Travels amongst the Border Princes (WFRP 2e) OOC

[rax]

If Toby gets in a hit, Severin will spend an FP to re-roll his Dodge. Missed by a measly 3 points...

[dojango]

If Toby gets in a hit, Severin will spend an FP to re-roll his Dodge. Missed by a measly 3 points...

Go ahead and roll it now so we have the roll when if we need it.

[dojango]

Keep in mind, from the book, for melee attacks, there is a modifier: Easy +20% Attacking a foe who is outnumbered 3 to 1.

[rax]

Go ahead and roll it now so we have the roll when if we need it.

Coming up...

(1d100)[6] vs. Ag 67

Keep in mind, from the book, for melee attacks, there is a modifier: Easy +20% Attacking a foe who is outnumbered 3 to 1.

I considered that, but the tactic of shooting our enemies has worked well so far and I don't think Severin would want to "order" Gabriele and Bert to rush the frenzied Blood God berserker. Of course, he'll have no objections if they choose to do so voluntarily...

[dojango]

Bert won't do it unless ordered and unless Gabrielle goes first, that much you're fairly certain of...

Bert (1d100)[2] (1d10+3)[7]

Toby (1d100)[100] v. 60 (1d10+4)[10]

[Haval]

He's a Chaos worshiper which means it's personal. And it might make it easier for Severin to disengage. Gabriele has no business ordering Burt to do anything, but he seems to know what he's doing.

I think technically I have to ready a sword before charging anyway.

Assuming I can take another round here

Free Action - Reload
Half Action - Shooting the Horse (ideally want to get Toby on the ground)
Free Action - Drop Bow
Free Action - Ready Sword

vs. BS 57 (is the horse in melee? -20)
(1d100)[30]

Damage
(1d10+3)[4]

[rax]

If you attack the horse rather than Toby, I don't think we'll be getting an outnumbering bonus for attacking Toby himself.

Edit: Nevermind, misread what Gabriele is doing. Thought she was attacking in melee this round.

[dojango]

(1d100)[88] (1d10+3)[13]

[Haval]

Like that 88

[rax]

Oh, what the heck. I'll spend my last FP to re-roll the second attack.

(1d100)[53] vs. 41

...nope.

[dojango]

Bert (1d100)[29] (1d10+3)[11]
Toby [roll]1d100[roll] v. 60 (1d10+4)[11]

[dojango]

If either of you want to claim some medium armor, go for it, otherwise the villagers will take it. Same for the riding horse.

[Haval]

Gabriele already has medium armour but wasn't using it for stealth reasons. I'll take the horse.

[rax]

Gabriele already has medium armour but wasn't using it for stealth reasons. I'll take the horse.

She's got the minimum necessary for a mercenary, but Toby's got full mail on all locations. So if you want to giver her the full kit, here's your chance.

Severin has all the armour I intend for him to use for now.

Edit: BTW, what happened to horse #3. Did it run back to the bandit camp?

[dojango]

Yeah it ran in the other direction. Could try to track it down, suppose, but it's been a long couple of days and it is getting dark.

[rax]

Been busy with real life stuff today, so no time to post IC. I'll catch up tomorrow evening.

BTW, dojango, did you see that DrK was asking whether there was any interest in continuing his Storm of Chaos game or possibly switching to something else?

[dojango]

(1d100)[5] v. 40 and (1d10)[10] for village healer.

[dojango]

Well that fixes Severin.

[rax]

Most definitely. Thanks, nameless village midwife!

[dojango]

With that kind of success, might need to reward her with a name.

[rax]

IC reply is up, but there's plenty more planning to do, I think. I need to get to bed now, but I'll post some questions OOC tomorrow.

Edit: Okay, so not today after all.

[rax]

Belisarius speaks up. "Uh, we reckon there's about 200 adults who can hold a stick or swing a sling. Half of them are going to be in the fields harvesting, so they won't be able to help do whatever. But they can try and fight as best they can? And there's maybe 60 of the tall folk? The rest are too old or too young to fight."

Sorry, just to be certain - is Belisarius saying that we have 200 halfling adults and 60 humans, or 140 halflings and 60 humans?

And since it's difficult to do detailed planning in the back-and-forth of the IC thread, I figured I'd toss up my ideas here and then Haval and I can ask the necessary questions IC to find out if there's a reasonable chance of them working.

First of all, I'm all for a layered defence. As Alyssa suggested, the palisade should be repaired, ditches cleared, and an abatis laid out. We want to make the approach to the palisade as difficult as possible. If the palisade doesn't already have one, I'd ideally also like to construct a halfling-sized walkway around the top so that our halflings can fire at the approaching bandits from behind the relative safety of the palisade. If the enemy gets past the outer defences, they can also drop rocks on them. Adding a couple of towers as shooting and observation platforms is also a good idea, but how many we might need really depends on the size of the village and how many points of entry there are.

In addition to improving the palisade and our ability to fight from it, I'd like to make the approaches to the village as difficult as possible. From our own walks in and out of the village, my understanding is that the approach from the bandit camp is through the southern rice paddies. If these are rice paddies as seen in the movies, I assume they're water filled basins with knee-deep mud and that there's one or more raised pathways/embankments that are normally used to get past the paddies to the village. Is that about right, dojango?

