Fighting Sail – Fleet Actions 1775–1815

I write for this history blog on occasion.
This is my review of the excellent naval wargame Fighting Sail.

Suppressing Fire

The Napoleonic War-Head Spike Directionis back, with another review for us; this time the new Naval rules from Osprey Games:

Fighting Sail is a new wargame from Osprey Games, pitting navies from the era of the Napoleonic and Revolutionary wars against each other in games ranging from one-on-one frigate duels, to squadron level battles with ships-of-the-line blasting away at each other.

I was very keen to try this one out, so much so that rather than waiting to amass a fleet of miniatures I assembled two fleets of paper ships, made with artwork from juniorgeneral.org (I highly recommend doing this if you’re strapped for cash, actually. They turned out quite nicely! MS Paint never looked so good!).

The gameplay splits broadly between two fairly obvious areas: sailing and shooting. Initially, I thought that sailing – and the various particulars of rolling for move points and variations due to the direction of…

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Parliament Of The Atlantic

I’m quite pleased with this daft story inspired by information passed on to me by my sister, Rebecca Lindsay, zoology student of note. Thanks to her for checking my science and to Joseph Crouch for suggesting a tweak to the ending.

Professor Barley had placed the subject in a tank about 4 feet square, which she had filled with water and placed on the deck of the Stoneking.  It was heavy enough to remain immobile as the ship, a former fishing trawler and now the Professor’s personal floating fiefdom, rolled in the mid-atlantic swell, gentle by the standards of the great ocean, but strong enough to send unsecured items, belonging to me and the other six interns rolling merrily around below decks, creating minor chaos.  At the top of the tank, a glass lid weighing approximately five kilos blocked the open top pretty much completely, except for a metal bar, wedged between the tank and the lid, with its end in the water.

The object of this exercise was to observe the animal within the tank attempt to escape.  Professor Barley had wanted to extract a wager from one of us on the likelihood of that happening, though no one would take the bet, it looked very unlikely to us, but nobody was smart enough to bet against the Professor anymore.

The animal in the tank was currently languishing grumpily at the very bottom, lying flat against the glass, her skin flushed a sulky red, perhaps in protest at her confinement, rough handling, and the various containers she had been sloshed in and out of since blundering into one of our nets.  I walked over the deck to peer closely at the thing while she was still relatively still.  I wanted a good look at her skin if she decided to change colour, but mostly I found myself staring into her great big beautiful eyes.  They were filled with a life I hadn’t totally expected.  I’d been studying marine life at Miskatonic for the last three years to get my degree, and now I was filling up the summer before starting my masters with this internship.  In that time I had noticed the live specimens I had studied fell into two distinct categories, the blank stares of cute, dumb, little fish.  Or the blank stares of utterly terrifying ‘stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back’ type things that would bite you just to find out if you were worth eating. This was different, the octopus didn’t stare blankly at all, she looked at me, her eye moving around slightly as she took in the details of my form, my face, the sunglasses resting atop my head and my hair, its thick dark brown waves restrained in a ponytail for now, my khaki shorts and my Miskatonic Greek Council T-shirt. I still doubted she knew or understood what she was looking at, but she seemed to. I asked Professor Barley about that.

“You know Kayleigh, I wouldn’t like to say how much they comprehend about us, but I bet it’s more than you’d think. The whole point of this test is to show you how intelligent these animals are.”

“I thought we were supposed to be grossed out by a bit of sea snot squeezing through some tiny gap?” Juan Delray remarked from off to one side, his perpetual smirk creeping into his voice, not for the first time.  I rolled my eyes and made a loud ‘Tsk’ noise, this was involuntary, driven by my loathing for the man-child.

“You’re all postgrad marine biologists,” The professor said to the group, ignoring the tone of Delray’s interjection, “I should hope you understand how an octopus body works, no skeleton, very flexible, etcetera.  What we’re looking for here, is signs of her intelligence. Notice there isn’t actually a gap anywhere for her to get out of the tank, but she could use that little bar as a lever to make one.”

“Octopuses are amazing, but also terribly unlucky,” She continued, “Their intelligence, as a species is so great that they can solve complex puzzles and outwit pretty much any other creature in the sea, but their lives are brutally brief, the males die after mating and the females starve to death while caring for their eggs.  If they had evolved their way out of that, then they could have developed a society. One whose sophistication rivalled our own.”

