Battle Reportification Part 10 - Plot

Now we arrive at the first post about the different parts of your Battle Report, this one focusing upon why you want to decide if a scene focuses upon Plot and how to do it.

Battle Reportification Part 9 - Themes

There are all sorts f directions that you could take your Battle Report. You could make it into an uplifting story about the triumph against all the odds, it could be a depressing tale of the brave soldiers who gave all they could and died for their efforts. Or maybe your preference is for the sick tales of corrupt commanders more interested in numbers than in men and how it all played down, him not being phased when he won at the cost of millions for a few square miles of land - he only cared about if the final objective was achieved. The purpose of this post is to help you set up themes for the story you want to tell, why you want to pick a theme and how to do it. One of the reasons that you should pick a theme is that it sets a standard; a guideline is established which you will be able to follow fairly easily and you will be kept on track with your goals. A lot of times people get working on something that they love and they lose sight of the vision that had initially been there, swept away by what they were doing now. The expression that is commonly used is that you don't see the forest for the trees. You have immersed yourself in your project so completely that you can't find your way back to what was going to make it great. Having a theme in mind from the get-go will provide you with something to measure off of, to keep you from becoming too distracted and able to focus on what matters. I'm talking about your family. Just kidding, if you need tips on being a family person I'm not the one to go to. You're playing with toy soldiers for crying out loud (most of you - I suppose some people could read this and not play with them. I don't know why, but you could… hypothetically). So back to focusing on what matters, you want the theme to help you remember what moments you want to portray in your Battle Report. And for the 40,001th time (hee hee) this will give you another opportunity to find inspiration should you ever need it. With that explanation out of the way how do you choose your theme? This fits in with the significant events and the gritty details posts, what was it that you thought was important. What made you think this would be a good Battle Report? Maybe you chose an arbitrary battle to do it for, but it is my belief that every battle can be made into a spectacular story, but sometimes people aren't able to tell it because of their personal tendencies. Not everyone can write uplifting canon about the heroic last stand of the 2nd company of Ultramarines on Macragge against the Tyranids. Others would find themselves horribly out of their league as they struggle to narrate the fall of Malant'ai. Know what your abilities are. This is not a time to be humble about your abilities, nor is it the moment to be delusional. If you truly have no idea, or even if you have a belief that you can't do something just give it a try. After about 3 attempts then you can give up, but until you have some proper experience who are you to say know? Think of writing a story as creating an army list. Sure that unit of wolf scouts hasn't served you so well the past two games, but its entirely possible that its been because you were using them wrong or the enemy armies just weren't what is typical and just happened to be able to deal with them. Maybe you weren't setting up the right situations in order to tell that tale of the heart broken mother who watched her boy fight in the planetary militia and wept for his death, one among millions who died for her. I'm not sure if I actually answered how you choose your theme though (sorry about that tangent. I think it was good in any case). Back to the idea of significant events and gritty details, how I mentioned the important stuff that you want to illustrate or that make this a good story for that. Whether you won or lost shouldn't impact the story you're telling. Yes on the battle field you failed to drive the enemy back, but telling a story is more than just plot (though it is a serious factor. A bad plot begets bad stories). The important part of telling a story often has to do with what it is about, the tone that you are taking. Remember all those stupid english classes that you took where all you did was discuss the genius of Shakespeare and how he brought in all sorts of elements that made fun of things or pushed ideas of aristocracy or equality or education or whatever? Well you want to make some of your own themes along those lines, bigger ideas that you (or your characters) push, statements about this that or the other. Most people like to hear a "today I learned" or some big moral stance on something. I'm not saying that everyone does, and a lot of time people don't agree with it, but the good guys have to be the good guys for a reason. The good guys always win because they are inherently better and deserve to win (in stories at least. Always a pet peeve of mine that bad guys never win but this is not a discussion for this blog). You will see yourself become more successful if you take a theme and you use it to show what happened, why it happened, and what it means. That theme will give you something to push for your readers, something that you can check for as you read your own story and see if it ends up actually coming across to them.

