Not every servant of the Twilight Order believed that confronting evil required standing close enough to smell its breath. As the Order adapted its ancient methods to the American frontier, some Crusaders discovered that the Winchester and other repeating rifles offered a particularly satisfying solution to supernatural creatures accustomed to relying upon terror, speed and brute strength. Brother Nathaniel Harcourt and Brother Samuel Whitaker became two of the Order’s finest riflemen, although each had arrived at that role by a very different path.

Brother Nathaniel Harcourt

Nathaniel Harcourt came to America as an experienced member of the Twilight Order, having already hunted supernatural creatures through Britain and continental Europe. He was methodical rather than flamboyant, preferring careful preparation and a well chosen position to the dramatic charge favoured by some of his fellow Crusaders. America suited him surprisingly well, particularly once he discovered that its rifles allowed him to engage the Order’s enemies at distances that would once have required considerably more dangerous methods.

Harcourt carries a rifle prepared for use against supernatural opponents, and whenever circumstances permit he chooses his ground before the fighting begins. He watches windows, ridgelines, church towers and patches of darkness that others overlook, waiting patiently for the enemy to reveal itself. There is little romance in his approach to monster hunting, but Harcourt has never understood why there should be. If a vampire can be destroyed from across a field rather than across a coffin, he considers the field the considerably more sensible option.

Brother Samuel Whitaker

Samuel Whitaker was raised on the American frontier and learned to shoot long before he learned that the Twilight Order existed. He had worked as a hunter, scout and occasional guide, becoming accustomed to reading tracks and noticing the small disturbances that betrayed the passage of men or animals. Eventually he began finding tracks that belonged to neither.

His first encounter with the supernatural convinced Whitaker that some of the stories exchanged around frontier fires deserved considerably more attention than he had previously given them. The Twilight Order encountered him while investigating the same series of unexplained disappearances and quickly recognised that the frontiersman possessed skills that could not easily be taught within a monastery or chapter house. Whitaker accepted recruitment with fewer questions than expected. He had seen what was hiding in the wilderness and had no intention of pretending otherwise.

Whitaker carries a rifle as naturally as another man might carry a walking stick, using his experience as a hunter to track supernatural creatures before they can choose the terms of an encounter. He has little patience for elaborate ceremony and even less for arguments about the Order’s ancient traditions, but his companions have learned to listen when he quietly announces that something has been following them.

The Long Watch

Harcourt and Whitaker make an effective partnership precisely because neither feels much need to compete with the other. Harcourt brings the accumulated knowledge and discipline of the old Twilight Order, while Whitaker understands the country in which that Order must now fight. One knows what they are hunting. The other knows where to find it.

When Brothers Matthias Kane and Gabriel Mercer advance with their paired pistols, Harcourt and Whitaker are usually somewhere behind them, rifles ready and watching the ground ahead. The pistol armed Crusaders may receive more attention when the shooting starts, but the two riflemen are perfectly content with that arrangement.

They would rather be overlooked by the enemy.

It makes the first shot much easier.

Nobody in Matthias Kane’s posse knows exactly how old Sir Gideon Vale is. Father Alasdair MacLeod once asked him directly and received only the observation that a priest should know better than to concern himself with another man’s age. Kane subsequently discovered references to a Gideon Vale in the Twilight Order’s records dating back far further than seemed possible. The descriptions were frustratingly brief, but each concerned a Templar fighting supernatural enemies and several appeared to describe precisely the same man.

Rumour within the Order places his age in the hundreds of years, with some claiming that Vale fought for the brotherhood when swords were still more common than firearms. There are stories connecting him with campaigns against creatures in eastern Europe, forgotten battles beneath ruined monasteries and hunts conducted long before Dracula established his power in America. None can be proved conclusively, largely because Vale refuses to discuss them. Occasionally, however, somebody mentions an event from centuries past and Vale corrects a small detail with the irritation of a man who remembers it personally.

There is nothing in his appearance to support the stories. Vale looks like a man in the prime of life, strong, composed and untouched by the passing decades. He bears scars, certainly, but none of the frailty that should accompany such impossible age. Whether this longevity is a blessing bestowed upon him, the consequence of some ancient ritual, or even the lingering effect of an encounter with something the Order would rather forget remains unknown. Father Alasdair has his theories. Vale has shown no interest in hearing them.

