Feldlager 2025 has wrapped. About 350 people and 50 horses have headed home, 165 panels for stables have come down the hill, 4 tons of muck have been shoveled, 700 kg of loose straw has been stuffed into assorted nooks and crannies, 560 kg of other waste has been disposed of properly, 16 respawn banners and 5 wagons have been collected and even now, a week later, Arne and his household are trying to figure out where to put everything. It was a massive undertaking.

For 2025 we wanted to build on what we had accomplished in 2023 and actually pull off some of what we had originally tried two years ago but couldn’t quite manage. On most fronts we succeeded, and while our implementation wasn’t perfect, we got much closer to our original vision than we had even thought possible last time. Next time we just might manage to get the output to match the ambition in our minds’ eyes.

My role in this whole ridiculous emprise is planning and running the war game…especially the infantry actions and ensuring that the cavalry have a place to play with the rest of us. And so while Arne Koets (and his household) and Nick Kraus make the entire back-end of Feldlager happen, this MILSIM Frankenstein of a “Feldlager Experiment” is mine…for better and for worse.

I’ve written and spoken pretty extensively over what I’m trying to do with this Reenactment-MILSIM exercise, enhanced with a bit of HEMA and LARP methodologies, and so I won’t reiterate it here. What I wanted to do instead was talk a little bit about how it went and what we observed…and I hope that it sparks a conversation about what you all, dear participants and readers, observed—and therefore what we might have been able to learn from our experiment this year.

The Storm before the Storm...

About 4 weeks out, we started preparing the commanders

We first gathered the Red and Blue commanders together about three or four weeks before the event, and shared this deck with them. Getting our newer and weirder ideas (like respawn/rally points) to work meant getting leaders ready to cascade information down to their troops. Given that Feldlager is a MILSIM exercise, using a military method for information dissemination (i.e., through leaders) seemed most appropriate.

In some cases, this worked very well. Both the Red and Blue top commanders pulled their lieutenants in for a meeting or two to set the priorities and approach, and as a result both armies felt more cohesive than two years ago.

In other cases, it didn’t work so well. Some banner-level commanders didn’t cascade relevant information down to their units or decided not to “play the game” and so didn’t bother to learn or use the information provided or to play the game the rest of us were trying to play.

Finally, due to my own lateness in assigning attendees outside of the largest groups to teams, we ended up with a pretty substantial problem with attendees having already self-selected into the larger groups (and therefore by default into Red or Blue teams). That meant that in the last few days before the event I was left trying to solve a pretty substantial imbalance in players on each side of the red/blue divide. Had I worked the teams out earlier we could have avoided this problem. Likewise, had we had a better system for players identifying not just their own group but the group they planned on camping with, we could have prevented a lot of last-minute angst.

So..Lessons Learned?

No military exercise is complete without an after action review (AAR) and no experiment is complete without publishing findings. So to that end, throughout the rest of this blog series I’ll be identifying those things that we learned for improving the event going forward (referred to from here on out as Lessons Learned) as well as those things we observed as outputs of the experiment itself (referred to as Observations for the rest of this blog series).

Our Preparation-phase Lessons Learned were:

Publish commander-level information down to the lowest participant, so that those participants can hold their own leaders accountable to “play the game” and don’t need to rely only on their commanders for information that everyone should have the chance to know.
Modify the registration process to make “who I’m camping with/want to fight with” clearer, rather than just relying on “which group am I in?” And, ideally, make it easy for attendees to update their camping arrangements as early as possible.
Publish and sort Red Team/Blue team alignments as early as possible. They’ll change (a lot) over the course of registrations coming in, inevitable cancellations, etc., but it’ll allow us to identify core groups and those units that might be easier to move around earlier. It will also make it easier to tie the kinds of units that players are trying to play/represent/interpret into the story line.

Red Team…er, Albrecht’s men had a gorgeous map made

On that note, The Storyline

Two years ago I told everyone, “I’m not a reenactor,” and while my garage full of tents, armor, clothes, tables, and self-made quills would argue argue that I’m full of shit, it’s still true that the reenactor’s mindset is something I’m still learning my way around. I’m a HEMA-ist and a soldier, and so for me personally the most important part of this exercise is trying to actually interpret and apply the physical actions of the books left behind by tacticians like Philipp Von Seldeneck.

So I would be happy with a weekend of training exercises and interpretation testing completely disconnected from a storyline or role-playing concerns. And yet, I confess, being immersed “in the fiction” is compelling stuff and a hell of a lot of fun. Anyway…

It took us a long time to get the storyline nailed down this year. As early as April or May we had a historically-inspired draft from Nuremberg archivist Daniel Burger, but getting that story to align with the various activities we wanted to play (a battle, some patrols, a Wagenburg, a siege, etc.) took a few months of planning and iterations. Little things like German laws concerning noise on Sundays complicated things like when could we do the cannonade, and will it be any fun to do the siege assault if the cannonade isn’t 10 minutes earlier? As we raced to get the schedule to fit everything we wanted to do, nailing down the final version of the story took a back-seat. In the end, we got the final scenario notes to Daniel about three weeks or so before the event, and got the final version of the story back just days before kickoff.

Ergo, another Lesson Learned…

4. Publishing even the major elements of the storyline earlier means that teams can be assigned in part to support the historical storyline “sides” far in advance, and will allow us to lean into the historical immersion a little better. While “red” and “blue” are helpful for planning, those aren’t really the terms we should be using in play if we know that the sides are “Sachsen” and “Brandenburg,” for example.

One more thing—what about the White Cell?

Having a proper white cell other than just me and Nick Kraus had been a goal since the earliest planning sessions in 2022. In practice, however, it was really hard to build one up. Coming from a military training background, the role of the white cell was really obvious to me; explaining that to would-be volunteers was too difficult back in 2023, and so we didn’t really have any white cell at all to speak of at the time.

This year, just days before the event, I managed to write this white cell guide and on Thursday and Friday as the event was kicking off I managed to gather up about 8 people who were willing to fill some of the functions of the white cell.

In other words, it was sloppy, last minute, and ad-hoc…but it also had the beginnings of something that was starting to actually work. My hope is that next time we’ll be able to build on the minor successes of this year’s early attempts to show up on “game day” with a proper, well-trained, well-prepared team of white cell volunteers who can help us really run the game in a unified, consistent way.

Therefore, yet another Lesson Learned…

5. Identify and train white cell volunteers early as possible, and manage them like a cohesive unit throughout the game.

Easy, right?

Now, if I’m being honest with myself, every single thing on this lessons learned list was something I tried to do this year (and back in 2023, too, for that matter). All I can say is that in 2023 we had none of these things, and in 2025 we got them late and a bit rushed, but we did have them!

It was our huge improvement in preparations that made 2025 run better than 2023, despite an increase of about 60% in attendees, about a 40% increase in horses, and an increase in complexity of activities planned. By the same token, it was the last-minute nature of many of these preparations that contributed the most to any confusion or frustration throughout the weekend.

In the end, we now have the foundation to build on all of these preparations for the next edition, and I expect that instead of doing more, we’ll want to do about the same amount, but better. I’m quite confident that we will.

Coming Up Next...

In the next entry, I’ll be discussing Friday’s big battle. In future entries thereafter I’ll cover each of the other major activities that made up Feldlager 2025. I hope you’ll join me for the ride.

~Jake

2025 After Action REview (Part I)