Andreivia: an imagi-nation (part one)

Having recently enjoyed Henry Hyde’s Partizan-in-the-Cloud video on the origins of his imagi-nations of Faltenland and Prunkland, I thought I’d share some details of my, quite different, approach to creating the fictional nation of Andreivia.

Now, I’ve always been a sucker for a bargain. I own far too many wargames forces and too many of those were built up because I saw some toys going cheap somewhere. I built Maximilian Adventure forces for Sharp Practice because I had half-a-dozen peons I'd previously picked up when considering a Mexico-focussed pulp campaign. In addition, during the mid- to late-1990s I ran the Northern Gathering of the Society of Twentieth Century Wargamers in Sheffield.  We’d always have a bring-and-buy and I’d always try to buy a souvenir of each event. In a way, these habits were key to the later discovery of Andreivia.

Thanks to my magpie buying habit, I accumulated a truly incoherent stash of late twentieth century military hardware in 20mm scale. Highlights included an A4 Skyhawk, an Argentinian bazooka team, some rather nicely painted plastic Arab infantry, a British Army Wombat AT gun, M2 Bradley IFVs in both temperate and desert camouflage, and even a Japanese Type 60 medium tank from the 1960s. All of this and more on top of a halfway-coherent Soviet force built around a VDV airborne platoon in BMD-1 armoured personnel carriers.

At some point in 2006 I decided I needed to do something with all of this. Even I had come to recognise that I’d most likely never get around to gaming the Falklands conflict, the Arab-Israeli Wars, a 1980s World War Three, and a 1960s invasion of Japan!  

I asked on various internet forums was there any historical setting where I could use a reasonable proportion of this collection? "No" was the resounding answer! 

However, several people did suggest that I create my own tin-pot little African country and play something like Peter Pig’s AK-47 Republic.  This had its appeal, but black African troops were among the few things I didn't have and the idea was most definitely not to buy more stuff to make a project work. [Although of course I'd later go on to purchase plenty of new toys as Andreivia began to build its own momentum.]

So, I started looking around for suitable settings. Where might I use both temperate- and arid-camouflaged materiel with European and Middle eastern-looking infantry?  

The answer came from Raids magazine. This French monthly, then readily available in an English edition, often carried news stories on military exercises in the Mediterranean region, and it wasn’t unusual to see a largely green tank alongside a distinctly desert-coloured armoured personnel carrier.  

Could I use the Med as a setting for a fictional country? Well... maybe... but somehow the region seemed a bit too familiar to allow the levering in of a new country. Then I remembered that the producers of the Sharpe TV series had been happy to send Sean Bean to the Crimea as a reasonably convincing stand-in for the Iberian Peninsula.  Somehow, a new nation on the shores of the Black Sea seemed less of an imposition on at least this Western European's sense of geography.

I knew nothing of the border region between Georgia and eastern Turkey but a new nation there, between the former Soviet Union and NATO, was interesting. If it also touched the borders of Armenia, then the centuries-old antipathy between Turks and Armenians would play into my situation quite nicely.

Influenced by what I had read and seen on television of the Yugoslavian Civil War, I decided to create a socialist republic that had remained outside the Soviet Union and that had managed to maintain a semi-detached relationship to the Warsaw Pact (thus allowing for an eccentric approach to military procurement - I was determined to work in that Japanese Type 60). As the Tito / Enver Hoxha generation of Second World War leaders began to die off there was scope for plenty of internal conflict, which, given the strategic location of the country, could draw in foreign intervention.

If the new country’s next-door neighbour was named for St George, it seemed only reasonable to have mine named for St Andrew. Thus, "Andreivia". 

By similar logic a cross of St Andrew seemed the logical design for the new nation’s flag.  I thought of reversing the colours of the Scottish flag but a blue diagonal cross on a white background already existed in the region as the Russian naval ensign. The easiest fix was to make the background colour yellow.  At that time I declared the cross to be cobalt blue. This was for no other reason than that I happened to have a tube of artist’s acrylic in that colour at the time!

I'd toyed with setting up wargames campaigns in the past. In my youth I was enchanted by Tony Bath's accounts (in Military Modelling and Battle for Wargamers) of his Hyboria campaign. I loved the idea of a long-running campaign with players generating complex and dramatic story lines. However, I knew that even if I had the enthusiasm to create a setting in detail from the ground up, determining population levels and designing fictional national economies, I was unlikely to sustain it over the months or years of campaign administration needed to create the kind of rich setting I aspired to.

So it was that I decided to adopt an approach I'd come across in the context of designing RPG settings; don't nail anything down until you have to!

I created an outline timeline for Andreivia and an outline map.

The eastern Black Sea region in the early 1990s

And there, for the time being, I stopped. 

In the next part of this tale I'll go into detail as to how the history of Andreivia developed as a narrative, co-operative venture starting with some dramatic military operations in the disputed Tuzkhur Valley.

Go to part two