Battle Reportification Part 15 - Connecting Storylines

The much anticipated conclusion to the Battle Reports series has arrived, and in it I will help explain how to connect your battles together into one coherent story.

So lets say that you've created your Battle Report and it was a wild success.   Huzzah!  But now what?  Where do you want to take it?  Where can you take it?  A lot of these sorts of questions were handled in the contingency plans and developments that you already went through as per my suggestions in previous posts.  I should hope that you haven't done everything with your characters/setting/story that you want in just one Battle Report!  So you then go and play another game, keeping a record of what happens similar to last game so that this clash can then be transcribed into another masterpiece like the first one.  The only problem is that you are playing against an entirely different army!  Maybe you even changed yours as well so that neither of the races involved had anything to do with what you had included with your previous story.

There are all sorts of methods that could be employed to solve this crisis.  One of these is to entirely make crap up.  Just convert everything that happened.  This involves trying to proxy each of your squads or vehicles or whatever and translating them into your previous army.  This doesn't have to be exact (there were casualties before) and also the characters involved wouldn't necessarily be deployed with the same people over and over again.  Their squad wouldn't change, but the area of the battlefield they were fighting in wouldn't have the same people in it all the time (remembering that these games are generally just a piece of a greater battle.  Unless you're playing Epic 40k or Drop Zone Commander).  That could explain new squads and characters as well as why previous ones are not involved.

Another potential way to resolve this is that you have just added some perspective.  Perhaps these could be events that are occurring at the same time.  They don't have to be on the same planet, system, or even sector.  If this is the case now you really want to take the long view and try to figure out how it is that these characters/armies are involved or could become so with each other.  Really plan out certain key plot points or events or developments in setting that are not game dependent that you could try and start steering these reports in the direction of.  This could then be the beginning of an amazing epoch that you will love to tell to your friends or be truly proud of showing to the internet one installation at a time because of all the work that you put into it and the quality that you are able to deliver through it.

That's all that I have for this grand finale, hope you guys liked that series and I will be posting another compendium post and link on the side like I did with the designing a planet series for future reference if you or any other readers should feel the need to find any of this easily.