His manner provides rather more evidence. Modern firearms do not impress him, although he has learned to use them when necessary, and he sometimes refers to events of the distant past as though they occurred last winter. He also possesses an uncomfortable familiarity with vampires and other ancient creatures. Some recognise him. A few have even called him by name.

That worries Kane considerably more than Vale’s age.

Within the posse, Vale accepts Kane’s command without objection, although there are moments when the younger Crusader finds himself wondering who is really the senior man. The Templar rarely offers advice unless asked, but when he does, Kane listens. A warrior who may have spent centuries hunting the supernatural has earned that courtesy.

The others have gradually stopped speculating about how old Gideon Vale might actually be. On the frontier there are mysteries best left alone, particularly when the mystery in question is standing beside you and fighting on your side.

For the moment, that is enough.

Edmund Vale, the son of Sir Gideon Vale, is himself a sworn member of the Twilight Order, although the circumstances of his birth have generated almost as much speculation as his father’s impossible longevity. Edmund appears to be a man in his early thirties, and Gideon has never explained when or where his son was born, nor revealed anything about Edmund’s mother beyond insisting that she was an extraordinary woman who deserved to remain beyond the Order’s curiosity. Raised with full knowledge of the supernatural world, Edmund never experienced the terrible moment of discovery that shaped so many of his companions, for monsters were simply another danger his father taught him to recognise alongside fire, disease and armed men. He inherited Gideon’s composure and sense of duty but not his remoteness, possessing a warmer temperament and considerably greater interest in the changing world around him. Their relationship is affectionate but occasionally strained, particularly when Gideon continues to treat his adult son as though he were an inexperienced novice. For Edmund, the greatest burden of being Sir Gideon Vale’s son is not living beneath the reputation of a legendary Templar, but knowing that while he grows older year by year, his father apparently does not.

Thanks to ChatGPT for assistance with the pic of Sir Gideon Vale.

Father Alasdair MacLeod had studied the rites by which a Seraphim might be summoned long before he came to America, but studying such things in the safety of an Order library was very different from attempting them while the dead were clawing their way from the earth. The first time he called upon one was during a desperate encounter with the Dark Confederacy, when Kane and his Crusaders were in danger of being overwhelmed and Alasdair finally accepted that mortal weapons might not be enough.

What answered his summons was not quite the heavenly apparition imagined by generations of religious artists. The Seraphim appeared as a young woman dressed more like a frontier gunfighter than an angel, with a long coat, broad brimmed hat and great feathered wings spreading behind her. Most surprising of all was the pistol in her hand. Alasdair later observed that if divine messengers were expected to work in America, it was perhaps only reasonable that they should dress and arm themselves accordingly.

She has never given Alasdair her true name. When asked, she simply told him that a name was unnecessary and that he should concern himself with why he had called her rather than who she might be. Alasdair consequently refers to her simply as the Seraphim, although some members of the posse have privately begun calling her the Angel of the Long Colt. Nobody has yet been sufficiently brave to use the name in her presence.

The Seraphim is not a permanent member of Matthias Kane’s posse. She comes only when Alasdair successfully summons her, emerging into the mortal world with wings spread and pistol already drawn. She does not take orders easily, even from Kane, but seems instinctively to understand the purpose of the Twilight Order and directs her fury particularly towards supernatural creatures. Zombies, vampires and other abominations receive little mercy from her, while those who command or summon them attract her attention with alarming speed.

There is something unsettling about her even for the Crusaders. She speaks little, displays almost no emotion and disappears as suddenly as she arrives once her purpose has been fulfilled. Alasdair has occasionally attempted to question her about where she comes from and what she truly is, but the answers have been frustratingly vague. He has gradually concluded that some mysteries are probably intended to remain mysteries.

There is, however, one thing about which the Seraphim has been perfectly clear. When Father Alasdair MacLeod calls and she chooses to answer, somebody has usually done something sufficiently wicked to deserve what happens next.

Then the wings unfold and the pistol clears its holster.

Thanks again to ChatGPT for assistance with the pics.

