The next two ragged veterans to return to Blackthorn Hall are riflemen, men who learned during the war that patience, good ground and a steady hand could often achieve more than enthusiasm and noise. Both had served with the 27th Virginia Cavalry, both had survived the collapse of the Confederacy, and both had spent the years since trying with varying degrees of success to build lives outside the regiment. The summons of Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair has now drawn them back into the orbit of the old command, where familiar faces, old loyalties and increasingly unfamiliar events are beginning to gather together again.

William Fitzhugh Carter

William Fitzhugh Carter had been the son of a modest Virginia landowner and entered the 27th with enough education to keep company accounts but considerably more enthusiasm for soldiering than bookkeeping. During the war he developed into an excellent skirmisher and became known for taking deliberate shots from cover while the more excitable members of the regiment galloped about attracting attention. Carter survived the final campaigns largely because he had learned that bravery and standing in the open were not necessarily the same thing.

After the war he returned home to find the family property burnt to the ground. He sold the land leaving him to drift between work as a surveyor, hunting guide and occasional guard for merchants willing to overlook his Confederate past. He retained the long rifle he had carried during the war, patched and repaired many times but always carefully maintained, and often remarked that a good rifle possessed considerably fewer bad habits than most men.

Carter came to Blackthorn Hall after receiving a short letter bearing the Saint Clair seal, although he has never revealed precisely what Lucien wrote. Whatever the message contained, it was enough to persuade him to put aside the life he had built and answer the call of his old connections once again, bringing with him his rifle, a small collection of belongings and very few questions about what exactly Lucien intended.

Richard Dabney Page

Richard Dabney Page was already an accomplished hunter when he joined the regiment, having grown up among the wooded ridges and valleys of Virginia where accurate shooting was regarded as a practical skill rather than a military speciality. His ability with a rifle soon made him useful for scouting, picket duty and dealing with enemy officers or skirmishers who believed themselves safely beyond pistol range.

Page was badly wounded late in the war and spent much of the final campaigning recovering while the Confederacy collapsed around him, an absence he has always regarded as a personal failure despite having had very little choice in the matter. When he finally returned home there was no regiment waiting for him and very little of the old life left to recover, so he spent the following years hunting for food, guiding travellers through country he knew better than most maps and keeping largely to himself.

The rumours that the 27th was gathering again at Blackthorn Hall therefore stirred something Page had thought long buried, and he arrived carrying the same rifle he had once used in Confederate service. Unlike Carter, he is openly suspicious of Lucien’s interest in the occult and has seen enough strange things around Blackthorn Hall to know that some threats are not easily explained, although he has wisely decided that asking Lucien too many questions is likely to produce answers he would rather not hear.

William Fitzhugh Carter and Richard Dabney Page bring something different to Lucien’s growing force, since neither is interested in close range heroics when a rifle and a good position will do the work more efficiently. Their return gives the remnants of the 27th Virginia Cavalry two experienced marksmen who know how to wait, watch and choose their moment, while their familiarity with the Virginia countryside makes them particularly useful whenever Lucien requires eyes beyond the boundaries of Blackthorn Hall.

Both men remain loyal to the memory of the regiment, although neither is entirely certain what that loyalty now requires of them. Strange riders have been seen moving through the trees after dark, familiar names have begun appearing where they should not, and Page in particular has started checking the faces around the campfire rather more carefully than he once did, while Carter simply cleans his rifle and waits to see what Blackthorn Hall produces next.

I recently came across Sun Rot, and it immediately caught my attention because it seems to have been designed specifically for those of us who are unable to leave well enough alone when it comes to games, miniatures and new projects. It is part roleplaying game, part skirmish game, part board game and part miniature project, all wrapped up in a grim and decaying fantasy setting beneath a dying sun, which means it manages to combine several perfectly respectable hobbies into one potentially expensive distraction.

