Cataphract: Medieval-fantasy roleplaying wargame, in the Black-Sea C. 1300

Summary

Cataphracts Design Diary #1 Cataphracts commanders: there is no actionable intelligence in this post. Read on. About two months ago, I reread several series on military historian Bret Devereaux’s blog, ACOUP: analyses of Helm’s Deep and Minas Tirith, breakdowns of pre-modern command and pre-modern logistics, and, of course, a post simply titled “How Fast Do Armies Move?”. I’m a fan of Devereaux’s—he writes in that delicious space of really knowing his history yet also with the understanding he’s writing for a bunch of D&D dorks who care about the fiddly minutiae of, say, the efficacy of maille vs. plate armor against English longbows. The fun, gritty little details. In military history, as Devereaux explains, there are basically three levels of decision-making: strategy (why you fight, the goals of the war), operations (how you get your soldiers to battle, how armies move), and tactics (how you win battles). It struck me, as Devereaux often alludes to, that there are a lot of games about strategy (Civilization, Diplomacy, the world map of Total War) and innumerable games about tactics (any given medieval strategy title or tabletop wargame), but very few about operations. Almost no games, as far as I’m aware, are interested in, say, the logistics of feeding an army, or communication structures between commanders in the field. Games usually simplify or skim over all those fine details of running a war, or just skip them entirely. So, I said to myself, why not try to make an operations wargame? Embrace the logistics, the gritty details, the fuzziness of the fog of war? Thus was born Cataphract, the written ruleset, and Cataphracts, the game I’m currently running. They have the same name because I made both of them, but—as I’ll discuss—if you run your own campaign, it’ll probably be different. (Really, this one should be called something like “the Voreia Campaign” or “the End of Emperor Michael’s Peace.”) Almost immediately, things started happening that I have never se...