With The Silver Bayonet: Britain: Bones of Albion out this week, here's a sneak peek at the book's introduction where author Joseph A. McCullough explores his inspiration. 

Welcome to Britain – Bones of Albion, the fifth supplement for The Silver Bayonet, and the third written by me. Let me open with a confession; this book is very much a love letter to my adopted country. I suppose I have always been a bit of a Britophile. The first authors who influenced me on my road to becoming a writer were J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Louis Stevenson. My favourite television show growing up was Doctor Who. When I got to university, I took every course they had on British history, especially if it covered the so called ‘Dark Ages’, and even went outside of my major to take classes on British literature and Arthurian Romance. Despite that, as a young man, I had no plans, or even desire, to travel across the ocean to visit the place.  

That first occurred when I finished university and my parents sent me on a backpacking trip through Europe, which included three weeks in Britain, an adventure that clearly changed my life. I returned to the island five years later to purse a master’s degree in creative writing. I never finished that course, but I met a lovely young woman, got married, and ended up finding a new home in the country that had so long influenced me from afar.  

In the twenty years I have lived here, I have explored as much of the country as I can, especially its ancient, mostly forgotten corners. Britain is such a fascinating island. It has an extremely high population density, and yet it is so easy to find empty space and solitude. It is covered in so many inspiring ancient and historical sites that many of them are left unremarked amidst fields or on hilltops. If you pull out any of the amazing Ordnance Survey maps that cover Britain, you will find numerous notes like ‘ancient monument’, ‘chapel (ruins of)’, and ‘hill fort’. Those italic notes are often the only clue that something interesting lies just around a corner.  

I didn’t mean to write a Silver Bayonet campaign book about Britain. Not at first, anyway. I just had this little idea. I live close to the Royal Military Canal, a 28-mile canal built as a defensive work and a means of military transport in case Napoleon invaded. It’s also dotted with abandoned World War II pillboxes, in case the Germans invaded. While cycling next to it one day, I had this idea that labourers working on the canal dug up something ancient and evil that caused the dead to rise. I thought I could write it up as a one-off scenario for a magazine. But then I wondered, which dead, exactly, would rise? It could have been just garden variety zombies, but this is an area that has been invaded many times: by the Romans, by the Anglo-Saxons, by the Normans… and, if you expand that to the whole island group, you can add in several other groups of invaders. What if something caused all the dead of all these ancient invaders to rise?  

The idea exploded in my head, and I set out to write a grand campaign that would send the specialist units all over Britain, fighting unique undead from the different eras of the past. My original scenario expanded into eight, and I set each of them in an interesting and unique site in Britain. Many of the scenarios are set in places that I have explored; some are still on my wish list. Now, I should say, that like The Silver Bayonet itself, I am dealing with a bit of pseudo-history here. While all the places I describe in the scenarios exist and can be visited, many of them looked very different in the early 19th century than they do today. Almost all of them have been subject to some level of archaeological study and some have even been rebuilt to various extents. For example, the ancient burial mound of Wayland’s Smithy is one of the coolest places I’ve been to in Britain, but much of that is the result of work done in the 1960s. Before that, it probably just looked like a hill with a few big rocks. But if you are playing a miniatures game of gothic horror, why would you put a hill in the middle of your table when you could put a full burial mound surrounded by ancient stones? I love history, but I try not to let it get in the way of having fun on the tabletop! I leave it to you players to decide how much you want to lean into historical accuracy and how much you want to just set-up the table and roll dice.  

I hope you enjoy this campaign filled with ancient druidic magic, undead from across the ages, and haunted locations. It has been an absolute blast to write! More so, I hope it fires your own imagination to explore the haunted corners where you live, and maybe to consider using them as the basis for your own scenarios and campaigns. Personalised games are always the most fun!  

Finally, I want to thank you all for your continued support and enthusiasm for this game and for all my game design work. I’ve now been writing games pretty much continuously for the last decade, which is something I could never have imagined as a young kid growing up in North Carolina. But then, I never imagined I’d be living in Britain either!  

If you would like to learn more about my writing, including a complete list of all my game design work, check out my website: www.josephamccullough.com. If you would like to directly support me, you can check out my Patreon, Games from the Grave, where I continually put up new bits and pieces for all my games as well as articles about the games industry and my own journey as a game designer.  

Joseph A. McCullough  

Kent, England, 2025 

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The Silver Bayonet: Britain: Bones of Albion is out on 23rd September (US) & 25th September (UK). Order Yours Here. 

Prepare your unit to meet Britain’s undead and track your recovery of the Bones of Albion with our printable sheets on our resources page.