In my brain, Lt. Vienne is a player character. I don’t know why but I have a total mancrush on him. He’s such a pimp.
I’m gonna say that Baron Sheva bought either a Psychologist (Lady Ahmi isn’t bought out of his Anvil Affiliation, I don’t think) or else just more dudes and arty. Remember that he’s got considerable additional force elsewhere on the planet.
And this group of Lords-Pilot would not have to even be part of the Anvil but part of his household, no?
I don’t know that there’s a hard distinction between an Anvil Lord’s Household troops and his Anvil Battalion, but, yes, his personal guardsmen would be attached to him directly.
-Chris
Allthough I appreciate the nerdy-ness of this and I fully endorse the fun found in fictionous military units. Is ours the only gaming table that doesn’t bother tracking the entire soldier (TO&E) rooster of our in-game affiliations? From noble Iron-wearing knight to toilet scrubbing private?
Why not just leave it vague, but open for stunts/descriptions. Need a personal bodyguard? Cricle check and/or puppy-eye the GM.
Need a cook, mechanic, vallet,<random> assistant, or messenger? Circle it. But WHY WOULD THE GM SAY NO? (unless this is/was an exceptional individual)
Keep it simple stupid. Let the story/players fill in the details to fit any concept. All while keeping the rules light and manageable.
Oh, I’m mainly doing this for the sheer nerdjoy. Since “Your Planet May Vary” is a cardinal rule of the Iron Empires setting and the Burning Empires game, from a practical player’s point of view, all of this is here to be used as inspiration when needed and ignored when not.
The Circles rules are very wide open on what “appropriate equipment” a Circled character shows up with, and that’s probably where this kind of thing is most useful in actual play – but I’d be appalled if someone actually slowed down the game for more than 60 seconds to cite this thing.
Syd says it best. this is background. If you want to use it, great, if not, great. Play styles vary (as does interest in this sort of arcana). We never use this at our table, but I’d like to bring it to bear if I can. My tactical mind is irritated by 100% winging it, particularly when it comes to numbers and available systems in a firefight. We spend inordinate amounts of energy determining what our characters’ Perception and Agility are and how they impact a firefight. Number and type of troops have a much greater impact on the way a firefight plays out, and I’d like to feel it’s grounded in something more substantial than my whim as a GM.
But that’s just me.
Chris
NkEnNy brings up a good point: why bother? Sydney is correct in that a lot of this is “nerdjoy” (I’m stealing that word for my lexicon!), but there is a potential impact that can add to the game play enjoyment of immersion into the plausible, semi-recognizable, internally cohesive, but very different world of the Iron Empires.
Say you do have an Anvil Lord with an Affiliation: Anvil 1D. What does this mean? Well, the rules do say:
“A 1D affiliation represents a small or poorly kept force comprised mostly of conscripts and landwehr with exponent 3 abilities. A 2D affiliation represents a competent or sizeable force of anvil trained soldiers and a smattering of Iron with exponent 4 abilities. A 3D affiliation represents a well-trained or elite force comprised of anvil trained, anvil elite and iron trained forces with exponent 5 abilities.” (BE, 249)
Yeah, but what does it mean you say? (As have others on this forum.) What is “small” or “sizeable”? BE says the GM decides, but, what does the GM have to go on? That is what we’re striving for here. A lot has gone on this thread, but I thought I’d give my take on it in this one.
Back to our 1D Anvil Lord. After discussions with the GM, it is determined his title is to an Anvil Battalion. Chris Moeller describes it as “The most common line unit. Primarily rifle platoons equipped with Anvil armor.” At the 1D level our Lord learns he has to maintain 2 Anvil Infantry Companies, an Armored Platoon, an Artillery Platoon, and an Iron Squad, all at exponent 3. (I’m working with Sydney and Chris on ways to increase or decrease size and exponents but that doesn’t come into play here.)
Yes, you say, but what does “2 Anvil Infantry Companies, an Armored Platoon, an Artillery Platoon, and an Iron Squad” mean to someone who doesn’t get off on such things? Glad you asked! Chris has kept things simple for Anvil (who should have the “Knuckle-dragger” trait): 3 squads to a platoon, 3 platoons to a company, 2-10 companies to a battalion.
