Whilst I rarely dabble in historical wargaming, on the odd occasion I do I often find myself glued to Youtube for several hours trying to get a better understanding of the time period I’m playing in. It generally leaves me a better-informed person, with the occasional nugget of historical gold, perfect for those awkward ice-breaker moments the corporate world occasionally throws at me.
Playing mainly fantasy games though, the need to delve into real world history does not often occur. Recently though I played my first couple of games of Silver Bayonet. A skirmish game set during the Napoleonic Wars. Having a love of all things Spanish I decided to give that faction a go. I usually like to have a bit of narrative when building warbands for skirmish games, but in this case I was at a loss.
I’ll be the first to admit that my knowledge of that period doesn’t extend much beyond a few episodes of Sharpe, and I wanted to take a slightly different direction than simply having Sean Bean’s Spanish counterpart wondering around saying “bastard” every few minutes. So, I dug into the history a little bit.
Now, Silver Bayonet is specifically a game about specialist military units that hunt supernatural nasties at the turn of the 19th century. It turns out that part of the war, the hunting of hobgoblins and werewolves, is not particularly well documented on Google. However, it got me thinking about whether there were any good stories that had been written on the subject. My go to for the supernatural are the likes of Dracula and Frankenstein, but these are set in a much later period. It turns out though that there are a couple of books that do tick the temporal setting box. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irvine, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. I couldn’t be happier to stumble over Strange and Norrell, as it’s a book I’ve been meaning to read since seeing the odd episode of the television series many years ago. Turns out it’s quite long, 36 hours on the audiobook, which means it will be a while before I make a start on the headless horseman, but if the first six hours are anything to go by it will be massively enjoyable.
So where does this all leave the narrative for my Spanish vampire hunters? Well, it turns out history is so often stranger than fiction. Nestled somewhere in a Google search I discovered that in the early 1800s the Spanish government were forcing people to be buried in community cemeteries, which were on unconsecrated ground. Apparently, this led to a wave of families digging up buried relatives and reburying them on consecrated ground, I mean if that isn’t narrative gold I’m not sure what is.
*As my brain worked on the title for this post, I was reminded of a Michael McIntyre sketch where he remarked upon the capacity for the British to use almost any word or phrase as a synonym for drunk, to be completely gazebo’d being one such example he offered. I found myself having a similar thought in respect of a gentleman’s particulars.
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