At its heart, Sun Rot is a cooperative, GM led adventure game in which the players control a small band of characters trying to survive in a world populated by strange creatures, questionable allies and the sort of situations that generally deteriorate as soon as someone announces that they have a plan. The setting is firmly grimdark, although not in the polished heroic fantasy sense that the term sometimes seems to have acquired. This is a world that looks worn out, diseased, unstable and probably best avoided altogether by anyone with even the slightest instinct for self preservation.

The rules are deliberately light, with characters drawn from four broad classes, Fighter, Wizard, Cleric and Astrologer, while actions are resolved through a combination of dice and cards. The dice determine whether the character has managed to achieve something useful, while the cards can then introduce complications, consequences and unexpected developments, which rather neatly prevents success from becoming too reassuring.

This is where the game begins to move away from a conventional board game and becomes much more interesting. Rather than providing a precise answer for every possible situation, Sun Rot gives the GM and players enough structure to keep events moving and then expects them to decide exactly what those events mean. A simple encounter can therefore become considerably more complicated as one player attempts to solve a problem, creates another and then watches with growing concern as somebody else makes the perfectly reasonable decision to interfere.

For me, that is one of the strongest parts of the design because the emphasis is clearly on creating a narrative rather than calculating the mathematically perfect move. The cards and dice create the circumstances, but the players have to turn those circumstances into a story, and this should produce the sort of games where everyone remembers the ridiculous sequence of events long after they have forgotten who technically won.

The boxed edition contains a substantial amount of material, including more than 250 cards, a double sided board, card terrain, character and monster standees, tokens, twelve dice, rules and a large collection of scenarios. In practical terms, that means you can open the box and start playing without immediately discovering that you also require a separate starter set, three expansion packs and a piece of terrain that appears to have been discontinued six months ago.

The real attraction for me, however, is that Sun Rot does not have to remain a board game.

The supplied standees can be replaced with miniatures, the card terrain can be replaced with proper scenery, and the game is miniature agnostic enough to encourage the use of figures from an existing collection. This is where the whole thing starts to become particularly dangerous for anyone who already owns more miniatures than is strictly necessary.

There is also a dedicated Sun Rot range available through North Star Military Figures, including the principal characters, Lunar Celebrants and several monster packs. The official range gives the game a strong visual identity, but it does not lock the player into using only those figures, which is exactly how I prefer these things to work. You can use the official figures, substitute something suitable from the collection, convert your own or simply rescue an old fantasy miniature from the back of a drawer and give it a new career.

This flexibility is probably what makes the price of the game easier to justify. If Sun Rot were simply a US$99 board game, I would probably hesitate, particularly once Australian postage had been added and the package had acquired the usual impression of having been personally escorted across the Pacific. If it were merely a rules light RPG or a small skirmish game, I might have the same reaction.

The difference is that it is all of these things at once.

You are getting a board game that can be played straight from the box, a rules light roleplaying framework, a skirmish game that can be transferred easily onto a fully modelled tabletop, a large collection of scenarios and, should you wish to surrender completely, an entirely new miniature project.

That combination is where I think Sun Rot becomes well worth the money.

The RPG element provides the story and character framework, the board game components make the whole thing immediately accessible, the skirmish element gives the action a proper tabletop presence, and the miniature side opens the door to painting, converting and terrain building. None of these parts appears to overwhelm the others, so the game can be approached as casually or as obsessively as the player wishes.

You could play entirely with the contents of the box and never buy another thing, which is theoretically possible.

You could also gradually replace the standees with miniatures, build dedicated scenery, add the North Star figures, introduce creatures from other ranges and eventually reach the point where the original board has quietly disappeared beneath several square feet of lovingly constructed ruins.

That seems rather more likely.

There is also a design philosophy here that I find appealing. Sun Rot does not appear interested in producing a rule for every conceivable situation, instead using simple mechanics to generate problems and leaving the GM and players to interpret the consequences. For some people that will be too loose, particularly those who prefer every uncertainty to be resolved by consulting paragraph 7.3.2 on page 84.

For me, however, the freedom is part of the appeal.

