Going Solo #1 – The idea

Sorry for the late post folks, had a pretty busy weekend and lost track of time.  Still here’s the latest from me to you.  Enjoy!

I’ve hit a point where I’m not going to be able to be a regular member of a gaming club, and unless I think of new ways to enjoy the hobby it will end up being shelved like it has been in the past. At the start of 2016, however, I came across a book discussing solo-wargaming (The Solo Wargaming Guide, by William Silvester). It focused on the authors thoughts on the concept and journey into discovering and using rules to run a solo campaign. After several great, albeit short lived, multiplayer campaigns with my club I really got into the idea of building a narrative and developing a story for my army and for the setting of the campaign. So I thought, “why not see if I can do something similar on my own.”

I’d always loved the idea of modern tabletop warfare and after discovering the micro modern genre (6mm or 1/285 scale) some years ago I decided that I would go ahead and use the modern times for my campaign. Developing a setting however took a bit longer as I had originally wanted to do a classic NATO v PACT conflict. I wrote an alternate history starting from 1940 with a mysterious character or 2 influencing events of senior figures (browny points if you can guess where the inspiration for that came from). I managed to get as far as the 1960s with writing summaries for each decade for major countries. Unfortunately I had gotten to the point where I didn’t know enough about the 60s-80s period to alter it and I also started to realise that trying to play this out would require truly epic amounts of work and models. Whilst I had surprisingly great fun writing the alternate fiction, I shelved it and went back to the drawing board.

I decided to come up with a completely fictional world where I was able to explore pretty much anything I wanted. I originally came up with 8 nations and placed them on a fractal generated map (Fractal Terrains 3 and Campaign Cartographer 3. both by www.profantasy.com), but up’d the nation count to 12 when I realised I wanted my world to be a bit livelier. Each nation was given their own short history, own ideology and form of governance, own preference on how they like to wage war, and own preference on the military equipment they use. It was important to me add such depth to my campaign so as to keep me interested in how the world develop from more than just the one-dimensional aspect of winning or losing battles. I’ve been a big fan of likes of Game of Thrones and Dune where some of the more interesting events take place off the battlefield and I want to see if it was possible to replicate that.

So now the idea was firmly in place in my head, I needed rule systems to allow me to fight in the modern era. The biggest requirement I have of my modern rule systems is that they come with the maths and mechanics to create new units that are balanced against each other. It took a long while but I finally found a decent set to use. Once I had them I was able to start working out how I would actually run this campaign… not a particular easy feat…

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