History Remains Awesome

This year's Huzzah game was thrown together in a bit of a hurry. I had known that I wanted to run a battle between two 19th century "imagi-nations" and that one would be more nautical and one more land based. When the time came to submit my game description I had to scramble and come up with the detailed backstory.

The Town of Krk

I've found the history of the city of Fiume interesting for years now and chose to make that the center of the conflict. I found a map of the area and just picked out two names that seemed interesting. The Duchy of Malomocco would be having it out in the Istrian peninsula with the Kingdom of Veglia. "Malomocco" is a region near Venice and Veglia is a town near Fiume. There is a peninsula near Fiume called Istria. Istria sounded exotic. And that was the complex decision making process.

Frankopan Gravestone

Happily history remains far more creative than I am. It turns out that Veglia is also known as Krk. Krk is both a town and the eponymous island the town rests upon. It has a lengthy and well documented  history and is of some importance culturally to the Croatians. Further, Krk was once ruled by the Frankopan dynasty, a period known as the Reign of the Krk Counts. This period came to an end when Venice reconquered the island and the people of Krk then fell under the control of various foreign elements until they regained sovereignty after the Second World War. So, in summary, Veglia actually was a Croatian kingdom which did struggle with Italians and actually was ruled by an interesting dynasty with origins in the Roman Empire. And the machinations of the Frankopans are far, far more interesting than anything I could come up with.


Today Krk is pretty tourist destination. There are plenty of photos online and there is a lengthy and convoluted history of the Krk Counts to dig through. It's a lucky break that my randomly picked imagi-nation turned out to be so interesting.