Introduction to Afrika

Fantasy Afrika for Skirmish Sangin

In 2015 Dishdash Publishing (DD) was approached by the Miniature Building Authority (MBA) with a request to sell our game Skirmish Sangin in their forthcoming Kickstarter. The Kickstarter was to create a series of 28mm non-denominal forces for a fantasy modern Africa.

At the time we where creating our own Somali miniatures for our project Maalintii Rangers (Day of the Rangers) that went on to be a very successful Kickstarter for us and you will see many of those miniatures in the forthcoming book, as they make great Afrika OPFOR Forces

After a brief discussion between the two companies, I got over excited about things as is usual and decided I would create a special book called Skirmish Afrika especially for that MBA Kickstarter. 

As MBA wanted to make sure this was all fantasy we looked at the country of Africa and first off  completely redrew the country boundaries and renamed the countries. Being long time Deutsches Afrikakorps (DAK) fans we changed the spelling to Afrika to emphasis the difference.

Thus the book concept was born. As with all births, its had its good bits, its hard bits and it downright painful bits and I am still not quite finished... its currently weighing in at 25k words wise and has breakdowns on 15 countries with ORBATS for all the main protagonists in each one. It also has (currently) 6 scenarios and an article about making Afrika terrain (sneak peek below). ORBATS on PMCs and Guerrillas and few other things to add that Afrikaan flavour.

In our renaming we took all the existing countries chopped up their names and mixed them up, combining country names and keeping the feel of the original african nations. Sometimes we reverted back to ancient country names, sometimes we just went wild with the names. Until we settled on the map of Afrika.

Below you can see one of the proposed double page spreads of the book.

Once the map was redrawn we had to provide sensible backgrounds for each of the countries, we looked at the land masses and worked up using bits of real history but changing the names to protect the innocent and also looked at a sort of modern colonialism. Thus you will be see everyone from China, India, USA and Europe having some influence on our new Afrikaan countries.

We then choose one major conflict for a small campaign of linked scenarios to show how you as players can take these country background and create your own campaigns.

Now obviously this is still a work in progress. The first draft has been completed and gone off to the trusted readers in the Sangin Community for feedback. Once thats collected and analysed, the book edited and laid out, it will just be the photoshoot that will be needed before we can release this bad boy, first to those wonderful people who supported MBA Kickstarter and then to you the waiting public.