The Easter Rising of 1916 has generated an enormous literature, much of it understandably concentrated upon events in Dublin, the political leaders of the rebellion and the subsequent British response. Daniel Wrinn’s Mission to Ireland approaches the Rising from a rather different direction. Instead of following Pearse, Connolly or the fighting around the General Post Office, Wrinn takes us aboard the German vessel Libau, disguised as the Norwegian merchant ship Aud, and follows Captain Karl Spindler and his crew as they attempt to carry a substantial shipment of German weapons through the British blockade and into Ireland.

It is an excellent subject for a short book because the voyage of the Aud really does contain most of the ingredients of a good adventure story. Spindler and his crew had to disguise not merely their ship but virtually every aspect of life aboard her. German equipment had to be concealed, Norwegian markings and documentation were prepared and the crew had to appear convincing if challenged by British patrols. Spindler’s original account makes clear just how detailed these preparations were, extending to apparently insignificant objects which might betray the vessel’s true nationality if a search were conducted. Wrinn makes particularly good use of this element of the story, and the voyage becomes an exercise in deception, navigation and calculated risk rather than simply a tale about transporting rifles from Germany to Ireland.

The strategic background is equally fascinating. Germany’s support for Irish revolutionaries was hardly an act of disinterested sympathy. Berlin saw rebellion in Ireland primarily as another means of distracting Britain and potentially forcing the diversion of troops and resources away from the wider war. Roger Casement had negotiated for German assistance, although his attempt to establish an Irish Brigade from Irish prisoners of war in Germany achieved very little. The Germans nevertheless agreed to provide a major shipment of weapons for the planned rebellion. The Aud carried approximately 20,000 rifles together with ammunition, machine guns and explosives, an arsenal which could have considerably strengthened the Irish Volunteers had it reached them.

Wrinn is at his best when describing the practical difficulties of getting that cargo to Ireland. Spindler successfully negotiated a remarkable voyage through waters dominated by the Royal Navy and reached the Irish coast close to the appointed time. The mission nevertheless collapsed because the German crew and the Irish revolutionaries failed to make contact. Changes to the planned rendezvous were made after the Aud had sailed, while Spindler had no radio with which revised instructions could reach him. British intelligence had also intercepted German communications concerning the operation. The result was one of those historical episodes in which several individually small failures combined to produce a much larger disaster. Spindler had succeeded in the extraordinarily difficult task of reaching Ireland, yet the weapons remained aboard his ship because nobody was waiting in the right place at the right time to receive them.

Eventually intercepted by British forces and ordered toward Queenstown, now Cobh, Spindler chose to scuttle the vessel rather than surrender his cargo. The Aud went to the bottom and Spindler and his crew became prisoners of war. For the Easter Rising the consequences were considerable. It would be excessive to suggest that the arrival of the weapons would necessarily have transformed the rebellion into a military success, but their loss deprived the Volunteers of thousands of modern rifles and a large quantity of ammunition at precisely the moment these were desperately required. The affair also demonstrates just how fragile the preparations for the Rising actually were, with communications, command arrangements and coordination often depending upon individuals carrying messages across considerable distances while British intelligence was actively attempting to unravel the conspiracy.

As history, however, Mission to Ireland has an important weakness. Wrinn presents much of the story as an immediate first person narrative, creating a fast paced account that frequently feels more like historical fiction or a naval thriller than conventional military history. That makes the book extremely readable, but it also creates uncertainty about where documented recollection ends and reconstructed dialogue or dramatic interpretation begins. Contemporary readers have similarly noted that the narrative style can make it difficult to distinguish firmly documented events from material inserted to create atmosphere. This is particularly important because Karl Spindler himself published an account of the operation, Gun Running for Casement in the Easter Rebellion, 1916, meaning that much of the underlying story can be compared with a readily available primary source. A more substantial discussion by Wrinn of his sources and of how he converted those sources into narrative would therefore have considerably strengthened the book.

There is also relatively little analysis of the larger strategic implications of the operation. I would have liked more consideration of what might realistically have happened had the arms been landed successfully, how they were intended to be distributed, whether the Volunteers possessed the organisation necessary to exploit them and how significant the German operation actually was within Berlin’s broader wartime strategy. Modern studies drawing upon Irish, German and British records allow the Aud mission to be placed within a much wider intelligence and political context than is attempted here.⁷ Wrinn instead concentrates overwhelmingly upon Spindler’s experience. That decision makes sense for the type of book he has written, but it also limits its usefulness as an analytical history of the Easter Rising.