I have always preferred games where the rules create situations rather than attempt to dictate every detail of what happens next, and Sun Rot seems to work very much in that spirit. The game creates the problem, the cards make the problem worse, and the players then have the pleasure of discovering exactly how much damage can be done while trying to repair it.

The more I look at the complete package, the more I think it offers very good value for the right sort of gamer. At roughly A$138 before postage it is certainly not cheap, but looking at it simply as a board game rather misses the point. For someone interested in RPGs, skirmish games, tabletop gaming and miniatures, it effectively provides several different forms of gaming within the same system.

That is either excellent value or a highly efficient method of emptying both the wallet and the painting queue.

My approach would be to start with the full box, use the supplied standees while learning the game and then gradually replace the characters and monsters with miniatures as particular favourites emerged. The North Star range provides an obvious starting point, but the miniature agnostic nature of the game means there is no real limit to what could eventually appear on the table.

And that, I suspect, is where Sun Rot will cause the most trouble.

The dying sun, grotesque monsters and questionable magic are all very well, but none of them is quite as dangerous as the moment you realise that the game has given you a perfectly legitimate reason to start another miniature collection.

I already have enough projects.

Naturally, that probably means Sun Rot is exactly the sort of thing I need.

There are battles decided by careful manoeuvre, clever positioning and a sound appreciation of the tactical situation. Then there are battles decided because one knight takes a look at his opponent, lowers his lance and decides that the simplest solution is to ride straight at the beggar. This was very much one of the latter.

The hero of the day was Sir Roderick de Montfort, the Red Knight, resplendent in scarlet surcoat and apparently possessed of the quaint medieval belief that enemy commanders existed principally to be charged. Facing him was Lord Alaric de Veyne, the Blue Lord, whose magnificent blue livery concealed a rather more developed instinct for self preservation.

The lord and noble knight began on opposite sides of the field and, for a glorious moment, it appeared that we were going to get the proper medieval conclusion to the affair. Sir Roderick spotted his rival, spurred his horse forward and charged directly towards him. Lord Alaric watched the rapidly approaching Red Knight, considered the traditional requirements of chivalry and promptly decided that discretion was considerably more attractive than valour. The Blue Lord turned his horse about and retreated, leaving his retainers to discover whether Sir Roderick was as dangerous as he looked.

He was.

Denied his intended opponent, Sir Roderick simply continued forward and crashed into the Blue Lord’s unfortunate retainers. Several of them attempted to bar his path and were promptly cut down, scattered or ridden over as the Red Knight carved his way through the blue ranks. What had begun as a heroic charge rapidly became a mounted pursuit, with Lord Alaric disappearing into the distance while Sir Roderick followed behind, occasionally pausing only long enough to remove another inconvenient retainer from his path.

Lord Alaric’s men certainly did their duty. Unfortunately, their duty increasingly consisted of standing between an angry knight and the man he was determined to catch. One after another they were swept aside, while their noble lord continued his somewhat undignified tour of the battlefield. Sir Roderick, however, refused to be distracted. The Blue Lord had started the battle as his chosen opponent and, regardless of how many retainers had to be demolished along the way, he was going to finish it that way.

Eventually there was nowhere left to run. Sir Roderick finally caught Lord Alaric and the confrontation that should have occurred at the beginning of the battle took place after a lengthy chase across most of the battlefield. This time there would be no convenient line of retainers to sacrifice and no easy escape route. The Red Knight charged home and brought the dastardly Blue Lord down, ending what had become less a battle between two noble retinues and more an extremely determined personal vendetta conducted on horseback.

Thus ended the glorious pursuit of Sir Roderick de Montfort, the Red Knight, and the considerably less glorious career of Lord Alaric de Veyne, the Blue Lord. Alaric had tried manoeuvre, retreat and the liberal expenditure of his own retainers, but none proved sufficient against an opponent whose entire tactical doctrine consisted of “There he is. Get him.”

Sometimes medieval warfare really does not need to be any more complicated than that.

Blade and Banner can be found on Wargames Vault

All figures are from the now out of production Schleich Knights which sometimes can still be found still on eBay.

