Planning my Syldavia and Borduria imagi-nations campaigns

The main reason I created this blog was to write about my 18th century imagi-nations wargaming project using the TooFatLardies Sharp Practice black powder period skirmish rules.

As regular viewers of this blog already know, I have written a lot of background material for these imaginary countries, as well as painting forces and buildings. The next phase was always going to be creating a narrative for the encounters between the two rival states. My intention was originally going to be a bespoke campaign generator with some mechanism for linking battles into a coherent single entity. To be honest, I knew that this was going to take a lot of time but, happily, I don't have to do this now.

Instead, I will be using the "Dawns & Departures" campaign handbook published a month or so ago by TooFatLardies to accompany the basic Sharp Practice rules. It is a PDF offering and gives lots of scope for all manner of campaigns.

One of the real joys of this system is that it allows your leaders to develop over the duration of the campaign, so once you have used the Character Generator in the rules to create your leaders they can then grow in fame, power, influence and wealth as they buckle their swashes across the tabletop battlefields that the campaign system will create. Alternately, they may well prove to be incompetent poltroons who lead their forces to defeat and find themselves treated with contempt and derision by their troops, not to mention incurring the wrath of their superiors. Truly useless leaders may find themselves court martialled, removed from command and dismissed from the service of their monarchs. Of course, a useless but wily leader might always try and brush his ignominious demise under the carpet ("I was undermined by jealous rivals and had devious but well-placed enemies at court") and sell his questionable services to the highest bidder or even build his own Free Company of equally desperate and questionable troops.

Constructing a campaign shouldn't take too long and I will write again about this, together with some potted biographies for my leaders.