Delray waddled over to the tank, hoisting his cargo pants back up over the crest of his globular hips, a task of sisyphusian proportions, then bent over, placing his lunar landscape of a face directly adjacent to the creature in the tank.  The two beings exchanged glances for a moment, then Delray rapped sharply on the glass with his meaty knuckle.

“Do something bitch!”

“Juan! Enough! We’ll talk about this afterwards,” Professor Barley admonished.

“Just getting the ball rolling Professor,” he said, before turning to his accomplice, Billy Matheson, and sharing a loathsome grin, both making a strange snorting laugh.  As he turned back to the octopus, she moved suddenly, flying at the side of the tank, tentacles first, as if to attack.  Though the glass prevented it and left her splayed across the side of the tank with her suckers and beak working furiously.  The professor threw down her clipboard in frustration,

“Fucking hell Juan! She’s too agitated to do anything now,” then she said to the group, “Ok, better make it chow time everybody, we’ll have another try at this tomorrow, while Mr Delray assists all with an extra turn on net-mending duty.”  The students filed out to the sound of Juan’s spluttering protests, I was last to go, watching the poor creature in the tank as the Professor and a couple of the regular crew attempted to recapture her, gently, and return her to the small tank she’s been kept in previously, there were tentacles everywhere as she flailed about, confused and frightened.  In that moment I felt truly sorry for this creature, supposedly so clever, being kept in a box for us to study.

That night I lay awake in my cramped bunk in the crew quarters, listening to the others snores, grunts and sleeping murmurs.  Delray wasn’t there, his net-mending would keep him out on deck for another few hours, which gave me no small amount of satisfaction.  However all I could think about was that octopus, alone and frightened in the tank.  In her eyes I had glimpsed something, the more I ruminated on it, the more I became convinced she could understand everything that was happening, that she felt shame and despair at being reduced to a specimen to be examined and tested. In the end I decided I would release her.  The little tank she had been moved to had a lock on it, I resolved to sneak into the main cabin, where all the specimens, living and…not living were kept in various boxes and bags, stacked nearly to the ceiling, pop the lock on the octopus’ box and walk away.  Plausible deniability would be my defence after that.

I got out of my cot, pulling on my dressing gown and pushing my feet into my slippers, shaped like the gaping maws of two great whites, and tiptoed out of the room, and down the tiny corridor to the main cabin.  I had to take special care to steady myself against the roll of the boat, bracing my arms on either wall.

I pulled up short with a start as I edged round the corner into the cabin, there was a pair of feet sticking out from behind a pile of boxes and packing crates, one foot was bare and one had a sock pulled half off, they were twitching and convulsing silently, as if their owner was having some form of seizure.

“Hello? Are you ok? Who’s there?” I ran over behind the stack, and then, I’m not proud of myself here, I screamed like a victim in a slasher movie.

The person prone on the floor was Juan Delray, I only knew this by his faded Rush t-shirt.  His face was totally obscured by his assailant, the octopus.

How she had got herself wrapped completely over his head I never knew, but her slimy, pliant body made a perfect seal, bulging outwards occasionally as beneath her, Delray struggled to breathe.

I stood, frozen to the spot, utterly horrified as the creature completed her act of murder, her skin changing from angry red to a light blue, the colour an octopus turns when satisfied and contented.  Delray shuddered his last and was still.  In that moment I understood the motives of the creature on the floor.

Revenge.

She had understood Juan’s cruel mockery and planned a strike of her own, I saw now her box, the lock broken and the lid pushed open, creating a tiny crack which had allowed her to escape.  The fridge, which stood in the small nook that constituted the galley, was open, its yellow light giving a sickly hue to the scene.  Delray must have come in from his net mending and sought himself a midnight snack, one he would now never eat.

The octopus slithered off Delray’s head.  Removed from the water her body lay almost totally flat, a gelatinous pancake of tentacular malice, eyes poking up from the slowly moving mass, looking around, while the arms stretched out across the floor, feeling, searching for their next target.

Still unable to shake my limbs from the terror inspired torpor, I felt a tentacle brush my feet, thinking soon this sea creature would envelop me, cutting off my air as she did to Juan a moment ago, but she moved on, instead hauling herself up a table leg, onto the keyboard of the ship’s main PC.  Facebook was open on the screen and the action of her questing arms depressed keys, spelling a series of random characters in the ‘what’s on your mind box’, before another arm pressed the backspace and deleted everything.  With torturous slowness, she pulled her whole body up onto the desk, and arranged all her arms so they snaked over the keyboard.  One by one, characters appeared in the box once again.

“moar cCuming. yOo pEritty.  go Naow.”

