It’s critical to remember that this is a society riven by endemic violence, much of it relatively small-scale. That’s another big thing it has in common with the Middle Ages that’s very different from 20th and 21st century Western experience. For most of us, it’s a rare experience to be robbed, assaulted, or even threatened with physical violence; and above that level of individual crime, there’s really nothing we worry about short of massive terrorist or state-sponsored violence, like a 9/11 or an invasion. But in a feudal society, not only are personal danger (at the low end) and war (at the high end) much more common, but there is a whole spectrum of violence in between: smash-and-grab gangs on grav bikes, bandit Anvil Lords with their private armies in the backwoods, piratical Hammer Lords doing freelance raids of world after world, privateers authorized by Forged Lords to raid shipping and ports, and all sorts of operations conducted by proper legal authorities but short of outright war, such as punitive bombardments or seizing hostages to execute in retaliation for rebellion.
[Today is my day for afterthoughts, it seems:]
Once you have that kind of endemic violence, it creates a particularly ugly feedback loop:
-
I feel threatened. Many of the threats are utterly beyond my capacity to deal with, but many aren’t. It’s worth being as well-armed as I can manage, even if it’s just a handgun for me personally, or a ragged militia with shotguns, hunting rifles, and no body armor for my village: There are muggers out there who just have knives, and there are gangs out there who just have pistols, who’ll now lose to me or my village in a fight; better yet, there are other muggers with guns and gangs with rifles who’ll think twice about taking me on and probably move on to weaker targets. So I get a handgun, or organize that militia with shotguns.
-
My neighbor doesn’t have a handgun; the next village or neighborhood over doesn’t have a militia with shotguns. They do have a nice fusion generator, or grav sled, or pretty daughter, or whatever, that it’d be awfully easy to take, now that I happen to have my handgun or militia.
3.1. I go kill my neighbor(s) and take their stuff.
3.2. My neighbor thinks about possibility (3.1) and decides to get a rifle for himself, or a militia with grenade launchers and flak jackets for his village.
- Everyone around us both feels threatened. They get rifles and grenade lanchers and rocket launchers and…
Rinse and repeat as needed. A dynamic much like this actually happened in Croatia between Croat police and Serb villagers in the build-up to the Yugoslav civil war, and it’s probably behind a lot of the “sectarian violence” in Iraq: Many of the kidnap-and-murder gangs are mainly in it for profit, opportunistically taking advantage of the chaos, and a lot of the not-for-profit violence is about getting the other guy before he gets you. By contrast to this vicious cycle, it’s a relief to swear allegiance to a powerful Anvil Lord who will take care of the fighting for you and who has a vested interest in ensuring that no village that pays him taxes slaughters another village that pays him taxes.
But of course the nobles are in this same cycle with each other, just on a higher and more destructive scale. If Baron A hires or raises a fast-moving, hard-hitting force of Hussars and grav-mobile infantry to hunt down the local grav bike gangs, Baron B who doesn’t have Hussars and grav-mobile infantry will inevitably wonder if A’s new force might hit him next.
Question… how strict is the prohibition against Hammer Lords employing anvil assets? I ask because I’m interested in what a Hammer Lord’s fief might look like. If she is prohibited from deploying ground troops of any kind, is the only threat she can deliver to her people that of firey death from orbit? Or would Hammer Lords make alliances with anvil lords… you keep my people in check, and I’ll make sure no one bombards you from space. Hammers are just to big to effectively impose order… it would be like spanking a baby with a chainsaw.
A Hammer Lord has limited ground assets, as well as some armored marines for boarding actions. They can’t field a battalion-sized Anvil force, or any sort of military grade grav-vehicle. So Jacked weapons (“Jack” means “Shipboard”, incidentally), Maybe a squad or two of Iron or Anvil-equipped Marines (kitted out for boarding actions), And Landwehr-class security troops for his estate and holdings.
By the same token, an Anvil Lord will usually have very limited Hammer capabilities: unarmored Mercators or Troop transports with defensive weapons/ECM. The idea is that they have to be able to move with a Fleet, but cannot fight their way onto an enemy world without Hammer assets.
Chris
Ah. From ‘Jack Tar’?
And that makes a lot of sense. Would these marines generally be Anvil attached to the ship, or Hammer crew with small arms experience?
What Mike said. Specifically: In game-mechanical terms, what are the lifepaths and lifepath settings involved?