So, what’s a squad? Well, it is the smallest combat unit which BE, p466, states consists at a minimum of “an officer/leader, a signals specialist, a medic, a squad support weapons specialist and a couple of assault weapons specialists,” or five men. Chris in canon and notes seems to give 10 men as a squad size. This gives us a squad with a sergeant, a signals specialist, a medic, a squad support weapons specialist and six assault weapons specialists.
In simplest game terms our Anvil Lord has access to 18 of these squads in Anvil armor with assault guns, each with its own Anvil Assault Sled and crew! He also has one squad with lasers and a fusor or PAc in Iron armor, again with an Assault sled.
Now he doesn’t have all these squads all the time standing by waiting for his orders, especially the Lords-Pilot in the iron squad who likely have other peacetime duties in the Lord’s household. Activating all of them will require circle and resource rolls and bring the attention of the Liege Lord and other Anvil Lords. However, he will be able to call on one Anvil Infantry squad, the duty squad, at any time, along with a Lieutenant as the Duty Officer.
For more color we can also say our Anvil Lord has 3 Grav Tanks (bigger, better armored, better sensors, longer-ranged fuzor than an Assault Sled) and 3 pieces of grav mobile artillery (an artillery scale weapon on a grav sled). If he decides to introduce these, he will need to tech burn them.
There ya go. From a 1D representing “a small force with exponent 3 abilities” we know have a unit of just over 200 combat soldiers with the necessary support, including a bunch of Assault Sleds, for his Firefights!
There is potentially more beyond this. A battalion will have a staff with an X-O, with whom the lord will have a relationship, and that there are two more Anvil Captains under his command. So, we could have a far more fleshed-out character. And that is the point of all the bother!
Building a System
Lance Blyth, cmoeller, and Sydney:
Yes. It was something of a rethorical question. However to make this a functional system, I think you will need to approach this differently.
The key words are simplification and/or abstraction; this in order to more easily allow for units/TO&E that don’t necessarily fit the galactic standard.
This means you should look at your building system. I call your attention to one of my early posts in this thread which revolves around the concept of spending ‘size’ (which is abstracted to 6 different steps) to gain proficiency, extra resources or capabilities. The point is to translate the “affilitation” dice into some sort of resource that can be expended to design an armed force.
If this abstract approach does not fit your goals, then I’d suggest trying to create a “Force Burner” Reminicent of the “Tech Burner” to help flesh out your military.
In example
To use your own example:
A 1D Military Affiliation on a modest tech index world.
Affiliation 1D: 1 Platoon worth of Exponent 3 troops (30-50 Men)
They have ballistic Armour and some sort of kinetic Assault Weapon. Given their low tech-index assume that they have Heavy Assault Guns (of somesort) to serve as squad weapons (say 3 to 5 units).
This same affiliation point; feeds, clothes, arms, and provides modest transportation(Combustion based Wheeled transport) to said forces plus basic medical and mechanical amneties.
Done
Personal Thoughts
Now mind you I imagined a more medieval standards (smaller) for armed forces in the Iron Empires than your more modern approach. I also assumed that different military “units” would be paid for by spending additional “affiliation” points.
Consider ‘Faith Conquers’ As Cotar Fomas Faith has access to a number of troops. I’d still imagine he paid individually (aff 2D or even 3D!) for the Grey Rats and an additional 2D affilitation for his other Church Troops .
It would however be very easy to re-tool the same basic “purchase” system to permit larger forces. As its more of a proof of concept than a finalized design.
Final Conclusion
When constructing a way to translate Affiliation (and remember not all affiliations have to be military!) into actually armed forces I think you should have an open mind. The Iron Empires, nay the universe, is a vast place. While there may once have been a human standard, the shining path that was the golden age of Terra has been lost; now there is only the lurking threat of Alien forces and mad nobles holding caches of ancient (relic) doom weapons.
You’ll need a system that can present many different types of forces. Ranging from elite Iron teams, gibbering alien hordes, mobile tank batallions, to lumbering super weapons. And this isn’t even touching the HAMMER side of the deal. Thousands of years of development, sometimes individual, will have produced very different ways of organizing your armies.
For something like this; I would have used a derivate of the “size” system I posted. Although a “Force Burner” could have worked just as well.