These reservations should not obscure the book’s considerable strengths. Mission to Ireland is short, accessible and highly readable, and it introduces readers to a fascinating episode of the First World War that remains far less familiar than it deserves to be. Spindler’s voyage was a genuinely remarkable feat of seamanship and deception, followed by a failure caused not by an inability to reach Ireland but by the collapse of the complicated system intended to connect the ship with the rebellion ashore. Wrinn captures that strange mixture of success and failure particularly well.

For readers already familiar with the Easter Rising, there is probably not a great deal here that will fundamentally change their interpretation of 1916, and those looking for a deeply researched academic study will need to look elsewhere. As an introduction to the voyage of the Aud, however, it works extremely well. It is history presented primarily as narrative rather than analysis, but fortunately the underlying story is sufficiently extraordinary that very little embellishment is actually required.

Recommended, particularly for readers interested in the First World War at sea, German clandestine operations and the military background to the Easter Rising. I enjoyed it considerably, although I would have preferred rather more historical analysis and a clearer distinction between documented evidence and reconstructed narrative.

For me the key criticism is the blurred boundary between history and reconstructed narrative. The underlying story is excellent, but Wrinn could have made a much stronger history book by explaining his sources and giving more attention to the consequences of the failure of the Aud mission.

Father Alasdair MacLeod was born in the Scottish Highlands, the son of a crofter whose family possessed little beyond stubbornness, faith and a collection of stories about things that sensible people insisted had never existed. As a young man Alasdair dismissed most of these tales as remnants of an older Scotland, useful for frightening children but hardly appropriate subjects for an educated clergyman. His studies for the ministry strengthened that conviction, although several years serving isolated Highland communities gradually made him less certain. There were lonely glens where people still barred their doors before sunset, ruined places avoided even by shepherds, and occasionally a burial conducted according to precautions that appeared to owe rather more to fear than Christian doctrine.

His introduction to the supernatural came when he was called to a remote household after several members of the same family died within a few weeks. What Alasdair encountered there destroyed any comfortable distinction between folklore and reality. More importantly, it brought him into contact with the Twilight Order, whose agents had been following the same events. They recognised both the strength of his faith and his unusual sensitivity to supernatural forces, and in time Alasdair was initiated into the Order and trained as an Arcanist.

He proved an unconventional one. Alasdair had little interest in mystical performance for its own sake and regarded supernatural power as something dangerous that should be handled with the same care another man might give a loaded pistol. His abilities were tools in the Order’s war, nothing more, and he remained a priest before he was an Arcanist. When circumstances demanded it, however, his prayers could become something considerably more tangible, strengthening his companions, resisting hostile sorcery and calling upon powers that even hardened Crusaders treated with considerable respect.

When the Order expanded its struggle against Dracula into America, Alasdair was assigned to Brother Matthias Kane’s posse. Kane commands the company in battle, but Alasdair serves as its spiritual counsellor and supernatural specialist. The two men have developed a strong relationship based upon mutual respect rather than unquestioning agreement. Kane decides where the posse will fight; Alasdair occasionally reminds him that surviving the fight would also be desirable.

He carries a shotgun, a weapon he initially considered rather crude until his first few months in America persuaded him of its virtues. Alasdair now regards it with much the same practicality he applies to everything else. Faith may protect a man’s soul, but when something with claws comes through the door, twelve gauge provides useful additional reassurance.

Perhaps his most extraordinary ability is his capacity to summon the Seraphim when the Order faces an enemy beyond the strength of ordinary men. Alasdair does not regard such an act casually. Calling a supernatural servant into the mortal world is not a parlour trick, nor something to be attempted merely because a battle is going badly. For him it is an appeal for intervention made only when mortal courage, silver and gunpowder may no longer be enough.

Despite everything he has witnessed, Alasdair retains a dry Highland humour that occasionally surfaces at the least appropriate moment. He has faced vampires, restless dead and creatures for which he still has no satisfactory name, yet remains convinced that the most frightening thing he has encountered in America is the coffee.

