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Systems & Settings => Rolemaster => RMSS/FRP => Topic started by: Thot on July 13, 2020, 06:58:30 AM
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So, my current RMFRP campaign is set in a post-collapse fantasy world. There was a world empire, run by the "sorcerer princes", who were mighty spellcasters back in the day. 30 years ago, though, the "Steel Rebels", a group, or should I say fanatic cult, of non-magic users started an insurrection, and killed all magic users - without using any magic of their own. The world empire collapsed as the sorcerer princes' monster breeds, demons, constructs and minions ran amok afterwards, while the Steel Rebels broke up into various factions and started fighting each other. Most of the great cities of old are lost, and those who remain have downsized from millions of inhabitants to hundreds or at most single-digit thousands. Many people died in the chaos.
That is set in stone, basically: A few rare magic users may have helped the Steel Rebels now and then, but mostly, the insurrectionists were fanatically anti-magic and killed spellcasters on sight.
At some point in the future, I might have to show leftover Steel Rebels fight leftover magic users. And I wonder what kind of tactics those successful anti-magic fighters might have developed when fighting forces that are lead and heavily supported by spellcasters. Any ideas?
What I have for now:
- Shield walls (against missile spells - how would you imagine this to work, if at all?).
- Heavy use of missile weapons
- Natural fire
- scattered formations much like vs. artillery or massed missile weapons
- foxholes possibly?
- Light, expendable cavalry to get into melee with the spellcasters.
Note that the Steel Rebels were against ANY kind of magic, even anti-spellcaster magic.
Any futher ideas or experiences, anyone?
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One additional point is, of course, numerical superiority on the battlefield.
And being fanatics, they were willingly sacrificing themselves to stop the magic users.
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If you haven't read the Malazan series, it's probably too much to tackle for some ideas. However, the setting does have "Otataral" which is an ore that inhibits magic. Otataral Dust can be used in a paste to provide magical protection. Using this type of mechanism, with the source of the material controlled by the Steel Rebels gives them an advantage over spellcasters.
https://malazan.fandom.com/wiki/Otataral
I also use similar in my SW campaign and have both dust and paste listed in my alchemy notes:
file:///C:/Users/brian/Downloads/SW%20Alchemy%20Notes.pdf
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I'd think that targeted assassination would be a likely method employed. Take out the more powerful magic users while they are asleep or similar. For some of this the mass battle tactics would be a distraction, or used to identify the magic user for targeting.
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Materials with inherent antimagic properties, e.g. to make armor. Materials with inherent anti-elemental properties, e.g. the (real) 9th century naffatun made armor that incorporated asbestos, protecting them against the fire and naphtha weapons they used.
Herbs with protective properties.
Heavy metal armor, especially helms, is helpful for making resistance rolls.
Magic items might be useful too, depending on how close they want to get to that line.
If distraction interferes with spellcasting, you could also launch clay pots full of scorpions, bees, etc. That also has real historical precedent.
Tactically, the priority against magic is to close as quickly as possible, and make multiple attacks (to overwhelm defenses like bladeturn).
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I think there wouldn't be one tactic. There would be many, most of which have been mentioned already:
Assassination. (Including hunting down and destroying any clones - if that is a thing.)
Swarming / Overwhelming Numbers. If you are a single mage, with a few hundred loyal followers, and 25,000+ are coming for you. I would suggest you run.
Superior Technology. Not saying machine guns and atom bombs, but better crossbows, and siege weaponry. Along with this, I would imagine that there are more types of beasts to utilize, and they should not just be limited to being used by the mages.
Stealth/Surprise attacks. If the wizard doesn't know you're there, it is much easier for you to kill them.
Infiltration. This is different from stealth in that this is more like spycraft; infiltrating the wizard's personnel and then betraying them. Though the first and best use of such an asset is information gathering. A well-placed mole is worth thousands of troops.
Deception. Various ways to use this, including getting the wizards to fight each other.
