Vanishing Armies

The concept of “vanishing armies” is rooted in the crap history we were taught in school vs. the far more accurate history we’ve learned as adults.  On this one, the main example is that we were told the South was defeated in Atlanta and there were no soldiers left to prevent Sherman from marching to Savannah.

Well, now I live in Tennessee, and the folks here know that wasn’t true.  The Army of Tennessee, after being defeated at Atlanta, marched northwest to Nashville, hoping to foul up Sherman’s supply lines.  OK, they didn’t fair too well in doing it, being soundly defeated in Franklin and then crushed trying to lay siege to Nashville, but the important point is that that army still existed.  They were still a threat.  They didn’t simply vanish.

Let’s take something a little more “period” - the Hundred Years War.  During the 100YW, there were frequent periods of truce.  During the truces, the soldiers were often “fired” / let go because they weren’t needed.  Some of these soldiers were left behind in countries that were not their home and didn’t have the means by which to return.  In any case, they either gravitated towards brigandry, or they formed into mercenary companies, often fighting for the various Italian city states.  This was a normal course of the war(s), and when the truces ended, many of them returned to their country’s side and started fighting again.  It is crazy to me that this was “normal”, but it does make sense.  Not only that, but I truly believe this was the origin of the whole idea of “adventuring”.  Just an opinion, no real historic fact for that one.

These “vanished” armies make for perfect adventuring party enemies.  Maybe they’ve gone rogue and are raiding the region or they’ve gone over to the other side and are now fighting as mercenaries.  In either case, they are exactly the kind of group GMs should be sending the party to go “take care of”.  So, at the very least, we’ve just given you next week’s bad guys.

 

Does this kind of content interest you?  If so, we hope you will consider joining us in our Small Bites project or the full title of How to Build Your Fantasy World in Small Bites!  We continue to build our community of game masters and world builders, and we would love to have you join us!

This post was written as part of The Legions of Garnock aka All About Fantasy Military Superpowers, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one is showcasing one of the most powerful militaries and how they handle their strategies and their various equipment load outs, as well as artillery, armor, officers, and a whole bunch of other things that might give you great ideas for your campaign.

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 93 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.

The Right Army for the Job

Too often in FRPG we have characters that can do it all.  The warrior steps up and whether fighting an army of goblins, a dragon or a god, he does everything in exactly the same fashion.  As with most FRPG elements, I think that is way too simplistic.  You have to use the right army for the right job!

Being able to do this requires something of the PCs - They must know their enemy.  If your archer goes out and spends all his money on the greatest armor piercing arrows available and then faces bare-chested barbarians, then he has wasted his money!  You have to know what you’re going up against if you want to be properly prepared.  We’ll be flipping back and forth between how this affects adventurers and armies, because the lessons are the same:  Don’t bring a catapult to a knife fight.

Depending on your rules, this will change from game world to game world, but there are some clear answers:  If you are going up against fire breathing creatures, get some anti-fire magic.  Does your world allow that on an army scale?  If you are facing armor, you probably want piercing weapons.  (We hope your rules at least cover that much!)  If you know you are facing a major arrow volley - try to get troops who can use their shields to the best effect (like a turtle formation).  If facing cavalry charges, get some pike men.  Many of these things are fairly universal having been practiced on Earth for at least a thousand years.

But this is high fantasy!  We have to be able to go farther.  If facing heavily armored enemies, do you have something that could eliminate their armor instead of just bypassing it?  Do rust monsters exist, and if so, can they survive being catapulted into the enemy?  Is there a lower level spell that will heat up the armor or increase its weight?  We assume that high level spells cannot be cast in army numbers but having a larger number of low level spell casters should be possible.  This doesn’t have to be completely high fantasy either.  In the Battle of Agincourt, the longbowmen famously took out the horses and forced the heavy armored knights to try and slog through the mud.  Not exactly a heavy use of magic there.

The point of this is to get you (and the players) thinking of how to use certain troops most effectively instead of just using the same tactics every single time.  Sure, there are tactics that almost always make sense, but there are trickier ways of doing things.  Do you have dwarven sappers who can effectively mine under walls or into the enemy camp?  Do you have elven archers who can run through a forest’s canopy staying out of the reach of the enemy spearmen?  Do you have a ram built for troll-sized soldiers?  But on the other side of things - make your players see how difficult the elven archers are to get into melee and have them use their own tactics to get into the elven camp(s) to minimize those advantages.  Troops with specific uses are really powerful when used properly; maybe the goal is to force them to be used improperly.

 

Does this kind of content interest you?  If so, we hope you will consider joining us in our Small Bites project or the full title of How to Build Your Fantasy World in Small Bites!  We continue to build our community of game masters and world builders, and we would love to have you join us!

