A Tiger's Leap

By TWCaartist

The After Action Report is a genre defined as a written report of an ongoing campaign - set often in the ancient world such as Imperial Rome, or the Crusades, or ancient Japan. These reports write-up a player's experience in the game and often detail events and battles in these campaigns.

Within that AAR genre, however, lies other tales which use that campaign to launch a tale or story which delves much deeper into a fictional world. These AARs are of that type - complex, character-driven, adventures which stand alone and apart from the game campaign upon which they are based.

Enter the world, then, where the tiger leaps out of its path and into a history where armies crumble, travellers fall afoul of conspiracy and the dust of war and battle never rests but coats all . . .

This is the first volume in an ongoing series of AARs entitled 'A Tiger's Leap' and launches the first episodes of six AARs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TWCaartist
• Release date: May 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476257518

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Published by AARTISTS at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Retained By The Individual Authors

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"For Robespierre, Roman antiquity was a past charged with the here-and-now, which he exploded out of the continuum of history. The French revolution thought of itself as a latter day Rome. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a past costume. Fashion has an eye for what is up-to-date, wherever it moves in the jungle [Dickicht: maze, thicket] of what was. It is the tiger’s leap into that which has gone before . . ."

- Walter Benjamin

AN ANTHOLOGY OF THE AAR

Introduction

What is an AAR and why an anthology of AARs?

I remember a few years ago watching a TV program called Time Commanders which allowed a team to take control of a classical army and fight an AI opponent in real time. As an avid war-gamer in my youth I was impressed with the graphics and gameplay and duly decided to buy the game which was behind this TV program. This was my first introduction to the Total War series and that first game was Rome: Total War, created by Creative Assembly. Very quickly, my life became one long round of empire-building and real-time battles using Roman legionaries against hordes of barbarians and much fun was had and still is! It was then that I discovered an online community called Total War Centre - a place primarily for players and fans to communicate, ask questions, pose problems and - more importantly - build modifications to the main game so that it became more ‘realistic’ or indeed added more depth to some of the underdeveloped aspects of the game. This last element, the modding aspect, is a crucial part of the Total War Centre online community and several mods have become established as classics in their own right. Mods such as Europa Barbarorum, Roma Surrectum, and Invasio Barbarorum, to name but a few of the dozens of mods, caught my attention and in the end my love of the Late Roman period allowed me to download and play the last one mentioned in particular. I immersed myself both in the mod’s details of that period and those fellow players who contributed to the forum. It was then that I stumbled into the whole AAR side of things and discovered another aspect to the online community.

In a nutshell, the After Action Report is an ongoing write-up of a single player’s campaign as it is played. The player will fictionalise the campaign by using and role-playing some or many of the AI characters given to him in the game as it develops. These characters range from important generals to spies and ambassadors down to local commanders and even merchants and priests - all of whom will accrue traits as they survive the battles and intrigues to follow. The most basic form of the AAR will involve a player introducing himself and the mod/game he is playing, which particular faction he will be using, and some of his overall objectives and rules. He will then update periodically with in-game shots of the campaign world map and also battle pics to illustrate how his tactics are working (or not!). Often these AARs will tail-off after a few updates as the campaign stalls or a save game becomes corrupt or the player becomes involved in real-life issues and no longer has time to update on a regular basis.

Other AARs however stay the course and over a long period of time, readers will journey along with the player over the mishaps, the triumphs and the sometimes bizarre things the AI does within the game. The faction rises into a serious power in the world and major characters grow up and then die or are killed as the years and decades move by. These AARs make for addictive reading because you are invited in to see another player and the choices he makes. There are even AARs which allow you to decide some of the next moves to come. On the whole these AARs allow the wider community to feel connected and involved in an ongoing online world.

Behind these AARs emerge other versions however and these strike a different tone or approach. These AARs focus much more on the internal world and the characters and far less on the outside player. They draw you into a fictionalised world and only dimly do you perceive the larger game mechanics in the background. Emperors collude with assassins as generals train troops while fleets are assembled - but in these AARs you do not see so much the choices the player is making as you are privy to the choices the characters are forced to make. Drama emerges as a real dynamic and fate or tragedy stands closely in the wings as a surrogate for the player’s choices.

Reading these AARs as a writer, I was soon struck by the variation in approach in the whole AAR genre: from the game-play openness, to the internal dramatic perspective, to finally AARs where you would not even know what the wider gaming mechanic was - so far into its fictional world were you thrown. These AARs also sprouted daily and weekly - some falling away, others updating week by week and gaining loyal readers and feedback. Soon competitions were emerging such as the Monthly After Action Report and Tale of the Week. Inspired by the game mechanics and the lush visuals, player after player aspired to put pen to paper and write a cracking story. Very quickly I could see a sort of continuum within the AAR genre: at one end what I call the documentary approach in which the player narrates or shows in-game pics of his campaign, often looking for advice or feedback, to the film approach where the game becomes dressing for a story within the campaign. There is no absolute difference between these two approaches but rather a sliding scale between them.

As the months passed I fell into the AAR world more than I did playing the game. I launched my first tentative AAR and waited nervously to see how it would be received. Alas, my main character died early on and the AAR ended as a result - but it allowed me to see the possibilities as a writer not only in the genre itself as a writing medium but also in the readership side of it; the feedback and criticism which was offered up. That was about 3 years ago and since that time I have written several AARs and have got to know several fellow writers within the Total War Centre community.

Which I suppose leads me back to my original question: why an anthology of AARs? What has struck me most over the last few years is the sheer quality of the writing and the genre itself. So I began to