Of course, the best tactics are the ones that use multiple different avenues to get to the target, so combine, combine, combine. But, I think there are two main factors in what would allow the non-mages to beat the mages: the first is sheer numbers, its why the villagers can beat the Frankenstein Monster, and the other is hyper proficiency; individuals and groups just training until they are the best in the world at what they do, basically the fantasy version of special forces.
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Thanks everybody!
To clarify: I was specifically asking for battle tactics, that is, open combat. Certainly, subterfuge and assassinations will have played their part in the insurrection, but it's not hard to conclude how those have looked like. Battles are, however, complex things even without having to counter magic.
Technology and "anti-magic materials" would require alterations to the background, which at this point in the campaign I am reluctant to do. Technology was generally high (if magic-dependant) pre-collapse, so everybody would have had high quality late renaissance equipment (no gunpowder, though). Anti-magic-materials or herbs would probably have looked to much like magic to the Steel Rebels anyway. The same goes, of course, for magic items: The Steel Rebels went out of their way to destroy any magic items they found. They typically used the mass-produced white alloy weapons and equipment of their time, though (+15 nonmagical OB, +10 DB metal armor).
Now, a few questions about specific problems with a few battle tactics, now seen from the magic users' side:
- Stopping cavalry by simply placing a wall in front of it, shouldn't that work pretty well? Many area-of-effect things, like fireballs or worse, shouldn't they also be quite effective?
- If I, as a sorcerer prince, do know that ambushes are to be expected, wouldn't I employ detection magic? Which would you prefer, if you had a choice?
- Infiltrators, shouldn't they be easily spotted with magical means? And wouldn't magical infiltrators be a big threat to the Steel Rebels? What would be their most likely reaction to magically supported infiltration?
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To clarify: I was specifically asking for battle tactics, that is, open combat. Certainly, subterfuge and assassinations will have played their part in the insurrection, but it's not hard to conclude how those have looked like. Battles are, however, complex things even without having to counter magic.
OK. Got it.
- Stopping cavalry by simply placing a wall in front of it, shouldn't that work pretty well? Many area-of-effect things, like fireballs or worse, shouldn't they also be quite effective?
Sure, both would be effective, but are fairly limited in use. Meaning: range and area of effect. Current gaming practices aside, battlefields tend to be rather large. Often spanning miles of "front." Sure, the more modern you get the bigger the battlefield (because technology demands it), but I think that magic could also have similar results. Though not quite as much due to the limited nature of magic. (the aforementioned: range and area of effect). I don't know the specifics of what you have going on here (i.e., how many high-level mages, mid-levels, low-levels, etc... or their disposition in the various spell lists), but I am assuming not many. This is for two reasons: 1) it takes a long time to become a mage powerful enough to do such things, and 2) it sounds like the mages in power were jealous of their powers and wouldn't like others getting powerful enough to challenge them. Both of these things would keep their numbers low. So, I don't think they are able to create these walls spanning hundreds or thousands of yards as would be needed to completely stop the charge of a decent sized cavalry unit. (Again, I don't know the numbers you are working with, so I am assuming here.)
- If I, as a sorcerer prince, do know that ambushes are to be expected, wouldn't I employ detection magic? Which would you prefer, if you had a choice?
- Infiltrators, shouldn't they be easily spotted with magical means? And wouldn't magical infiltrators be a big threat to the Steel Rebels? What would be their most likely reaction to magically supported infiltration?[/quote]I'm going to combine the answers of these two as they are similar questions.
Detection magic in RM kind of sucks. I do think it was built that way, so players can still be surprised. Most detection spells cover a massively huge area of 5-feet!!!! Ranges are good, often in the hundreds of feet, but that minuscule area is pathetic. The only one worth a damn - and it is easily able to be handled too - is the Presence spell of a Mentalist. Ten feet per level radius, so a 20th level has a 200-foot range, 50th = 500-feet, etc... As cool as that is, it only detects the presence of sentient creatures.
