Sunday, 3 February 2013
In Her Majesty's Name
View Hallo Chaps! Gladstone's whiskers it's been a while but when Her Majesty calls ect. Harrumph! Any hows old beans some exciting news for you Little Wars fellas, you should be aware that those wags at Osprey Publishing are releasing one of your gamebooks in April entitled "In Her Majesty's Name" (stand straight there fella!) but new intel has appeared on my Babbage Engine about some toy soldiers to accompany it (all from those johnnies at North Star and post free for you fine chaps across the Empire in distant climes where the sun never sets like Australia).
I saw these posted on Facebook earlier. They do look pretty fabulous!
ReplyDeleteThey could very easily derail my plans for this year...
Oh I say how splendid; immediately promoted to the top of the wish list!
ReplyDeleteI say! Rather splendid, what!
ReplyDeleteDash it all! There goes my budget for raising new troops, old boy! How absolutely splendid!
ReplyDeleteJust wonderful stuff! I could loose myself collecting fine characterful miniatures like these.
ReplyDeleteGentlemen,
ReplyDeleteWhen we were first approached to create this game, we did a lot of research into both the period, contemporary literature, games and figures currently on the market, and the genre as a whole. There are some good games out there already but most of them are wedded to a specific narrative and many have really gone off on a fantastical tangent.
We felt that the Victorian Scientific Romances that entranced us both as children deserved something different. Authors like Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and H.G. Wells gave us a vision of an age where anything was still considered possible.
Thus we decided to create game founded in the actual technology of the late Victorian era, but enhanced by logical extrapolations of that technology such as that dreamt of by Edison and Tesla and a thousand less famous scientific geniuses. The patent records of the time would have made da Vinci jump for joy. Want a Bowler hat with a pistol in it - there was a real patent for it. Want to distribute electricity wirelessly - Tesla patented it. How much further advanced would the technology of 1895 have been if Babbage had been successful with his mechanical computers in the 1840's, fifty years before the period we cover?
We also looked closely at the beliefs and superstitions of the period. Even great men of the time believed in things that we would now consider fantastical, so what if some of these were actually true? It was a time of Spiritualism and Mesmerism, of illusionists, diabolical cults and new religions. Men still regarded their souls as worth saving, and a few as worth stealing.
Cheers,
Craig.