My first task for the campaign was to make a map for the armies to fight over. As I’m using the rules of ‘A House Divided’ this meant it would be a straignt area-to-area map of boxes for key locations, linked by roads or railways or seaports. There was also the matter of production points. For this, I decided to make liberal use of Wikipedia and base things primarily on population. After only the briefest of checks, it was clear that info on Scotland’s population, industry and Railway networks of the 1860’s was not of use at all - I’d have to launch a major historical research project! I rapidly decided to use only present-day information, as this was readily available. This would mean certain ‘new towns’ only built after WW2 to ease overcrowding in Glasgow would anachronistically be created in 1861, but I overcame this problem simply enough – I just decided I didn’t care!
Production proved easy enough to work out. Scotland has a population of about 5.2million, so by taking 1 Production Point (PP) as representing about 100,000 people, I quickly managed to knock together a numerical value for each major city, up to a total of 52PP’s on the map. For the rural population, I took the total for each local council region (equivalent to U.S. States, I suppose) and applied it to whichever town was where the council offices were based – the administrative heart where any rural recruits would be assembled anyway.
The overall geography was pretty easy to map out. Scotland is (running south to north) first hilly border-country, then the narrow ‘waist’ of the country at the roughly 40-mile wide Central Belt where most of the population is based - principally in the two major cities of Glasgow in the west, end Edinburgh in the east.
After this, the landscape generally builds up into the mountainous
So, I picked the large cities and towns as ‘areas’ for the map, marking up a photocopied roadmap to sort it out, and drew out the roads & railways as they exist in the modern day (much easier in the Highlands, as the terain usually limits you to only one or two big roads out of each town. I assigned the PPs to each town and got a pretty decent spread.
I then spent a quite enjoyable amount of time randomly swapping ownership of various combinations between the
Nevertheless, as you can see from the map below, I generally sorted things out along these lines. The Union has the Borders and the Central Belt, while just northwards of the bottleneck ‘waist’ we have the Rebellious States, with their centres of power in Fife (the ‘Virginia’ of the Rebellion) and in far-off Inverness (like New Orleans, a major city far in the rear, but vulnerable to Naval attack.) The city of
Next, the armies themselves!
Your map is an excellent adaptation of a 'normal' map for use as a campaign map. It is easy to understand and should make for a very interesting campaign.
ReplyDeleteGood luck with it,
Bob Cordery
Hi Bob,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments! I'm heading towards more details shortly, which I hope to post soon.
CWT