So, if you are in the middle of their army, they got tons around them, so hiding among them should be easy. To determine that you are not supposed to be there, means focusing on you. So long as you don't stand out or draw unwanted attention to yourself, there should be no reason for that to happen. Presence is the only spell that mundanes have no ability to counter - its not like they can stop being sentient. (I take that back. They can. It's called dying. Now they are an inanimate object, no longer subject to the spell.) All the others just enhance existing senses. While this will make sneaking by them harder, it does not make it impossible.
As for the mages infiltrating the Steel Rebels: sure, they will be able to do so with shape/appearance altering magics. But, again, only the mentalism spell users can truly emulate an individual well to near perfection, so much so that figuring out that they are not actually that person might be as close to impossible (without magic) as to be impossible. Just watch any Mission Impossible movie or TV episode to see how infiltration can be handled - both well and not-so-much.
On the battle-field adaptability is key. The ability to alter your tactics to fit the new situation on the fly is immensely important and the commander that cannot does not survive long. Stealth/subterfuge/trickery is still important, like making them think you are attacking from one direction when you are actually coming from another (or not at all - you are attacking someplace else completely). So, I think there would be certain "hero-commanders" of the Steel Rebels, ones that showed their ability to adapt and win, even though the odds were long and things seemed unwinnable.
I do think you are going a little too gung-ho on this "must hate everything magic or seemingly magical." (Of course, your game and all that.) But, as a matter of psychology, if they hate everything that seems magical / can affect things magical, they would hate their own, normal weapons too because they can kill magical beings. This is like hating silver because it hurts werewolves or wooden stakes because they kill vampires. So, I would suggest pulling back a little on that, and giving them a material that helps them against magical beings/powers, though, by all means, make it rare. Perhaps the leadership has rings or another talisman they have to wear in order to prove that they are not mages - for it burns the skin of magical beings (mages and others). This means, that if they are in doubt about someone and they have access to this material, they can perform a test. That would help against magical infiltration, but because of the rarity, many infiltrators will go undiscovered.
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Presence is the only spell that mundanes have no ability to counter - its not like they can stop being sentient. (I take that back. They can. It's called dying. Now they are an inanimate object, no longer subject to the spell.)
Hmmm. There's the Death Trance skill. SoHK gives it as Absurd to die for 1 minute per level and then recover. Might be poisons that boost that. Could be great as an ambush technique if you are worried about mentalists. I was originally thinking you could feign death, but RMSS doesn't seem to have a skill that simulates death, only spells. This is definitely a niche tactic though.
Regarding detection spells, if you don't want to postulate any tools or materials used to counter detection, and your extremists are unwilling to even approach the line e.g. with magic items and potions, then the bottom line is they will be detected, and their only possible tool will be overwhelming numbers. They could recruit (or enslave?) creatures to bolster their numbers, too. But if this is your storyline, I would make a point of emphasizing that the mages jealously horded their secrets and were accordingly rare.
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Hmmm. There's the Death Trance skill. SoHK gives it as Absurd to die for 1 minute per level and then recover. Might be poisons that boost that. Could be great as an ambush technique if you are worried about mentalists. I was originally thinking you could feign death, but RMSS doesn't seem to have a skill that simulates death, only spells. This is definitely a niche tactic though.
Yeah, that could definitely be an unusual tactic, though I would only think that those capable of pulling this off (having a decent chance of properly utilizing the skill) would be high-level and likely not someone would want to throw away to kill low-level enemies. So then it becomes: how to get the big-bad to bother looking at this person's corpse? Are they all gloaty and silly like that? Still, it could make for an interesting scene - and legend: the only Steel Rebel to successfully perform that and was able to slay the high wizard (muckity-muck) was Grognard the Bearded! It is why the name Grognard is still feared to this day!