[i]Edit: Consider contemporary times. A mere 100 years ago troops and army sizes were very different from today. 200 years ago armies were organized in a totally different fashion to fight totally different wars. Platoons do not universally contain 3 squads, nor do all squads have 8(+1) members. Roman Legions were certainly quite different. And this is just on our old tired earth across the span of a mere 2000 years. Imagine a crumbling Empire spanning an entire galaxy!
This is why Size is abstract. 30-50 men for a [b]Platoonb or 500-1000 men for a [b]Battalion/b purposely left vague to account for anything from cultural implications, casualities, PERSONAL PREFERENCE, or just style. From the semi-heroic perspective of our STORYTELLING, a military Battalion performs equally well in a firefight wether with 586 or 983 men fluffwise.[/i]
You can’t have more than one Affiliation linked to the Hammer Lord or Anvil Lord traits. You only get one Affiliation which provides troops from the first X LPs at Exponent Y (unless you have Forged Lord, or both Hammer and Anvil Lord, and in those cases you have two such affiliations, one with Hammer and one with Anvil.)
Trevor Faith doesn’t have Anvil Lord at all. He doesn’t use Syd and Chris’s rules, he just has an Affiliation with the Grey Rats and a relationship with their sergeant (“Shogun,” right?). Then he’s got an Affiliation with the Hotok Sodality and a relationship with Urci Fox. He doesn’t have functional command of the rest of the Sodality outside Fox’s company in game terms, even though he’s at the top of the org chart. If he was Anvil Lord, he would.
With respect to the rest of your post, though…
NkEnNy, you have stated that Syd, Lance, and Chris’s efforts here do not serve you. That’s quite right. As much as I’m enjoying what they’re doing, I doubt I’ll ever use them in play either. If you want to produce a more generalized Force Burner, encompassing very unusual Anvil Battalions as well as non-battalion Anvil forces, Landwehr, etc, you can do that. If I know Syd, he’ll be right in that thread with you. But the project in this thread is to produce a model for how to produce a typical Anvil Battalion, within one standard deviation of the mean. These tables don’t do anything but that. Either that’s useful to you or it’s not.
The Iron Empires, nay the universe, is a vast place. While there may once have been a human standard, the shining path that was the golden age of Terra has been lost; now there is only the lurking threat of Alien forces and mad nobles holding caches of ancient (relic) doom weapons.
Amen brother! This should in no way be seen as a limit on anyone’s imagination. I try to throw in a caveat in all of my posts something along the lines of: “of course there are a million worlds out there, each one with its own possilibites. If yours has a giant bioengineered squid grav tank, go for it.”
Here’s my bias. I’m a huge J.R.R. Tolkein fan, and my fiction benefits from his style of deep background thinking. It’s why my stories take so damn long to write. I think of Lance’s mechanical ideas as a “golden mean” that we can refer back to when creating our multitudinous variations.
-Chris
I want one!
Come on, Syd, where’s that Biomechanical Battalions burner? Snap to it, man!
[steaming, molten brain matter pouring out of ears] Sure… I can do that… and burn up every kind of Kshatriyen and Shudren in a typical Vaylen battalion… and assign the Bat Kraken the rank of First Lieutenant … and… [/dies]
Fantastic! Have it on my desk by Monday.
[Molten, steaming brain matter drips onto Thor’s desk]
Dro, clean this up! The Sri Lankan’s AWOL.
Chris, we can give Syd a new brain and just hull him, right? It’s not optimal, but we need to keep up appearances with his family.
/laughs hysterically as the thread disintegrates like Bat-Kraken caught point blank in a fusor blast.
Let it be written…
Zabieru, cmoeller, and fellow acolytes of the Bat Kraken agenda. I think you guys are misintepreting what I’m saying. Like noted I fully endorse and greatly enjoy indepth analysis of background material.
The observation I’m making is that, while such details are both interesting and valuable. For reasons already mentioned they make a poor basis for developing a universally applicable army creation game mechanic.
Any “Army Burner” wether based on the concept I outlined, or made to work with ‘trait points’ akin to the Device burner will find a well thought out (and realistic!) TO&E list an INVALUABLE piece of colour.
In other words
TO&E => Excellent Colour =/ Game Design
Army Burner needs => Support for all types of colour => Good Game Design
COLOUR + MECHANICS + BITS ==> teh w1n
You’ve laid out the challenge very clearly–thanks for helping me keep my eye on the ball in all of this!