Hopefully after a week off and forgetting to publish the blog post on the right day last week we are back on track. This week we are talking about fantasy armies and how they should be interesting and different from real world historical armies. One thing that is important to consider throughout is how the species you are looking at are going to influence these decisions. After all, I don't think anyone wants a dwarven army to look identical to an elven army.
First we need to start with mages and magic, because how you decide to handle magic will impact every other part of your fantasy armies. How common and powerful are mages? And how well can mages defend military formations from other mages? If mages are common, powerful and hard to defend against, then basically everything else is cannon fodder. Which may not be the most interesting way to go. Personally I think you probably want mages to either be rare or that mages balance each other out and largely don’t impact the battle unless one side’s non-mages are able to start shifting that balance. You then need to consider how they are deployed, is there one central cadre or are mages parceled out to different battalions?
Assuming that mages aren’t all powerful, we are next going to look at the most common and probably among the least interesting parts of any pre-modern army, melee infantry. Almost always the largest component of any army, melee infantry still come in a variety of forms. Are they peasants that are rounded up and have a spear shoved in their hands or are they professional soldiers like the roman legions? What is the purpose of your melee infantry? Do they just hold ground until your other elements defeat the enemy? Or are they supposed to be the battle winning element of your army? This can determine if you are using spearmen, pikemen, heavy armour and short swords or some other combination. Your army may even have different types of melee infantry that support each other.
Next is ranged infantry, most commonly archers. There is probably less variety here than most other areas but there are still some things to consider. What ranged weapon do they use? Longbows, shortbows, crossbows including repeating ones, javelins, and slings are all possibilities that offer different pros and cons including cost, training and range. What percentage of your army is ranged infantry? How armoured are they? The types of weapons you chose will also impact their employment within the army. Some ranged weapons can be fired in an arc, so a solid wall of infantry can be in front of them, others are straight line or so short ranged that they are only useful as skirmisher weapons or if your army leaves gaps for them to fire through.
The last of the normal elements of a fantasy army that you could find in real world armies is cavalry. It is also probably the one that you can have the most non-historical elements to. Historically cavalry is usually split into light and heavy cavalry, sometimes with ranged cavalry as an additional category. The main difference being speed and armour, heavy cavalry is designed to break formations and fight protracted battles in melee, a classic example being knights; light cavalry is fast and often just a dude on a horse with a spear. But fantasy gives us the chance to significantly change things with mounts other than horses, including a new category of flying cavalry. If you want you can have centaurs, dragonriders, giant wolves, lizards or whatever else you think is cool as a type of cavalry in your fantasy armies. Different types of mounts may have different roles in an army. You probably aren’t lining up a bunch of dragon riders for an organized charge, and you probably wouldn’t use rhino knights to pursue routed enemies. Larger mounts of elephant sized or larger may have multiple riders and/or a howdah like thing on their backs.
Now we get to the purely fantasy again with monsters. With this category I don’t mean orcs or dwarves or other human-ish sized creatures, but larger creatures like trolls or giants. Or non-humanoid creatures that aren’t being used as mounts. What role do they have in your army? Are they a very defensive unit that holds the line, are they line breakers that smash holes in the enemy spear line, or do they have some other role? Do any of these creatures have weapons or armour? A troll is scary, a troll with a giant sledgehammer and armour is an entire different level of terrifying. Game of Thrones showed us the power of a giant with a longbow when the wildlings attack Castle Black. How common are monsters in the armies? A dozen trolls in an orc horde of 10,000 is a curiosity, 200 trolls is a different element.
The final category is artillery, which until the last few centuries didn’t really exist in most armies except for siege warfare. Fantasy can change this if you want, do you really think a dwarf army wouldn’t have artillery? One of the best places to look for ideas is the roman legions, who appear to have had a variety of field artillery long before its time. Several of them throw various spear and bolt style projectiles, you could have weapons that fire several bolts, or even put smaller weapons on a mount. This is also an area where you may see mages working more directly with the siege weapons, because casting some kind of damage enhancement spell on a 10 foot long spear or a 100 pound block of stone you are tossing at the enemy is probably more bang for your buck than augmenting the spears of a dozen foot soldiers.
What do you think is important to make fantasy armies cool? Was there something I missed? Would be interested in seeing blog posts that are examples of fantasy armies from Gal Hadre, such as the Werd city state of Kal’Garand? Come back in a week for a look a Gal Hadre Path of Death focus.
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