Battle Reportification Part 8 - Gritty Details

I'm going to dive right into this article without any pretext. How is it that you give the proper amount of detail for your Battle Report? And how do you know where to put in the most effort? Well hopefully you will have a great amount of detail throughout it, but obviously you want to know where you should really put in the elbow grease and make it sparkle like the sunlight gleaming off of a vampire's pale white skin… oh wait we don't want to write anything ridiculous and absolutely idiotic, sorry about that. First we'll go into the where: what kind of story are you going to tell? I'm going to go into themes for your Battle Report next post, but for now lets work with what we have. Once you've decided on the themes that you want to be associated with your story and you've chosen the characters to narrate it and the setting you need to figure out what really pushes those ideas. What parts of the Battle or narrative that you had going on in your head lead you to that final decision? Which shoot outs or desperate dog fights brought out the best in your ideas? Those moments that brought you to your theme are the big ones that you want vividly portrayed because you want to show that it was what is actually important. Secondly you are going to want to divide up the events in your Battle Report (note that I said in your Battle Report and not your battle. Don't let the tabletop rule everything you want to do, use it as a guideline). Moments can be divided into a variety of categories, all of which I will go over later: plot; character development; setting; With those in mind you are going to decide what details in particular to focus on. Of course this will be discussed in future posts, the next four or so posts will all be related with this one and each other so it might be a little frustrating to read through this until you are able to put all of the pieces together at the end (its only four days after this one, you'll live). So the types of details that you center your efforts upon will be determined largely by the type of scene you are doing so we can skip that bit for now. What I don't need to do in those posts is provide you with a scale for effort. When you lay out what you want to include in your Battle Report scenes wise (you don't have to do all of this ahead of time though you may find it to be beneficial considering the format that I am presenting) you should make a conscious choice on how important each of these scenes is in terms of the category assigned to it. Just how much character development comes out of this scene between the narrator and an enemy soldier youth? Does it impact the audience's view of the narrator more than the scene where we see them hold their best friend as they die, or is it less important than the scene where we find out their favorite brand of caffeine? Once these decisions are made you will find everything else is much easier. Onto how you actually put in the detail. An exercise that you might find to be useful is imagine yourself as a storyteller. I know that sounds obvious, but see yourself actually telling your friend this story over the phone or while at a campfire. Does it have the necessary imagery to give them an actual sense of what is going on or to know how tense the moment is supposed to be? Can they picture it in their heads? Do they have a sense of attachment to the story, do you think they would be leaning in towards you to hear what you are saying better in order for them to fully embrace the experience so they don't miss a word? Can they tell what are the important moments? Of course you are going to have to be brutally honest with yourself, this is not the time to be exaggerative. Maybe you need to actually test it out on someone, but for the most part you can weed out the unnecessary stuff and find out what needs the most work to start with with this technique. The key to keep in mind is that you are ultimately telling a story, the entire thing has to be communicable through language. Your hand gestures will not be present when people are reading your stories, they cannot make those same leaps of the imagination and imagery that you are going to initially. Another technique that I will give you (and this will be brief) is that you should picture it in your head. What do you see? Now take every possible bit of it and put it into words. Describe it down to its absolute core so that if someone was there they would be startled as they noticed something that you picked out that they had not even noticed despite standing in that same spot as you. Both of those methods should serve you well along with the tidbit I gave you some post in the past about the feeling of the room (temperature, taste, sound, smell, etc.). Hope this was a good read, thanks for joining me!

