Sinsystems
Patron Librarian
And while you could potentially be right, that still is mostly speculation based off of a lot of conjecture rather than anything explicitly stated in the story.The construction of the village is not entirely speculation. We know there is no wood locally for the town to be made from wood. If you want everyone gold off voting until @BoneyM returns and confirms what the town is made fo that would be fair enough, but that's not your argument, you want to ignore a serious problem the plan you support may have and assume everything is fine. The burden of proof that a plan will work should be on its supporters, not vice versa. To justify why this plan should work, you should be presenting evidence that the town isn't just flammable, but very, very highly flammable so that a fire would spread very quickly. Old human towns in the real world were full of very flammable things. We can be almost absolutely certain that these buildings are less flammable than that, simply because they won't be full of pitch, which is an accelerant, or dry fabrics, or have the walls almost literally made of kindling (plaster and lathe). Fires in historic cities cannot be used as a model here.
But if you want evidence of potential flammability then we have already gotten an example of Greenskin dwellings being flammable with how previously how the Goblin dwellings in the hall of the moon went up in flames and I have no reason to believe that the dwellings in the village should be any different. Secondly the entire place is described as a shanty town where all the buildings are packed close together and only a few proper roads, those are highly susceptible to fire even in modern settlements (or as modern as informal shack sprawls can get) they often burn out of control if not put out immediately.
This is still an Orc town, there should be smoke rising from all over the place. By the time the fire has reached the point that the Orcs will notice the smoke the Rangers should be long gone.On the ranger, orcs move significantly faster than dwarves, and as soon as a fire is lit the plume of smoke will give the location away almost immediately.
Honestly I feel like you are drastically underselling the skill of the rangers here.
That is rather disingenuous. Mainly because I have not at any point said that setting the fire is instantaneous or trivial to do, merely that with the current state of how sections of the town are abandoned that means that we have relatively easily accessed areas to work in to set our fires. Additionally when I say a "Single point of failure" I am referring to a single point where if things go wrong the entire operation fails, in the Burning Shadow plan it relies on Mathilde being able to cast a Burning Shadow spell on the Citadel's shadow.Mathilde still has to set all the fires that are anywhere useful. She's still the single point of failure. And you're still assuming that setting fires is instantaneous and trivial to do. The backers of this plan haven't even identified how Mathilde even starts a fire in the first place, even making the heroic assumptions that the buildings are made out of wood, and for some reason are made of highly flammable wood. People have talked about accelerants, but I'm pretty sure matches don't exist.
Now while I acknowledge that the GM has said it is possible to use Burning Shadow in such a manner, I feel like I should point out that such a usage is almost certainly at the limit of the spell's capabilities and will almost certainly require a roll in order to work properly. As such if something goes wrong there then the entire plan is ruined.
This isn't true for the Fire plan, because while a key part is going to be Mathilde setting the buildings in the direction of the Citadel ablaze, if that part fails that doesn't ruin teh entire plans as other parts of our forces will be using various methods to set the fires. Hence my previous statement, the fire plan has redundancy to it as each successful fire lighting attempt adds to the overall blaze.
Also there are multiple way to light a fire for example some flint to make the initial sparks. Do remember that cannons and handguns are a thing so there should be man portal way to light fires available.
Burning Shadows doesn't work like that, it's more like an acid in how it effects things. Also if the Catapults can do so then adding more fire starting attempts would just make the blaze even bigger at a faster pace.Also, if the town can be set on fire and will catch that quickly, the Burning Shadows plan does that as well, as it has the grudge throwers fire whatever is useful at Grobi town as the attack goes in.
It does so in a way that doesn't risk wasting the lives of the Rangers or waste Mathilde's time doing something that a catapult can do better, because the catapult can throw an awful lot bigger incendiary to light one fire than Mathilde or a Ranger can carry in total.
Why spend Rangers' lives (at least some are bound to die) and the opportunity cost of Mathilde's time on something we can do much easier, quicker, and better with artillery?