From Battlefield Press website - In the year 1632 things couldn't get much worse in northern Germany. There was no food. Disease was rampant. For over a decade religious war had ravaged the land and the people. Catholic and Protestant armies marched and countermarched across the northern plains, laying waste the cities and slaughtering everywhere. In the year 2000 things are going OK in Grantville, West Virginia. Everybody is attending the wedding of Mike Stearn's sister (including the entire membership of the local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America, which Mike leads) and is having a good time. Then, everything changed � When the dust settles; a small group of armed miners go out to find out what's going on. Out past the edge of town Grantville's asphalt road is cut, as with a sword. On the other side, a scene out of Hell; a man nailed to a farmhouse door, his wife and daughter lying screaming in muck at the center of a ring of attentive men in steel vests. Faced with this, the people from Grantville don't have to ask who to shoot. At that moment Freedom and Justice, American style, are introduced to the middle of The Thirty Years War.