Quote:Elite? Ohyeah. The members of the Royal Guard are selected from the regular military branches on the basis of height and reflex speed. Then they spend several years training, not just as a Praetorian guard but as battlefield shock troops, too.
I'm gathering that the Royal Guard are fairly elite if they're wearing 'full armor', but even so they're not going to have fun running away from lightly armoured men, much less dog cavalry. And being outnumbered 5-to-1 I doubt that the Captain is liable to like the idea of standing and fighting without a formaidable terrain advantage.
The princess didn't want to back off not just for moral reasons, but because leaving that kind of raiding party loose near a major - and almost undefended - town would not be likely to endear them to the hosts they'd been sent to make a treaty with.
Quote:In a lot of ways the Islands are closely modeled off of the classical Greeks. So, yeah, at sea, you're a lot more likely to see two scraggly little guys in breechclouts going at each other with boarding axes, but for actual warfare (rather than the casual piracy that's just considered a matter of opportunity and a fact of life), you'll see each city-state raising its citizen militias and fielding them in phalanxes.
Interesting that pikemen would be characteristic if these Islands are a bandit/pirate haven. Pikes aren't terribly handy onboard ships, or in anything but formation fighting (boarding pikes are somewhat smaller) which doesn't seem too plausible, particularly if cavalry are less of a threat.
And, without cavalry, I'd actually expect a phalanx to be more dangerous, rather than less - since there are, as I understand it, exactly four ways of dealing with the things.
1. Get a phalanx of your own. (none of the other four factions in this world have any)
2. Shoot the shit out of it with missile weapons. (takes a lot of time and effort, and only works if you have maneuvering room and aren't pinned down defending something)
3. Flank it. (Which becomes much more difficult without cavalry)
4. Find a few fighters so good or so well armored they can survive having that many spears aimed at them, then throw them into the teeth of the thing and have them hack the poles off and open a gap for the rest of your army. (This was why medievel doppelsoldiers were paid what they were - it's dangerous.)
Quote:'Flatlander' is a derogatory for the River Kingdom, yeah. But there are actually going to be five factors in the long run.
Thus far I'm seeing three or four factions: the mountain kingdom of your protagonist (the Dynasty?), the Islanders and the River Kingdom (I'm not clear if they're the same as the 'flatlanders'). I'd be interested in seeing how your geography works out if islanders are a threat as a source of bandits to a mountain region - usually mountains are far enough inland that islands wouldn't be much of a refuge, but I supposed that there are exceptions.
The Mountain Kingdom is very strongly associated with its ruling family, for the same reason that they're referred to as the Dynasty by, well, everybody, rather than just their own subjects. They're directly descended from the last survivor of the ruling family of the state that, by the time the story's set, is only known as 'The Old Empire', which, up until its collapse, ruled - not just reigned over, but actively controlled - pretty much the entire civilised world.
The Old Empire fell apart for, mm, three reasons. First, its outlying territories hadn't had time to fully assimilate when everything went to hell. Second, there was an invasion - your classic 'steppe nomads descend on civilization' scenario - that overran about the northern third of the Empire and shattered the better part of its military strength in the bargain. Third, power hungry elements in the imperial capital (noble families, the three major churches, the old praetorian guard, etc) kicked off a civil war when the external fighting killed off most of the Dynasty's clearer successors.
The civil war eventually ended when one of the surviving frontier armies returned home and slapped down the various factions, but by that point the only survivor of the blood royal was, not to put too fine a point on it, a slimy little toad of a man who had headed for the hills (literally) to try and raise an army of his own.
In short, a vice-ridden coward who the army's general would rather die than put on the throne. Since, by that point, most of the outer regions were lost causes anyway, he shrugged and put on the crown himself.
Geography - the rivers that give the River Kingdom its name are not minor ones; even the smallest is the size of the Ohio, and the largest is more comperable to the Amazon. The three middle ones in size aren't connected to each other except for each flowing into a lake called the Jewel, which is drained by the largest one that is, in turn, joined by the smallest. The Jewel, by the way, is an impact basin of dinosaur-killer proportions, and young enough to be absolutely unmistakable as such.
The land gets higher and hillier as you head north (and keeps doing so until you hit the polar icecap), but the headwater zone that's ruled by the former invaders - whom I've still yet to come up with an apt name for - is still mostly open plains.
The ranges that give the Mountain Kingdom its name run north and south along the eastern border of both of the other described nations, and are built by the same sort of volcanic activity that's responsible for the Andes, the Cascades, and the entire Japanese island arc. The vast majority of the population lives in one of seven major north-south valleys - hence, 'Kingdom of the Seven Vales'. The Brothers mentioned in the dialog are the forts responsible for defending the only two passes into the first vale low enough to get an army through.
The continental boundary that's building those ranges keeps going past the end of the landmass, though, and starts to curve off to the west - which is where the Islanders live.
Culture tidbit - the Old Empire and the invading nomads were both matrilineal. The mountain tribes that the Dynasty built their new kingdom off of weren't, and neither are the Islanders or the new invaders who're the fifth faction.
See, the landmass these people are living on extends from the pole down to the northern tropic, and all the civilisation is in the southern parts... so they don't really know that the tundra zone wraps around and connects to two more landmasses. The old invaders came north, then west, then south to arrive from one; the new are coming east.
...
It would probably help if I mentioned that Creative Assembly's Total War games were a major, major influence on this setting's formation.
Ja, -n
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