Battle Reportification Part 7 - Significant Events

I'm not so sure about all of you, but sometimes it can be really difficult to tell what the turning point in the battle was. Was it one shooting phase that did it, or did one unit's heroic charge deal the death blow to the important character on the opposing side? How far can you narrow the critical moment down to? This post will try and show you how to narrow it down and also how to make multiple parts of the fight interesting and narratively important. I'm going to have to be very arbitrary because it is impossible to provide a concrete set of guidelines for determining the shift in the balance of the war, but I will do my best given the resources I have at my disposal. Let us examine what movies, books, and other mediums generally use to portray moments of intense import for the plot or character development. When do they have you cheering the victory or crying from depression? When the hero is incapacitated or the big bad has been knocked off his high seat, this generally signals the end. Of course it is not quite the same as the death of the villain is almost always at the end whereas the hero is taken down somewhere in the middle (only to rise again. Of course the hero could also be knocked out at the end and then in a few minutes be back on his feet but that is neither here nor there). Look at your battle and see when it was that your or the opponent's general died. It is entirely possible that both ended up dying, that just changes how you want to tell your story. With the death of the general comes the type of tale you can tell. If the general died in the beginning the story is one of the army fighting on without him, demoralized but grim in their resolution, digging in to fight to the end even as their comrades die around them (victory or defeat does not matter, the story could be the same). If they died in the middle of the battle, that is when the force starts falling apart or is driven to greater things to avenge the heroic death of their commander. If it was the end it could be a tragic death, something gut wrenching because of all that they had given to bring victory and yet they would never live to see it. On the other hand if their force had fallen apart earlier they could have died because they could not stand the shame of their defeat and leading their friends to their deaths or could have perished as a coward, cut down despite trying to use his friends as bullet bait. This is all determined - again - by the style of story and characters you want involved in your Battle Report. Where else could you look for significant events in your battle? At what point did the most models perish? When were your forces gunned down en-masse or did you cut through several units of troops with your valiant cavalry? Were you able to take out the majority of the enemy forces when you stormed their base of operations, or were you forced back by disciplined volleys? These are instances in time that you can go to town as a narrator, plucking at the heart strings of your audience as you try and capture the emotions that the characters must be feeling as everyone they have known and loved for 20+ years are gone in the blink of an eye or they liberate that town from the occupation of the heretical chaos influence, knowing that the people who had cowered in their homes for years would finally be able to see the light and live under the freedom given to them by the Emperor. Perhaps what you want most to look for when you seek out those significant events in your Battle Report to illustrate is try and figure out where can you convey the most life and detail, what will make an excellent scene and piece of writing that you would love to show your friends or the internet at large. I'm not sure if I mentioned this anywhere else but in my mind Battle Reportification should not be just a passing attempt, it is a serious effort to craft something that isn't seen anywhere else. Not quite as long as a short story, but with plenty of depth, plot, and character development that could be as good as many short stories. This isn't just about saying what happened in your battle, this is going the whole hog (I think that's the saying but I'm not sure) and putting in place all the elements that would make this Battle Report a piece of literature, not just fluff. This is the difference that I see in fluff and lore. Fluff is filler garbage that is eye candy, does not really satisfy, it just fills the time until we come across something better. Black library on the other hand is often lore because of the character development, serious themes and powerful character development. There are examples that are simply fluff because they aren't really works that aren't seen elsewhere and aren't really unique, but most of it does add something to how you view the 41st millenium and the Imperium or the other races. Giving someone something new to think about, that is what I think is one of the greatest achievements of doing good writing. That’s also how I look at blogs, if you have nothing different to say from other people or if you are just whining and not contributing then you don't need to have a blog. But I'm digressing and I apologize for that. I hope you enjoyed this post, always glad to write for you guys!

