Eating too much this week was probably not good for my guts. But I’m out from work until Monday! And that’s pretty great.
You know, I highly considered not doing more of these, but then I recalled that I named the last one ‘Part I’ so I suppose I should probably do a ‘Part II’ at some point, huh?
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Fantasy Tactics, Part II
Moving on--
FANTASY MOUNTS!
In fantasy stories you sometimes see people riding creatures that aren’t horses. And that’s fine! But in war time you have to consider that a lot of animals, no matter how cool it would look to ride, probably wouldn’t make good mounts. Horses are very good at running long distances faster than humans can, and are big enough to carry people and objects. And obviously, we’ve been breeding horses to specialize in those traits.
But there are animals that I don’t think are very good for riding, and I don’t know that anyone would try. Wolves for instance, come up as mounts for orcs in The Hobbit (and we see it in The Lord of the Rings movies), and those are explicitly a special kind of evil wolf that Tolkien refers to as wargs, so I give it a pass. But we see wolves as mounts in some other fantasy stories, or big cats or something (Aslan gets a pass in LWW too because, well, he’s Lion!Jesus). I don’t think that predators make very good mounts. Maybe for patrols and parades (which would happen a lot in most fantasy settings). But warfare? Long distance riding? No--most predators are not built to run long distances for long amounts of time. They ambush prey. Some can run for longer than others, and yeah, they’d be vicious to attack people with. But calvary charges? Heck no. They’re not built for that. Obviously, I suppose it’s possible for people to breed animals with these traits, but I’d like to be told that rather than just ‘these people ride giant predators.’
Other animals I feel like don’t get enough thought put into it. We see dwarves riding goats in Inheritance Cycle and The Hobbit films, but not much is done with that? And like, yeah, maybe on a flat plain they’re not as good as horses, but in mountainous terrain? Goats are perfect mounts. They can climb rocks much better than any bipeds.
There’s also a scene in The Battle of the Five Armies in which we see a dwarf riding a giant boar? That’s… actually a really good idea. Obviously boars as they live in our world aren’t great for riding, but assume you could train and breed them for that, do you have any idea how hard it is to kill a giant boar? It’s a massive, sturdy animal great for attacking and hard to kill. It’s not great for speed, but it’s not a bad creature for riding in the thick of a melee.
TRAINED SOLDIERS VS. HARDCORE WARRIORS!
There’s a bit in one of the Codex Alera books (a series in which the culture is based off of ancient Rome) in which Tavi our protagonist, must join the army as an officer, and when he’s told that he needs to learn how to fight, he protests that he knows how to fight. Except his friend points out that while he can fight in a duel, he can’t fight as a soldier, which is different--fencing is not the same as being in formation and relying on the men around you. He can beat anyone in a fight against single opponents, but doesn’t know how to be in a testudo formation.
Likewise, we see this come up several times in Ranger’s Apprentice, where the protagonists have to train a large group of people to fight against a better threat. Battle of Skandia is about Skandia (a Scandanavia stand in) being invaded by the Temujai (a Mongol stand in), and the heroes teach the serfs to be archers. Not marksmen, of course, because they don’t have the time. But to be able to shoot volleys. The tenth book in the series has them in Nihon-Ja (a stand-in for Japan) and helping the emperor in fighting off a samurai rebellion, and they train their men, a group of woodcutters, how to fight in a testudo formation, because against men who are used to individual combat with swords and spears, an impenetrable shield wall is a bit difficult.
It’s not a matter of making sure each individual person in the unit is a skilled warrior, it’s about making sure they can all fight as a unit.
In fantasy stories, there is often an emphasis on elite units being made up of hardcore warriors that can take anyone in a one-on-one fight. But in many cases, the military units that won battles weren’t badasses, they were disciplined. Shield walls, volleys, formations--these get jobs done just as well. We do see formations in fantasy and historical films, but they’re often broken up as soon as the fight gets going. And I understand that it’s more dramatic and cool to watch badass warriors taking out hordes of enemies like that, but let’s establish that formations are useful and have reasons for existing.
There’s a series I started (and can’t find the next book for!) where the antagonist invents shield walls, and this utterly baffles everyone else because theirs is a hardcore warrior culture, and no one knows what to do against it. Naturally, it starts to curbstomp everyone else it comes up against.
NAVAL BATTLES!
You know, not a lot of fantasy stories do much with naval battles. Like sure, they’re there. And I think there are scenes in fantasy stories (Dragonlance comes to mind) in which it’s clear to everyone that if a dragon shows up while you’re in a ship, you’re screwed. But in a world in which there are wizards, well, what are they doing during naval battles? Or voyages in general? It’s possible that having someone throwing around a lot of magic during a voyage in a small contained space that’s made of wood is a recipe for disaster, but I don’t usually get an explanation for this.
[I imagine that in these fantasy worlds, sailors might have superstitions that it’s bad luck to carry a mage on board a ship.]
What can mages do during naval battles? Quite a lot, I imagine. Lighting enemy ships on fire, calling lightning and waves, making and throwing projectiles, putting up barriers to protect the ship. And if the other ship has a mage too, then you get a very complicated situation in which two ships are firing at each other and two mages trying to outdo each other and overcome magical defenses and counter magical attacks.
Heck, even outside of battles, wizards would be handy on ships. Using air manipulation to fill sails and get them going in the right direction, keeping the seas calm, summoning fresh fish up from the ocean to keep the crew fed, keeping the ship clean with magic… there’s a lot to be done here.
AIR SHIPS!
Not enough fantasy stories have airships. Those are awesome! Why not use those more? And I think that obviously you’ll have airship vs airship battles, but the one thing I’m thinking about is that an airship is also, if applied correctly, completely deadly against ground troops. Because here you have a flying armor vehicle that may have ranged weapons that could easily float over a battlefield and bombard enemy forces with cannon fire or heavy objects or whatnot.
And of course, airships fighting each other (which we would have gotten a lot of if the 2011 Three Musketeers had ever gotten a sequel). These would obviously be much slower than the dogfights between airplanes or starships, and these ships would have more mobility than normal ships because they’re moving in three dimensions rather than just across the surface of the sea (although the idea of ships that sail across clouds sounds very cool too).
There are reasons, I imagine, why an airship would not be practical. But I very rarely see them brought up. In worlds where wizards can do basically anything, it seems very possible that someone would have thought at some point to make a flying ship. And yet they’re not that common in mainstream fantasy, and you hardly ever see them pulled out in warfare.
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