Enter, the Queen's Musketeers

Introducing another Batrachian unit, the Queen Marie Suzette's Musketeers. This unit oftens serves as a guard for the Queen on various royal occasions and excursions. But don't let that or the colorful uniforms fool you, this is a battle-hardened unit, lead by Colonel le Comte de Dormez-vous. The Col. le Comte is a political appointee and a favorite of the Queen.

Unknown Soldier

This is probably a long shot, but can anyone identify this unknown soldier found wandering in a garden? Presumed to have been there since the 60's or earlier.
I haven't seen it in person yet, but I'm told he stands around 2 inches tall, and from the depiction he could be a "flat".

A bit of philosophy

I have been following a bit of discussion on the Old School Wargaming Yahoo Group concerning fictional countries/worlds and Napoleonic era gaming. That and other thoughts from other groups about starting new periods got me to thinking a bit about imaginations and ImagiNations (ImagiNations = imaginary countries).

The aforementioned discussion revolved around why so few of these ImagiNation campaigns seem to take place in the Napoleonic era and so many in the 18th century/Seven Years War era. I don't know, but I suspect there are several reasons, some of which were expounded on in that discussion. Among these are:

• possibly a "cultural" bias in the sense that earlier practitioners and writers on wargaming chose to use the SYW era for theImagination campaigns, thereby giving the idea a certain stamp of approval. While their counterparts who wrote of Napoleonic gaming mostly confined themselves to more historic and less fictional participants. I haven't read all of the literature so I may be characterizing the differences incorrectly.
• possibly, as some have said, the Napoleonic gamers tend to be more "serious" about the history of the period they play in.
• possibly, as others have said, Napoleon so dominates the era that people can hardly conceive of gaming in the period without the little corporal and the French dominating the game (witness some of the recent proposals to have Nappy assasinated to remove his influence from the premise for a campaign, or moving the time period forward a bit past so Napoleon is out of the picture, imprisoned on St. Helena for example)

So, while there have been some ideas for more or less Napoleonice era campaigns they still seem to remain rooted for the most part in real countries. But there is no reason you couldn't have a couple of minor states battling it out as surrogates of the major powers or even as a completely separate conflict, neither affecting nor affected by the Napoleonic conflict. After all, the mid-18th century ImagiNations are often a world apart from the Seven Years War and Frederick and Maria Theresa and other lofty personages.

There are, of course, the rare exceptions, but by and large most of the ImagiNations do seem to find themselves in the mid-18th century. I haven't seen or heard of many WWII or American Civil War era campaigns using ImagiNations, for example. A few do break the mold to be situated in other eras (or places?), and some gamers indulge in a bit of time travel and visit their ImagiNations in more than one era (or even genres). And then there are the games and campaigns that are conducted in mythical places like Afriboria, Hyboria, and the like. Not to mention all of the fantasy and much sci-fi games and campaigns.

So my point is it's okay to use your imagination and some artistic license and discover new worlds, at the very least new geographies situated within the lighter corners of our own world.

Have fun!