Battle Reportification Part 6 - Narrating Character

First I would like to make a call for everyone that reads this blog to go check out all of the different networks that I posted on the right side of the blog that have been there since the beginning, all of them have quite a few good blogs and you probably have noticed based on my list of blogs towards the bottom of the page that I read a lot of blogs, most of them having been found by following those links when I was first looking into the different networks. I would also like to thank wargaming tradecraft for accepting me into their network, and would advise you all to look at the blogs that are posted there (it is an old network that is moving, so hang in there, more blogs will be put up there with time as they are moved from the old list to the new). Once again thanks for the plug guys, and now on to the normal blog post. (btw Graven Games is still awesome. I love giving them shout outs lol) Again this post is involved with the previous one, so I will do my best to not repeat myself (though I think that last time I did a good job of not getting too off subject). The topic up for discussion today is designing your Narrating Character which you will use for your Battle Report (or most of it anyways). Now there is tons of stuff on character creation that I'm not going to go into, just the basic stuff that you can use to put in some work to make something awesome while not too much that you spend hours on just the character creation. Again you are going to want to examine how everything that happened in the battle fits together. Once you have that figured out you have to start hearing voices in your head. What attitude do you hear that would really help make the story you want to tell excel? What tone of voice will accentuate the best parts of what happened? Should it be snarky, quirky, humorous, sadistic, sarcastic, sassy, intelligent, depressed, who will do the best for you? Oftentimes the character should reflect your own personality as your personal tendencies will mean that you have a knack for doing a good job of that attitude, but don't be afraid to experiment! If nothing else take some inspiration from your friends, enemies, public figures, anywhere that you look! A second part of making this narrating character is that you want to have a small bit of background assigned to them. I don't mean totally defining every detail and part of their history, just enough for you to work with and refer to in your story and that you could use to craft their personality (or you could reverse engineer the history based on their attitude or vice versa). Sometimes depending on the lore for your army you will know where the character came from if they are a part of the army, sometimes you will have a wide assortment of options. For instance you may have an imperial guard army composed of a variety of companies or platoons that come from all sorts of backgrounds that change frequently, hence the reason that you don't know all the homes of all the people. This option provides some flexibility in your story telling and the background of your force. Another possibility is that you could utilize someone not even part of your army as a narrator, or a non-combatant that travels with it. A local that gets caught up in the action that goes down in their home hive or a city slummer that is fleeing the law crosses into a field and gets sucked into the battle with no way out. It does not have to be a role that is played out on the tabletop at all, you could make up everything about them just because you have an awesome vision in your head. This will allow you to make full use out of the work that you already put into the planet that you designed already. You could take someone that was from a completely different system or sector and insert them for some narrative flavor that contrasts the behavior and style that is evident in the rest of the army or conflict. The key to all of this is to use your imagination, run with anything that you think will work and that you can totally see happening on your battlefield. Whether it advances the plot because the character is an inquisitor investigating the army as it performs maneuvers in the name of the emperor or a child of a cook ran off of the ship and is now running under the wing of the imperial guard platoon commander is up to you, there are NO limits to who could be involved with the battle. As a final thought remember that it does not have to be someone that actually showed up on the tabletop, just make sure that you think they could do a good job of telling the amount of the battle that you think is appropriate to advancing the plot and the events that are surrounding the story that you are trying to tell.

