This post is
dedicated to adding to the history of your military force, specifically what
battles and enemies it has been faced with.
So part of the fun
of this part is that you get to come up with whole scenarios and situations
that could have arisen, using just your imagination to craft fantastic moments
in your favorite settings for your personalized army that you have put so much
effort into to have fought in. One way
to really excite yourself for playing your army and feel new life in a game
that you may have felt was getting stale because of the monotony of your
regular games is to immerse yourself in an epic action. For instance one of THE best moments that
entirely caught my attention and thrilled me was one of the battles of the
Gaunt's Ghosts series (I know I bring them up regularly, but that is because I
have found it to be an excellent set of stories) was the battle on the planet
Verghast. It really raised my
expectations for the rest of his books, and unfortunately he never met them
after the high I got from there but that doesn't mean he wasn't exceedingly
excellent, that was just a moment of pure awesome that perhaps pushed my
imagination to a point that was beyond what he could then match. But that is what is great about writing our
own stories, you can then work to exceed your own expectations and you won't be
limited by others' writing.
So what was it that
will make your army seem particularly realistic and also exciting, a piece of
fiction that you can be proud to show off to others? A good place to start would be with previous
Battle Reports you have done; the caveat is that this requires you to have
played a game with this army before and done a Battle Report. If that is not possible, perhaps you are just
writing a story for fun or designing your next army you need to look elsewhere
for this. Perhaps you can model the
conflict on a battle that you have fought against the theoretical army, and
just make a few tweaks to that list and do some creative remembering such that
it is more in the style of the new contingent.
If this isn't to your liking however, maybe you want to take a planet
you may have designed (perhaps following the guidelines given in the series of
posts I give, a link to which can be found to the right) or a system and just
taking a few minutes to push that future of the planet forward in a way that
involves the army that you are concerned with at the moment. As always another source of inspiration is
all around you, in books, movies, friends, games, etc.
So that might be
where you want to start with in fleshing out the history of engagements for the
army. But what is it that you need to
keep track of so that what you write means anything and will actually engage
any readers? Keep in mind how these
conflicts should change the army, perhaps you have an idea of what the morale
and feelings of the troopers were right after the founding. This is your chance to guide them into the
grizzled veterans or whatever concoction you want at the end in the forms of
various wars that take their toll in some way or another, changing their
philosophy of fighting, morale, etc. based on casualties or the types of
xenos/heretics they have faced.
I'm sure that I
could write a series on crafting just a battle… oh wait, I already have. But in any case, what will likely really
invigorate you is constructing something that is thoroughly epic and a solid
read. The quality of the story has to do
with your writing abilities and I can't help too much there as I am not a
particularly articulate or good writer, but I believe that I can help with the
bit about the awesome part of it. Most
people like to have a grand sense of scale, a feeling that the universe hangs
in the balance based on this engagement with your forces and so you might want
to have at least one battle that is like that.
Don't make all of them that way because then it gets boring (sort of the
problem towards the end of the Ghost's series that I started to get before I
caught up with the current book and read that) but one decent engagement of
huge import is great. Another piece of
the feeling related to the battle is not just the scale, but also the danger
and the sacrifice. Giving a number of
casualties or even names attached to them won't make a reader understand just
how awful things were or what was lost.
The horrors of war are best understood (and this is sheer hypocrisy
seeing as I have never seen war except in history, fiction, and non-fiction
books or documentaries and the like) when there is someone/something to relate
to. For instance when I was going into
my Battle Report Operation Iron Defense I was fully intending to kill off
Mart'el. I then proceeded to become too
attached to him myself and so was unable to do it. Of course in the future I will not have such
compunctions because I plan to introduce enough characters that one of them
will have to die. But hopefully you all
felt some sort of loss when you thought he died (of course if you are anything
like me you would have believed that he was alive until shown the body because
authors rarely kill someone like that off.
At least that early on certainly.
Game of Thrones is a whole different ball park. What I'm trying to get across here is that
you need to put in some effort and development into people that will help you
craft a story that is suitably powerful enough that it matches what you were
hoping for while also relating the necessary amounts of danger and sacrifice to
feature just what was gained at so high a price.
To conclude I want
to go through what made that book about the planet Verghast so good (this will
be without spoilers… except for one.
Obviously there was a battle there, things kind of escalated beyond what
was 'expected'. But if you didn't see
that coming then you clearly have no experience with books anyways, you must
have been wondering what was going to be written about for several hundred
pages). First there was a sense of
massive scale. Yes it was a battle for
one city. This city however was MASSIVE. One giant freaking wall, which the Ghosts
were given just a segment of to defend.
Not only did Abnett cover the Ghost's part in that defense (which was of
course brilliant and totally everything I could possibly hope for) he also
updated us on everything else that happened in a way that really showed how
narrow the defense was. And then how it
was again. And again. And so on.
Second was the cost. People die
in this book. HUGE amounts of guardsmen
perish, defenses fall and are reclaimed by guardsmen some of the time. Cost of course does not even have to be in
life. The psychological change is
something that can be more apparent and empathetic than the death toll
sometimes. People change in ways that is
sickening, innocence is despoiled and things happen that just wrench your
heart. Third was the sense of
desperation and importance, just how dire the situation really was. There was a buildup as things just fell
apart, and as they did more was revealed and you just knew towards the end that
things were practically hopeless. For
all intents and purposes (and this is not a spoiler) people in command die or
are unable to communicate and things deteriorate to the point that one after
another rank is gone through for overseeing the defense of this city. The final piece that is perhaps the most key
part is the heroism. People rise up from
the ashes, climbing over the bodies of the fallen to act beyond what was
expected of them. Sheer suicidal bravery
is seen time and again, in an entirely believable fashion. To fit with this theme oftentimes it ended up
getting them killed, but this was a conflict that forged the greatest of people
in the hottest of furnaces in such a way that nothing else could possibly match
it. This is why I had a good time
reading it, and why none of the other books I have read since have been able to
match this one story unfortunately. I
look forward to the day I find a better action sequence in a book.
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