My Life As A Gaming: Even Fantasy Gamers Need To Know Their History

The title is misleading. This is really a recap of the Battle of the Atlantic in World War 2, dominated by German U-boats vs. Allied surface and aerial assets.

Indy talks a lot about technology and doctrine, but I can put it simply: the Allies forced the Germans into killzones and pounced upon them. The bait were the convoys and all the goods needed for the United Kingdom to stay in the fight. The killzones were the spaces created between the bait and the escorts, complimented in time by intelligence provided by aerial reconnaisance and signals intelligence intercepts.

It took a lot for this to come together, but the results speak for themselves and if such a similar situation were to arise now you would expect to have all of these elements reassert themselves swiftly to recreate those killboxes and replicate those results.

Therefore, I ask you this question: put in the position of someone looking to do commerce raiding to drive an enemy power out of the fight, and with this history informing your actions, what do you do to avoid this scenario repeating itself?

It's an interesting scenario question, isn't it? Now apply all of this to your campaign--even fantasy games, since they have stealth and piracy is a thing--and you see where I'm going with this. The historical record often has fantastic events in its pages, events that are going to come up organically in your own fantastic adventure gaming and fiction, and the different trappings don't change the fundamentals.

Imagine, for example, that you're playing in Jeffro's Trollopolous and you want to bring a hostile city-state to heel. Choking off the trade that supplies it with what it cannot produce itself is part of a siege campaign, and that's what the Battle of the Atlantic was. Imagine that you're playing a Macross campaign; you're going to want to find out how the enemy is supplying itself with the food, men, and material that it requires to wage war against your heroic Valkyrie squadrons and the idol singers that love them. You can be the First Lord of the Star League, the Emperor of the Galactic Empire, Warchief of the Horde, or a free captain on the Sea of Stars who's skull banner means freedom, dealing with this scenario in this manner is the same process.

Therefore, regardless of what genre your scenario claims to be in, you are dealing with the same things. If you can answer the above hypothetical in real world terms, you can answer it in any fictional context. This is why the better fiction writers always have a handle on real world history and current events, and make reading about it part of their routine; it makes the fiction better by providing it with the vital substance of reality without the drudgery that often comes with it.

And that is why real RPGs--real gaming--as the #BROSR lays out--is the real hobby; real gaming is wargaming.