So, on Nabijah. Yeah, honestly? I was not expecting her trip back to Cahzor to go as well for her as it did. I rolled for which sister she would encounter and it turned out to be
Inga, the second-eldest and very nearly the worst possible matchup. And as the session said, she was indeed losing... right up until Inks' tech saved her ass.
Lucky Nabijah indeed. And yes, I've been modelling them as higher-Strength Elite Troops who are utterly obnoxious for how they don't need to make Ride rolls to control their mounts and have none of their combat stats capped by Ride, and can thus enjoy all the advantages of being on warg-back with (almost) none of the penalties. So fifty of them is
pretty awesome to have.
I did rather like the conversation between her and Inks, partly because it reinforced the characterisation of both of them in a really good way. Inks is still a little solipsistic to worldviews other than her own - and Nabijah is a
warrior who is, yeah, fundamentally not
rational about risks to her life in the same way that Inks is. To Inks, if you die,
that's it. Game over. So don't do things that might lead to that. Keris is actually even more so - she avoids even situations where people might
want to kill her, or at least avoids such people finding out she exists. But in Nabijah's eyes; what's the point of not-dying for longer if you're not
living with that extra time? A hundred years of being meek and pathetic and quailing at every fight and letting people stomp all over you; winning no glory and never demonstrating your strength or taking down things bigger than you... that's just a hundred years of humiliation and cowardice, versus forty of being an awesome alpha hyena-bitch whose legend will go down in history like her mother's.
(There's also the fact that Nabijah is probably not even into her third decade yet, and is still happily living in that stage of teenagerhood where you're immortal and don't have to care about risks because dying is something
other people do, right? Inks herself went through that phase - despite her rational mind pointing out it was a fallacious conclusion - and her gut only accepted it when her mother kindly and gently pointed out that no, you
totally can die at twenty-ish, look, see?)
Moving on - and on that same note - the thing about using the undead in war is that
fearless troops are, by and large, automatons. Now, it's not impossible to make corpse-automatons! You can totally do that, though it's more necrotech than necromancy. The thing is; that comes with the
downsides of automatons, which is the kind you can mass-produce are almost invariably really, really stupid. "Real-world robot with very limited memory for standing orders" stupid. Like, "if you order a bunch of automaton-zombies to march and someone attacks the side of their column, they won't fight back until ordered to" stupid. That kind of stupidity is honestly more of an impediment than routing when scared is, most of the time - mechanically, you're still making something equivalent to morale checks, they're just a case of "the dumb automatons are too confused to do anything effective" rather than "too scared to continue fighting". Higher-level automatons can be smarter, but then they get
really really expensive to make and maintain, really really fast. Which is why you don't see people in the Age of Sorrows marching into battle with Hellboy's Golden Army or a legion of skinless Terminators. Except in Hell. And even then, it's usually Ligier showing off in a situation where mobbing it with demonic soldiers would be cheaper and more cost-effective.
(You also see it in Krisity, where Calesco has been trying with limited success to insist on using cheap/dumb automatons and trained-beast armies as a way of turning inter-soul wars into something more like giant dynamic chess matches where no actual sapient beings get hurt. It's had mixed results so far.)
So, most of the time when you see undead troops, it'll be ghosts stuffed into bodies to animate them. And that means they're either hun ghost soldiers - in which case they're basically equivalent to mortal soldiers except they're sociopaths where their Passions and Fetters aren't involved, and thus still have Virtues and will still run away if Inks jumps into the middle of their formation waving Chronicle around and flaring totemic - or they're yidak. And yidak are nothing
but emotion - they have no rational restraint at all and will be
extra special savage when they attack, but they're pure mainlined Id and will flee like beasts if they're scared.
To summarise, yidak-zombies are basically trained animals to hun-zombie "corpse-soldiers". And while you should never mistake ghosts for
humans, they're still "people" enough to react with fear to things, and won't have the "fearlessness" trait unless you've been doing very unsettling (and expensive or high-Enlightenment) things to them. Or you could just go the Abyssal route and make them more scared of routing and facing your anger than of being hit by a grand daiklave wreathed in burning sunfire. But that's the high-Enlightenment "War Charms" option again, so.
To summarise the summary, making things fearless
and smart is hard, because making something smart almost invariably makes it "people", and people come with both a) Virtues and b) the capacity to rebel (oh, hi there, Unconquered Sun! How're ya doing?)
To summarise the summary of the summary, SWLiHN has been stubbornly fighting the way the universe works for the past (5000+[#VALUE ERROR]) years.
