The author of The Silver Bayonet: Italy: The Shades of Calabria, T.C. Stephen, is back with another blog – this time diving into the world and setting of the Napoleonic gothic horror wargame's new supplement...

On Battlefields and the Dead

When developing this new supplement for The Silver Bayonet, I came to it as an historian with an understanding of Calabria’s place in the Napoleonic period (something we’ll talk about briefly below). Although this wasn’t a historical skirmish game, I had no intention of ignoring the history. I wanted to write a narrative-style campaign that brought in many of the elements that made the Calabrian war so engaging, and so I devoured as many primary sources as I could get my hands on.

Whilst thumbing through Duret de Tavel’s accounts of his time in the French army occupying Calabria, I was struck by how often he discussed visiting battlefields, both ancient and contemporaneous, throughout the region. Calabria has a great number of battlefields, though many have been lost to settlements, earthquakes, rising seas, and time. During the French occupation, new battlefields were popping up almost daily where Calabresi, Sicilian, Albanian, French, Neapolitan, Swiss, and Polish troops fought for their lives, or where taking a wrong turn in town or lagging too far behind a marching column might land you in an early grave.

My own experiences on battlefields is as a tourist rather than a participant. I was about eleven or twelve when I visited the Gettysburg battlefields for the first time. Back then, I was obsessed with American Civil War history – and had been hooked since I first watched the Gettysburg TV miniseries brought about by Ted Turner (better known as a two-part movie, but it was originally made for television). I read every book about it I could get my hands on. I would have visited every battlefield if I could, but Gettysburg was the closest. And so it was only proper that I spent months pestering my parents to take me there – to where the battle actually happened. They finally relented.

I’ll never forget that blustery fall day, far removed from the summer months surrounding the anniversary of the battle. The park was cold, still, and silent; few tourists visit at that time of the year. I remember walking the slopes of Little Round Top, the leaves surrounding the Colonel Strong Vincent statue crunching beneath my feet with every step. The chill wind blowing through the trees sounded like the whispers of the soldiers who fell on that hill to my young ears. Gettysburg is one of the best preserved and most studied battlefields in the United States, but there’s still so much we don’t know about it. And yet, standing on the battlefield, you can almost see it, hear it, and smell it. Like it was happening in your presence.

This feeling of being on a battlefield, mixed with the uncertainty of history, has paved the way for another type of experience: ghosts.

I’ve listened to my fair share of stories about them. American Civil War battlefields are home to dozens – if not hundreds – of such stories. Real or not, believe in them or not, I still find them all fascinating. As long as the stories don’t tread on the real history, I don’t mind them too much. They bring people to the battlefield who might not otherwise want to visit. I see them as a different type of way for people to experience the battlefield, even if it isn’t the same way that I’d prefer to experience it.

I suspect there are many Napoleonic battlefields that share similar haunting stories, though as an American, I don’t have the ability to regularly visit those battlefields. When researching for this blog post, I was not able to find any publication on the subject in English that wasn’t somewhat questionable as a source. Nevertheless, it’s hard to believe this is strictly an American phenomenon.

I’ve always felt that it is on battlefields where the dead really speak to the living. Not literally – not in the way you’re imagining it right now. Books teach us a lot and diaries and official orders can go a long way towards explaining a battle, but there’s nothing quite like being on the ground where it happened and following in the footsteps of those long gone. A battlefield can show an observant tourist how the sloping of terrain can create a barrier (being in defilade) from withering enemy fire, a cornfield which may obscure patient soldiers just beyond it (or even moving through it), and how low ground before a rise in terrain can make the highest hill on the battlefield simply disappear from view.

It is in these moments when I believe we may hear the dead speak. We experience their stories first-hand because we stand where they stood, in a way that can be sombre and chilling at the same time.

Yet for a fictional supplement on Calabria for a gothic horror fantasy game like The Silver Bayonet, the battlefields of Calabria had to be considerably different from their real, historical counterparts. On these battlefields, something sinister has corrupted the once hallowed ground. Evil stirs and battlefields come alive in a very literal way. In this fictional Calabria, standing on the spot where the dead once stood will lead the trespasser to an unfortunate end; one in which they might become part of that battlefield permanently should they linger for too long.

Calabria: Europe’s Terra Incognita

Calabria’s historical setting and its place in wider Europe during the Napoleonic period was important to developing the narrative campaign for The Shades of Calabria. After all, Napoleonic history is the backdrop to this fictional game with ghosts and vampires! And it wasn’t actually that hard to do, as the reader might note from the very real quotes that precede many of the chapter headings in the book. Immersion is important to me, so I tried to bring that to the player as well.

