I was thinking of the ceramics for making heat-resistant tile armor plates...you know why!
High-Tech Forces vs. High-Magic Forces
- Thread starter mmadsen
- Start date
coyote6
Adventurer
What non-armament technologies and gizmos would be useful for fighting fantasyland?
Nomex suits, for soldiers tasked with eliminating pyromaniac wizards.
Big fans, for blowing their stinking/poisonous/solid/acid fogs back at 'em (or at least apart).
Herbicides and crop-dusters, for those pesky druids.
Ooh, what could modern armies do against the classic Natural Spell-enabled wild shaped druid? Kill every animal you see? That would be a bit much -- win the war and exterminate a few species. How could you distinguish a shapeshifter from a real animal? (Assuming that the shapeshifting actually works, and doesn't have some odd thermographic signature or the like.)
How much would modern marketing and similar psy-ops techniques help? The average American grows up in a blizzard of marketing and ads and propaganda; Joe Medieval's got a couple of lords and priests. Memetic warfare for the win!
Nomex suits, for soldiers tasked with eliminating pyromaniac wizards.
Big fans, for blowing their stinking/poisonous/solid/acid fogs back at 'em (or at least apart).
Herbicides and crop-dusters, for those pesky druids.
Ooh, what could modern armies do against the classic Natural Spell-enabled wild shaped druid? Kill every animal you see? That would be a bit much -- win the war and exterminate a few species. How could you distinguish a shapeshifter from a real animal? (Assuming that the shapeshifting actually works, and doesn't have some odd thermographic signature or the like.)
How much would modern marketing and similar psy-ops techniques help? The average American grows up in a blizzard of marketing and ads and propaganda; Joe Medieval's got a couple of lords and priests. Memetic warfare for the win!
El Mahdi
Muad'Dib of the Anauroch
Oh Yeah! I understand. They'd be great against fire breathing dragons, fireballs, lightning bolts, scorching ray, etc.
Taking that the other way also, IR missiles with a few programming/sensor tweaks could probably target fire breathing dragons.
I was just taking it into the personal armor realm due to concepts of future armors that are being worked on. Specifically one's using ceramic plates for protection, along with electric "muscles" and exo-skeletons for strength enhancement.
Something else that might be cool is if the high tech forces start understanding the high-magic forces abilities and magic a bit (as some have posited earlier in the thread), they may be able to develop anti-magic missiles (technology-magic hybrid devices). A missile with a detect magic spell on it would be the fantasy version of a HARM missile (anti-radar missile). A Wizard starts casting and all of the sudden - BAM!
The Veil War's author has commented on our little thread:
One of the most interesting things in laying out the background for this story is coming up with a plausible rationale for high-powered fantasy infantry. If the invading goblin hordes were equipped like the Swiss Landesknecten, or Roman Legions, or an early Medieval spear levy they would stand exactly no chance against the modern-style military in a stand up battle. Hell, look what happened to Saddam’s army in ’91 and he was equipped with technology only a few decades, not centuries, behind the current state of American military art. The battle of 73 Easting was a turkey shoot.
If you have an army, even a very large army, of essentially non-magical creatures with a few chocolate-y nuggets of magic embedded within, the non-magical part gets rapidly attrited until all that is left is a few powerful magical creatures or wizards in the middle of an abattoir being targeted with lots and lots of artillery, missiles and – if all else fails – small tactical nukes.
I looked at it this way. If you live in a world where magic works, magic will be part of the way you live your life. You – or the skilled craftsmen and enchanters who make your stuff – will begin to include magic in everything. First in the high value artifacts, eventually in damn near anything. Look at what’s happened with computer chips here in our world. First, they were used for extremely critical national defense needs like decryption and calculating atomic bombs. Later, big business started using mainframes. Later still, personal computers. And finally, there’s chips in your toaster and throwaway toys from Happy Meals.
This doesn’t mean that every fantasy world dweller is a wizard that can cast a fireball any more than every American citizen is a Chinese or Indian integrated circuit designer. But the residents of the fantasy worlds will increasingly, over time, benefit from the diffusion of magic into smaller and smaller crevices of their lives, barring only some cultural prohibition on the use of magic or some sort of serious side effects from prolonged magic exposure akin to the brain tumors we all get from using cell phones. (You don’t have a brain tumor? Wow, lucky you.)
So a fantasy army that has ubiquitous magic is not one where everyone is a wizard, but rather one where everyone has access to reasonably powerful magical artifacts – enchanted armor, enchanted weapons, etc. And that eliminates one major advantage of a modern military force – the fact that each American soldier or Marine possesses an automatic weapon that can shoot very far and very fast.
