job.

Conclusion

Narrative gaming should therefore be understood neither as storytelling added to gaming nor as gaming interrupted by storytelling. It is a distinctive creative process produced by the interaction of designed systems, human decisions, uncertainty, representation and interpretation. Scholarship concerned with historical problem spaces, procedural rhetoric, uncertainty, wargaming methodology and narrative in gaming approaches this relationship from different directions, but collectively demonstrates why games need to be considered as active systems rather than passive containers for stories.²³

Its science lies in constructing probabilities, incentives, constraints and feedback systems capable of producing coherent possibilities. Its art lies in giving those possibilities meaning. Between them stands the player, making decisions whose consequences neither designer nor participant can know completely beforehand.

This is why the finest tabletop narratives are rarely those that designers attempt to write in advance. They are the stories that the design makes possible.

The battlefield prepared on the table before the first turn is therefore not yet a story. Neither are the carefully painted figures standing upon it, however elaborate their histories may be. They represent potential. Narrative begins when someone must choose, when another player responds, when the rules intervene and when events refuse to proceed exactly as anybody intended.

This does not diminish the importance of character background. Instead, it places background within a larger process. A biography establishes who a character is believed to be before play begins. Rules then expose that character to uncertainty, player decisions place the character at risk and consequences provide evidence from which a new identity develops. The backstory provides a beginning rather than a conclusion.

The same process occurs at every level of the game. A nameless hill becomes the place where a regiment made its last stand. An ordinary building becomes the farmhouse that changed hands four times. A minor character becomes the campaign’s unlikely survivor. A failed attack becomes the event from which three later scenarios develop. The physical objects have not changed in themselves, but their meanings have been transformed by accumulated experience.

By the end of the game the table has changed, but something more important has changed with it. Figures that began as miniatures have acquired reputations. Places that began as terrain have acquired histories. Decisions have produced consequences and uncertainty has transformed plans into events.

The game has become something remembered.

That is where the science of game design becomes the art of narrative gaming.

Footnotes

1. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Greg Costikyan, Uncertainty in Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
2. David E. Banks, “The Methodological Machinery of Wargaming: A Path toward Discovering Wargaming’s Epistemological Foundations,” International Studies Review 26, no. 1 (2024): viae002, https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viae002.
3. Jeremiah McCall, “The Historical Problem Space Framework: Games as a Historical Medium,” Game Studies 20, no. 3 (2020).
4. McCall, “Historical Problem Space Framework.”
5. Philip Sabin, Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games (London: Continuum, 2012).
6. Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
7. Thomas Ambrosio and Jonathan Ross, “The War on Terror beyond the Barrel of a Gun: The Procedural Rhetorics of the Boardgame Labyrinth,” Media, War & Conflict 16, no. 4 (2023): 495–515, https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352221108824.
8. Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play.
9. Costikyan, Uncertainty in Games.
10. Peter P. Perla, The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1990); Banks, “Methodological Machinery of Wargaming.”
11. Anne Marie Hagen, “Learning (Better) From Stories: Wargames, Narratives, and Rhetoric in Military Education,” Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies 5, no. 1 (2022): 282–296, https://doi.org/10.31374/sjms.120.
12. Costikyan, Uncertainty in Games.
13. Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play.
14. Philip Hammond and Holger Pötzsch, eds., War Games: Memory, Militarism and the Subject of Play (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).
15. Adam Chapman, Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016).
16. McCall, “Historical Problem Space Framework.”
17. Chapman, Digital Games as History.
18. McCall, “Historical Problem Space Framework.”
19. Ambrosio and Ross, “War on Terror beyond the Barrel of a Gun,” 495–515.
20. Hagen, “Learning (Better) From Stories,” 282–296.
21. Banks, “Methodological Machinery of Wargaming.”
22. Perla, Art of Wargaming; Banks, “Methodological Machinery of Wargaming.”
23. McCall, “Historical Problem Space Framework”; Bogost, Persuasive Games; Costikyan, Uncertainty in Games; Banks, “Methodological Machinery of Wargaming”; Hagen, “Learning (Better) From Stories.”

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After completing the Church of Dagon, the Dark Confederacy and the Crimson Coven of Salem, it seemed only reasonable to recruit another group who might, with considerable generosity, be described as the good guys. The Twilight Order is an ancient brotherhood of monster hunters whose origins reach back to the Crusades and whose long war against Dracula has followed him across the Atlantic and into the American West. There the old traditions of armour, blessed weapons and religious devotion have been forced to accommodate six shooters, rifles and the rather more direct methods of frontier justice.

My posse will eventually number eleven figures (coz that’s what I have), combining the Order’s traditional warriors with ordinary gunfighters and a little supernatural assistance.

The Preacher, Arcanist
The spiritual centre of the posse and the man responsible for confronting threats that cannot simply be dealt with by putting another bullet into them. His faith is genuine, although experience has taught him that prayer works considerably better when accompanied by a loaded firearm.

Two Crusaders with Two Pistols Each
These are the Order adapted to the American frontier, retaining the discipline and purpose of their medieval predecessors while exchanging sword and shield for paired revolvers. Crusaders are among the Order’s specialist monster hunters, protected by armour and carrying weapons prepared for supernatural opponents.

Two Crusaders with Rifles
Where their pistol armed brethren close with the enemy, these two prefer to destroy evil at a respectable distance. Their rifles give the posse some much needed long range firepower while allowing the Crusaders to watch over their less heavily protected companions.

A maximum of two Crusader can be used in a posse, but the four give me the option of upgrading with rifles if I wish.

Two Templars of the Order, Supernatural Hired Guns
The Templars represent the older and considerably less accommodating face of the Twilight Order. Clad and armed in a fashion that would have looked perfectly at home several centuries earlier, they are warriors for whom the arrival of Dracula in America merely means that the battlefield has changed. The published miniature range specifically identifies the Templar as a Twilight Order Hired Gun. Unfortunately I am only allowed to hire one Templar of the order in any posse so one will probably just sit in the box or used as a gunslinger.

Three Gunslingers with Pistols
Not everyone fighting monsters needs centuries of tradition behind them. These three are frontier gunfighters who have attached themselves to the Order for reasons of their own, bringing quick hands, loaded pistols and the useful Western understanding that sometimes the best theological argument is delivered at close range.

The Seraphim
The strangest member of the posse is not really a member at all, but a supernatural ally summoned by an Arcanist when the Order requires rather more substantial assistance. The Seraphim is described as a winged warrior armed with twin blessed silver pistols, essentially bringing divine intervention to the battlefield in the form of an angelic gunslinger. Beyond that, I have found surprisingly little detailed background in the published material, so I will probably develop her character from what we do know rather than inventing anything that contradicts the setting.

