Topic: Steel Rebels campaign: Brainstorming about anti-magic tactics

[Thot]

Regarding levels and professions, I assume that about 38% of all people where level 5 or less, and 79% of all people level 10 or less - a gaussian distribution with its peak at 5 and 6.

Regarding professions, about 12% of the population were a member of a magic-using profession and trained in that profession. (Simply adding up all the probabilities for rolling the required attributes randomly). About 75% of the population were "no profession", the remainder being non-magical professions.

[Thot]

Also, I would like to add that a recent encounter of the PC's involved a Lich and his five Dark Herolds, who were all chained to the 40-meter high ceiling of the Lich's former "Magodral" (basically, an opulent magical cathedral-skyscraper that was only partly destroyed by the Steel Rebels). In exchange for liberating him, he gave them a treasure of surviving magical items and his word to never have his minions harm them (at least not intentionally). The undead necromancer is not evil at all - he just became undead after the Steel Rebels ravaged his city for the first time, and tried to beat them back that way, which nevertheless failed. The local god to which he is an ("evil") cleric is not in any way communicating about its preferences, like all gods in this world, so the Channeling users under that god's influence are free to do as they please.

Long story short: The Sorcerer Princes were largely a benevolent world government, even the undead ones.

[jdale]

If 12% of the population was magic-using, and the sorcerer princes were overall benevolent, I would think you'd have at least another 30% loyal (you'd have more than that just based on their families unless most families are all-magic or no-magic and never mixed) and you can pretty much always find at least 30% of the population disinterested. So maybe 28% on the anti-magic side. If you then assume that the average magic-user is 5-6th level and you have about 2% of the population as magic users level 11+, honestly I don't see how the anti-magic side wins this rebellion. Those are some huge advantages for magic. At lower levels, magic doesn't have as much of an edge over arms, but at higher levels it is big.

Obviously there may be other factors you aren't mentioning, but I would think they would need to have some incredible tricks up their sleeves or some methods that render magic moot. Magic-hunting dogs, spell immunity herbs, magic-blocking blade poisons, a powerful religious faction backing them for its own reasons, something, possibly everything.

You don't have to justify that or say what edges they had here on the forum, but my perspective going into this as a player would be "what was their big secret that allowed them to pull off an impossible win?" So it should be possible to eventually discover that.

[Thot]

Well, they somehow won, and they did not use anything approaching magic; that's a given.

From what I have gathered in this thread: They may have used science, lots and lots of smoke, explosives, maybe even poison gas, bows and crossbows, and vast numbers. They were also fanatic about destroying all magic and had, shall we say, extremely good PR, so few recruitment issues. They also, apparently, had vast financial resources backing them to pay for a lot of high-quality non-magical equipment.

[jdale]

But based on the demographics you gave, their advantages couldn't have included "vast numbers." They could at best have been equal numbers. That's what that changes.

[Thot]

Not strategically, no, but tactically.

When the players have figured things out, I'll post more about the background of the insurrection here.

[rdanhenry]

Thing is, if the magic-wielders are few, then they'll have their own soldiers who do all this mundane stuff, too, only augmented by magic. If they are not so few, they'll still have soldiers, but there will be plenty of mage-soldiers, and they'll still augment magic with whatever mundane techniques are around. So, you need really big numbers, massive imbalances in commander competence, or the Steel Rebels need to hit the magical dudes when they're already down. Your demographics don't fit the overwhelming numbers idea (and given the advantages of magic, it'd need to be order-of-magnitude superiority). So you're down to making the rulers of the world incompetent, or you're finding a way to weaken them so they're vulnerable to what should be an easily dismissed threat.

Don't want anti-magical materials? Well, what about a once-in-a-few-thousand-years astronomical conjunction that suppressed the power of magic for a few months? No way from anyone in the modern world to get their hands on that. You could even make a loss of magic a result of a terrible spell failure result on a massive ritual, if you want the Sorcerer Princes to have paved the road to their own downfall.

Maybe the Steel Rebels focused on the healers to start with and managed to take out enough that there were no longer enough to nip budding plagues in the bud and the cities were ravaged by disease, collapsing civilization out from under the magical rulers?

Maybe the mages were already worn down from another war. Could have been a civil war. Could have been an invasion from another dimension, another world, or maybe rampaging dragons (though this would leave the surviving magic-wielders quite experienced, as well as their own soldiers).

How do the luddites have better tech and more cash than the folks with their hands on the means of supernatural production? That sounds like the previous suggestion going on now, but by proxy. And so what happened to these powerful backers who surely would have moved to step in and take over after the existing power structure was out of the way?