Other issues, like logistics, air power, long range artillery – well, we’ll have to deal with that, too. But we haven’t even added dragons and wizards to the mix yet.
If you have an army, even a very large army, of essentially non-magical creatures with a few chocolate-y nuggets of magic embedded within, the non-magical part gets rapidly attrited until all that is left is a few powerful magical creatures or wizards in the middle of an abattoir being targeted with lots and lots of artillery, missiles and – if all else fails – small tactical nukes.
I looked at it this way. If you live in a world where magic works, magic will be part of the way you live your life. You – or the skilled craftsmen and enchanters who make your stuff – will begin to include magic in everything. First in the high value artifacts, eventually in damn near anything. Look at what’s happened with computer chips here in our world. First, they were used for extremely critical national defense needs like decryption and calculating atomic bombs. Later, big business started using mainframes. Later still, personal computers. And finally, there’s chips in your toaster and throwaway toys from Happy Meals.
This doesn’t mean that every fantasy world dweller is a wizard that can cast a fireball any more than every American citizen is a Chinese or Indian integrated circuit designer. But the residents of the fantasy worlds will increasingly, over time, benefit from the diffusion of magic into smaller and smaller crevices of their lives, barring only some cultural prohibition on the use of magic or some sort of serious side effects from prolonged magic exposure akin to the brain tumors we all get from using cell phones. (You don’t have a brain tumor? Wow, lucky you.)
So a fantasy army that has ubiquitous magic is not one where everyone is a wizard, but rather one where everyone has access to reasonably powerful magical artifacts – enchanted armor, enchanted weapons, etc. And that eliminates one major advantage of a modern military force – the fact that each American soldier or Marine possesses an automatic weapon that can shoot very far and very fast.
Other issues, like logistics, air power, long range artillery – well, we’ll have to deal with that, too. But we haven’t even added dragons and wizards to the mix yet.
Stepping a bit back but... no-way, no-how.
I think you vastly underestimate the logistics behind extending force. Those people have to be moved, supplied with gear, and, most importantly, fed.
This Thanksgiving, it is estimated that 42 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more from home. And that travel is distributed over the entire nation, not all at one spot - it is spread through all the planes, trains, and highways, and it'll still be massively crowded.
Now, try to move more than double the number of people, and put them all in one spot, so most of them are traveling a lot more than 50 miles. There is no place on the planet set up to handle that kind of influx in anything like short order. In addition, continuously move a hundred million gallons of water and a three hundred million pounds of food *EACH DAY* to those people. And, get all these people their guns, and medical care for when they've been rent asunder by an ogre...
Oh, and move and feed all the people to support the fighters, as well.
No. That's just not happening.
I thought that would be one of the most terrifying advantages of a monstrous army. How do you feed an army of monsters? Not by bringing along rations...
That hadn't occurred to me, but you're right. Gives them a good motivation to advance, rather than retreat. If you retreat, you're leaving dinner behind on the battlefield.
Fantasy monsters- at least certain ones- would benefit greatly from "The Dodo Effect"- the creatures of this world may simply not recognize them for the threat they are, making them easy prey, at least initially.
Imagine, for instance, a necromancer releasing a single Shadow (or another caster summoning a demon that could spawn) inside a major metropolitan area. By the time the threat is recognized, the battle for that city may have passed the tipping point.
Assuming, arguenndo, that this world's forces can even combat such beings.
(See Terry Brooks' Knight of the Word books to see how THAT plays out.)
Imagine, for instance, a necromancer releasing a single Shadow (or another caster summoning a demon that could spawn) inside a major metropolitan area. By the time the threat is recognized, the battle for that city may have passed the tipping point.
Assuming, arguenndo, that this world's forces can even combat such beings.
(See Terry Brooks' Knight of the Word books to see how THAT plays out.)
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Yah. Everyone talks about how the modern military could drop a tacnuke. The other side of that is a shadow or wight teleported into NYC's Central Park.
prosfilaes
Adventurer
I went to look up the numbers ... and 100 million is a low estimate. We've been there, done that. That's how many people the world had under arms in WWII. No, not on one battlefield, and that includes support... but the population of Faerûn is less than 50 million (FRCS, 3ed). We can win a battle of attrition.
What are their goals? That's the equivalent of dropping a nuke on a city, except that turns the enemy civilians into creatures that can destroy your troops on a touch and is spreading from city to city. Unless you've got serious magical backup, that could burn the invaders.
Not only that, if we haven't started using nukes, we will. Oh, and do they have DNA, because biological warfare is back on the table, and goblin-specific plagues are now looking amazingly safe. If they thought they could keep any country uninvolved or neutral, I don't think any nation is going to be comfortable while the invaders are dropping spawning undead in cities.
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