I like the phrase, ‘history is stranger than historical fiction’, because it’s usually true. Hollywood likes to pretend (and thus many laypersons believe) that history is boring, so they can rewrite it any way they want without the viewer being the wiser. In truth, history is the life experiences of normal people, and those stories provide our understanding of the past. They can be boring, but usually they’re not. Sometimes the stories seem more far-fetched than the fiction inspired by them. Battlefields are full of such stories and Calabria during the setting of this book is no different, though unfortunately many of our stories about it come from outsiders.

At the turn of the 19th century, Calabria was an enigma to the rest of Europe; a land of beauty and mystery. Besides those who called Calabria home, few others had reason to venture there. The few tourists (mainly travel writers) who did never stayed long, but they were also the only true source of information about Calabria to the rest of the world at the time. Those who had business dealings – landlords and politicians mainly – sent others there in their stead.

In world books or atlases of the time, Calabria came with caveats of danger, thievery, and murder. Even though travel writers made it through Calabria (albeit, with local guides) without any harm befalling them, the rumour of something possibly happening always caused these tourists to fear what they couldn’t see. In fact, Calabrians were typically welcoming, even if cautious to trust outsiders. Visitors were treated to good food and drink, often at the expense of the family providing. But reputations are fickle things, and at the time they carried with them a weight that lingered on the minds of those who risked entry.

Undoubtedly, these rumours reached the ears of the soldiers on their way to occupy the Calabrian countryside. And what they didn’t hear from other Italians on the road, they would come to see first-hand, and soon enough.

A Green Land Soaked with Mud and Blood   

Rather than repeat my introduction, I’ll simply say that the launch of the campaign in (and occupation of) Calabria in 1806 by the French set the stage for a series of massive and violent uprisings. Insurrection and guerrilla warfare became commonplace.

Guerrilla warfare is invariably unpleasant. A year before the Peninsular War kicked off, French soldiers in Calabria were being felled by stealthy jabs of a stiletto or pugnale. They were often ambushed by briganti bands whilst out on patrol, and stragglers from marching columns were cut down or simply disappeared. It was not unusual for the mutilated corpses of the missing to be discovered when and if their fellows were able to search for them.

But what made Calabria truly dangerous wasn’t the people, but the environment itself and the lack of infrastructure. Nearly all the roads in Calabria were unpaved, and during the torrential rains that came in the cooler months they became nearly impassable, especially when nearby rivers and streams swelled into raging torrents that swept away bridges and fording spots.

Supply lines were always tempting targets of the roaming briganti bands, as were messengers with orders from the general staff. Often lines of communication were cut by marauding Calabresi. For the French, it was difficult enough to move large numbers of troops – let alone artillery, which could not even enter Calabria until several months into the campaign, and only with limited supplies of ammunition even then.

To counter this, the French army had to spread itself out thinly across Calabria, with small detachments (not even companies) of regiments holding villages and towns, with centralised headquarters in certain regions being assembly points for reinforcements and supplies to those detachments – though the poor infrastructure left many detachments isolated and exposed. For the occupation of a pacified region, this might have sufficed – but not for Calabria.

Small patrols were often sent out at the beginning of the campaign, if only to keep these detachments aware of what was happening around them. Such patrols were often death sentences. Eventually larger patrols were despatched, but these left the villages sparsely defended, attracting briganti to move in and retake the town, often overwhelming the depleted French garrison, the luckiest of whom would die in the fighting.

When uprisings broke out or an attack on a French detachment occurred, retribution came swiftly. Villages were burned down, suspected collaborators were judged by a military tribunal, jailed, and eventually hanged, their corpses dumped into shallow graves and left to the elements and wildlife.

P.L. Courier, an officer with the French army, would write: “When we catch the Calabrians we shoot or hang them; when they catch us they stab us or burn us alive.” It was a dangerous time.

Crafting History into Horror

This is all to say that Calabria at this time ran rife with conflict in a way that was challenging to bring to the tabletop, especially for a skirmish game. Up until now, The Silver Bayonet hasn’t really been set on an active battlefield – the action occurs in the shadows or on the outskirts of the war, or even well after a battle has ended and the armies have left the field. The specialist units have been a force that, up until now, preferred to fight the supernatural in the wilderness, in castles on mountains, or in the sands of the desert, well away from armies slugging it out at places like Eylau, Austerlitz, or Danzig.