That gives me the complete recruitment plan for the Twilight Order, although at present recruitment mostly consists of figures waiting patiently to be cleaned, undercoated and painted. Once they begin emerging from the painting table I will give each of them a name and proper backstory, building the posse in the same way as the Dark Confederacy, Church of Dagon and my other Dracula’s America forces. For now the Order has assembled. They simply need uniforms, weapons, faces and, judging by some of the figures currently staring accusingly at me from the painting queue, a little divine patience.

Something has been found beneath the old mission.

For generations there had been stories about the place, although sensible folk treated them in much the same way as they treated tales of haunted mines, lost Confederate gold and things seen moving beneath the water after dark. The Church of Dagon knew better. Beneath the ruins, half submerged in black water and surrounded by stones carved long before Europeans reached these shores, they found the enormous form of something that should not exist.

The priests recognised their god.

Dagon sleeps, but the Shadow War has weakened whatever power once kept him dormant. The Church has gathered around its master and begun the rites that will awaken him. Another posse has learned what is happening and arrived with the rather sensible intention of making sure that he remains asleep.

THE TABLE

Place Dagon in the centre of the table within a suitable Sleeping Place, perhaps a flooded ruin, ancient shrine, abandoned chapel or stone circle.

Place three Ritual Markers around Dagon, each approximately 6 inches from him and roughly evenly spaced. These might represent altars, standing stones, braziers, sacrificial tables or other suitably unpleasant religious furniture.

The Church of Dagon deploys within 12 inches of Dagon.

The opposing posse deploys within 6 inches of any table edge.

The game lasts six turns.

Dagon remains on the table throughout the game but begins dormant and cannot be attacked.

SCENARIO RULES

Summoning Points

The Church is attempting to accumulate supernatural power over the six turns of the game. This is represented by Summoning Points.

The Church may gain a maximum of one Summoning Point per turn.

Place each Summoning Point beside Dagon so that both players can see the progress of the awakening.

At the beginning of the game, only the Church Arcanist can generate Summoning Points.

The Arcanist

The Arcanist does not require a Ritual Marker to conduct the Awakening Ritual. Dagon himself is the focus of the ceremony.

To attempt to gain a Summoning Point, the Arcanist must be within 6 inches of Dagon.

The Arcanist must use:

Action 1: Concentrate.

Action 2: Cast.

The Awakening Ritual has Difficulty Rating 3.

Make the Casting Test normally, including the +1 modifier gained from Concentrating.

If successful, the Church gains one Summoning Point.

If unsuccessful, nothing is gained that turn. The ritual continues and another attempt may be made during a subsequent turn.

Only one Summoning Point may be gained during each turn.

The Emissary of Dagon

While the Arcanist remains in play, only the Arcanist may attempt the Awakening Ritual.

If the Arcanist is taken Out of Action and the Emissary of Dagon remains alive, the Emissary may continue the ritual.

Like the Arcanist, the Emissary does not require a Ritual Marker and need only be within 6 inches of Dagon.

The Emissary follows the same procedure:

Action 1: Concentrate.

Action 2: Cast.

The Awakening Ritual remains Difficulty Rating 3, with the normal +1 modifier for Concentrating.

A successful Casting Test generates one Summoning Point.

The Blood of the Faithful

If both the Arcanist and the Emissary of Dagon have been taken Out of Action, the Church can no longer generate Summoning Points through sorcery.

Any remaining Church model may instead voluntarily sacrifice itself at a surviving Ritual Marker.

The model must begin its activation in contact with the Ritual Marker and use Action 1 to make the sacrifice.

Remove the model from play immediately and add one Summoning Point.

No Casting Test is required.

Only one sacrifice may generate a Summoning Point each turn, and the normal maximum of one Summoning Point per turn still applies.

Ritual Markers

Ritual Markers are not required by either the Arcanist or Emissary. Their primary purpose is to provide sacrificial sites should both ritual leaders be killed.

An enemy model in contact with a Ritual Marker may use an Action to attempt to destroy or desecrate it. Make a Difficulty Rating 3 Fight Test.

If successful, remove the Ritual Marker.

A destroyed Ritual Marker cannot be restored.

The markers may be attacked from the beginning of the game, even though their real importance may not become apparent until much later.

If all three Ritual Markers are destroyed and both the Arcanist and Emissary are Out of Action, no further Summoning Points can be generated.

Dagon Stirs

1 Summoning Point: The water surrounding Dagon begins to ripple.

2 Summoning Points: Dagon moves. Every model within 6 inches must make a Courage Test.

3 Summoning Points: The ground trembles. The area within 6 inches of Dagon counts as Difficult Ground for the remainder of the game.

4 Summoning Points: Dagon begins to breathe. Every model within 8 inches must make a Courage Test. Church models receive +1 to this test.

5 Summoning Points: Dagon opens his eyes. Every non Church model with line of sight to Dagon must immediately make a Courage Test.

6 Summoning Points: Dagon begins to rise.

Dagon Cannot Be Attacked

Dagon has no game profile and cannot be targeted by shooting, close combat or Arcane Powers.

The battle is about preventing his awakening, not fighting him after it happens.

THE FINAL AWAKENING TEST

At the end of Turn Six, calculate the Church’s Awakening Number.

Begin with the number of Summoning Points accumulated during the game and apply the following bonuses:

+1 if all three Ritual Markers remain intact.

+1 if both the Arcanist and Emissary of Dagon are still alive.

Then roll 1D10.

If the result is equal to or less than the final Awakening Number, Dagon awakens.

If the result is greater than the Awakening Number, Dagon remains asleep.

Example

The Church has accumulated 4 Summoning Points.

All three Ritual Markers remain intact, giving +1.

Both the Arcanist and Emissary are still alive, giving another +1.

The Church therefore has an Awakening Number of:

4 + 1 + 1 = 6

Dagon awakens on a D10 result of 1 to 6.

If one Ritual Marker had been destroyed, the first bonus would be lost and Dagon would awaken only on 1 to 5.

If the Arcanist had also been killed, neither condition would be satisfied and Dagon would awaken only on 1 to 4.

The maximum Awakening Number is therefore 8, giving the Church an 80 percent chance of success if it gains all six Summoning Points, keeps every Ritual Marker intact and somehow manages to keep both ritual leaders alive.

VICTORY

If the Final Awakening Test succeeds, Dagon awakens and the Church of Dagon wins.