Assuming this way through the paddies is also the easiest way to approach the village with a large number of men, I'd like to booby trap that approach. The villagers doing the harvesting can pull double duty here. We should seed the pathway or pathways with punji sticks or maybe just collapse them at some point, forcing the bandits to head off the pathways and down into the paddies to get around the obstacles. Here's where we pull our nasty trick - as the harvesters clear a paddy, they replace the harvested crops with lines of punji sticks so that bandits slogging through the mud are basically walking into a minefield. If we can pull this off once or twice, we're going to injure a fair few of them as they try to maneuver round our obstacles, and the greener troops are probably going to be fairly demoralized.

We should also plan for a defence inside the village in case the palisade is breached. Here I think we need to keep a mobile reserve of humans ready and able to fight in hand to hand. We could also convert some farm carts into war wagons that can be rolled out to seal breaches and make impromptu barricades in the streets (assuming the village is big enough to even make blocking individual streets a thing). The wagons would be reinforced with plank walls on one side allowing halfling or human archers to shoot from a protected position. Spear armed humans would also be able to fight from behind the planking with the advantage of protection and higher ground. The wagons themselves should also be weighed down with rocks to make them harder to push out of the way.

Another thing we could do is to set up tripwires along various streets. If the bandits break into the village, they'll probably head for the perceived village centre as fast as they can. Tripwires stand a good chance of, well, tripping them up. Once they're flat on their backs, defending halflings could emerge from the surrounding houses and hit them when they're down.

...or we just go for something simpler than war wagons and tripwires and just construct prepared fallback positions inside the village with ready made barricades where our militia can rally to defend.

All of this points towards making the production of arrows and gathering sling stones a priority. Ideally we want to whittle the bandits down so much at range that we won't be doing much hand-to-hand combat. I think we already had 40 spears and 20 swords, so getting more spears would be a good thing, but secondary to getting a solid supply of ammunition for our bows and slings.

In terms of training, as I said in the IC, we should try and play to our militia's strengths. Halflings are, on average, pretty decent missile users. What we need to get the most out of them is to train them to follow orders and direct their fire as ordered. Additional training to make them more accurate would be a bonus.

I assume the humans are a mixed bunch when it comes to melee, so they'll need more training if we're to use them as our primary hand-to-hand combatants. A shield wall would be nice, but if we concentrate on getting them to use spears, then our primary concern should be to train them to fight in formation rather than make each individual the best combatant he can be. Anyone can defend a barricade or a wall, what we need is for them to be able to make use of hopefully local superiority in numbers and to stand their ground when pressed. And obviously there'll be humans who are much better at shooting than melee, and some halflings that won't mind close combat. These should train according to their proclivities as well.

[Haval]

I take it the palisade goes all the way around the village? Is it rice paddies on every side or are parts of it easier to approach?

If I was paranoid I'd be worried about them doing something to break the palisade with fire or axes. In which case a walkway that would help us shoot them first would be a good idea.

All for as many traps as possible but I assume we have to prioritise some things over others.

[dojango]

140 halflings and 60 humans capable of fighting.

The village is bounded on the north by the lake, on the west by the rice paddies. There is a raised road by the village, but after that it is as you describe, a wet swampy mess. The south and east are largely cleared land, pasture and a few garden plots. Also middens and graveyard. The forest eaves are about 50 yards away.
The palisade is bascially a stout wooden fence. There aren't any firing platforms yet, Alyssa wants to build some wooden towers, though. There is a muddy ditch that fronts the palisade, which can be cleared of debris and widened, although that would take up a lot of time. Also there's no palisade on the lake side of the village. The lake protects it well enough, I'm sure.

In the village there are about twenty small wooden houses, each of which has an extended family in cramped conditions. In the center is the inn, which is built of stone and has a stone-walled garden around the magic apple trees. The 'streets' in the village are mostly mud, and there are a few chokepoints where houses are close together, but mostly there is space between them for small gardens, chicken coops, pig pens, wells, privies, and other incidentals of village life. The village green has been turned into a refugee camp where people are living in tents. There are plenty of carts and wagons you can use to make strongpoints and channel attackers.

[rax]

So does that mean an enemy force could completely bypass the paddies and approach to within 50 yards of the village by coming from the east or the south? And that there approach would be through forest thick enough that we wouldn't really notice them unless we sent scouts into the forest?

[dojango]

Yeah, the village is built on the edge of the paddies. So if they come out of the forest it would be a surprise unless you're looking for them. I got the idea for the layout of the village when I was in Tennessee, they had a model of an old Indian village laid out. The village is on the shore of an oxbow lake, and the rice paddies are between the old river bluff and the lake. The old river bluffs make it so that there is a rise a hundred yards or so away from the lake and the village, and because it's covered in a deciduous hardwood forest, visibility is limited. By contrast, the old castle was located on top of the old bluff, so that visibility is much better.

[rax]

Hmm, that's troublesome. That makes my idea to boobytrap the approaches to the village much harder.

How tall is the palisade and how strong? Can a couple of grown men with a rope just pull it down?

[dojango]

It's not that weak. They would need axes, rope, and some time to pull parts of it down. Or gunpowder, I suppose. Fire. The usual siege stuff.

[Haval]

Just means that towers or some ability to shoot people trying anything might be important. I can't see them being organised enough to do that and shield people from missile fire at the same time.

I wonder how easy it would be to burn down sections of the forest. Possibly when there are raiders in there.

[rax]

Just means that towers or some ability to shoot people trying anything might be important. I can't see them being organised enough to do that and shield people from missile fire at the same time.

I wonder how easy it would be to burn down sections of the forest. Possibly when there are raiders in there.

Probably quite difficult. This region seems to suffer from regular downpours. My guess is that the woods are quite soggy.

Speaking of which, I assume that a larger body of men at least needs to use established trails to move easily through the forest?