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.

 

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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.

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