If the Final Awakening Test fails, the opposing posse wins.

This makes every part of the battlefield important. The attackers can reduce Dagon’s chances by disrupting the ritual, destroying even a single Ritual Marker, killing either ritual leader, or forcing the Church into increasingly desperate blood sacrifices.

The Church, meanwhile, cannot simply concentrate on accumulating Summoning Points. Keeping its three Ritual Markers intact and protecting both the Arcanist and Emissary can provide another two points towards the final Awakening Number.

By Turn Six, every casualty, every destroyed altar and every successful ritual has contributed to the final moment.

Then someone rolls the D10.

And everyone discovers whether Dagon wakes.

Thanks to ChatGPT for assistance with the illustrations.

There are many histories of Nazi Germany written with the considerable advantage of hindsight. We know where events were heading, we recognise the significance of developments that contemporaries could easily dismiss, and we inevitably read accounts of the 1930s with Auschwitz, the Second World War and the destruction of much of Europe already in our minds. Elizabeth Marshall’s An Accidental Brush with History is interesting precisely because it approaches the period from the opposite direction. Marshall was a young Australian woman living in Germany before the war, recording a society whose future had not yet been written.

The book draws heavily upon Marshall’s contemporary letters and diaries from her time in Germany. She had travelled to Europe in the 1930s and lived in Germany while learning the language. These circumstances placed her in the unusual position of being both participant and outsider. She was living within German society sufficiently closely to observe ordinary life, yet she retained the perspective of someone who had grown up elsewhere and could therefore notice things that might have appeared unremarkable to those around her.

This is the great strength of the book. Marshall was not a diplomat, journalist, intelligence officer or political activist sent to Germany specifically to analyse Hitler and National Socialism. She was a young woman getting on with her life who happened to find herself watching one of the most consequential political transformations of the twentieth century. The result is history viewed from street level rather than from the cabinet room.

That distinction matters. Histories of Nazi Germany understandably concentrate upon Hitler, the Nazi Party, rearmament, antisemitism, foreign policy and the machinery of dictatorship. Marshall’s perspective reminds us that enormous political changes are experienced by most people in much smaller increments. The transformation of Germany did not arrive every morning announcing itself as another stage on the road to catastrophe. Political symbolism became more prominent, attitudes changed, restrictions accumulated and behaviours that might once have seemed extraordinary increasingly became part of everyday life.

For me, this gradual process is the most interesting aspect of the book. We are accustomed to looking backwards and identifying turning points, but people living through events rarely possess that luxury. They encounter individual incidents without knowing which will eventually prove important. Marshall’s contemporary observations consequently possess an immediacy that a retrospective memoir written entirely from memory could never quite reproduce.

The letters and diaries are also valuable because they preserve uncertainty. That can occasionally make them frustrating historical documents, since Marshall naturally did not understand everything she witnessed, but that is precisely what makes them useful. Historical actors do not possess footnotes explaining what will happen next. Rumour, incomplete information, personal impressions and misunderstanding are part of lived history. Marshall allows us to see something of that uncertainty rather than imposing too neat an interpretation upon it.

There are limitations. This is not, and should not be approached as, a comprehensive history of the rise of Nazi Germany. Marshall could only describe the Germany she personally encountered, and her social circumstances inevitably shaped what she saw. Her observations cannot tell us what every German thought about Hitler, nor can individual experiences provide a substitute for the enormous scholarly literature examining the political, economic and racial foundations of National Socialism.

There is also an unavoidable tension when contemporary documents are subsequently assembled into a published narrative. The author knows how the story ends even though the younger woman writing the original letters did not. Readers know even more. A comment that may have appeared relatively insignificant when first written can acquire an ominous quality because we recognise what followed. That hindsight cannot be eliminated completely, and readers need to distinguish between Marshall’s contemporary observations and the significance we subsequently attach to them.

Yet this limitation actually points towards one of the book’s greatest values. An Accidental Brush with History demonstrates how difficult it is to recognise historical turning points while standing in the middle of them. Dictatorships are much easier to identify retrospectively than they are while institutions, social expectations and accepted standards of behaviour are being progressively altered.

Marshall’s later service in the Women’s Royal Naval Service adds another dimension to the story. The young Australian who had travelled to Germany to learn its language eventually found herself serving during the war produced by the political transformation she had witnessed. The contrast gives the memoir an unusual completeness without turning it into a conventional military autobiography.

The title is therefore particularly appropriate. Marshall did have an accidental brush with history, although perhaps something rather more substantial than a brush. She found herself close enough to extraordinary events to record them while still remaining an ordinary observer. That combination makes the book worthwhile.

I found An Accidental Brush with History most rewarding when read not simply as another book about Hitler or Nazi Germany, but as a study of how people experience historical change. Its importance lies in the small observations, the uncertainty and the accumulation of incidents whose eventual significance was far clearer to later generations than it could possibly have been to the young woman recording them.

For the military historian, there are books that provide considerably more detail about German rearmament, strategy and the road to war. For the political historian, there are more analytical studies of National Socialism. Marshall offers something different and, in some respects, more intimate: the opportunity to watch history developing before the observer knew what sort of history she was witnessing.

That makes this a modest but valuable memoir. It is also a useful reminder that the people who witness great historical events rarely recognise them as neat chapters in a history book. They simply wake up each morning and discover that the world around them has changed a little more.

Recommended, particularly for readers interested in interwar Germany, eyewitness accounts, social history and the experience of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary political change.

There was always going to be something missing from my Church of Dagon posse. I could have the priests, the faithful, the Deep Ones and all the other unpleasant things that crawl out of the dark places, but sooner or later somebody was going to ask the obvious question. Where is Dagon?

The answer is now standing on the gaming table.

For the “Big Guy” I have used the Giant Mutant from the Mantic Haunted House boxed set, a suitably enormous and thoroughly unpleasant miniature that, with the right treatment, makes a very convincing Dagon look alike. He towers over the rest of the posse, which is exactly what I wanted. This is not supposed to be another hired gun who wanders into the saloon looking for work. This is something ancient, monstrous and decidedly beyond the normal scale of Dracula’s America.

The Thing Beneath the Water

The Church teaches that Dagon was old when mankind first learned to fear the darkness beyond the firelight. He slept beneath black waters while nations rose and disappeared, hearing the prayers of those who understood that the sea does not belong to humanity and never has. Most dismissed such stories as the ravings of isolated fishing communities, although those who investigated too closely had an unfortunate habit of disappearing.

Then came the Shadow War.

