Warfare - adventure hooks?

[CCamfield]

Well, it's obvious from the war/rape/slavery/etc thread that there are some people here quite knowledgeable about medieval/D&D warfare, so let me throw this out: can you suggest some plot hooks for war campaigns, outside of major battles? I have some ideas but could certainly do with more.

The campaign I'm working on starts off with a war, which should have a basic pattern of naval battle(s), landing, big battle(s), and siege.

As it stands, the characters will only be level 1 at the beginning of the campaign, and not in command positions either.

Sea warfare:
- boarding action
- can't think of anything else!

Landing:
- landing in a small boat in a quiet cove, going overland to take control of a signal post
- "Omaha Beach" or Trojan War style battle when landing the troops?

Peripheral to main conflict
- taking a hostage
- strike behind enemy lines
- take (open) a gate from the inside
- take an outlying village or similar
- moral crisis: see fellow troops pillaging an outlying town
- an enemy general movement's known, going out to a village or outlying settlement for some secret reason - capture him
- meet with a person from the town who is willing to betray the city or get a few people inside
- track down a missing war chest (army pay)

 

[CCamfield]

P.S. - am I right in thinking that the only d20 book about warfare released so far is AEG's War?

 

[the Jester]

One of the biggest concerns of medeival- well, really, ANY- army is logistics: feeding the troops, making sure there's enough water, weapons, etc. On the ship, maybe they get becalmed in a poor fishing area and have to find a way to survive off the sea. How about encounters with non-military vessels, such as trade ships from a neutral country or even the enemy nation?

Also, there's always the possibility of a mutiny on board, maybe triggered by disease, lack of supplies, etc.

You seem to have some good ideas, but remember that a lot of the action in a war doesn't have anything to do with the battles per se. There are civilian issues, supply issues, disease, the politics of dealing with surrounding countries that may or may not get involved, holding onto conquered towns, pacifying the local farmers (sometimes by killing them and burning their farms), etc, etc.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

For Urbis, my homebrew setting, I am generally assuming that two basic types of troops exist:

- low-level "grunts" whose basic job is to (a) "police" the population of conquered territories, and (b) serve as "canaries" so that their superiors can learn about problems ("Hey, the evening patrol near Cott's Point is late! Send someone over to see what's keeping them from reporting in!").

- highly trained "specialists" (in other words, your typical adventuring part, with the difference that these guys are usually more coodinated and disciplined...) whose job it is to take out key objectives, like enemy spellcasters and Nexus Towers (basically, big towers that can gather magical energies and use them for some really nasty spells).

Open field warfare with massive armies in tight formations is just a more expensive way of suicide in a world with fireballs and other area effect spells... And when your enemies can teleport in behind your defensive walls, you need to be able to outthink them.

So where do PCs come in?

For low-level parties: Get hired to police a newly conquered area. The natives are frequently hostile, and you never quite know where you stand with them. When someone attacks you from ambush, do you take it out on the civilian popularion, or do you want to protect the non-combatants at any cost, even when it might endanger your men? There's some great potential for moral abiguity here...

For high-level parties: Just read up on a couple of Shadowrun adventures, and apply the ideas accordingly.

It's not quite your usual dungeon crawl - instead of some ancient tomb where some skeletons stand in every room but don't react what happens in the next room, you will have to sneak into a fortress and achieve your objectives - and if the defenders notice you, you might have lost already. And these defenders are rarely dumb, so you will have to be very careful and outwit them. Sneak in? Don disguises? Hope the invisibility spells will hold out until the end? Better make sure you have a backup plan...

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

War Hooks

Medieval Western European warfare has some unique plot hook aspects of its very own.

In the middle middle ages pitched field battles between armies were extremely rare. The majority of conflicts were sieges and skirmishes. Major component of the strategy of warfare were forcing the allegiances of local nobles, moving to occupy fortified positions before the enemy did, raiding to acquire/deprive the enemy of precious and pivotal resources, and counter raiding.

Sieges:
Offensive:
-defending siege equipment
-going in through the tunnels
-scouting/harrasing relief forces
-disinformation campaigns against same
-taking and holding positions in no-mans land for honor
-raiding for supplies
-protecting supply lines
-politics among the participating nobles and even captured nobles
camp politics
-moments of faith - happened a lot during the sieges of the first -crusade and afterwards
Defensive:
-defending the walls
-scouting enemy movements
-destroying enemy siege equipment
-raiding camps and positions
-detecting and destroying the tunnels
-getting messages through to relief forces
-keeping up morale
-politics among the defenders
-camp discipline
-raiding for supplies and against enemy supplies
-negotiating with besiegers
-evacuating positions
-fighting along inner walls
-moments of faith - see above

Skirmishes/Raiding
-killing scouts/couriers
-destroying crop land/peasants
-creating rumors of false troop movements
-looting for the faction paychest
-following rumors of supplies
-kidnapping enemy nobles - Eleanor of Aquitane and John Marshall won the dynastic wars after Henry II's death by kidnapping most of the nobility of Southern France with a highly mobile and very small elite force of knights
-fighting off fellow skirmeshers and raiding units
-occupying fortified outposts
-scouting
-running messages
-killing the tax infrastructure
-performing acts of charity for the sake of pr
-crazy acts of daring and chivalry since this was where reputations were made and broken
-diplomatic work with neutral nobility
-wiping out bandits who might affect your own lines
-harrasing the supply lines of sieging forces

First level adventurers would likely make their debut by defending a local alligned lords lands against raiding forces. First level characters who want to live, that is. Raiding gets you killed by the woods and sieges are d-e-a-t-h.