The monsters, at least, can sometimes be improved with a shotgun.

Thanks to ChatGPT for help with the pics.

The Twilight Order had crossed an ocean in pursuit of Dracula, but it quickly discovered that America required a different sort of Crusader. Armour and ancient knowledge remained useful, particularly when the enemy possessed claws, fangs or an inconvenient habit of refusing to remain dead, but the frontier rewarded men who could draw quickly and shoot accurately. Among those who adapted most readily were Brother Matthias Kane and Brother Gabriel Mercer, two very different men who had reached the same conclusion: in America, the Order’s ancient war would increasingly be fought with a pistol in each hand.

Brother Matthias Kane

Matthias Kane was born into the Twilight Order rather than recruited by it, the latest member of a family whose service could supposedly be traced through several generations of monster hunters in Europe. Long before coming to America he had been trained in the Order’s traditions, its accumulated knowledge of supernatural creatures and, perhaps most importantly, the responsibility that came with commanding men who were expected to confront things from which any sensible person would run. His experience and family standing eventually saw him appointed leader of the posse, charged with taking the Order’s war into a frontier where many of its old assumptions no longer applied.

Kane arrived in America with considerable confidence in the Order’s traditional methods, only to discover that a breastplate and centuries of accumulated wisdom were of limited value when an enemy could empty a revolver at you from across a saloon. Rather than stubbornly resisting change, he became an enthusiastic student of the American gunfighter. He learned to draw with either hand and eventually abandoned the sword he had carried from Europe in favour of two heavy revolvers, both loaded with silver ammunition whenever supernatural opposition was expected. He still wears the armour of the Order beneath his coat, regarding the combination of medieval protection and modern firepower as evolution rather than sacrilege.

Among his companions Kane has acquired a reputation for walking directly towards creatures that sensible men are running away from. He is not particularly reckless. He simply believes that after centuries spent learning how to kill monsters, the Twilight Order should not embarrass itself by retreating from them.

Brother Gabriel Mercer

Gabriel Mercer travelled a very different road into the Order. An American by birth, Mercer had already spent years carrying a pistol before he learned that vampires, restless dead and the other creatures whispered about around frontier campfires were considerably more than stories. His first encounter with the supernatural cost the lives of several companions and would almost certainly have claimed his own had a travelling member of the Twilight Order not intervened.

Mercer subsequently joined the Order, although he never entirely embraced its European traditions. He respected its knowledge and shared its purpose, but saw little reason to carry a sword simply because somebody several hundred years earlier had found one useful. Mercer already knew the weapon in which he trusted his life, and the Order merely improved upon it by giving him silver ammunition, armour and a much better understanding of what needed shooting.

He carries a matched pair of pistols, worn low and positioned for a fast draw, and has developed a particularly effective method of fighting at close range in which one pistol keeps an opponent occupied while the second delivers the decisive shot. Where Kane represents the old Order learning the ways of the West, Mercer represents something potentially more important: an American generation of Crusaders developing traditions of its own.

Together the two make an unlikely pair. Kane carries centuries of family tradition with him, while Mercer regards tradition as useful only until somebody discovers a better way of doing the job. They argue regularly about methods, equipment and almost everything else, but when something unpleasant emerges from the darkness their differences disappear remarkably quickly.

Four pistols come out. Usually, that settles the argument.

The Polish Soviet War is one of those conflicts whose importance seems considerably greater than the attention it receives in most general histories of the twentieth century. Adam Zamoyski sets out to correct some of that neglect in Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe, first published in English by HarperPress in 2008. It is a relatively short book, especially considering the complexity of the campaign it describes, and that brevity is simultaneously one of its greatest strengths and its most obvious weaknesses.

Zamoyski begins with the extraordinary political circumstances surrounding the rebirth of Poland following the First World War. Poland had returned to the map of Europe after more than a century of partition, but neither its borders nor its relationship with its neighbours had been satisfactorily resolved. To the east, the Bolsheviks had survived the worst of the Russian Civil War and increasingly regarded revolution as something that should not remain confined within Russia. Poland therefore became much more than disputed territory between two emerging states. It stood between Bolshevik Russia and a Germany suffering political and economic turmoil in the aftermath of defeat.