My guess, given Luke’s shooting down the idea of a separate “Hammer Marine” lifepath, is that:
- A Hammer Lord’s ground security forces mostly have the “Soldier” lifepath from the “Anvil” setting;
- A Hammer Lord’s Marines mostly have the “Anvil Elite” lifepath from the “Anvil” setting, with a sprinkling of troops with the “Armiger” and/or “Lord-Pilot Anvil” lifepaths from the “Nobility” or “Court” settings.
- An Anvil Lord’s transport spacecraft is largely crewed by personnel with civilian lifepaths from the “Spacefarer” setting, sprinkled with specialists and supervisors who have lifepaths from the “Hammer” setting.
Alternatively, the Hammer lord might need to rely on Merchant League, Theocracy, and Commune mercenaries. Possibly even going so low as to hire hive thugs. Perhaps they aren’t permitted to have formed units with military grade weaponry, but as we discussed earlier, all they really need to keep the peace is thugs.
Well, Chris is final arbiter of canon, but I swear I was told differently when we were building this thing. Personally, I think it’s more interesting to create interdependence. If a Hammer Lord can’t field any infantry personnel – he has to ask his local Anvil Lord for marines and MPs for ports – and the Anvil Lord has to ask very politely for transports, then there’s greater cause that the two lords will work together for common cause (at least in my twisted mind).
I’d just love to play out the story of the bold, revolutionary Hammer Lord who decides to break the rules and raise his own secret army. I guess that’d make him a self-made Forged Lord, only without any real peerage.
p.
Reminds me of the Miles Vorkosigan books. Miles talks about a period of neo-barbarism where all the nobles on the planet were fighting each other. Eventually the emperor took power, and in order to prevent the nobles from fighting, he imposed a hard cap on their armed forces. Well, obviously, one lord didn’t appreciate that, so he hired a few thousand cooks (who all oddly had former military experience… funny how you get lots of unemployed soldiers looking for work when you disband armies…), and armed them with butchers knives instead of short swords.
This rebellious lord lost. He was sentenced to death by exposure. The man with a thousand cooks was sentenced to die by starvation (and people said Emperor Ezra didn’t have a sense of humour). Of course then the outworlders invaded, and Ezra was forced to postpone the sentence because he needed the lord to lead his cooks against the invaders. Happily, the lord was shot during the fighting, and was thus saved a long and painful (and ironic) death.
Well, Chris is final arbiter of canon, but I swear I was told differently when we were building this thing.
That’s entirely possible Luke! Regardless of how it’s nailed down, the core idea is that Anvil is lord of the land, and Hammer is lord of the sky. A Hammer Lord will never be able to stand up to an Anvil Lord on the ground and vice versa. That doesn’t mean that the line between the two has to be so bright that an Anvil Lord can say “Sorry, my liege, but I don’t have any transports for my boys. You’ll have to fight this war without me.” When the emperor calls, everyone has to answer, including the poor Anvil Lords out on the frontiers, limping in with their clap-trap mercators. Armies and Navies in the IE are conglomerations of hundreds of entirely self-sufficient sub-units, all squabbling for priority, getting pissed off at one another and going their separate ways at the drop of a hat. Inter-arm cooperation like we see in a modern army is nothing any self-respecting Lord would be party to. Additionally, I can’t see any Hammer Lord being content with the title “Lord Of Transports”.
As for dedicated space-borne warriors, I always envisioned troops with zero-g training specifically intended for boarding actions in space. History, going back to the Greeks with their fighting galleys, gives ample precedent for it. Those troops would have to be associated with the Hammer arm. Perhaps they are banned from wearing armor when they’re planetside…
-Chris
i played that character. it cost me an expensive 5 trait points to buy the Hammer Lord trait and 3 Circles for the Hammer Affiliation, but it made for a great storyline. she started as the current military dictatorship with a professional volunteer force under her.
the ironic part was, she ended up no different than the original deposed Forged Lord. she even ‘agreed’ to marry him (was mind-raped into believing she had to). i think it says a lot about co-dependancy. we played out the man vs. woman aspect, and it was mirrored in layers by the hammer vs. anvil aspect, and also the rebel vs. lord aspect. in the end, she came full circle and crowned herself queen. it was the only way to stay on top.
i think that is often the case with celebrity, especially military celebrity. dictatorship is just that. abuse of power for what you consider a ‘greater good.’ The Burning Iron Empires continuum really pushes you to examine that abuse of power.
it’s a blast.