This post was written as part of The Legions of Garnock aka All About Fantasy Military Superpowers, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one is showcasing one of the most powerful militaries and how they handle their strategies and their various equipment load outs, as well as artillery, armor, officers, and a whole bunch of other things that might give you great ideas for your campaign.

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 93 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.

Armies - and their mercenary bands

We’ve touched on this before, but the size of the standing armies in Fletnern is woefully small.  The reason?  An army doing nothing but standing guard is a huge drain on the community.

So how big are the armies?  Well, in theory, Garnock’s army is 60,000 soldiers strong.  That’s for a city with a population of roughly half a million (not including the vast farming regions around the city).  Brinston’s army is far smaller, but they do have an extensive navy.  Still, full numbers of their military personnel are in the 18,000 range for a city of maybe 800K citizens (not including farmlands).  Now this one does not include the armed and armored civilian policing units who often find themselves going to war when the army does.  But honestly - that’s not important.

What?  Knowing the size of an army isn’t important?  Nope!  Not in the least!  What matters is how many soldiers you can get to go attack someone else or how many you can get to defend your lands.  Attackers are tough to come by.  Defenders are relatively easy.

Let’s take the Wembic Empire for example.  Emperor Baratock has bragged that he has a million soldiers, and he might!  But even he cannot field an army of 1,000,000.  First off, he doesn’t trust anyone.  If he leaves with the army, he has no idea if there will be a throne for him to come back to.  He also needs to leave guys at home to guard the borders, so someone doesn’t take advantage of his absent army.  He also has a lot of guys who aren’t loyal enough - they may show up for the march to war, but they’ll be lost in the tree line before they get to the battle.  Lastly, if he wants these guys to go to war, he needs to pay them.  Now Baratock probably doesn’t need to do more than feed them while they are in the field (still an incredible effort), but he needs to offer them a chance to loot enough stuff that will compensate them for leaving their homes.  Prizes that big are few and far between.

Speaking of prizes - remember how the Roman Empire compensated its soldiers?  Typically, it was something like:  twenty years of service and we’ll give you 50 acres in a land that you just helped conquer, so expect constant attacks.  During the 20 years of service, it was more along the lines of:  how many slaves can you capture?  So, if you have an aggressive force of soldiers out in the field, how are they being compensated?  Soldiers may accept that they are paid a certain wage, but if that wage is similar to what a clerk or craftsman (or anyone else who is not risking their life) makes, the soldier is going to expect something more.

That “more” matters!  Both to the soldier and to the world economy.  If there are soldiers capturing slaves, then the cost of slaves is going to stay low.  But you have to factor the idea of slaves being sold in large numbers and then being shipped around the world.  If you bring 800 slaves into a community of 4,000 people, there is going to be an impact on the culture of that community.

 

Does this kind of content interest you?  If so, we hope you will consider joining us in our Small Bites project or the full title of How to Build Your Fantasy World in Small Bites!  We continue to build our community of game masters and world builders, and we would love to have you join us!

This post was written as part of The Legions of Garnock aka All About Fantasy Military Superpowers, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one is showcasing one of the most powerful militaries and how they handle their strategies and their various equipment load outs, as well as artillery, armor, officers, and a whole bunch of other things that might give you great ideas for your campaign.

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 93 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.

Mercenaries and their bands

In some of the more recent fantasy novels, a guy goes and borrows money from a bank and then goes off and hires 3,000 mercenaries.  That strikes me as asinine.  3K mercs were just sitting around somewhere, got off their duffs and came to fight?  Now some of these stories might try to explain why these guys were able to do this (they were done with the war they were fighting, they deserted, or something else), but unless this movement of 3K soldiers makes an enormous change to the politics of the world, it cannot happen.

How do I handle it in Fletnern?  Mercenary companies in Fletnern hire out in the dozens, not thousands.  More commonly, there are recruiters who know where to find large numbers (still dozens, maybe up to 200) soldiers that would be willing to sign up as mercs if the pay was right.  These guys are scattered all over a region or major city, so assembling them takes some time.  It is the recruiters who make sure they all show up at the right time and with generally the right equipment (for which the recruiter gets a tidy sum of money!).  Some might see these recruiters as mercenary captains, and sometimes they are.

What were these mercenaries doing in the off months?  All sorts of jobs:  guarding buildings or caravans (which means they may not be in the region you wanted them to be), bouncing at bars, trying to farm, or just about anything else.  They were NOT sitting around in their armor waiting for a job to come up.  For those companies that stay together, it is a constant struggle for them to get enough work to keep the company from falling into debt.  If you only work four months out of the year, you need to make three times as much as the other guys to pay for your time off.  So, OK, maybe mercenaries do make three times as much as a regular soldier but lining up four months of work out of the year is tough to do.