Suddenly, she dropped from the desk and slid across the room, squeezing under the door which lead out to the main weatherdeck with a sudden burst of terrifying speed. The letters spelt out by the creature on the computer lurked at the back of my mind, I still considered them to be random characters, glimpsed in a hurry and not considered further.  I ran to the door and threw it open looking out onto the deck, lit by floodlights in the darkness.  The octopus was pulling herself up over the rail at the edge of the deck,  I imagine our eyes met again as she sat, draped over the rail like a wet towel, then she dropped into the sea, regaining her true shape in the supporting embrace of the water and disappeared into the abyss, powered by a jet of water.

I leant over the rail, trying to get a glimpse of her as she receded, and was nearly thrown from the ship as there was a great crash, and the groaning sound of metal under stress.  The ship lurched violently, and seemed to have stopped suddenly, as if the anchor had been dropped and caught on something immovable.

I saw more shapes in the water now, approaching from the blackness, they seemed to surround the boat, thin at first, moving swiftly and in formation.  Then as one they spread their bodies to slow down, tentacles now visible and their skins changing from pale blue to deepest red.

I wanted to warn the others, but there was barely time before they slithered up the sides of the boat and infiltrated through every tiny nook and cranny.  I watched from the lifeboat I had commandeered as the lights all over the Stoneking went out, and listened, agonized over the screams of the crew and my fellow interns, which fell silent shockingly quickly.  As I gunned the lifeboat’s engine and sped in the direction I reckoned the eastern seaboard must be, I saw the boat begin to settle astern, disappearing under the waves, perhaps they had made a hole in it somehow?
In the madness of that night it seems silly to recall, that a glowing plume of tentacled flotsam seemed to rise, in two great pillars.  Taller even than the main faculty building at Miskatonic, embracing the floating tomb called Stoneking.

Not-For-Profit

I love music. I am a poor musician but I enjoy playing, and inflicting my noise on people as part of a band, this text below is my fantasy of how that should play out. Part of a wider story that I will not finish, so here you are…

That night Green Goddess were second on at a not-for-profit DIY night in a cellar in Camden, Neal considered these to be the best kind of gigs really.  They were put on by someone with a lot of time (or some maniacs who had way too much to do already!) and all the door money was split between the bands. There were no fancy light rigs, or those tacky revolving disco things, and the musicians usually preferred to do the sound between themselves, twiddling knobs at random until they arrived at something all were happy with.  Better that than someone calling themselves a ‘sound guy’ or worse, ‘engineer’ who would do the exact same thing, before demanding payment, or worse, payment in beer.  The alternative to this DIY philosophy was the scabs who were trying to make money from the venture!  The audacity of it!  As if anyone expected a band to make money these days, a stupid idea.

      The crowd was respectable, about 50 or 60 people in a rotating roster between the main room where the bands played and the outside seating where they could smoke and talk loudly about themselves.  The challenge was to play something that would bring the self-centred tossers in to watch you, normally it worked around the time of the penultimate song.  Though a decent number were loitering inside, and they seemed to be waiting expectantly, Neal had noted this recent development, and put it down to Izzy’s influence.  They hadn’t been playing together long, but she had something, magnetism and charisma that left people staggered, him included. 

      She wasn’t, in any sense what ‘girls in bands’ were supposed to be like, she wasn’t a girl even! Izzy was, definitively and defiantly, a woman, a female musician, but never a girl.  The closest comparison Neal could think of was Poison Ivy Rorschach, the guitarist of The Cramps. 

      Everybody remembers Lux Interior deep throating the mic and running round in high heels and his PVC thong, but Ivy was the one in charge, she wrote all the music, did all the arrangements, she even took over as the band’s manager when the man who had been responsible for them fucked the whole thing up royally.  She strutted round the stage with this look, it just said do not fuck with me. These knee high boots conceal deadly weapons and I will fuck you up while my husband holds you down. See my husband? He’s the one in the bondage gear over there humping the speaker stack, I’m the boss of him, do you think anything in the world scares me?

     Izzy had the same look.  And people loved her for it.  She didn’t state any of this explicitly, or preach anything, she just lived it.