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The group is so against magic that they won't use it for themselves, but would they use items that are naturally magic canceling?In Elemental Companion, the material called Eog is naturally "magic-canceling" I'm not sure how in depth or strict the guidelines are for the members, but it could be a good material to have. The Eog isn't literally using a spell to cancel magic, it's just a naturally occurring property of the material.
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Now, a few questions about specific problems with a few battle tactics, now seen from the magic users' side:
- Stopping cavalry by simply placing a wall in front of it, shouldn't that work pretty well? Many area-of-effect things, like fireballs or worse, shouldn't they also be quite effective?
- If I, as a sorcerer prince, do know that ambushes are to be expected, wouldn't I employ detection magic? Which would you prefer, if you had a choice?
- Infiltrators, shouldn't they be easily spotted with magical means? And wouldn't magical infiltrators be a big threat to the Steel Rebels? What would be their most likely reaction to magically supported infiltration?
One limit here is the spell lists available to the magic users. Also a question of how much the magic users cooperate in you're setting. One magic user can be taken out by a mob. However the large number of Arms Masters would be able to do lots to hold people off.
Detection magic is great, but also often from memory in the RM rules gives a Yes/No answer, or needs a link to the location/person been watched. So of limited use.
Infiltrators can be spotted, but depends on how they do it. If it is palace servants who go over to the other side, then hard to spot. Also to stop the magical one, the use of passwords that shift over time, or single use ones can help. Also having strict security protocols around higher ranking officers.
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Skill Companion: School of Hard Knocks introduces as an optional rule Resistance as a skill to improve resisting magic (separately for each realm). It is also made so that it is easier to learn if you don't know magic.
It is also good to realize that spell users have a limited power point supply. As mighty leaders of their empire, they might have lots of PP multipliers, adders, and daily items, but they would eventually run out.
To help with that, mundane fighters could utilize something like dummies to make the spell users waste their magic.
Also, does magic have a sort of "smell", a scent? They could train dogs or other beasts to track spell users and attack them when ordered. How they did the training is an interesting question though, considering they don't have magic users of their own.
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Also, does magic have a sort of "smell", a scent? They could train dogs or other beasts to track spell users and attack them when ordered. How they did the training is an interesting question though, considering they don't have magic users of their own.
You just need a couple prisoners for that, if it's possible.
If you postulate a creature that feeds on power points, it would be a natural for this purpose. I can't find an existing one though.
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Range. Most spells have at most a range of 3 dam. A long bow has a range of 12 dam or even 23 dam if you use the AC (with a decent penalty), not to mention using siege weapons, that have ranges in the hm rather than mere dam.
And, as mentioned, infiltration, seduction, starving tactics, etc. Regardless of how powerful they might be, the spell users are still normal beings after all.
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Range. Most spells have at most a range of 3 dam. A long bow has a range of 12 dam or even 23 dam if you use the AC (with a decent penalty), not to mention using siege weapons, that have ranges in the hm rather than mere dam.
I am confused as to what "dam" means, or "AC."
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Include poison in assassination methods.
Perhaps there was some way to taint the source of magic also, so using magic would actually kill them through a form of magic poisoning or mere calamity.
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I’d add to the list anything that would limit visibility. You cannot target what you cannot see, so maybe means of creating fog or mist.
Sabotage to destabilize structures to collapse under the sorcerers and of course the English tactics of the long bow used in high volumes.
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I’d add to the list anything that would limit visibility. You cannot target what you cannot see, so maybe means of creating fog or mist.
Smoke and mirrors! Good point, thanks!
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The group is so against magic that they won't use it for themselves, but would they use items that are naturally magic canceling?[...]
No. Aside from in-universe reasons, which exist but which I am not ready to reveal in case a player reads this, there is also the matter of meta-reasons not to include such stuff: I want to have it be "pure" there.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Not strategically, no, but tactically.
When the players have figured things out, I'll post more about the background of the insurrection here. :)
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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?
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>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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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).
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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
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Last session they finally caught on to the climate change parallels in the campaign theme. :D