It all makes for an excellent scenario, set when the pre-dreadnought battleship was the epitome of Edwardian power and elegance. In fact, The Riddle of the Sands even involved a planned German invasion of Britain, launched from the German North Sea coast. The plot of both books centred around Anglo-German rivalry, the threat of war, and spies.
Better still, this was the background to Erskine Childers’ great adventure book The Riddle of the Sands, written in 1903, or John Buchan’s magnificent Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), turned into a gripping film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935
The diplomatic brinkmanship before the start of the First World War makes a great backdrop for a fictional battle or campaign – you’ve got the Balkan Wars, Anglo-German rivalry, clashes over Colonial policy in Africa and a general drum-banging militarism. Fortunately, this was a period which was ideally suited to “what-if” scenarios. Like the earlier period, this was one where I had to rely on a fictitious war, fought during the last years of the Edwardian Era, or a year or two afterwards. The result is a large and growing collection of late pre-dreadnoughts, which I still use with Perfidious Albion rules, available as a download from A&A Games. This time I bought two core fleets – one British and the other German, although I’ve since added a few others – Austro-Hungarian, French and Italian warships. Well, I bought a few, then a few more, and before I knew it I had a range of pre-dreadnoughts, most of which were from the period from 1890-1910 – around the time HMS Dreadnought entered service in 1906 and changed the face of naval warfare forever. Jim was offering them for sale, as a way of raising money for Mrs. He had a friend – a ship modeller called Mike Earll – who died, leaving his poor widow with a garage full of scratch-built ship models. However, I’d already adopted the rule that I shouldn’t take on a major new period without abandoning an old one, and by that time I’d already started collecting a whole new set of pre-dreadnoughts. This was a difficult thing to do, as the ships really looked great. I’ve since sold these two fleets to my buddy Dave Marks down in London, who should put them to good use. There’s Something Wrong with our Bloody Fish Today! (2).
0 kommentar(er)
