Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Horse & Musket Volume II

  One of the joys and pains of scenario design in Horse & Musket is creating and learning about obscure battles. Sometimes maps and sources are so few that a scenario has to be abandoned, such as Villmanstrand (part of the Russo-Swedish War 1741-43). On the other end are battles for which maps and books in English are plentiful, such as Fontenoy and Culloden. Kesselsdorf lies between the obscure and the famous.  The first step is to read what I can on the battle. The number of books treating the topic in a super specific way is zero. There are...

The challenge in creating Volume II of Horse & Musket lay with picking a time frame. The War of the Spanish Succession set the overall parameters of musket combat, which did not greatly change until the American and particularly the French Revolution. Yet, there is a difference between the wars that were fought from 1721 to 1748 on the one hand, and the apocalyptic Seven Years’ War on the other. The difference was less in tactics and more in the armies. The main armies of Europe in the period were France, Britain, Prussia, and Austria. Each had very different experiences...