One of Zamoyski’s strengths is that he does not reduce the conflict to a simple story of Polish resistance to Soviet aggression. Józef Piłsudski had his own ambitious objectives, particularly his attempt to establish a wider political arrangement in eastern Europe and his offensive into Ukraine. The Polish advance on Kiev consequently occupies an important place in the story. It initially appeared successful but ultimately left Polish forces dangerously extended and helped create the circumstances for the enormous Soviet counteroffensive that followed.

This is where the book becomes particularly effective as military history. Zamoyski is very good at describing a campaign characterised by enormous distances, uncertain intelligence, exhausted troops, improvised formations and rapidly changing fortunes. Armies advance spectacularly and then appear almost to dissolve when supply, morale and command arrangements fail to keep pace. Cavalry remains operationally important, while railways, horses and marching infantry coexist with aircraft, armoured cars and other products of modern warfare. The result is a battlefield that feels transitional, somewhere between the nineteenth century and the increasingly mechanised warfare that would dominate Europe twenty years later.

The personalities are equally important. Piłsudski, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Semyon Budyonny, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin emerge not merely as names attached to armies or political movements but as individuals whose ambitions, assumptions and personal relationships affected events. Zamoyski is especially effective when showing how both Polish and Soviet commanders operated with incomplete information and frequently misunderstood what their opponents were doing. Contemporary reviewers have similarly noted his ability to combine battlefield movements with portraits of the principal commanders and the wider political setting.

The centrepiece is inevitably the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920. Zamoyski explains how apparently victorious Soviet armies reached the approaches to the Polish capital only to find themselves increasingly vulnerable. Polish resistance stiffened while the Soviet advance became dangerously extended. Piłsudski’s counterstroke against the exposed Soviet position transformed what had appeared likely to become a Polish catastrophe into a remarkable military victory.

Importantly, Zamoyski avoids presenting the result simply as the product of miraculous Polish heroism. The so called Miracle on the Vistula was produced by command decisions, operational opportunities, Soviet mistakes, intelligence, morale and the ability of Polish forces to recover sufficiently to exploit the weaknesses of their opponent. The Soviet command structure was far from harmonious, and the behaviour of the Southwestern Front, with Stalin among its political leadership, contributed to the failure to concentrate Soviet power effectively against Warsaw.

There is much to admire here. The narrative moves extremely well and complicated operations are generally explained without burying the reader beneath orders of battle and minor tactical detail. The maps are particularly important because this is a campaign in which geography and movement are fundamental to understanding what happened. Zamoyski also succeeds in conveying the confusion of operations rather than presenting the campaign retrospectively as a neat sequence of predetermined manoeuvres. Contemporary commentary has rightly praised this ability to make complicated battlefield movements understandable.

There is, however, a price for this readability. At around 160 pages in the original illustrated HarperPress edition, although other editions run longer because of format and illustrative material, this is not a comprehensive study of the Polish Soviet War. The political and diplomatic background is necessarily compressed, while the social history of the conflict receives relatively limited attention. The experiences of civilians, competing national movements in the borderlands, Ukrainian aspirations and the complicated ethnic politics of the region deserve considerably more examination than the book has room to provide.

The treatment of the aftermath is also somewhat too brief. This matters because Zamoyski places considerable emphasis on the proposition that Warsaw was a decisive moment for Europe. If that claim is accepted, then the longer term consequences deserve more sustained analysis. The Treaty of Riga, the failure of Piłsudski’s broader eastern ambitions, Polish Soviet relations during the interwar period and the consequences for Ukrainians and Belarusians could all have been developed further. This criticism has also been made elsewhere, with reviewers noting that the political consequences and non military dimensions of the war are considerably less developed than the campaign narrative itself.

I am also slightly cautious about the subtitle, Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe. It is certainly effective and captures the international ambitions surrounding the Soviet advance, but it risks making the outcome appear more straightforward than it actually was. Bolshevik leaders hoped that revolution might spread westwards, particularly into Germany, but the suggestion that the Red Army was on the verge of simply marching across Europe can push a complicated political and military situation rather too close to counterfactual certainty. The significance of Warsaw does not need to be exaggerated for the battle to remain extremely important.