[jdale]

>Thing is, if the magic-wielders are few, then they'll have their own soldiers who do all this mundane stuff, too, only augmented by magic.

In the case of non-magical soldiers on the side of the Sorcerer Princes, I would think priority #1 would be for the Steel Rebels to get their guys into officer positions so they can use that force themselves. That doesn't work as well if there are very large numbers of magic-using soldiers though.

[Thot]

In a former amusement park (where all the dinosaurs escaped after the insurrection, of course), the players recently encountered a 60-year-old, sixth-level bard who had no significant ranks in any weapon skill, and only one combat-usable spell list. Why would he have learned any more? He lived in a peaceful utopia, ruled by the sorcerer princes, and so did his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him, and when the disaster struck, he just hid and stayed out of harm's way in order to survive, like most civilized people would try to.

So, being a magic user does not imply being a combat-worthy magic-wielder in such a world, especially given the level distribution.

[Spectre771]

We have a spell user in our party who knows 2 spell lists, but no spells for level 1.  He was a huge asset to the party.  He had only 3-4 ranks in a short bow skill, but he was extremely pivotal in many situations.  I love when PCs utilize all of their skills to the more creative manners to help the party (or to survive).

[Thot]

We have a spell user in our party who knows 2 spell lists, but no spells for level 1.  He was a huge asset to the party.  He had only 3-4 ranks in a short bow skill, but he was extremely pivotal in many situations.  I love when PCs utilize all of their skills to the more creative manners to help the party (or to survive).

Oh, sure. But most non-combat magic users will have just behaved like, say, an average particle physicist under ISIS' rule: Get your head down and deny ever having learned how to cast magic. Hide. And don't cast any of your knowledge spells, because the fanatics will come and murder you for it.

Or to phrase the point differently: A world government will not maintain an enormous military.

[Gideon]

A couple thoughts.
Martial Arts - A general MA should be taught to the Rebels, this increases their effectiveness in dodging attack and getting better crits on spellcasters. If not philosophically opposed CHI  abilities would help immensely.
Mobile Wooden Structures to block LOS spells. Disposable, set of wooden fences to pull up and soak AOE elemental spells will be critical.
Full Helms and large shields to increase dB against various spells and attacks. This also helps with certain Mentalism spells (Even when not true, adds to paranoia culture)
Poison gas - suffocate and give action penalties to the casters  and enemy archers.
excavation units - To disrupt Ley line flows (maybe cause flows to shift a few hundred yards or miles from the ancient fortress) and more tactically to destabilize enemy fortifications and to allow troops to move closer to targeted mages.

[Thot]

A couple thoughts.
Martial Arts - A general MA should be taught to the Rebels, this increases their effectiveness in dodging attack and getting better crits on spellcasters. If not philosophically opposed CHI  abilities would help immensely.
Mobile Wooden Structures to block LOS spells. Disposable, set of wooden fences to pull up and soak AOE elemental spells will be critical.
Full Helms and large shields to increase dB against various spells and attacks. This also helps with certain Mentalism spells (Even when not true, adds to paranoia culture)
Poison gas - suffocate and give action penalties to the casters  and enemy archers.
excavation units - To disrupt Ley line flows (maybe cause flows to shift a few hundred yards or miles from the ancient fortress) and more tactically to destabilize enemy fortifications and to allow troops to move closer to targeted mages.

Excellent ideas! Especially the wooden structures are hereby adopted!

[Thot]

A bit of background, as the PC's have now figured things out:

In this setting, the use of magic consumes part of reality. This consumption manifests itself as black "voidspheres" that loiter around places where magic has been cast excessively. The structure of reality regenerates slowly if no (or only very little) magic is cast in the vicinity, resulting in a shrinkage of the sphere.

The Steel Rebels felt that the use of magic was destroying the world, bit by bit, and felt they needed to put an end to it, with force if need be; hence their rebellion - it seems, however, that the Steel Rebels of the second and further generations did not really understand this any more, and were really just fanatics hellbent on ending magic "just because".

Many voidspheres have vanished or shrinked a lot since then, but in some place, virtual domes of blackness still exist. Particularly where magical creatures such as undead, constructs, or demons are abundant (demons do cast magic often), the local voidspheres are still growing, as well as wherever "always on" magic items are active (such as the weapons of the players, though I am not sure they have grasped the implication yet).

[juza]

If I was running a campain like that I probably let the players find out that the leader(s) of the rebellion actually use magic to help the rioters. So rebels will face their worse nightmare. That could lead to a interesting dramatic turn in which they have to face the moral problems that arise when an high idealis inevitably corrupted in the way to make it happen

[Thot]

Last session they finally caught on to the climate change parallels in the campaign theme.