As supernatural forces spread across America, the barriers separating the ordinary world from older and considerably less pleasant places began to weaken. The priests of Dagon recognised their opportunity. Their rituals became more ambitious, their sacrifices greater and their congregations increasingly convinced that they were not merely worshipping an absent god. Something was listening.

Eventually, something answered.

Whether the creature discovered and worshipped by the Church really is Dagon is another question entirely. Perhaps it is the Old One himself, somehow trapped in a dormant state within the mortal world. Perhaps it is an avatar, a lesser servant wearing a shape that the human mind can comprehend, or simply some enormous Deep One elevated by generations of worship into something approaching divinity. The priests have no doubts.

They call him Father Dagon.

Everyone else calls him something considerably less polite while running in the opposite direction.

Putting Dagon on the Table

There are no official rules for fielding Dagon in Dracula’s America, and I actually think that is a good thing. Giving him a normal profile, a points value and the possibility of being shot dead by an enthusiastic cowboy with a six shooter rather misses the point. Dagon should not simply become another large model in the posse. He should be an event.

Rather than having Dagon suddenly appear when a ritual succeeds, I prefer the idea of making the model the physical centrepiece of the table from the beginning. Dagon is already there, dormant and unmoving, perhaps standing within a flooded cavern, an abandoned chapel, a ruined mission or some ancient ritual site that the Church has discovered and claimed as its own. The great creature does nothing at first, but its presence dominates the battlefield and makes it perfectly clear what the Church is trying to achieve.

The scenario therefore becomes a race to awaken Dagon. The Church must reach the ritual site, protect its priests and complete whatever ceremonies are required to stir the sleeping Old One, while the opposing posse must break through the congregation and stop them. Dagon remains on the table throughout the game, looming over proceedings as a rather substantial reminder of what will happen if the defenders fail.

I think this works particularly well for Dracula’s America because the actual fighting can still use the normal rules. There is no need to invent an enormous collection of statistics for Dagon because, while he sleeps, he does not need any. He is effectively terrain, an objective and a very large threat all rolled into one.

The Church might need to accumulate a number of successful ritual actions, hold several sacred locations around Dagon, or keep its preacher alive and within the ritual area for a set number of turns. Their opponents know exactly what is happening and exactly how long they have to stop it. As the ritual progresses there could even be signs that something is changing. Dagon begins to stir, the ground trembles, strange noises come from the water and everyone sensible starts wondering whether whatever they are being paid is really worth it.

If the opposing posse disrupts the ritual before it is completed, Dagon remains dormant and the Church has failed. If the Church completes the ritual, Dagon awakens and the game is over. There is no final battle against him and no opportunity for somebody to produce a lucky shot and kill an ancient horror with a revolver. The Church has achieved its objective, the Old One has awakened and anybody still hanging around to see what happens next has seriously misunderstood the situation.

Most importantly, I would never include Dagon as a permanent member of the Church posse. His appearance should be rare enough that seeing the model standing in the middle of the table immediately tells everyone that this particular game is going to be something different.

The Giant Mutant gives me exactly the imposing model I wanted for the role. He may never receive an official Dracula’s America profile and he certainly will not be turning up every week alongside the Church gunslingers, but that really does not matter.

After all, if you are going to build a Church of Dagon, sooner or later you have to wake the Big Guy up.

In a few days I will post “An Awakening of Dagon” scenario in the Dracula’s America scenario style for you to use.

Last night I managed to get another game of Trench Crawl onto the table, this time against JT. As this was one of those occasions when the designer actually has to play his own rules rather than merely explain why they should work, I approached the evening with considerable confidence. This confidence lasted approximately as long as it took us to draw the first few cards.

The first game could hardly have produced two more different trench systems. JT’s trench set off across the table towards victory with all the determination of a Roman road builder who had been told there was overtime available if he reached the other side before lunch. Mine, meanwhile, meandered across the battlefield like a drunken surveyor looking for the pub he had just left. Every new section seemed determined to take me anywhere except towards the objective, until eventually the Exploration Deck put me out of my misery and presented me with a dead end.Doh!

JT therefore took the first game, and we reset everything for another attempt. The second game began in much the same fashion, with JT once again heading confidently towards the far side of the table while I began another scenic tour of the Italian defensive system. This time, however, the cards decided that JT had enjoyed quite enough success for one evening. After a promising start his trench suddenly terminated in a dead end. There was some satisfaction in this development, although not quite as much as I would have liked because he was still considerably further across the table than I was.

That meant I had to keep going.

Disaster nearly struck when my wandering trench began heading directly towards JT’s abandoned one. Apparently there are few things more embarrassing in trench warfare than spending half the battle crawling through enemy trenches in the wrong direction and then discovering somebody else’s trench occupying the space where you intended to go. For a while it looked as though I might manage the remarkable achievement of blocking my own advance with my opponent’s failed advance.

Fortunately, another turn appeared before the whole thing became a magnificent monument to poor military engineering. My trench swung around and finally began heading in the correct direction. Victory was suddenly possible, although the Italians had clearly decided that if they could not stop me getting there, they could at least make certain that very few Australians arrived to enjoy it.

By the time my battered section finally made its way through the position, I had only about half the troops I had started with. The enemy had proved considerably more resistant than I would have preferred, and the gradual loss of manpower and firepower certainly made those final trench sections rather more uncomfortable than the early ones. Still, a victory is a victory, particularly when the alternative is explaining how you managed to get lost in a trench system game that you designed yourself.

So we finished the evening one game each, which seemed a suitably respectable result for both of us.

There was, however, one important piece of playtesting feedback on which JT and I were in complete agreement. Our old and tired eyes are apparently no longer compatible with the original Quick Reference Sheet. The rules were fine. Reading the bloody thing was becoming the real test of morale. I have therefore given the QRS a bit of attention, changing the layout and increasing the font size so that consulting the rules no longer requires binoculars, a magnifying glass and the eyesight of a twenty year old.

I have added the revised two page A4 QRS to the blog for anyone interested in downloading it. It may not prevent your trench from wandering aimlessly across the battlefield, colliding with your opponent’s trench or ending abruptly in the middle of nowhere, but at least you will now be able to read the QRS explaining exactly how badly things have gone.

The bell began ringing three nights after Saint Jude’s Church burned to the ground, although there was very little left of the building capable of producing any sound at all. The roof had collapsed during the fire, the eastern wall had followed before dawn, and the timber tower had fallen across the cemetery, splintering among the graves of those who had built Blackwater Creek and those who had died believing that the town, and the order upon which it rested, would endure long after them. The bell itself had disappeared. Men searched for it among the ashes, beneath the blackened timbers and eventually in the shallow creek behind the churchyard, but they found neither bronze nor iron, nor any fragment that might explain where it had gone.

