Of course, people have a variety of ideas as to what the good stuff to include should be. I once participated in a 15-player Ancient Greek campaign in which the included economic game quickly came to dominate. Trading and production became the focus of the players' attention, with battles rare and primarily aimed at destroying or protecting crops. This seemed to please most of the players, and a reasonable argument can be made for the historical plausibility of the system, but it did not pose the kinds of problems I was interested in solving, so it was not a good system for me. If you are to enjoy your campaign be sure that you know what you want to do.
What to Look For
So what do I look for in a campaign? I want to give the players a chance to exercise what I think is a critical skill: operating with incomplete information. I want to see how terrain affects the choice of where armies end up fighting, and try my eye at using terrain to its best advantage. I want to include the coordination and control problems that appear when the arena grows beyond a single battlefield. I want to use historical force structures to see if I can get any insight into how they affected the way the armies fought. I want to explore the constraints on getting the troops to and onto the battlefield and the proper use of light cavalry. I want to try to out-maneuver an opponent and to worry about lines of communication. And I want to do it in a game that gracefully handles 8-12 players.
This has led, through a number of trials (and at least as many errors), to an system our club has used for several successful Napoleonic campaigns. Each focused on an area perhaps a week's march across, with a couple of corps on each side, and lasted a couple of weeks of campaign time. It isn't all that hard to do, we've had a whole bunch of fun, and we may even have learned something along the way. What follows is a description of how we have handled this particular type of campaign.
Starting Out
The first and absolutely necessary prerequisite is a congenial group of players and one person willing to serve as referee. If the players are going to argue about details constantly, or if you don't have a referee, this method of campaigning will not work. At all. One of the things that happens with a campaign is that all sorts of odd situations will arise. You can attempt to write rules to cover everything, but you will probably end up with a huge compendium of exceptions and unforeseen interactions, and bog down in the minutia of rewriting and adapting. You will be more successful if you keep a free kriegspiel in mind. Given a framework of rules and methods, the referee should be free to handle each situation in the way that he feels will most benefit the game and the players. Remember that the referee is always right, even when he is demonstrably wrong.
We have found that one player to a division works well. In part this is because that is the command size our rules use: one on-table command figure per division. It also is a natural size unit for issuing independent orders. The players who are corps commanders generally also command one division of that corps. The over-all commanders of each of the sides typically also command the heavy cavalry reserve or a similar formation.
There are a couple of other constraints you need to watch. You need to have the troops to fight the battles you will generate. Murphy's Law says that there will probably be an Armageddon-like encounter sometime during your campaign, and you will need the lead to back up your campaign design. While our Spaniards have filled in for Dutch-Belgians when absolutely necessary, you need to have figures of some sort for every unit you include.
Finding Your Way
You will also need maps. This size campaign seems to fit nicely in an area about 50 x 100 km, so you will need some sort of map covering this size area. In order to get to solve some of the problems I think are most interesting, your maps should have enough detail to go directly to the tabletop. We have used several approaches to this. In one early campaign I used a 500,000:1 topographical map to get the general terrain features, then drew tactical-scale maps with fictional terrain of the right types to cover the areas the armies actually traversed. Later, we fought a Waterloo-area campaign using maps adapted from a reprint of Ferrari's watercolor maps of the area, known to have been used by officers on both sides in 1815.
For our last campaign, we had what I think was the best system we have yet tried. Each player was given an operational map showing major roads, rivers, and towns on an 11x17 sheet of paper. For the actual terrain, I scanned a topographical map of the area, scaled the scan so that 1/4" was equal to a foot of tabletop (305 m in our case), superimposed a hex grid, and then redrew the map using GeoHex shapes for contours. Since I had to work from a modern map, I eliminated all the new highways and railroads, most of the other roads, and reduced the size of the cities to the best estimates I could get. I used the current vegetation and water courses, except that I eliminated drainage canal systems, replacing them with bog. Each page at this scale made up one section of the operational map. When an army moved into that section, the commander got the map.
I started with maps of the sections where contact was most likely, and frantically prepared more as the armies dashed hither and yon. These maps make it easy to handle the transition from map to tabletop. Terrain just down the road a bit is clearly defined, although the players have only a general notion of what it is until they have actually been there to scout it out. An additional benefit to having the map on the computer is that I can add layers for each side and one for my own notes. This means that I can easily print out a map for a battle showing one side's own units and those enemy units he has seen, while hiding the other information. When we get to the tabletop I rescale the map of the immediate area, usually to 1/2in or 3/4 in to the foot, before printing and distributing them.
Choose a new path
Finally, you need some inspiration. You have probably started on this whole campaign thing because some real campaign impressed you with its possibilities. Let me strongly suggest that you not refight a historical campaign, for two reasons. First, the referee will inevitably be besieged by players clamoring to include some stray bit of detail from their own research that benefits their army: some odd company-sized unit that has to be added to their division, the loopholed garden wall on the second block of some village, or the three dozen remounts that arrived on day four. This just gets in the way of getting on with the game.
The second, more important, objection is related. If you are refighting an interesting historical campaign it will have been analyzed, often to death. One of the first Napoleonic campaigns I attempted to run was a refight of Waterloo, using Bruce Quarrie's rules. The Prussian player, confronted with a French attack, is not presented with the same difficult choice that Blucher faced: he has nearly two hundred years of second-guessing and analysis to fall back on. He also has a complete OB of the allies and enemy, their historical starting positions, and objectives. The player in the role of Napoleon knows far more about the British dispositions than Wellington himself did!
Instead, set up a campaign based on the historical one, including the features that made it interesting to you in the first place, but explicitly different. A couple of years ago we played one enjoyable Waterloo-based campaign in which the force structure had been changed a bit and the French had begun by making a successful attack at Charleroi, pursuing the Prussians to the East before the game began. The problems were fresh, and the players got to make their own new mistakes.
If you are contemplating your first campaign, it is a really, really good idea to start with a couple of warm-ups: just one small corps on each side, just beginning to move into contact with perhaps a single battle to be fought. This lets you test your rules, referee, and players without a huge expenditure of time and effort. Adjust and try again until you're confident that you're ready to invest in the whole thing. We did this, and it was invaluable training not only for the referee, but for the players. We have, in fact, done this a couple of times since as a way of spicing up a single game.
More Napoleonic 1812 Campaigning
Often the first reason for trying a campaign is simply to avoid some of the problems inherent in one-off games, like the quarter-to-quitting-time charge, use of recon elements primarily as battle troops, and not retaining a reserve for pursuit. Much of this can be handled by playing a series of linked games with extended consequences: the troops available in game 2 depend on what happened in game 1. This type of system is fairly straight-forward to set up and run, but I tend to think of it as a game-generator, rather than a real campaign. More interesting are campaigns that also allow to try your hand at problems not posed in single battles: larger scale maneuver, communications, reconnaissance, choice of terrain, choices of force composition, logistics, diplomacy, and economics.
As more of these possibilities are included, of course, the campaign expands until it becomes completely impractical - and too much like real work to be fun. A good system is structured to let you deal with the problems you find interesting, and abstract the others, keeping the practical problems within reason.
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