After spending most of March working on polish and bugtesting, I am now about 70 000 words deep into Act 3 of Shadow of the Eagles, which covers one of the most mythologised – and ultimately most controversial – parts of Napoleon’s military career: the Egyptian and Syrian Campaign.

This is a complicated topic, in more ways than one. Napoleon himself was able to control the narrative in his own lifetime, framing the whole campaign as a military triumph which – just as importantly – expanded the limits of knowledge, kickstarted the field of Egyptology, and brought inestimable benefit to the future of human civilisation.

A more detached – or more cynical – observer might just as readily characterise it as a colonialist pipe dream spun up as a way for the French Directory to get rid of one of its most successful and popular (and therefore dangerous) General, who proceeded to lose a critical proportion of France’s naval strength, ruthlessly suppress the local populace, and spiral into megalomania and self-destruction to the immense cost of the people of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the soldiers under his command.

I’m going to try to examine both these perspectives through the course of Act 3 – although that doesn’t mean I consider them equally valid. At the same time, I’m going to try to mechanically demonstrate the sheer complexity of the Egyptian Campaign at a strategic and operational level. Unlike the First Italian Campaign, this wasn’t just a matter of an army being deployed to a theatre of war with a set objective and a well-defined enemy, this was Napoleon essentially getting carte blanche to conquer and rule vast swathes of land which nominally belonged to a power at peace with France. The result was a sprawling theatre of war which included multiple concurrent campaigns against local rebellions, and multiple enemy armies.

There is also the question of the Egyptian Campaign’s end – because when Napoleon left Egypt, he notably didn’t take the vast majority of his army with him (he even left his mistress behind), instead opting to sneak past the British fleet which had annihilated his own aboard a single frigate with some of his most trusted officers. If you play your cards right, you will have a chance to be one of those officers – but if you don’t, or choose not to, then I want to have fully defined paths for those outcomes. Do you find a way back to France on your own initiative? Do you stick it out until the end, surrendering with Menou when the British take Alexandria in 1801? Or do you “go native”, becoming one of Muhammad Ali‘s first French advisors (though naturally, this will end your campaign)?

Needless to say, all this is going to be a lot of work, and I expect it take me most of next month too. I may be 70 000 words in, but I suspect that this is only the first third of the whole act – at best.

If you want to support the project – and get access to the development Discord and the playtest versions, take a look at the separate Patreon for Shadow of the Eagles here.

In the meantime, my first Patreon is still going. This month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding, are now up.