ImagiNation Speculation

So...If I am going to do this fictional medieval world thing, what are the basic goals and parameters of what I would be trying to accomplish?

Border troubles in the Duchy of Alten

Goals:

1. Have a place to fight miniatures games in.
2. Create a little piece of a world that has enough detail that the games seem to be grounded in some sort of (un)reality, in the sense that my fictional people are fighting these battles for a reason, and not in a vacuum. What has come before shapes the here-and-now, and what happens now affects the future.
3. Have fun creating whatever I end up creating. In most of my hobby endeavors I have come to embrace the fact that for me it is almost entirely about the journey and only very marginally about the destination. There are those who can set a goal to do Project XYZ, and then buy, paint and focus on that project until it is done. I am the antithesis of that person.
4. Use this as an excuse to paint more miniatures. With the leeway to create national colors, regional heraldry etc...

Considerations and Questions:

• One of the main points of this is to play games. The structure of the world, first and foremost, must support gaming story lines.
• The games will be played with the miniatures I have in my collection, or can buy and paint (c. 1350-1425AD). While some "generic" enough miniatures will serve a variety of uses, it is inevitable that some of the more ethnic types of miniatures be associated with certain fictional countries. For example, while I continue to work (slowly) on my historical Ottoman army, it is highly likely that there be a place on my map, called whatever, where my Ottomans will live and fight, but will not be "Ottomans". The very nice range of Old Glory Eastern Europeans from the Balkans, Hungary and Romania could also fill a space, or spaces, on my map. Or even the Mongols as stand-ins for "steppe people". Unless everyone is going to look uniformly vanilla Western European, this is pretty much unavoidable.
• To differentiate the various areas and countries on the map, it is almost inevitable that I find myself thinking "this country will be France-ish, this area can be German-ish, and this country could be Northern Italy-ish". If nothing else, clustering place names into things that sound like the above helps create a distinction between different areas, which is useful. So there will likely be areas of English sounding names, and Germanic names, and Italian-esque names...
• I find naming things to be the toughest part of this sort of thing. After all, once you start to build a story around certain names you are sort of stuck with your choices, and if you don't like what you are stuck with...well...
• As I expect this to be a very off-and-on sort of endeavor, I am thinking I should spin this off to its own blog. That way, even if things progress in fits and starts (as I expect them to), they will all be contained in one place without a lot of family stuff and various other things taking up weeks or months of space in between.

Which brings us to...

The Basic Plan:

1. Start another blog (linked to here of course).
2. Work on my original "small border area" in sufficient detail to start playing games when the mood strikes.
3. Continue fleshing out the larger world in very broad terms.
4. Have fun with Hexographer.
5. Add detail to different areas as the mood strikes.

Sounds simple enough I suppose.

Any comments from lurkers who might stumble on this would be welcome.

An ImagiNation...with Scope Creep

Scope Creep: When a project of modest proportions (or any planned proportions, for that matter) takes on a life of its own and becomes bigger than planned...and bigger...and bigger.

But I am jumping ahead.

Most of my wargaming is a solo endeavor, but to keep things interesting, and to make for a better story when blogging about my solo games, I often try to frame those games in the context of some manufactured "campaign". These generally peter out after a few games because I lose interest in trying to fit what I am playing into a historical context, with proper map references, time lines, etc. I probably shouldn't get hung up over this stuff, but I do.

One of the things that has always intrigued me, and seems much more prevalent amongst our English wargaming brethren, is the idea of an ImagiNation; a fictional place, maybe or maybe not linked to reality in some way, but set in a specific time period from a technological standpoint. From browsing the web, ImagiNations set in "Europe-ish" during the Seven Years War period seem especially abundant. Seven Years War figures and rules are used, but the places and people are made up. Sometimes they are "near" Austria or Prussia, sometimes not. This gives great leeway in letting your creativity run as rampant as you want. So that's the intriguing part. I suppose liking this kind of idea is the same thing that made me always want to be the dungeon master when playing D&D back in the late 1970's and early '80's. Drawing maps. Imagining worlds. Writing history instead of reading it.

I have considered doing something along these lines for a while now, but finally decided that I would scribble down a few ideas on setting up a modest little imaginary world in which I could use my medieval armies from time to time.

Things began harmlessly enough. I would need a small kingdom, or part of a kingdom, which would need some neighboring areas to interact (and fight) with. My first sketch map of such a realm, on the back of a piece of scrap paper, was simple enough. A semicircle represented the edge of our new "home" kingdom. Adjacent to that border were a few different adjoining areas, exact content to be decided later. A few bits of terrain were sketched in. A basis of an initial storyline was imagined.

Having made a few simple sketches, I began to wonder what kind of mapping software (free if possible) might be out there for creating simple hex-based maps. Within moments of a first Google search, I was looking at a website for a product called Hexographer. It has a free version and a pay version, and the free version seemed to have all the functionality I was looking for, and the samples shown were nice looking "retro" style maps that would fit the bill perfectly.

Within minutes I had downloaded the free version, and in less than an hour, I had created the core of the little map below; a border area of two neighboring realms.

A small border area with two antagonists

But Hexographer was so easy to use, and so fun to play with, that over the course of another couple hours I had expanded a good bit beyond my original border area. After all, I couldn't help but wonder what the rest of those two kingdoms looked like, and who their other neighbors were. After all, they had to fit into the larger world somehow, right? So the map started to expand. And more of the world began to take very loose shape in my mind.

Two kingdoms take shape...

And that area had to fit into an even bigger picture, right? Where were their borders, and who could other antagonists be? Oceans needed to be somewhere. Which makes for coast lines. You need water. And some crude attempt at realistic geography should be attempted. And the geography in turn would dictate where rivers would run. And rivers and mountains and other terrain determine where the trade routes would be, and where cities would grow, and where borders might reasonably end up. Along with thoughts on who were enemies of who, and where the historical allies might be. And what the current situation might be on day one of this new land. Yikes.

...and the world grows some more

Which brings us back to scope creep. In maybe a half a dozen hours in little bits and pieces over the past week and a half, I have gone from a very simple pencil sketch doodle on the back of a sheet of scrap paper to a sketch outline of a much much larger world, one quarter (the northeast quadrant) of which is shown in the final map above. All because I found Hexographer, and had fun playing around with it. Once the creating started, it became very hard to stop. Not that I tried all that hard to stop.

What comes next? I don't know. Maybe I'll figure that out when I am done drawing more maps and writing more history in my head.