Battle Reportification Part 5 - Detailed Explanatory Scene

Writing this blog is already changing how I'm playing. Yesterday when I was playing I was looking at everything in an entirely new light. Normally I think that when something completely against the odds happens I just think its cool. But yesterday when a ton of fantastical crap went down I was thinking of how it would look in a story, how I would explain it and write the scene involved in a Battle Report. It wasn't just cool, I was forging a narrative during the game. Of course I normally play competitively in tournaments but this time I kind of went a little crazy and did stuff that was not very… strategic. Rushing towards the Space Wolves is NOT a good idea for Tau, though it was hilarious to watch as my army then imploded. But enough about that, moving on to what this post is about. Now that you've determined all of your supporting details involving purpose and location it is time to get working on your actual Battle Report. This post and the next one will go hand in hand, so stick with me as I make some leaps about characters that will be delved into further tomorrow. So why bother creating a scene designed specifically to explain things to your audience in the first place? Just like I already said in the location post part of this is for setting the mood for your readers to tap into and expect from the rest of your Battle Report. If you provide a scene for explanation then they will know how things work. The second part about the explanation scene is that it is when you get the opportunity to have your imagination run wild and you get to decide all the cool details and tidbits that you want to be a part of your story. This is one of the defining moments for your Battle Report, this is where you can make your battle not just another game of 40k or warmachine, now you are starting to add tension and weight to everything that happened. The fate of the continent may have rested upon this battle, but the audience can only know this if you tell it to them! Furthermore explaining what is going on will remove some of the confusion (I'm sorry, I know its obvious but it still needed to be said) that might have been infused into your story if you did not take a moment to sort everything out so that details regarding characters, motivations, location, everything is told so that your audience does not need to do any thinking but can just sit back and enjoy the narrative that you have created (or at the moment are creating). So how do you get around to writing this detailed scene? Look at everything that you've already sorted out (the purpose, the location, and what actually happened in the battle). Based on these factors what could you reasonably tie together? What is the specific story that you want to tell, what is it that was important to this battle and how is the world or important plot pieces being changed by specific parts of the fight? Not everything has to be, or even should be important to the plot. Just as I said some posts back, if everything was detailed and important, there would be no sense of scale or weight - you'd lose what was actually important with what was just a cool fight that had no real significance in your narration. But back to piecing things together: look at what parts fit together, what was the purpose of this battle, what led up to the gauntlet being thrown and the two sides dukeing it out in this particular location. Decide what was the situation before the actual war was declared, what led to the escalating tension, what caused the final eruption, and what has happened between that moment and the start of the battle. All of that is exactly what you will be describing (maybe not all at once, you can take your time and explain it all throughout a variety of Battle Reports if you want to continue this saga that you are working on) and so now you should be able to see why this scene is important. If you didn't explain some of this than a large part of what will make your Battle Report cool and unique, an actual story and not just a bunch of figures moving around on a tabletop would have been left out and no one would have seen your abilities as a story teller! The second part to the detailed explanatory scene is the detail: when you read a book you will notice that the successful ones make sure to do a very good job of portraying what the place is like. How it looks, the temperature, the taste of the air, the flavor of the wind or dust, the sounds in the background, the texture of the walls, clothing, the floor or dirt, etc. Everything is given detail, or at least enough such that the audience could feel like they are in the room. You don't actually have to describe every little nook and cranny, you just have to provide the feeling that you have done that - what I mean is that you should have a solid amount of description and anything that you plan on having your characters interact with should either have been described or it should be something that you specifically are waiting to mention until it become important. By providing such details as temperature you can make yourself look really good by providing such moments as a character shivering in the cold or even hunching their shoulders to combat the blistering gale that was crashing through the fur cloaks of the local Feudal lord. It doesn't change the plot, but it looks really good and for a small amount of work will improve your standing in the eyes of those that are looking at your Report. Even if you don't show it to anyone, it will look really cool to you and make you feel accomplished and that your battle is unlike any other that you've played out on the tabletop. (sorry about not posting this last night, it seems that Sundays I have a problem with my internet so whatever, I guess Monday's or Saturday's I'll just post twice to make up for it. Expect another post today as I am going to start working on that one now since I had this one done yesterday)

Special Missions #3

Sorry, ran out of time after playing in a 40k tournament and got home late so was unable to come up with new stuff.  I'm working on creating these in advance so I have a pool of legitimate articles to post when they are needed, but until I am able to do that I will give you another special mission (I only have one other on hand that I can easily access, lets hope I don't miss another again ;-) )

Game Three

Deployment:       Pitched Battle

Set up:                  Seize Ground

Conditions:          Reinforcements?  Every turn starting with round 2 roll for reserves for one unit worth 100 points from your codex, created before the game begins and before you know who your opponent is.  This unit deepstrikes onto the field using the normal deepstrike rules.  The unit can be any type, vehicle, infantry, or otherwise even if it does not normally have the deepstrike rule.  Secret Objectives that list their weight in determining a victor of the game.

Extra Points (again for that battle points system I designed):

• Only lose 2 units completely (partial losses are permissible) - 1 point
• Destroy your enemy's reinforcements before it causes 100 victory points of damage to your army - 1 point
• Destroy 200 victory points or more of your opponent's army with your reinforcements - 2 points

Secret Objectives:


1. Kill one enemy unit of at least 5 models or more down to only 1 model and keep it alive. (2 objectives)
2. Hold at least 2 objectives for 4 consecutive turns (2 objectives)
3. Have the most victory points in your opponent's deployment zone (1 objective)
4. Keep your HQ alive the entire game and deliver the killing blow to at least one unit (2 objectives)
5. Eliminate all of your enemy's Elites/Fast Attack/Heavy Support - must be the most filled section (2 objectives)
6. Hold at least 2 objectives for 3 consecutive turns (1 objective)

Sorry about not having the story descriptions in here, pressed for time and REALLY want to go to bed.  Hope you guys like it, and I'll be back with Battle Reportification tomorrow!