Inactive [LP CYOA] Overlord

A note on the numbers above:
The absolutist Louis XIV of France commanded up to 30,000 men, with no nobles being allowed to raise armies of their own in France in the 17th century, meaning that vast majority of availible soldiers were in the King's service. Methuss seems to have four times as many availible soldiers. Should we understand that it is a sprawling empire, four times the size of France?

 

Pretty routine for fantasy stories to have little to no grounding in logistical support limits.

 

It is routine for the Codex to demand better

But in all honesty, that was just a question to Treave, regarding the size of Methuss.

 

The French army at the end of the 17th century boasted, at least according to their records, 400,000 men if I'm not mistaken. Which source are you citing?

Here, I'll link a paper by John Lynn on the size of the French army in that era.

http://www.reenactor.ru/ARH/PDF/Lynn_01.pdf

 

To be honest, I just read it in the history section of the weekly newspaper. Should have checked twice before jumping to conclusions. So how large is Methuss? And the other realms? Will you draw us a map?

 

You're mistaking me for some other more hardworking and diligent LP writer, I'm afraid. No maps.

 

Even a very general one? Pwease? Pwetty pwease?

 

You can buy one when you reach the capital.

 

You fiend!

 

B1 > C

 

Some thoughts on the information:

Obviously, if you want to topple Methuss, you need to get the nobles on your side or incite some sort of civil war/succession crisis.

I wonder what the circumstances of the second son's death were. Could there have been some plotting that lead to a mysterious accident?

The Duke seems to be a tremendous power behind the throne and acts as a kingmaker. As for the Marquis, he's clearly a military prodigy, akin to this world's Hannibal or Alexander. Repelling an invasion from a rival power at only 21 years old is truly remarkable.

 

I would see it as highly inadvisable and unprofessional, seeing how the main reason for choosing C is to avoid potential risks. We should do this as cleanly as we could.

It is also interesting that he had to act to make Feist recognized as a Crown Prince, even though logically he already was the First Prince and an official successor... or was he? Did His Majesty have other plans for succession?

The inner politics of Methuss appear interesting by the description alone.

Tally (open) Tally (close)

Azira C>A1
Nevill A1>C
Gobblecock B1
Baltika9 C
lightbane B1>C
Lambchop19 C>B1
Grimgravy A1>C
asxetos B1>C
Kz3r0 C
Kipeci C
Storyfag A1
archaen A1>B1
Elfberserker B1>A1
Jester C
Esquilax B1>C
ScubaV B1>C
Greyviper C
Kayerts B1
Smashing Axe A1>B1
Absinthe C

A1 - 6 (1) Nevill (C), archaen (B1), Gobblecock (B1), Grimgravy (C), Smashing Axe (B1)
B1 - 6 (9)
C - 8 (10)

 

I want someone to assassinate the King in a zany way, if only to say, "Murder most Fowyl, as in the best it is, but this most Fowyl, strange and unnatural"

 

True. This would work better with B1, but it seems C is going to win for sure.

 

C what must be done, will be done.

 

HISTORYPOST INCOMING -- STAND CLEAR

It's not really clear that this is true, at least not to the extent represented here. There are a largish number of successful commanders from pre-modern times who started in their teens or twenties and had considerable success around the time they started; a large number of the tasks involved in successfully leading a (pre-modern) army lend themselves well to aptitudes rather than skills. The reason it seems weird to us is that we very seldom have reason to put a young person in charge of an army today, and in fact doing so would be taking on a large, avoidable risk. (Since randomly selected people with limited skill development *aren't* usually talented, and the lack of experience means that we lack a particularly good filter for sorting the untalented majority from the talented minority.) Aristocracy sidesteps the problem of reluctance to giving unqualified people commands. More signiifcantly, being a commander in a setting where your enemies also are working off an aristocracy makes it much easier to stand out as an exceptional commander, since the likelihood of the opposing commander's incompetence is higher.

It's worth noting that Louis XIV was an aberration of his time in many ways, including this one. Moreover, the 16th to 17th centuries saw unprecedented development in real world militaries (the "military revolution" alluded to in the paper), and as it notes, the largest French force mustered prior to 1632 was less than 75,000. My impression is that the setting we're in is multiple centuries older. So a question that may arise is, was the growth of militaries in that era a coincidence, or was it logically contingent on technological, social, and political factors that didn't exist until the mid-17th century? I'm inclined to guess the latter; a kingdom fielding 6-figure armies for anything outside an existential threat probably requires a few things to be true:

a) Infantry needs to be useful in a way that scales. (There aren't enough horses.)
b) Unarmored or lightly armored troops need to be useful in a way that scales. (There isn't enough armor, either.)
c) For the above two reasons, you probably need them to be using ranged weapons. And you probably need the ranged weapons to be firearms. Why? Training 125k dudes to do anything is pretty hard. It took a long time for firearms to strictly outperform trained archers (there's a famous example of the Duke of Wellington asking for a company of longbowmen during the Napoleonic Wars), but it is vastly easier to create a useful soldier in a few weeks or months if you're teaching him to shoot a gun than a bow, or (god forbid) if you're giving him a melee weapon that you expect him to wield in limited armor without shitting his pants.
d) There's some thought that improvements to fortification technology consequent to early artillery resulted in a siege-based style of warfare, which meant it required more manpower to run a war than was previously the case.

So there is some historical basis for believing the logistics represented in this game about demon tits might not have 100% verisimilitude. I recommend not caring about it. In conclusion, B1, making our dude murder his own men for the love of our depraved pet genius is cool.

 

Hardly so. It might be more advanced in some ways, more backwards in others, but this is not the sort of thing where you can make a direct comparison. I don't think you should treat the setting as an analogue of real world Europe in whatever century it might seem to be in, with precisely the same factors that shaped its developments, except with added magic. After all, going by that pace of advancement, the various kingdoms should have long invented computers and the internet by now. Alternate history this is not.

The paper was just to show that you don't need some sort of 'sprawling empire' as a prerequisite for fielding 100,000 men should the need arise, even in what might appear to be a pre-industrial setting.

You could care, but it probably wouldn't matter anyway when a million-strong undead army that shits all over the art of logistics gets raised.

 

B1

I want something interesting to happen here.

 

I take off my conditional C and vote strict A1 > B1.

 

Never let the Codex get bored, eh?

 

Voting B1 OR C (whichever is higher, ignore if tied).

 

A1 > B1

Treave is going to do the most sick, twisted shit with these characters, given how they started as happy-go-lucky types, the only way to go is down, fast. Forcing them to kill their comrades, whether it's just the commander doing it or the surviving company is going to warp their minds. It'd be a mercy to kill them all now, but it wouldn't be very interesting.

 

In hindsight I think I'll just vote C because Zhang Manxing route.

 

Flop back to C to resolve the tie.

 

I agree and I love the potential for twisted depravity, but it just seems dumb to take the risk of taking so many of these guys captive. We have a bunch of trained professional soldiers in the bandits that we've turned to our will, but these guys seem really tight-knit, tough and the sort that would be difficult to crack and/or supervise. Talal, their commander, seems to be the exception to the rule, but that's because we're in a great position to exploit his weaknesses. In that situation, I can't justify the risk of taking on these men as underlings without the sort of psychological leverage that we have on Talal.

Sadly, C will win, so the potential for the sick shit treave has planned will win out.