For reference, I highly recommend reading the Alexiad by Anna Comnena or The Life of St. Louis by Joinville(?). Both have amazing descriptions of how wild medieval combat was and are filled with adventure hooks. They are also pretty available, particularly through college book stores, and VERY easy to read.

Plus Anna is one of the few ancient women to write history in a grand style. Dune borrows liberally from the feel of her histories.

Dumas's Three and Four Musketeers are both very good as well. Sure they're way out of period, but they perform most of the same military activities knights and adventurers would expect to see.

Note that Medieval Warfare also included a very bizarre set of rules of warfare that it was extremely bad to develop a reputation for violating.

Siege:
-You always allow a fortified position to surrender and keep nearly all of its resources, save maybe exiling armed forces not belonging to the fortification and killing some ringleaders. Fortified positions that were taken by siege forfeited their rights. By the laws of Meditteranean warfare everyone in the city could be killed.
-Though violating sanctuary was a no-no and there were wierd situations where one faction in a city would surrender but not another.

Skirmish:
-Killing peasants was pretty proscribed. It was the point of a lot of the raiding, but the church hated it and put down lots of rules to give the peasants some safety. There were days when it raiding wasn't allowed to give peasants room to move around. Pretty strict sanctuary laws. And codes similar to those talked about with sieges. Peasants, in return, couldn't attack soldiers with certain weapons or under the same circumstances.
-All the normal chivalric stuff about taking people prisoner and ransoms and duels and not raiding churches.

And a general rule was that if the church had revoked its protection from you most of these rules didn't apply.

The Albigensian Crusade wasn't so much declared as a whole population lost what would be their 'rights of citizenship' today and the whole world came to kill and loot them.

The "Kill them all, God will know his own," came from a legate who was asked to interpret one of those weird instances in siege warfare. A Catholic town with a significant Albigensian population had fallen to siege and the army wanted to know if the Catholics, who presumbably would have 'surrendered', still had rights under the rules of war. As I recall, the legate did not have so great a career after this incident.

Oddly enough, most of these rules did apply to opponents during the Crusades. That's why the initial sack of Jerusalem was so shocking to the Middle Eastern world.

 

[CCamfield]

Re: War Hooks

Strangemonkey, what a great post. Thanks very much for all the hooks and information!

 

[Old One]

Some Additional Sea Adventure Thoughts...

In addition to boarding actions:

• "Break the Boom" - Some medieval harbors, like Constantinople, had large "booms" - or barriers of logs connected with chains - that protected a harbor. A mission could be to attack the boom to force entrance into the harbor or defend the boom from an enemy attack. How hard is it to make "log-rolling" checks in armor?
• "Break the Blockade" - The enemy fleet has a harbor blockaded and the PCs are assigned to a small, fast ship that must get reinforcements, supplies, a magic item or an important dignitary into or out of the port. Also, under the Rules of War from the Eighteenth Century on, breaking a blockade meant the blockading force had to withdraw for a month (rarely observed).
• "Capture the Flag" - A critical artifact is on an distant island. Both sides send elite troops to secure the artifact on small, fast ships. The PCs have to race against another adventuring group, working for the enemy, to secure the artifact. The approach to the island is treacherous and perhaps the island is occupied by creatures hostile to both parties. You could set up a situation where the two parties are forced to work together in order to survive and secure the artifact or where one or both ships are destroyed.

Just a couple of thoughts...

~ Old One

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I know this thread is old, but I just found my way here and suddenly it came to me...

The most hellacious thing I could imagine doing to pcs in a medieval war setting...

Around the late dark ages, a fleet of Viking Long boats sailed into the harbor of Constantinople while the main fleet was gone.

The Byzantines had only six ships and, for some reason that escapes me, the boom didn't work.

So the Byzantines sailed out against the Viking horde with their six ships... ...armed with greek fire tubes.

The result was extremely unpleasant for the Viking fleet in their open top wooden vessels.

George RR Martin has a faintly similar scene in Clash of Kings.

Reading the above posts it just came to me how majestically horrible it would be to try to role-play surviving such an experience or even winning it.

I mean, surely even PCs have a limit to the amount of horrible flaming smack down they are willing to visit upon someone.