There is another difficulty created by the book’s concision. Zamoyski moves between armies, formations and commanders quickly. Readers already familiar with the campaign will probably have little trouble following these changes, but newcomers may occasionally find themselves trying to remember exactly which army is advancing towards which river and under whose command. Other readers have identified the same problem, particularly the rapid switching between Polish and Soviet commanders and formations. More detailed operational maps would alleviate some of this problem.

None of these criticisms seriously undermine the book because Zamoyski was clearly not attempting to produce the definitive academic history of the war. What he has produced is something arguably more useful for the general reader: an accessible introduction that demonstrates why the campaign deserves further study. The underlying scholarship is considerably stronger than the pace and accessibility of the narrative might initially suggest, and assessments of the book have noted both the breadth of Zamoyski’s knowledge and his deliberate decision to write a synthetic account rather than an exhaustive specialist study.

For the military historian and particularly the wargamer, there is also a great deal here to think about. The campaign is full of operational problems that translate readily to the tabletop or campaign map: overstretched supply lines, unreliable intelligence, cavalry exploitation, command rivalry, exhausted formations, vulnerable flanks and armies whose apparent numerical strength often bears little relationship to their actual fighting effectiveness. Warsaw itself is fascinating precisely because the outcome cannot be explained simply by comparing numbers.

Warsaw 1920 is therefore an excellent introduction rather than the final word on its subject. Zamoyski writes exceptionally well, handles operational movement with clarity and succeeds in making a complicated and often neglected campaign understandable. Its principal weakness is that the very brevity which makes it so readable also prevents it from exploring some of the political, social and strategic questions raised by its own argument.

I finished it wanting considerably more detail, particularly about the wider political consequences and the experiences of the peoples caught between the competing Polish and Soviet projects. That is a criticism, but perhaps also a recommendation. A poor introductory history leaves the reader thinking that there is nothing more worth knowing. Zamoyski’s leaves you wanting to find a much larger book on the subject. I enjoued it.

I picked up Dewey expecting a story about a remarkable library cat, and for the most part that is what makes the book work. Dewey was found as a tiny kitten in the book return chute of the public library in Spencer, Iowa, and from that unlikely beginning became not only a fixture of the library but something of an international celebrity. His appeal is easy to understand. He was affectionate, independent, occasionally inconvenient and entirely feline.

The strongest parts of the book are those that deal directly with Dewey and his relationship with the people around him. The library was more than a building full of books. It was a community space, and Dewey became part of that community. Children sought him out, lonely people found comfort in him, regular visitors came to expect his presence and eventually people from far beyond Spencer knew his story. That is a considerable achievement for one small orange cat.

Where I found the book less successful was in the amount of space devoted to Vicki Myron’s own story. Her personal experiences are obviously relevant because she rescued Dewey, cared for him and worked with him for many years. Some background is therefore necessary. The question is how much.

At times Dewey feels as though it cannot quite decide whether it is the story of a library cat or Vicki Myron’s autobiography with a library cat running through it. Her family history, health, relationships and personal difficulties occupy a substantial proportion of the book. Much of this is interesting enough in its own right, but I am not convinced that all of it strengthens the story that drew most readers to the book in the first place. There were occasions when I found myself wanting the narrative simply to return to Dewey.

This becomes particularly interesting when the book reaches the question of what should happen after Dewey. The decision was made not to replace him with another library cat. There were understandable practical concerns surrounding allergies, liability, changing expectations and the complications of having an animal in a public building. None of these concerns should simply be dismissed.

As a professional risk manager, however, this section particularly struck me because I know only too well how easily risk discussions become dominated by downside risk. What might go wrong? Who might complain? Could someone be injured? Is there a liability issue? Could the presence of the animal create an accessibility or health problem? These are legitimate questions and any organisation would be expected to consider them. The problem is that upside risk is far less often built into the same equation.

Risk is not only about avoiding loss. It is also about uncertainty creating opportunities and benefits. In Dewey’s case, those benefits were not theoretical. They had already occurred and could be observed over many years. Dewey brought people into the library. He gave children another reason to visit. He offered comfort to people who were lonely or distressed. He became part of the identity of Spencer and eventually drew attention to the library and town from around the world.