Nevertheless, shortly after midnight on the third night, the bell rang once.

On the following night it rang twice, and on the night after that three times, until the people of Blackwater Creek began closing their shutters before sunset and pretending not to notice that every sound seemed louder once darkness settled over the town. The first person to disappear was Jeremiah Crowley, an elderly shopkeeper whose family name appeared on half the oldest deeds in the district. His boots were discovered beside his mother’s grave the following morning. Anna Finch disappeared the next night after telling a neighbour that she had dreamed of her grandmother standing beside the creek, while Robert Mills, Samuel Deacon and Martha Pike followed over the next several evenings. Billy Carter, who was seventeen and possessed the particular confidence of young men who have not yet encountered anything stronger than themselves, announced that he intended to spend the night in the cemetery and discover what was happening. His rifle was found leaning against the wall at sunrise.

Billy was not.

By then Sheriff Nathan Cole had abandoned the comfortable explanation that nervous townspeople were frightening one another and had sent messages in several directions asking for assistance. One of those messages eventually reached people who understood that there were things in the world older than law, older than churches and considerably older than the men who believed themselves qualified to explain both.

Five days later the Crimson Coven of Salem arrived at Blackwater Creek.

Prudence Blackwood sat at the rear of the wagon and studied the settlement as it appeared beyond the last low rise. She was the eldest of the three witches, although nobody who knew her particularly well would have considered asking how much older, and she had spent enough years confronting the Arcane to recognise places in which the ordinary world had begun to fray. Blackwater Creek announced itself quietly. There were no spectral figures beside the road and no unnatural lights among the trees, but every dog in the settlement had turned toward the ruined church and remained there in complete silence.

Beside Prudence sat Rebecca Crowe, whose knowledge of healing extended well beyond the setting of broken bones or the closing of wounds. She had learned long ago that the most persistent injuries were frequently those that respectable people refused to acknowledge, particularly when acknowledging them would require admitting that a household, a church, a community or an entire social order might itself be the source of the harm. Rebecca watched the townspeople rather than the ruins and saw fear everywhere, in the movement of curtains behind windows, in the speed with which doors were closed and in the way women lowered their voices whenever a husband, father or employer approached.

Abigail Hawthorne sat opposite them with her doll Patience resting against the folds of her crimson dress. She was the youngest member of the Coven and looked sufficiently harmless for most strangers to underestimate her, which Prudence had always considered one of Abigail’s greatest advantages. People often found it difficult to imagine power when it appeared in the form of a young woman, and they found it harder still when that power carried a doll rather than a gun.

Patience had therefore proved educational.

Elias Ward rode beside the wagon. Men bearing his family name had once stood among those who condemned women in Salem, and although Elias had never accepted the idea that guilt passed automatically from one generation to another, he had come to believe strongly that inherited advantage created obligations of its own. He could not undo what his ancestors had supported, nor could he turn their victims into symbols that absolved him merely because he now regretted their fate. He could, however, decide what he would do when women were threatened in his own time.

The remaining four riders had become part of the Coven’s wider company through experience rather than doctrine. Jonas Cade carried a revolver and possessed the calm confidence of a man who had learned that strength did not require him to occupy every room in which he stood. Clara Bell carried the same weapon but had begun to discover something less easily defined within herself, an instinct that sometimes warned her before the witches spoke and occasionally allowed her to sense the movement of Arcane power before anyone else. Amos Callahan carried a shotgun, while Lucas McCain rode with a rifle and the practical understanding that supernatural evil, however complicated its origins, occasionally presented a perfectly ordinary target.

Sheriff Cole met them outside the Blackwater Hotel and explained the disappearances, the bell and the fire that had destroyed Saint Jude’s. Prudence listened without interruption until he mentioned Reverend Wallace, the church minister who had vanished the night before the fire. During the week preceding his disappearance Wallace had excavated beneath the eastern foundation, claiming that he had found evidence of an earlier structure. He had refused assistance, cancelled evening services and eventually locked the church, although several women of the congregation later told Rebecca that the Reverend had become increasingly agitated whenever they asked what he had discovered.

That detail interested Prudence because it reflected a pattern she had encountered elsewhere. Men who claimed authority over mysteries were frequently less troubled by ignorance than by the possibility that somebody else might understand more than they did.

The Coven went directly to the ruins, where Saint Jude’s proved to have been a modest frontier church erected upon foundations that were neither modest nor Christian. Beneath the burned timbers lay enormous blocks of dark stone, several bearing shallow markings almost concealed beneath mortar. Abigail uncovered the first complete symbol, three interlocking circles surrounding a vertical line, and Prudence recognised enough of its structure to understand that it was neither ornament nor prayer. The church had not been built upon an ancient sanctuary but upon an ancient barrier, and the generations who worshipped above it had eventually forgotten that something beneath them had once been deliberately restrained.

The discovery seemed uncomfortably appropriate to Rebecca, who had spent years observing communities maintain customs long after forgetting why they existed. Rules survived their reasons, authority survived those who first claimed it, and restrictions imposed upon one generation could become traditions defended by the next. Eventually nobody remembered who had built the walls.

They simply remembered that the walls must remain.

The cemetery provided another clue. Every missing person had a close female relative buried within Saint Jude’s grounds, and each corresponding grave had recently been disturbed. Jeremiah Crowley’s mother lay close to the western fence, Anna Finch’s grandmother beside the church, while similar connections linked the remaining disappearances to women buried throughout the cemetery. The records revealed another pattern. Many of those women had died young, several in childbirth, one in an asylum and two after being described in church records as difficult, disobedient or afflicted by moral weakness.

Prudence read those entries twice.

The language was familiar.

Every century invented its own polite vocabulary for women who refused to behave as expected.

When Abigail approached the creek near sunset, she saw Martha Pike standing among the reeds on the opposite bank. Martha had disappeared the previous night, yet she now stood in a soaked nightdress with water dripping from her sleeves although the evening remained dry. Sheriff Cole recognised her immediately, but Prudence noticed something else. Martha was not looking toward the ruined church.

She was looking toward Abigail.

The bell sounded beneath the earth, and Martha raised one hand before stepping backwards into the reeds and disappearing. Lucas crossed the creek and searched the bank, but no tracks continued beyond the water.

