Wandering through the local bookstore with my wife, I was suddenly distracted by a paperback sitting, cover out, at eye level. This cover depicted gentlemen in peaked caps firing a cannon at a T-Rex on a sandy beach. I was intrigued, to say the least.
The book was Taylor Anderson’s “Purgatory’s Shore”, and the synopsis lived up to the cover. To give an extremely simple summary, US reinforcements bound for Vera Cruz during the Mexican-American War are swallowed up by a cyclone that transports them to a different dimension, one where Dinosaurs, lizardmen, and a viciously oppressive regime threaten the inhabitants of an alt-Yucatan. Only the Americans and their modern artillery can save the day.
So it isn’t high art, but it is a hell of a lot of fun, and a good bit of military fiction. After about a third of the book I was smitten and decided it would be an excellent idea to wargame this fictional world. I didn’t realize how in-depth the universe would get and that Mr. Anderson had a parallel series called “Destroyermen” that followed a WWII US Destroyer similarly snatched away to this alternate world. I tend to get ahead of myself. All that to say that I made some initial choices that don’t align with Mr. Anderson’s vision, and so I own the mistakes and lore-inaccuracies that fans of the series are sure to notice.
Anyways, my initial excitement: An early battle sees US forces trapped on a beach defending against waves of lizardmen (Grik, in universe) and evil empire aligned local tribes. I thought this would be a good place to start. The order of battle seemed simple enough, the scenario was well defined, and it would be a fun entry to the world that I could bring to the club for people to try.
The first step was to pick a ruleset and define forces. My go to large skirmish set is the ‘Rampant’ series by Dan Mersey. Mixing black powder weapons with bows, swords, and teeth make me think Dragon Rampant could best represent the wide mix of forces in a reasonable manner. US forces were clear, we needed volunteers, regulars, dragoons, and cannon. OPFOR was a mix of Central American Native Irregulars and Lizardmen, plus a stand out T-Rex for a showy centerpiece.
I have access to an order of battle, a 3D printer, and a credit card. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t find anyone that produced US Mexican-American War figures in plastic in 28mm. There are some great figures from 1st Corps (pictured below) but they were a little out of my price range at the time. So I had to rethink my approach.
The Evil Empire in the story is the Holy Dominion, an authoritarian theocracy with frankly loony levels of evil that came about as displaced Spaniards conquered and then merged with the local Aztec-parallel. So what if I gamed that conflict instead, and returned to the Artillerymen at a later date?
This was mid-December of 2025 and Wargames Atlantic was having a sale on their plastic kits. It so happened that I could grab a box of their lizardmen, which I was planning on from the start, and then grab some boxes of their Aztec and Conquistador lines for about the same price as a single batch of period-appropriate pewter. So the scene was set, I would first wargame the Spanish conquest of this new world’s new world.
It took until I got a bit further into the book to learn that the Spanish conquest happened about a century later than the conquistadors were ravaging our own new world, but hey, lets call this an earlier, failed attempt. Why not?
Next time, I’ll get into how I decided that the best thing to do with the project was bring it to a convention!
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