    Woody went up to the ‘stage’ first (one corner of the main bar.  The one place that didn’t obscure the route to the bar or the toilet), his own snare and kick pedal under one arm.  They were sharing a lot of gear with the first band which made this entrance look even more slick than it was.  He settled himself behind the kit, adjusting the distance of everything by fractions of inches, then stretching out his arms, a stick in each hand to gauge the positioning, and making further minute adjustments.  When he was satisfied he waved to Neal, who was ordering drinks in his most affected nonchalant way, doing his best to hide the nerves.  Neal in turn waved to the friendly bartender he’d talked to earlier, who obligingly turned out all of the lights in the room, just as Woody plugged in the strip of blue LED lights that ran right across the stage, running along the tops of the amplifiers and the PA cabinets, and was now the only source of light, a dull blue glow that made everything look cold, evil, and awesome!  Woody started drumming now, a lazy, yet thunderous beat that he kept up as Neal worked his way to the front of the crowd, carrying a pint in each hand, one for him and one for Woody, who always forgot to get one, but would be gasping by the third song at the latest.

    Neal picked up The Pig, his cheap, heavy, and shit, bass guitar that he had bought with money he saved from his paper round in 1999, preserved for gigs, the thing sounded nasty in just the right way, but couldn’t be relied upon for anything but trouble and strife.  One day soon, when the moment felt right, Neal was going to smash it on stage, a sacrifice in the name of art and noise.  He couldn’t wait.  The Pig rumbled and burped out the bass line for the first song, slow and ominous in the blue gloom, and a few people cheered, either they knew the song of they were just enjoying themselves, could go either way.  Neal smiled to himself, concealed in the dark as Izzy stepped up and plugged in her guitar.  She’d put her game face on and that always made Neal laugh, to see his mate, normally so chilled and happy-go-lucky suddenly become this stonehearted mean faced killer, it was excellent.  The Gretsch came to life in a scream of feedback and Neal jumped into the air as Woody seemed to hit everything at once, the whole room tipped 45 degrees and the crowd howled at the sudden release of energy.  Just a few seconds in and Neal could feel the sweat gathering in the small of his back and soaking his hair, dripping from his fringe.

They must have doing something right as the room seemed more packed by the second, the smokers and the talkers were being drawn in and taken under Izzy’s spell.  One bloke, and that was the best word to describe him, except maybe ‘ape’, duck egg blue shirt stained with spilled beer and revealing some hairy belly along it’s lower perimeter, made a lunge for Izzy and managed to lay a paw on the strings of her guitar, the song faltered and hung in the balance for an agonising moment, a half second that stretched on forever.  Neal stepped forward, the headstock of The Pig pointed at eye level like a spear, but Izzy didn’t need him, probably didn’t even notice him as she kicked the guy squarely in the crotch, and shoved him back using the guitar, the crowd cheered even louder and Izzy dropped back into the song without missing a beat as the bloke was dragged away by a bouncer, what became of him after that, Neal could only speculate.

    The bar had a backstage of sorts, it had previously been a restaurant next door owned by the same guy, who also did the cooking, but when he retired his daughter took over and didn’t bother keeping the restaurant going.  Now when bands played they dumped their gear there and slumped amongst the tables and chairs when they had finished their sets to recover.  There was a sofa which a shirtless Woody had claimed, he was now soundly asleep and snoring loud enough to compete with the DJ next door.  Neal was sat on the floor with his back resting on the same sofa, head back and eyes closed.  Izzy sat on a wooden chair, putting her guitar back in its hard case and stowing away leads and doing all the myriad little fiddly things that you have to remember when gigging.  She sighed and smiled in a satisfied way.

“That was intense man,” No response, “Neal?” She snapped her fingers in his face and his eyes flicked open “Neal!”

“What? I wasn’t sleeping.” He protested as he dragged himself into a more upright position, his muscles squealing in protest.

“You were!” she insisted, “I said that was intense, people were actually into us tonight.  Nice one.”  Neal rubbed his eyes to get some life back into them after the total energy expenditure of the performance.

“It was you Izzy, they love you. You ARE a rock star, in the proper sense of the word.”

“Shut up,”

“I mean it, you’re so, and excuse me for being American here, badass! I’m a bit in love with your stage persona, She is terrifying.”

“I didn’t realise I had one.”

“Well you do,”

“Neal, can I ask you something?”

“Go on,”

“I’m really serious about doing this for a living, I know it’s stupid but I don’t want to do anything else with my life.  I need you, I don’t want to spend another two years finding the right band, you boys are it.  Can I count on you to stick with me Neal?”

Neal looked into her eyes, there was no way he could afford to keep doing this full time, his sister refused to lend him any more money and his parents didn’t speak to him all any more.  By his estimates he could go without a job for maybe another two months.

“I’m with you all the way Iz.”