I discovered recently that I am getting old. Not because of aching knees, grey hair, forgetting why I walked into a room, or making strange noises whenever I get out of a chair. No, the evidence came from my grandson.

We were doing something together and I asked him to hang up the phone.

He looked at me.

“Where?”

There are moments in life when the generation gap does not merely appear. It opens beneath your feet like the Grand Canyon.

Of course, he was perfectly correct. You cannot hang up a mobile phone. There is no receiver, no cradle and certainly no hook. Yet those of us of a certain vintage continue happily telling people to hang up, dial numbers and give us a ring, despite the fact that none of these actions bear much resemblance to what we actually do.

It reminded me of another recent encounter with my grandsons. We were helping out at Victorious and I was being nagged about something. Eventually I told one of them that he was sounding like a broken record.

I received the look.

It was the particular look a younger person gives an older relative when they are not entirely sure whether they have heard an ancient expression or are witnessing the early stages of mental decline.

Then it occurred to me that he probably had no idea what I meant. Why should he? A broken or scratched record getting stuck in the same groove and repeating itself endlessly was once an instantly recognisable experience. Today it requires an explanatory footnote.

Apparently I now speak a dialect called Old Person English, a language built around telephones attached to walls, records, typewriters, carbon paper, printing presses, film reels and technologies that disappeared years ago.

So, for the benefit of my grandchildren, here is a short translation guide to some of the expressions we continue to use despite the technology behind them having vanished.

Hang up the phone — There is nothing to hang up.

Dial a number — There has not been a dial involved for decades.

Pick up the receiver — First find a receiver.

Give me a ring — No jewellery is required.

Get off the line — What line?

Sounds like a broken record — Requires a short lecture on vinyl records, scratches and grooves before the insult can be properly appreciated.

Rewind it — Nothing is actually being wound.

Fast forward — See above.

Tape it — There is no tape involved.

Don’t touch that dial — Good luck finding one.

Stay tuned — Nobody is tuning anything.

Tune in — Ditto.

Roll down the car window — What we actually mean is press the button.

Film it — There is probably no film anywhere in the device.

Footage — There are no feet of film either.

The cutting room floor — Now presumably the deleted files folder.

CC me — Carbon copies without carbon paper.

Cut and paste — No scissors and, disappointingly, no paste.

Put pen to paper — Open Word.

Back to the drawing board — Open another program.

Hot off the press — Often used for something that has never been anywhere near a printing press.

Get your wires crossed — Frequently said while using a wireless device.

On the same wavelength — No radio tuning required.

Burning the midnight oil — Electricity has made this considerably safer.

The penny dropped — Particularly impressive in Australia considering the penny disappeared in 1966.

Clockwise — Perfectly obvious until you meet someone who has grown up looking only at digital clocks.

Turn over the record — Once an essential part of listening to an album rather than an obscure instruction from an elderly relative.

Drop the needle — Vinyl enthusiasts may be keeping this one alive.

Put the pedal to the metal — Still understood, although increasingly threatened by cruise control, electric vehicles and eventually cars that do the driving for us.

Hold your horses — Usually said by people who own no horses.

Put the cart before the horse — Requires familiarity with two pieces of transport technology that most people have never used.

Close, but no cigar — Apparently there was once a time when narrowly succeeding might reasonably have resulted in tobacco.

Roll the credits — Assuming the streaming service does not minimise them and immediately try to start the next episode.

The strange thing is that none of us thinks twice about these expressions. We inherit them, use them and pass them along long after the objects that created them have disappeared. Language, it seems, is considerably more reluctant to throw things away than technology is.

Which means I shall continue to dial numbers, hang up phones, roll down windows, stay tuned, sound like a broken record, get my wires crossed and wait for the penny to drop.

My grandsons can continue looking at me strangely.

And if they do not understand something I say, they can always look it up.

Just don’t tell them to look it up in the phone book.

Thanks again to “Chattie” for help with the pics.