So! Moving on once more to what Inks will be using her soldiers for, and fighting zombies
from. El Galabi. As you've perhaps seen from the guarantees Inks had to make to the Coxati, the focus on the seasonal aspects of raising armies, the politics she's had to play with, the mechanics of gathering up her troops and
getting them to the place (and I would be bringing down the hammer of
supply lines and baggage trains if I hadn't sadly neglected to sort out what her Resources actually are), I'm very big on trying to present this campaign in terms of
war as a story. War isn't just two lines of soldiers rushing at each other with swords and yelling; it's a
societal institution. It's a weight that warps the land for miles - sometimes
hundreds of miles - around it. It impacts, and is impacted by, everything from geography to history to economics to population count. Farming and food production, weather and climate, the balance of urban and rural populations, education, industry, financial systems, foreign policy, cultural values... even
entertainment and
religion. War has ties to all of them - and the effects flow
both ways; they're felt on
both sides. A feedback loop between war and society; two halves of the same whole.
When Carl von Clausewitz said that
"war is the continuation of politics by other means", he didn't mean it as a snide prod at politicians. He was serious. He meant that almost every societal factor that applies to politics and government applies to waging war as well, because war basically
is governing a country to do a specific thing - it's just that the bit of the country you're governing is carrying weapons, and the thing you're trying to get it to do is go stab another armed bit of another country who are trying to do the same thing back. That aside, you still have to deal with
everything every politician ever has to deal with when they're trying to get something done; chief among them being that it won't
get done unless the will of the masses either supports doing it, or at the very least doesn't
actively oppose doing it. One person can't win a war - no, shut up Keris, you can't actually define what "the will of the masses"
is, so you're not allowed to be part of this conversation. Ultimately, one person can't win a war, so they need a lot of other people to agree to do what they say. And that's politics. And politics is, ultimately, what stories about nations come down to.
Unfortunately, that kind if complexity means you can't really model it perfectly except by... well, by having a real-world war. Everything else is going to be an abstraction, and an increasingly simpler and less accurate one as you scale down to the kind of thing two people can fit in their heads during a four-to-five hour session in their time off. This comes back to the
gameplay/story divide that
@Shyft has made reference to. He's very much here for the gameplay, while I prefer the story stuff. So far, this campaign (and to a broader extent, game) has been my attempt to walk along the line between the two. I'd like to think I've done pretty well so far, and I'm making a concerted effort to use the faltering bits of a mass combat system from Core and our dicussions to set up something solid that Inks can hook into and throw dice at, so that he has happy experiences with it.
It would not necessarily be inaccurate to describe this as my having given up on letting him use the normal combat system in duels because he
keeps hiring the people I offer him to fight, and just deciding to roll with the one fight he seems
determined to pick in the near future.
The issue here, of course, is keeping it balanced to the level of grittiness I want, which is why I pushed fearless troops back. As
@Shyft has noted before, I'm very much in support of a scavenger-tech Creation where cannibalising and reusing the finite remnants of a lost age is
objectively the best way to build - the cost being, of course, that those resources are finite and so the "price" for the comparative ease of crafting is that your empire is built on dwindling irreplaceable resources that will drive you to go out and pillage the ruins and relics of other polities; sparking war and plot and so on.
@Shyft very much doesn't like that - he's violently against "Lost Elf Crafting", which I... hmm. My scavenger-tech view isn't
exactly Lost Elf Crafting, in that it doesn't say that what was done before can
never be done again, but it does sort of put hard limits down that you're not realistically going to build up to level of the High First Age or even Shogunate within the likely standard of a game. It's just not going to happen - not because the crafting is impossible to replace, but because the
infrastructure and
manpower isn't. Politics and interconnectedness again - the only way to get High First Age tech is to rebuild the High First Age, and with the Exalted Host as fractured as it is nowadays, that just ain't happening.
But that doesn't make for a satisfying game for
@Shyft. So I've made deliberate choices to do away with it - starting with being a lot more lenient than my instinctual responses are prone to being when "crafting from scratch" comes up, eg the boots. I
do want to mandate that Inks puts the infrastructural work in to make proper sunforges and be limited by them being large, static, smashable installations, so I'm hoping that
@Shyft won't try to abuse or powergame the starting-out allowances for slapdash temp-forges, but we'll see how that goes as we proceed forward. Another tool I've used to great effect is Piercing Sun, whose past career has done a very good job of giving Inks a clean slate for building-from-scratch by dint of pilfering or breaking all the old relics that were nearby and easily findable. Or even moderately findable. Some even quite difficult-to-find-able ones, actually.
... yeah, I enjoy writing Elemi Piercing Sun. He's fun, in the way that only old ex-PCs can really be.
