The American Civil War Is My Favorite War

"It is good that war is so terrible, lest we should grow too fond of it."
-Robert E. Lee

Okay, I'm just going to go ahead and outright say it...

In my honest and humble opinion, I think that the American Civil War is probably my favorite war.

There, I said it.

In many ways, the American Civil War was a crossroads in military history, both in terms of the tactics and in military technology. It was the intersection of both the old style of warfare that had been dominant from the advent of firearms up through the Napoelonic Era and what would become the newer warfare of the 20th Century that in many ways continues to still shape the nature of even our modern warfare in the early 21st Century.

It is also a cool setting in terms of its aesthetics. Victorian fashions, steam locomotives, and wearied bloodied soldiers in snazzy blue and ragged gray uniforms horribly killing each other across the green hills and valleys of the quaint Virginia countryside.

Not to mention the fact that the music from the Civil War also seriously kicked ass too.

Only the rock songs of the Vietnam War can come anywhere as close to being as awesome as this....

I honestly think that the American Civil War would make for a very good setting both in gaming and fan fiction. It has a small yet significant and devoted presence in miniature tabletop war gaming, but not much in role-playing games, and nearly no presence at all in video games.

Basically, the only video games set in the Civil War were a few strategy games in the 1990's and early 2000's, a couple of low-budget FPS games that the History Channel put out for the Playstation 2 and Xbox 360 in the late 2000's (back when History Channel still actually at least pretended to care about history) and an online multiplayer game on the PC called War of Rights that is still in an open early access development but can be purchased on Steam.

However, as an American, and as someone who lives in Virginia where a large portion of the war's major battles were fought, I have a deep passion and interest for the American Civil War.

To paraphrase the late great author and historian Shelby Foote, any understanding and I mean true understanding of the history of the United States begins with an understanding of the Civil War. It defined us as a nation. The Revolutionary War set us free and the World Wars made us a superpower, but the Civil War was the crossroads of our being. It defined us as a nation and what kind of character we would have as a nation, both in good and bad ways.

And I have to agree with Shelby Foote on that. The American Civil War was the crossroads of American history and it was a hell of a crossroads.

To get back to the topic of gaming, I personally think that the setting of the American Civil War would make for an excellent source of drama, storytelling, role-playing, and conflict. And I may or may not have an open-world sandbox RP campaign based on the American Civil War, most likely using Boot Hill 2E or d20 Past as a rules set.

So watch this space!