I think the main issue here is that too often novelists think it is really cool to talk about 40,000 soldiers going to battle against 35,000 soldiers.  They think that if they can make the battle sound huge enough, you’ll believe it was epic.  But also, if they talk about it in thousands, you aren’t going to ask what happened to individual guys on the battlefield.  They can give you the action at a 10,000’ view and you forget that war is a dirty, muddy business where people get maimed.  Sorry if I missed the romance this time.

I think JRRT did it right.  The Riders of Rohan were a muster - a militia of trained men who did other things and showed up for battle when the king called them together.  If you want to raise a major army in Fletnern, you pretty much have to do that - get a whole bunch of “kings” to gather their people (few of whom are professional soldiers) and have them all fight together.  Hopefully, you do find militias that actually know how to fight.

 

Does this kind of content interest you?  If so, we hope you will consider joining us in our Small Bites project or the full title of How to Build Your Fantasy World in Small Bites!  We continue to build our community of game masters and world builders, and we would love to have you join us!

This post was written as part of The Legions of Garnock aka All About Fantasy Military Superpowers, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one is showcasing one of the most powerful militaries and how they handle their strategies and their various equipment load outs, as well as artillery, armor, officers, and a whole bunch of other things that might give you great ideas for your campaign.

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 93 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.

Developing Interesting Historic Battles

There is a difficult issue that arises whenever you are trying to game master a major battle in a role-playing game.  Hopefully, your rules are such that the player characters cannot simply slaughter thousands of enemy troops, but how are you going to make the party important in the battle - after all the player characters are really the center of the world, at least to the people you are interacting with.

This is difficult, because you don’t want to make it as though four to eight people can affect the outcome of a major war.  That would make the enemy either stupid or incredibly weak, and there doesn’t seem to be much justification for making them either.  So, where’s the balance?

The balance comes in using some of history’s craziest tactics.  How can you do that?  Watch videos!  No really, watch youtube or whatever your favorite video site is.  Search on something like “top ten craziest tactics” or “top ten battles won in odd ways”.  These are out there for you to find and in addition to being interesting (since we know you are into battles or you probably wouldn’t be playing role-playing games), they can give you ideas that you need.

Now Fletnern is NOT Earth!  There are no 60K on 45K battles.  Garnock has the largest (human) army, and they only have about 65K guys.  Some of them have to stay home and guard the walls.  So, you are probably going to be starting by reducing the overall number of folks on both sides.  That helps your PCs quite a bit.

Now you have to make that crazy idea work for your campaign.  I like to have the PCs working with a team of NPCs, maybe a platoon of soldiers led by a maverick young officer.  This allows for a couple of things.  If the enemy should be hitting and killing lots of people, they have the platoon to kill instead of your PCs.  No, it’s not fair, but I prefer not to kill PCs just because they are in a huge battle.  Perhaps more importantly, if the PCs don’t come up with a cool idea, the young officer can.

But can you really steal these ideas?  Maybe.  Some of them don’t work.  Most ideas having to do with tanks might work by replacing the tanks with knights, but because of the gun issue (knights typically don’t have range bombarding capabilities) this won’t often work.  Some of the ancient battles, especially when Alexander the Great fakes someone out will work.  Yes, sometimes using modern tactics can work, but the idea of letting your PCs use something that the great generals could have thought of but never bothered to isn’t very likely.  That’s where the young officer can come in.  He can spot something special about the terrain that the PCs didn’t catch and offer some crazy idea that might just work.

I still don’t think you have the party and the platoon slaughter thousands, but they might be able to stop 400 enemy soldiers from sneaking through a pass that allows them to get behind the main army and thus save the day, even if no one really knows they did.  They can distract and thus misplace huge numbers of the enemy by leading them on a goose chase.  (That seems to have been a Mongol tactic when tied to run, fire, run again.)

The point is - You don’t always have to come up with everything yourself.  Using things that actually happened #1 means it could work and #2 eases the stress on your brain - at least a bit.  We’re always trying to give you idea sparks; sometimes we need to give you ideas about where to find your sparks.

 

Does this kind of content interest you?  If so, we hope you will consider joining us in our Small Bites project or the full title of How to Build Your Fantasy World in Small Bites!  We continue to build our community of game masters and world builders, and we would love to have you join us!

This post was written as part of The Legions of Garnock aka All About Fantasy Military Superpowers, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one is showcasing one of the most powerful militaries and how they handle their strategies and their various equipment load outs, as well as artillery, armor, officers, and a whole bunch of other things that might give you great ideas for your campaign.

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 93 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.