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

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

Abner Taliaferro

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

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

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

Silas Pendleton

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

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

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

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

Thomas Beverley

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

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

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

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

Josiah Cabell

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

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

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

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

Nathaniel Randolph

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucien began spending more and more time there after dark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

Abstract

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Limitations of Traditional Morale

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

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

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

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

Trauma Is Not a Morale Penalty

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

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

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

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

Stress, Strain, Trauma and Moral Injury

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cohesion and the Unit as a Social Organisation

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

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

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

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

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

Leadership, Trust and Betrayal

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

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

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

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

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

Experience and Strain Can Develop Together

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

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

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

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

Persistence and Multiple Timescales

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

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

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

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

Path Dependence and the Memory of the Game

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

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

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

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

Nonlinear Behaviour

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

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

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

Emergent Behaviour Rather Than Diagnostic Tables

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

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

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

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

Recovery Must Be Part of the Model

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

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

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

Modelling Moral Consequence Without Creating a Diagnostic Game

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

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

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

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

Consequences Rather Than Penalties

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

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

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

Player Knowledge and the Omniscient Commander

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

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

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

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

Trauma and Player Agency

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

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

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

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

Feedback Loops

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

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

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

A Practical Integrated Model

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

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

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

Implications for Simulation Validation

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

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

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

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

The Limits of Quantification

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

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

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

Scale and Decision Relevance

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

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

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

Ethical Considerations

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

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

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

Wider Implications for Wargame Design Theory

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

Bibliography

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM 5 TR. 5th ed., text rev. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2022.

Du Picq, Ardant. Battle Studies: Ancient and Modern Battle. Translated by John N. Greely and Robert C. Cotton. New York: Macmillan, 1921.

Figley, Charles R., ed. Trauma and Its Wake: The Study and Treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. New York: Brunner Mazel, 1985.

Frankfurt, Sheila, and Patricia Frazier. “A Review of Research on Moral Injury in Combat Veterans.” Military Psychology 28, no. 5 (2016): 318–330.

Griffith, James. “Test of a Model Incorporating Stress, Strain, and Disintegration in the Cohesion Performance Relation.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 27, no. 17 (1997): 1489–1506.

Griffith, James, and Mark Vaitkus. “Relating Cohesion to Stress, Strain, Disintegration, and Performance: An Organizing Framework.” Military Psychology 11, no. 1 (1999): 27–55.

Jones, Norman, Rachel Seddon, Nicola T. Fear, Pete McAllister, Simon Wessely, and Neil Greenberg. “Leadership, Cohesion, Morale, and the Mental Health of UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan.” Psychiatry 75, no. 1 (2012): 49–59.

Kanesarajah, Jasmin, et al. “Unit Cohesion, Traumatic Exposure and Mental Health of Military Personnel.” Occupational Medicine 66, no. 4 (2016): 308–315.

Kellett, Anthony. Combat Motivation: The Behavior of Soldiers in Battle. Boston: Kluwer Nijhoff, 1982.

Litz, Brett T., Nathan Stein, Eileen Delaney, Leslie Lebowitz, William P. Nash, Caroline Silva, and Shira Maguen. “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy.” Clinical Psychology Review 29, no. 8 (2009): 695–706.

Marshall, S. L. A. Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947.

National Research Council. Technology for the United States Navy and Marine Corps, 2000–2035: Becoming a 21st Century Force. Volume 9: Modeling and Simulation. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1997.

Nilsson, Sofia. “Leadership as Related to Moral Injury in a Military Context: A Systematic Scoping Literature Review.” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 30, no. 2 (2026).

Norman, Sonya B., and Shira Maguen. “Moral Injury.” National Center for PTSD. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Orme, Geoffrey J., and James E. Kehoe. “Cohesion and Performance in Military Occupation Specialty Training.” Military Medicine 185, nos. 3–4 (2020): e325–e330.

Perla, Peter P. The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1990.

Sargent, Robert G. “Verification and Validation of Simulation Models.” Journal of Simulation 7, no. 1 (2013): 12–24.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

I seem to have developed a Dark Confederacy problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hopefully some finished tomorrow.