That night the Coven examined Reverend Wallace’s papers and discovered the extent of his excavation. He had found references to what he called the Women’s Bell, an object buried beneath Saint Jude’s by an earlier community and subsequently surrounded by several layers of protective stonework. Wallace assumed that the people who concealed it had feared witchcraft and therefore concluded that the bell itself represented a source of forbidden female power which Christian authority had rightly suppressed.

Prudence reached a different conclusion.

The old records had been written almost entirely by men describing women whose testimony had never been preserved.

The distinction mattered.

Among Wallace’s notes were references to three women brought to Blackwater Creek generations earlier after being accused of practising forbidden rites. The minister who recorded their arrival described them as unruly, influential among other women and resistant to correction. Their names had been removed from later copies of the parish history, although Wallace had recovered fragments suggesting that the women had not created the thing beneath the church.

They had imprisoned it.

The bell had once been part of that binding.

Somewhere along the way the story had been reversed, and the women who protected the settlement had become witches whose power needed to be contained, while the prison they constructed became evidence of the danger they supposedly represented.

Rebecca found the inversion entirely believable. History, she observed, was remarkably accommodating when written by those who benefited from forgetting certain details.

The disappearances now made greater sense. Whatever had been released beneath Saint Jude’s was reaching Blackwater Creek through the women whose lives had been reduced to brief entries in church registers, using descendants who carried their memory whether those descendants understood it or not. The old injustice had not itself created the entity, but generations of silence had weakened the barrier around it because the original binding depended upon remembering who had built it.

The town had forgotten the women.

The thing beneath the church had not.

Before dawn Prudence determined how the ward might be restored. Three points had once surrounded the chamber, representing knowledge, care and will, although later church builders had obscured them beneath symbols of obedience, repentance and submission. Wallace had destroyed the eastern ward while attempting to uncover the supposedly dangerous power beneath it, and in doing so had opened a pathway that the imprisoned presence could exploit.

Restoring the barrier would therefore require more than repairing stone. The original act had to be remembered correctly.

Prudence would renew the ward of will, Rebecca the ward of care and Abigail the ward of knowledge, although Abigail’s role puzzled Sheriff Cole when he learned of it. He had expected the eldest woman to represent knowledge and the youngest merely to assist, an assumption Prudence corrected without ceremony. Age might accumulate knowledge, she explained, but every generation also discovered things that the previous one had been unable or unwilling to see.

The witches returned to Saint Jude’s shortly before sunrise and found every grave standing open.

Figures waited between the stones, but unlike the dead they had encountered elsewhere, these did not immediately attack. Men and women from several generations stood silently among the graves, their clothing reduced to rotting remnants and their faces carrying no obvious hostility. At the centre of the cemetery stood Billy Carter, still alive but motionless, while several dead women surrounded him.

Elias initially assumed that they threatened the boy, although Rebecca recognised the truth first. They were preventing him from entering the church.

The dead were not the enemy.

The bell rang seven times, and a section of ground beneath the eastern wall collapsed to reveal a stair descending into darkness. At the sound, several male corpses turned violently upon the others, while those nearest Billy tightened their circle around him. The cemetery erupted into movement as generations of the dead appeared to divide according to some allegiance formed long before any of the living understood the conflict.

Lucas, Amos, Jonas and Clara responded cautiously, firing only when the hostile dead approached, while Elias reached Billy and dragged him clear. Rebecca placed a hand against the boy’s forehead and discovered an Arcane connection running from him toward the stair, although the force drawing him below was not connected to his own desires. It felt instead like expectation, command and obligation made tangible, the accumulated weight of being told what one must become because others had decided it before one was born.

Rebecca broke the connection through Faith Healing, and Billy collapsed as though a physical burden had been removed from him.

The bell rang again.

Prudence led the others underground.

The passage beneath Saint Jude’s carried symbols from several periods because every generation had altered the story while preserving enough of the structure to keep the danger contained. Early marks recognised three women as guardians, later inscriptions transformed them into penitents, and still later Christian carvings depicted male saints standing triumphantly above female figures whose names had been removed altogether. By the time Saint Jude’s was built, the protective ritual remained but its meaning had been inverted so completely that the congregation prayed each year for protection from the very women whose work continued protecting them.

At the bottom lay a circular chamber containing the bell.

Reverend Wallace stood beneath it with his hands fused to the black metal. Behind him waited the missing townspeople, while beneath the dark water something moved with a shape that changed according to whoever looked upon it.

Prudence saw a judge.

Rebecca saw a husband standing over a frightened wife.

Abigail saw a schoolmaster telling a girl that certain books were not intended for her.

Clara saw nothing clearly at first, which frightened her more than any monster might have done, until she realised that what she perceived was a crowd of ordinary faces turning away whenever something unjust occurred.

Elias saw his ancestors.

Only then did Prudence understand the nature of the prisoner. It was not a man, a spirit or even a creature in the ordinary Arcane sense, but something formed and strengthened by the repeated surrender of one person’s will to another’s authority. It had worn many forms across centuries because domination rarely described itself honestly. Sometimes it called itself law, sometimes protection, sometimes tradition, sometimes nature and sometimes simple common sense.

It survived because people learned to mistake familiarity for inevitability.

Wallace had believed he was releasing ancient female power from beneath the church. In reality he had freed the thing the women had imprisoned.

Prudence began the Blessing, although the creature immediately turned the history of Salem against her, filling the chamber with images of accused women, gallows and crowds demanding punishment. It offered a simple interpretation in which men were always oppressors and women always victims, because replacing one absolute hierarchy with another would still leave the creature nourished by division and control.

Prudence refused that temptation as readily as she rejected the older lie. The past could not be repaired by pretending complexity had never existed, and liberation built upon the silencing of somebody else would merely reproduce the structure it claimed to destroy.

Rebecca moved among the captives, using Faith Healing to separate them from the expectations and inherited fears through which the creature controlled them. Each person responded differently because liberation could not simply be imposed from outside. Rebecca could weaken the bonds and offer strength, but the final movement had to belong to those she helped.

One by one, they chose to step away from the bell.

Abigail placed Patience beside the damaged ward and began her Summoning, not calling a monster or spirit but reaching backward for the memory of the three women whose names had been erased from Blackwater Creek. Their forms gradually appeared around her, indistinct at first and then increasingly clear, although Abigail understood that she was not literally restoring the dead. She was restoring their place within the story.

The forgotten women had names.

Sarah Vale.

Mercy Bell.

Anne Hawthorne.

Abigail stopped when she read the third name within the restored markings and understood why women of her own family had carried fragments of the old knowledge without knowing where it began.