I should check theses forums more…
So I have decided to throw in my two cents (is it flogging a dead horse by now?) on this matter. Hopefully I can add something new without parroting what’s already been said.
To start with, control of the skies is going to influence infantry/planetary operations immensely. In World War 2, this type of control allowed the owners to run rampant against their opposition. During the Blitzkrieg, German air power could surge farther ahead of the tanks and take out anti-armor or fortified positions. When the US entered the war, they took the skies and smashed anything that was caught in the open and undefended by air craft or AA positions, allowing them to cripple supply lines by sinking vessels or destroying trains, destroying grounded aircraft, support assaulting infantry, catching armor out in the open and what have you. This idea continued passed this point, with Gunships in Vietnam capable of stopping assaults on fire bases or other defensive points and during Desert Storm where, I think, 200 some miles of roadway was turned into a graveyard of military vehicles caught in the open.
Hammer assets reflect the ultimate level of this. You control not only the skies of the planet, but potentially a large expanse of space around the planet. Any Anvil commander worth his salt is going to have scouts on the ground, either infantry or light vehicles. The point was brought up that starships can’t watch all the ground at once. True, but that’s not necessary when you have Anvil troops who can scout forward, identify dug in or static enemy positions and have this relayed back to orbiting hammer vehicles. Your eyes on the ground have just found your target and you can strike like the angry fist of god. This would mean anvil assets sitting at defensive positions or rearward points are toast as would be something caught moving in open areas.
As for the man portable anti-armor weapons, even most modern tanks can take long range hits from man portable weapons, something in my mind saying that the current LAW and RPGs have to be somewhere around 50/100 meters or less from the target to penetrate(Probably wrong on that), and even then, it has to be a hit against rear, top or side armor and on a tank that isn’t using reactive armor. The bigger AT weapons are usually crew served or mounted in light vehicles, like the TOW.
So, as it looks like I’m just rambling, what am I getting at? Modern (future?) infantry would have a handful of roles. In the what we could think of as modern warfare, with armor rolling about to break through enemy lines and infantry scrambling under enemy fire, the Anvil, specifically infantry, would play more of a support role for armor. Assuming that AT weapons in the Iron Empires run into the same problems as modern man portable AT weapons, enemy anti tank teams have to be rather close to their target and striking from a blind spot in the tank. A squad of infantry working in unison with the tank gives it 10 pairs of additional eyes to use to spot enemies. They also add to the tanks ability to engage and suppress enemy infantry in cover as they can flank easier, use cover the tank can’t and engage more targets then the armors anti infantry weapons can alone.
Anvil would also be a means to secure a city or population center as the objective of war is to take and hold land or, assuming the area is useless to you, deny it to the enemy. Aerospace and armor vehicles are not designed to hold territory. Grav sleds are nice, big targets for guerrilla or troops dug into an urban environment. Even today, a modern battle tank can be taken out with an IED composed of a tube, copper disc and homemade explosives. So not only is infantry in an anti-armor/armor support role, but it is now a paramilitary/urban combat force. Infantry, and Anvil armor would be wonderful for this, can go where armor has problems, can take advantage of more cover and, another big one once the main element of fighting is done, connect with the populace. Anvil is too well trained and expensive to have garrisoning held territory, which would be carried out better by a force of loyal natives (such as Iraqi police) or Landwehr in the IE’s instance.
Another role for Anvil, should the unfortunate event occurs and the opposing Hammer Lord isn’t using a tactic of fear, is as a Guerrilla force. A big screw up in Iraq was the disbandment of the entirety of the Iraqi military, putting many people out of jobs and creating a large pool of disgruntled, veteran fighters for an insurgency to pull from. As been stated, Guerrilla forces have to make a major move at some point, and if you have trained anvil troopers mixed in with the population, this would be easier. The polish resistance during WW2 launch their assault on the Germans when the Russians were only a few days away from them and up until that point they had been assassinating German officers in the streets quite regularly. This lead to a blow to the garrisoned Germans morale. Trained Anvil acting as Guerrillas in what the enemy thinks of as a secured rear would not only do damage to their morale, but force troops from other areas to be moved to where they are operating to combat them. They could also pull from the populace more fighters as atrocities are commit against them to try and snuff out the insurgency and train them should they have the right type of personnel. This could spread to other areas under enemy control or, should the opposing Hammer/Forged Lord get mad enough, result in the area being blasted from orbit. However it’s still a win.
