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.

 

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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.

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.