Patience raised one cloth hand toward the bell.

Around Abigail the three summoned figures completed the broken circle.

The presence beneath the water surged upward, and Elias found himself confronted by the image of his own ancestry offering him a simpler path. He could seize control, protect the women by ordering them away and thereby transform himself into the heroic man who saved them. The temptation was powerful precisely because it disguised authority as virtue.

Instead he remained where Prudence had asked him to stand and guarded the stair.

His task was not to lead the Sisters.

It was to ensure they remained free to lead themselves.

Jonas, Amos and Lucas did the same, defending the chamber without attempting to take possession of the ritual they did not understand, while Clara moved toward Abigail. Her own uncertain Arcane awareness had grown stronger throughout the journey, and she finally recognised that she had spent months waiting for one of the witches to tell her whether it was real, as though power only became legitimate when somebody already possessing authority approved it.

Abigail reached out her hand.

Clara took it.

The ward brightened.

Prudence placed both hands upon the bell and felt the accumulated history within it, generations of women being told that silence was virtue, dependence was protection, obedience was morality and exclusion was simply the natural arrangement of things. Yet alongside those memories were men who had refused those expectations, women who had defended one another, daughters who had rejected the limitations accepted by their mothers and mothers who had struggled so their daughters might reject them.

Change had never belonged to one person.

It had always been collective.

Prudence completed the Blessing as Rebecca freed the last captive and Abigail restored the final name within the ward. The three points surrounding the chamber flared together, not destroying the power beneath them but denying it the unquestioned authority upon which it depended.

The bell cracked.

The sound that emerged was not loud, yet everyone in the chamber felt something break that had existed for far longer than the metal itself.

The creature beneath the water collapsed inward.

For one moment Prudence saw its countless faces, judges, fathers, ministers, employers, husbands, mothers enforcing rules upon daughters because they had once endured them themselves, women turning upon other women to gain security within a system that rewarded compliance, and men who recognised injustice but remained silent because challenging it would cost them comfort.

Then the water became ordinary water.

The chamber began collapsing around them, forcing the company toward the stairs while Elias carried Reverend Wallace and Jonas helped Rebecca with the weakened captives. Abigail hesitated because Patience remained beside the broken bell, but falling masonry separated them before she could return.

The survivors reached the cemetery moments before the ruins of Saint Jude’s settled several feet into the earth.

Across the churchyard the dead became still.

Several of the women remained standing slightly longer than the others, facing Abigail until the first sunlight crossed the graves. Then they too disappeared, leaving nothing behind except open earth and the uncomfortable understanding that Blackwater Creek owed its survival to women whose names it had deliberately forgotten.

The town council initially proposed rebuilding Saint Jude’s on the same site.

Prudence objected.

The council, composed entirely of men, explained that church affairs were hardly matters upon which travelling women could claim authority.

For the first time since the Coven arrived, Sheriff Cole laughed.

The new church was eventually built elsewhere.

Something else replaced Saint Jude’s. Rebecca proposed a school and Clara suggested that it admit girls on precisely the same terms as boys, while several townsmen objected that such an arrangement would produce all manner of undesirable consequences. When asked to identify those consequences, none managed anything more persuasive than the claim that matters had never been organised that way before.

Prudence considered this an excellent reason to begin.

The cemetery records were also rewritten. Sarah Vale, Mercy Bell and Anne Hawthorne were restored to the town history, not as witches defeated by Blackwater Creek but as women whose actions had once saved it. Other records were reconsidered as well, particularly those describing women as unstable, immoral or disobedient without recording what they had actually done. The process proved uncomfortable because history became considerably more complicated when the voices removed from it were permitted to return.

Abigail remained troubled by the loss of Patience until the morning the Coven prepared to leave, when Clara found the doll sitting upon the wagon seat. She was covered in mud and missing one button eye but otherwise intact, and Abigail held her for a long time before carefully placing her beside herself.

Prudence examined the doll but offered no explanation for her return.

Some things did not require one.

As the Crimson Coven left Blackwater Creek, the town behind them had not suddenly become equal, enlightened or free of the habits that had shaped it for generations. Men still held most positions of authority, women still carried burdens nobody thought to count, and more than one resident privately complained that matters had been perfectly satisfactory before the Salem women arrived.

Yet girls entered the new school.

Women began speaking during town meetings.

Clara Bell rode west with the Coven no longer waiting for somebody else to tell her whether the power she felt belonged to her.

Elias Ward continued beside them, neither leading nor following, but sharing the road.

Far behind, beneath the buried foundations of Saint Jude’s, the broken bell remained silent.

It was not destroyed.

Perhaps such things never are.

But it had lost something far more important than its voice.

It had lost the right to be obeyed.

Authors note: Thanks to Hans Christian Anderson and his story “The Bell” for the idea of the Church Bell (although the allegory and the story are quite different), and thanks to ChatGPT for assistance with the pics.

At last, The Crimson Coven of Salem is complete and ready to take its place on the tabletop. After spending so much time recently painting the Dark Confederacy and the assorted undead, murderers and other thoroughly disreputable inhabitants of Dracula’s America, I thought it was about time I produced some “good guys”, assuming there really is such a thing in the decidedly murky world of Dracula’s America. The result is the Crimson Coven, a band of Salem witches and those willing to stand beside them against the considerably darker powers stalking the American West.

At the heart of the Coven are the three witches. Crone Prudence Blackwood is the eldest and most experienced, carrying the power of Blessing and providing the wisdom and authority around which the others gather.

Mother Rebecca Crowe, gifted with Faith Healing, is the protective centre of the group, tending wounds and keeping her companions on their feet when common sense might suggest that remaining there is a particularly poor idea. Together Prudence and Rebecca represent the accumulated experience of the Sisterhood, but neither underestimates the importance of their youngest companion.

Maiden Abigail Hathorn is accompanied everywhere by her doll, Patience, which she carries with the same determination with which the other members of the posse carry their weapons. Abigail possesses the power of Summoning and has also demonstrated an unusual ability to strengthen the magical efforts of the witches around her. She may appear to be nothing more than a young girl clutching a much loved doll, but appearances are notoriously unreliable in Dracula’s America, and anyone dismissing Abigail as harmless may discover that Patience is the least disturbing thing standing in front of them.