Anvil is really in trouble in the event that the skies above them become suddenly hostile. And to have an Anvil dedicated to open warfare that usually comes to mind at the mention of war is kinda silly. Infantry would have a role supporting armor and fighting in built up areas where the armor can’t operate. It would also make an effective resistance force in the event of its loss to normal warfare.
Woo! Big post. Hope it made sense.
I don’t think you’ll find much argument against your points. Hammer Flies, Anvil Dies is a truism. And Sydney and I are preparing to play out a group of Jaeger light infantry supported by a Hussar light scouting vehicle trying to spot a mechanized iron company for a hammer cruiser in orbit.
There are just a few points. man portable AT weapons don’t seem to suffer the range problems that modern ones do. Yes, they are shorter ranged than vehiclular weapons, but not that much shorter, and they do about as much damage as vehicular weapons. This makes the a grave danger to armour.
Secondly, infantry can hide from hammer assets much more easily than armour, meaning that if there is a hammer in orbit, vehicles become a liability.
I am all in favour of combined operations between infantry and armour. I think they’re the only kind that are truly successful. Back when I played Nationstates (a freeform political/military RPG) all of my tank units had organic tankodesantniki troops riding in the back because tanks without infantry die very quickly. That is one of my reservations about the high velocity warfare being advocated… when you deploy infantry, you tie your tanks to their speed…
Though I jsust had a wicked image of a bunch of Anvil Assault Sleds screaming over a forest deploying troops out the back, and continuing on to hit hostile armour, being repused, and retreading over thier infantry, who use their heavy weapons to maul the perusing grav-armour. Mandugai style. Are Anvil lLords as impetuous as medieval knights?
There are two real kinds of Anvil, as I see it. There are the Soldiers, Scouts, Sergeants, and then there are the Stormtroopers and Anvil Elite. You don’t want to use Stormtroopers and Anvil Elite in high intensity warfare any more than they should have deployed the SAS and Rangers in line units in WWII. They are special assets, like chisels, and though they make pretty good screwdrivers doing so ruins the chisel for its original purpose.
Absolutely agreed on the importance of combined arms – armor and infantry, Hammer and Anvil. On that note:
It’s very easy to overestimate the importance of airpower – or of any single arm (e.g. tanks) in isolation. From the invasion of France in 1940 to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, airpower has proven devasting against forces that are concentrated and in the open, on the move: tanks to a degree, but above all supply columns (the main impact of Allied airpower in 1944 was not to destroy the German panzers, but to deny them railroads or fuel to redeploy). Even with the benefit of modern surveillance and precision weapons, airpower still has tremendous problems against dispersed, dug-in forces: guerrillas most obviously, but any infantry force, and even armor if cleverly positioned. I don’t imagine that the Hammer vs. Anvil equation would be radically different in the Iron Empires: surveillance, precision, and firepower will have advanced, but so will camoflague, jamming, and armor.
If you just have Hammer gunships in orbit and small spotter teams on the ground, the enemy Anvil will be able to disperse and go to ground, making themselves difficult targets. (This is the problem the NATO air campaign over Kosovo had). You’ll probably be able to blast the hell out of the enemy’s cities, which may be all you want if you’re doing a punitive raid, but is counterproductive if you’re trying to conquer something for your own use.
If you just have massive armor and infantry forces on the ground, conversely, the enemy Anvil will be able to concentrate and maneuver, fighting you on equal terms.
So what you want is Hammer in orbit, and small spotter teams, and concentrated, fast-maneuvering armor-infantry forces. That way, if the enemy disperses and hides, your maneuver forces can isolate them and pick them off one at a time; if the enemy concentrates and moves, your maneuver forces hang back while your Hammer blasts them.
Rommel did something very similar to the British armor in the North African desert in World War II: launch a feint with his tanks, draw the British tanks out in pursuit, and have his infantry and anti-tank artillery (88 mm flak guns) waiting in ambush.
You don’t want to use Stormtroopers and Anvil Elite in high intensity warfare any more than they should have deployed the SAS and Rangers in line units in WWII…
I’d actually argue for Anvil Trained troops – Anvil Elite and Armigers – in large formations: Having such superior armor, complete with protection against biochem weapons and radiation, makes them much less vulnerable to enemy artillery than militia troops in flak jackets. Iron Trained troops are even less vulnerable: They can survive Vehicular-scale Megablast effects. Of course Superstructural-scale Megablast (i.e. the Missile) will massacre anything, so any such force needs either dispersion and cover or grav-mobility to avoid being fixed by artillery; they just need less of them than a lighter force.