If we are going to talk about the risks associated with Dewey, then those outcomes belong in the calculation just as surely as allergies, scratches, cleaning problems and liability concerns.
Indeed, Dewey himself provides the evidence. The downside risks of having a cat in a public library were real, but they existed throughout his life there. Against them stood years of positive interaction with thousands of people. That does not mean the negative risks should be ignored. It does mean that the discussion becomes distorted if they are treated as the only risks that matter.

This is where I think the decision not to have another library cat deserves more scrutiny than it receives in the book. There would obviously never have been another Dewey. Attempting to manufacture a replacement would have been artificial and probably unsuccessful. But that is different from deciding that there should never again be a cat in the library.

A new animal would have brought different uncertainties. It might not have had Dewey’s temperament. It might not have connected with people in the same way. Equally, it might have developed its own place within the community and created a completely new set of benefits. That possibility is also risk. It is simply upside risk.

In professional risk management we are very good at documenting what might hurt an organisation. We are considerably less consistent at documenting what might help it, particularly when the benefit is difficult to quantify. Joy, companionship, community identity, emotional comfort and the simple pleasure of encountering a friendly animal in an unexpected place do not fit neatly into a risk matrix. That does not make them unimportant.
Dewey’s story demonstrates this better than most examples I can think of.

A cat might scratch someone. Someone might complain. Someone might be allergic. There could be cleaning issues, insurance questions or administrative complications. All true. But Dewey also gave enormous pleasure to an enormous number of people. He helped make a library feel welcoming and human. He created connections that no publicity campaign or community engagement strategy could easily reproduce.

I suspect that if Dewey had first appeared today, there is a fair chance he might never have been allowed to remain in the library at all. There would have been policies, risk assessments, liability concerns and perhaps a committee meeting. The apparently prudent decision might have been to send him somewhere else. From a conventional downside risk perspective, that might even have looked sensible. From the perspective of what actually happened because Dewey stayed, it would have been a disastrous missed opportunity.

That is ultimately what I took from Dewey. The book is warm and often moving, although I think it loses focus when too much of Vicki Myron’s personal story pushes Dewey into the background. More importantly, the decision not to continue the tradition of a library cat raises a question larger than Dewey himself.

Have we become so focused on identifying everything that might go wrong that we sometimes fail to ask what might go wonderfully right? Have we lost our humanity in the process. The positive benefit of companion animals in aged care, hospitals and schools is well documented, as is the increased productivity morale and stress reduction of pets in the workplace. Dewey was not part of a strategic plan. He was an accident that became an extraordinary success. In the end isn’ that all that matters

A must read for all cat lovers

Apparently, today marks 2,000 consecutive days of posting on the blog.

When I started this little exercise on 3 April 2021, I had absolutely no idea that I was signing up for what has now become 5 years, 5 months and 20 days of turning up every single day and finding something to write about. At the time it probably seemed like a good idea, which is usually how these things begin before they quietly develop into habits that are increasingly difficult to escape.

Since then there have been book reviews, military history, Australian history, wargame rules, miniature painting, dinosaurs of various sizes, Dracula’s America posses, convention reports, cartoons, essays and the occasional ramble that probably made perfect sense when I wrote it but may require archaeological investigation to understand now.

The remarkable thing is not that I managed to write something every day, but that I have not yet run out of things to say. Those who know me may argue that this was never likely to be a problem.

There have certainly been days when inspiration arrived early and days when it appeared to have taken annual leave without submitting the appropriate paperwork. On those occasions a half painted miniature, an obscure military book, or some ridiculous incident involving the grandchildren has usually come to the rescue.

Two thousand consecutive days sounds rather more impressive than it feels. Mostly it has simply been a matter of sitting down each day and putting a few words together. Somewhere along the way, however, those few words have turned into 2,000 posts without missing a single day, which is something I am quietly pleased about.

I have no intention of making any grand promises about the next 2,000 days. After all, by then I will probably be reviewing books I have already reviewed, painting the same miniature for the third time, and explaining to another grandson what a broken record was.

For now, though, I will simply mark the milestone, thank everyone who has continued to read the blog, and then get on with tomorrow’s post.

After all, the streak is now at 2,000 days.

It would seem rather a shame to spoil it now.

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.”

Bibliography

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