Elias Ward is the Coven’s Guardian, although his willingness to place himself between the witches and danger comes from something deeper than employment or obligation. His family had known persecution in the past, and the stories passed down through the generations left him with little sympathy for those who used fear and superstition as excuses to hunt people they did not understand. Ward believes in the cause of the Salem Sisterhood and, more importantly, has come to regard Prudence, Rebecca and Abigail as an extension of his own family, particularly the young Maiden whose safety he takes very personally. He knows perfectly well that standing between a witch hunter, vampire or risen corpse and its intended victim is unlikely to encourage a long and peaceful life, but Elias made that decision long ago. The witches have their powers and their armed companions have their guns, but when something has to physically stand between the Crimson Coven and whatever is coming for them, that something is Elias Ward.

Magic alone, however, is unlikely to keep the Coven alive for very long, so the witches are accompanied by several decidedly practical companions. Amos Callahan carries a shotgun, a weapon requiring considerably less arcane preparation than witchcraft and capable of resolving most arguments at appropriately short range.

Lucas McCain provides the Coven with a rifleman and some much needed reach, his name being a deliberate little tribute to The Rifleman and one that became impossible to resist once the figure was armed accordingly.

Then there are the two pistol armed gunslingers. Jonas Cade is the experienced hand, a man whose survival has depended upon knowing when to draw, when to shoot and, perhaps most importantly, when remaining in town for another drink is no longer advisable.

Alongside him is Clara Bell, equally comfortable with a pistol but rather more intriguing because she has begun trying to develop her own latent arcane abilities. She has no intention of replacing the witches, nor does she pretend to understand their powers, but in a world containing vampires, walking corpses and considerably worse things, Clara has decided that learning a little magic “just in case” seems an entirely sensible precaution.

Bringing these very different characters together visually was one of the reasons I decided against the traditional black clothing normally associated with witches. Instead, The Crimson Coven of Salem has been painted predominantly in Khorne Red, giving the posse a strong crimson identity that immediately distinguishes them on the tabletop while retaining enough darkness to suit the setting. They may be fighting against evil, but there is no particular reason why they should look cheerful while doing it.

So the Coven is finished: Prudence Blackwood, Rebecca Crowe, Abigail Hathorn and Patience, Amos Callahan, Lucas McCain, Jonas Cade and Clara Bell, a mixture of witchcraft, faith, firearms and questionable judgement ready to confront whatever the supernatural West throws at them. They are certainly more respectable than my Dark Confederacy, although admittedly that is setting the bar so low that you could probably trip over it.

Are they really the good guys? In Dracula’s America, I suspect “less alarming than the opposition” may be the safest description.

Either way, The Crimson Coven of Salem is ready for action.

The frontier has never suffered from a shortage of men willing to sell their skill with a gun, although in Dracula’s America the occupation has become considerably more hazardous than it once was. A hired gun might still be employed to guard a payroll, settle a range dispute or discourage bandits, but increasingly the work involves things that do not rob banks, surrender when surrounded or necessarily remain dead after being shot. For men who have survived long enough to understand this changing West, the answer is not always greater courage or faster reflexes. Sometimes the answer is simply a bigger gun.

Among those following this philosophy are Amos Callahan and Lucas McCain. Neither fits the popular image of the pistol carrying gunfighter waiting beneath the noonday sun. Callahan prefers the brutal certainty of a shotgun at close range, while McCain has little intention of allowing an enemy to get close enough to use a pistol in the first place. Both have learned their trade through experience rather than reputation, and both have survived encounters that have convinced them that the strange new America rewards preparation far more reliably than bravado.

Amos Callahan and his Trusty Shotgun

Amos Callahan once rode guard on stagecoaches carrying payrolls, mail and occasionally passengers wealthy enough to attract precisely the sort of attention the company would rather have avoided. He learned early that a shotgun was an excellent argument at close quarters, particularly when faced with several determined men climbing aboard at once, and over the years the battered weapon across his knees became almost as familiar to regular travellers as the coach itself.

His career ended on a night run through New Mexico when the coach was attacked by something that was neither outlaw nor raider. Amos never gave a convincing account of what happened, although he returned alone three days later carrying the same shotgun and considerably less interest in discussing the supernatural. Since then he has worked as a hired gun wherever the money is reasonable and the questions are few, keeping his shotgun loaded with a mixture of ordinary shells and rather more expensive ammunition intended for things that should have remained buried.

Amos has no interest in magic, prophecy or grand causes, but he has seen enough of the new America to accept that monsters exist. His philosophy is therefore reassuringly simple. Whatever comes through the door, put both barrels into it and consider the theological implications afterwards.

Rifleman Lucas McCain

Lucas McCain is a patient man, which in the West is sometimes considerably more dangerous than being a fast one. Raised among hunters and trappers in the mountains, he learned to shoot at distances where most pistol men would struggle to identify what they were shooting at, let alone hit it. During the war he served as a scout and marksman, spending long periods ahead of the main body watching roads, river crossings and enemy camps before firing a single carefully chosen shot.

The war left Lucas with little enthusiasm for uniforms or officers, so he returned west and discovered that a man who could place a rifle bullet exactly where he intended could always find employment. Railroad companies hired him to deal with bandits, ranchers employed him during range disputes, and more recently considerably stranger clients have begun paying for his services against enemies that do not always remain dead after being shot.

Lucas treats the supernatural much as he treats everything else: observe it, understand it and find out where to put the bullet. He rarely boasts and has little patience for men who do, preferring to find a good position while everyone else is still arguing about who is the fastest gun in the territory. By the time they have settled the matter, Lucas McCain is usually several hundred yards away with his rifle resting comfortably against his shoulder.

Another Pair of Guns on the Trail

Callahan and McCain have little in common beyond competence and a healthy desire to remain alive. Callahan is at his best when trouble has already arrived, standing his ground with a shotgun while everyone with better judgement is looking for the nearest exit. McCain would much rather deal with the same problem from a distant ridge, preferably before it has realised anyone is hunting it. One trusts weight of shot and nerve, the other patience and a single carefully placed bullet, but both methods have proved remarkably effective.

They have crossed paths often enough with other wandering gunslingers to recognise that there is safety, or at least improved odds, in travelling together when circumstances demand it. Neither pretends that companionship has turned them into heroes. They still expect to be paid, they still prefer jobs where somebody else explains exactly what they are facing, and both reserve the right to reconsider their employment when words such as vampire, necromancer or ancient curse appear in the conversation.

Yet when the money is down and the shooting starts, neither man is inclined to abandon those beside him. In a West increasingly populated by creatures that regard ordinary men as little more than prey, that reliability has become almost as valuable as their skill with a gun. Amos Callahan brings the shotgun, Lucas McCain brings the rifle, and between them they have most distances covered.