For players of The Shades of Calabria, the war isn’t far away; it’s happening all around them. Small engagements, isolated patrols, marauding bands of briganti hunting down French soldiers and spies; there were even some raiding parties by British and Neapolitan forces on coastal villages. Besides sieges that were taking place at fortified towns like Amantea, two well-known battles also occurred in Calabria during the first few years of occupation: Maida and Melito.

For that reason it made sense that the pragmatic realities of being in a war zone should feel more present for the player. The shadow war was happening out in the open in Calabria, against the backdrop of a historical campaign and a popular uprising occurring at the same time. It wasn’t enough that the player would be facing the standard array of baddies; they should also feel that they were navigating through this historical landscape – and feel its stakes.

Therefore we introduced the new mechanic of ‘Roaming Patrols’ to The Silver Bayonet. There’s the standard patrol, which consists of three models, or the Hard Mode patrol which is made up of five models. These patrols can come on the table in different ways, but their presence will be known when they arrive. A few dice rolls will determine their allegiance and make-up; in most circumstances, they won’t be there to help! And the player will likely need to allocate some of their resources to deal with them.

But what about the servants of the Harvestmen? There are many supernatural beings in The Silver Bayonet, but what could stand to challenge an occupation army made up of thousands of troops? My thoughts fell back to my childhood and that first time on the Gettysburg battlefield. What if the dead couldn’t rest so peacefully? What if something commanded them to rise again with the purpose of creating a legion of undead? Such a force could maul or even destroy the French army (or any Coalition army sent against them) and destabilise more than just the region of Calabria.

Necromancers seemed the obvious choice. New mechanics had to be developed for such a task without making it so cumbersome as to be unplayable in the fast-paced and bloody skirmishes of The Silver Bayonet. The necromancers had to be powerful, but also not overly so; they had to have a weakness for players to exploit. So it was decided to make them a bit squishy. After all, these aren’t soldiers – they’re human cultists.

During playtesting, however, it was clear we needed to handicap the players’ ability to simply shoot them to death. This is where the green mist came into its own. The green mist is both the controlling force and a by-product of the necromancy magic. And it gave the campaign back some of its ‘shadow war’ aesthetic. The mist inhibits visibility across the board, making closer encounters necessary to dish out punishment.

Next the necromancers needed minions to raise up! Once again, my mind returned to the ghost stories I had heard from various battlefields over the years. Phantom soldiers attacking breastworks which no longer existed and the skeletal remains of the hastily buried war dead left forgotten to time: these concepts would work well. It also gives the players some fun conversion possibilities. Who is to say that some undead Roman legionnaires, Greek hoplites, or even shipwrecked Normans couldn’t be called to serve the whims of the necromancers?

That left only the final boss for the campaign. Perhaps some ancient evil lurked within the ancient tombs and temple ruins of Magna Graecia. Known simply as ‘The Necromancer’... Il Negromante (whatever this creature’s true name was, has been lost to time) gave its necromancer minions their power. Left unchecked, Il Negromante would raise an undead host large enough to challenge all the armies of the world, such are its machinations.

Concluding Thoughts

As a child, it was easy to let the eerie sounds on a quiet Gettysburg battlefield so close to Halloween influence me. It wasn’t so difficult to conjure images of the blue-clad ghosts moving through the woods behind me, rushing to face off against the spectres in grey, racing up the stony hill to my front. Of course, that imaginative scene never materialised for me, not then nor in any of my return visits in the years that followed. Now as an adult, I was given an opportunity to take those imaginative scenarios and apply them to my other interests, like gothic horror, tabletop gaming, and 19th century Italian history.

The purpose of this blog has been to provide the reader with a window into the growth of the book, its new mechanics, and some of its thematic elements. Hopefully it was successful! I’m extremely grateful to have been given the opportunity by Osprey to build upon the wonderful lore that Joe created.

We have striven to create a style of gameplay that respects the rich and complex history of the Calabrian War, as well as the Calabresi themselves, who had to endure years of suffering and mistreatment at the hands of the Bourbons and the French.

As the players begin their own adventures using The Shades of Calabria supplement, I am reminded of the words spoken by the then-king of Naples, Joachim Murat, to French officers after three hard years of campaigning: “Why did you go down into this cut-throat place? But, what is more, you have come out of it like heroes.” It is my sincere hope that all who pick up a copy of The Shades of Calabria end their narrative campaign feeling as if they are heroes, happy and satisfied and ready to return for even more adventures in the future.

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The Silver Bayonet: Italy is out in the UK November 28th, and in the US November 26th.

Pre-order today.

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