The Stormtrooper lifepath is clearly intended for a Special Operations role, but even then they have a place in conventional warfare. Remember that the original Stormtroopers, in the German army in World War I, were select squads of men trained to sneak forward in small parties, bypass the strong points of the enemy trench line, and break open pasts for regular infantry to follow. I can see an Iron Empires stormtrooper squad infiltrating up to a critically placed fortress to destroy long-range artillery that is blocking an armored advance or holding off Hammer assets beyond effective bombardment range.
Yes, Rommel is a modern example, but I wanted to use a medieval one =) I love rommel and his AT guns… he’s remembered as an armour commander, but it was his use of mines and guns that were responsible for his success. I think he’s overrated, but I still love him.
Sydney, the combined arms co-operation between hammer and anvil is EXACTLY what I envisioned. Ground forces force the enemy troops to concentrate, while the space forces smash them. Like a Hammer and Anvil.
The problem is, Anvil Trained troops are JUST as vulnerable to vehicular scale weaponry as standard infantry, which means if the enemy begins laying down fire with a PaC, the anvil will fry with the other infantry. And, paradoxically, a soldier armed with an assault laser is just as dangerous to someone in Iron as a tank with a fusion gun. Given the time and expense associated with training and equipping these troops, I see them being used more for special operations… like infiltrating enemy lines to destroy an artillery piece, as you suggested. What I don’t see them doing is serving as line infantry in defensive positions, or as garrison.
Yes, that is a paradoxical thing – I’m not sure how much that reflects the original vision of the setting and how much it’s an artifact of the rules.
Either way, it makes Iron the perfect infantry for mechanized warfare: Armed with Fusors, PaCs, and Heavy Lasers, they can trade shots with enemy Assault Sled toe-to-toe, yet they are much better able to take advantage of cover and concealment (as the rules explicitly state, with the provisions about a vehicle’s Profile reducing its benefits from Cover).
Ironically, it makes Iron terribly inefficient for fighting other infantry. So many high-quality infantry units would probably mix Iron and Anvil, perhaps at a ratio of 1:3.
…Anvil Trained troops are JUST as vulnerable to vehicular scale weaponry as standard infantry…
Again, absolutely true – which argues for pure-Iron units for the most intense assaults.
[continuing]
But an all-Iron unit is indeed a specialized thing. I’d see it as super-heavy assault infantry, deployed by Assault Sleds to storm a particularly well-defended point, or dug in to protect an absolutely critical position.
My thought on Anvil forces is directly influenced on what the Hammer is. The only real space fight we see is in Faith’s Iron and distance isn’t given. But Burning Empires sites 40K and Ian Banks as inspiration. The big scifi nerd that I am, my thoughts on space based combat is influenced by novels like Shadow Point, the Honor Harrington novels by David Weber and Books like Excession by Banks. In SP and other 40k books with naval combat, their Point defense weapons can track and engage targets as small as a grav sled or smaller at extreme range, as it does in the HH series with their use of lasers. A laser alone, tied into a proper sensor, can, at the least, engage a target effectively at one light second. Being able to engage and fight at a handful of light seconds with energy weapons would be feasible, especially if you also carry fast moving missile ordinance that allows you target and fight at much longer range, such as they do in HH with their X-ray burst heads and the sheer number of missile tubes the average in universe ship carries. In Excession, I believe it’s ROU Killing time, goes Rambo and engages a fleet of warships that are scattered acrossed several light minutes without worrying about whether it will hit or not.
If IE capships have a fraction of this capacity and IE fighters are a legit threat to them in space, sitting tens of KM above a planet and engaging similar sized targets with their point defense weapons would be a cake walk at that range. And if the main weapons on a hammer are approaching 40k lance battery power, star wars Turbolaser or just really big nuke tonnage, the hammer doesn’t even have to be dead on target to take out anvil on the ground, even if they are scattered. There’s also the fact that if Anvil scatters and goes to ground and the invading force with the hammer takes the cities, it’s only a matter of time until they can starve the anvil that hid into doing something brazen, like assaulting a city with Hammer hanging above, or simply starving them out.