Fantasy Tactics, Part Two

 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?

---

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.

---

Powder Mage is Brilliant, Go Read It

 This week has been stressful because of the amount of work I had to do in the office, but other than that it hasn’t been that bad (for me). Still, I tend to have “Oh no, what if I have covid?” panics at least once a day. So that’s fun.

NaNoWriMo’s still kicking my butt, thanks for asking.

Anyway, let’s talk about Powder Mage mothercluckers.

---

Powder Mage is Brilliant, Go Read It

The fantasy genre has a bit of a weird relationship with gunpowder.

People tend to equate the fantasy genre with the middle ages, and with a pre-gunpowder world. And that’s not an unfair assumption to make in many cases. Mainstream fantasy tends to shun firearms. It’s not true of all fantasy, obviously--the dwarves have it in Warcraft, there’s more niche stuff like the Soldier Son Trilogy, and the Fable sequels have it--but overall, it’s not very common. When it does appear, like in The Two Towers, or Kung Fu Panda 2, it’s a foreign concept to most characters in the setting. And that’s fine! I’m not bashing those stories.

It gets a bit weird when you have things like urban fantasy though, where guns are almost nowhere to be seen for… Reasons. I recently reread Rick Riordan’s The Burning Maze, which is the third book in his Trials of Apollo series, and there are some comments about how guns don’t work around demigods or something (but no other combustive technology, like car engines have the same problem), which is never even hinted at, and somewhat contradicts what we see in the previous twelve books. Methinks Rick has been talking to Cassandra Clare again; she also has a similar rule in Mortal Instruments on why Shadowhunters don’t use guns, but again doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t affect any other forms of combustion or projectile technology.

In any case, a lot of fantasy doesn’t want to deal with guns. Because that takes out the sword fights, I think. And this misses that there was a long time when guns weren’t really that reliable and hadn’t quite replaced the sword. That a fantasy setting not unlike the Enlightenment of our world would be a really interesting place to tell stories.

Brian McClellan apparently agreed.

Hence: The Powder Mage Trilogy. A trilogy of rather thick novels set in a fantasy world that is currently going through something like our Age of Revolutions. The story begins with the country of Adro’s Field Marshal, Tamas, leading a coup to overthrow the monarchy and the chaos that follows from that. What makes this setting interesting is its magic system.

See, for a while there were two kinds of magic users in the world (well three if we’re counting bone-eyes, and a couple other things, but we’re not getting into that now): Knacked and Privileged. Knacked basically have one superpower, or a Knack, and that’s it. Not needing to sleep, or perfect memory, or detecting mages, or healing, or whatever. Usually not very powerful.

Privileged, as you can imagine, are much more powerful. They have more traditional magic, based on the elements, though they have to wear special gloves in order to control that power they can throw around. They can also see in the Else, which is like the Third Eye for detecting magic and seeing other mages and such. They tend to get gathered up into Royal Cabals that nations maintain for guarding the royal families and leading military expeditions.

But recently in this setting, in the past hundred years or so, after the widespread use of flintlock firearms in the military, another kind of mage has evolved into being, one that Privileged can’t see in the Else, although they can see them right back: Powder Mages, who have magic connected to gunpowder. They can snort it to go into a powder trance and become more powerful, and are all amazing marksmen. But they also have complete control of combustion, and can use up and redirect gunpowder without pulling triggers, reloading, or even using a gun. At one point Tamas makes a barrage by throwing a bunch of musket balls into the air and firing them off (though it’s not very accurate, it deals with a large group well enough). It’s pointed out several times that pointing guns at Powder Mages is really dumb, because they’re just prevent the powder from igniting. And Vlora makes a cask of gunpowder explode by will.

It’s an interesting idea, because this kind of mage, that deals specifically with gunpowder, obviously hasn’t existed forever. It’s fairly new (though not THAT new by the time the story starts). And it made me think about what McClellan is doing with this idea.

The Powder Mage Trilogy is about change. A lot of fantasy stories are. Changes to the characters, changes to the world, change to society, changes to warfare, and changes to religion. Those are all very common things. But this trilogy shows how the world is adapting and evolving by displaying how the magic itself is evolving. And no one really gets how or why. We see that Powder Mages are a new type of magic that evolved and nobody really knew how to deal with it at first. And we see magic evolving more, with things like Privileged who don’t need to use gloves, or Powder Mages pushing past the normal limits of their abilities. And it doesn’t feel like McClellan’s breaking the rules, because it’s not so common or overdone that he’s throwing the rules out the window. But he does it in a way, mostly with characters who aren’t the main ones, to show that the world is changing, and no one really knows how or where it’s going.

And that’s… pretty heavy. I mean the series starts with imagery very reminiscent of the French Revolution--the king and his family are overthrown, the nobles are guillotined, their property is seized (but it turns out that the royal bank account is empty anyway), and Adro now has to fight off foreign powers that are trying to take advantage of the chaos and prevent them for starting a republic. Obviously, other book series deal with social upheaval and societal change--A Song of Ice and Fire is the famous one, but it’s in so many stories like Wheel of Time and The Dragon Lords and The Obsidian Trilogy.

But it’s not always tied to magic like that. In Wheel of Time and The Obsidian Trilogy, it’s more that old forgotten forms of magic are being rediscovered (NOTE: I say this without having yet finished Wheel of Time). With this, it isn’t one aspect of the world that’s changing--it’s everything. And the characters can’t hold on to anything too tightly because that might be pulled out from under them too. They’re not trying to make things the way they were, because they can’t go back to that way--it doesn’t exist anymore.

Everything is changing. Nothing’s the same anymore. And that’s not a risk a lot of fantasy stories take. It’s not one most fantasy stories need to take, I think. But it’s something I didn’t expect. And I think it’s worth looking into the series for.

---

Fantasy Tactics, Part One

 Existential dread, something about being scared for the world, yadda yadda. This wasn’t too bad of a week, but I just keep seeing headlines about how we’re all dying and that’s not great for my state of mind! It makes me want to not go to work! But I need to be paid! So you see the problem I’m in!

Anyway I was thinking of doing a more Limyaael-style Saturday Note this time around.

---

Tactics in Fantasy

Alright I know that movies aren’t great depictions of battle tactics. I know. Okay. It’s fine. Movies are for entertainment. I’m not one of those people who sits and cries foul every time there’s the tiniest inaccuracy in a movie, unless it hits my buttons, or I’m really annoyed or something.

But I would like to see people do some more stuff with tactics and warfare in fantasy. To be clear, books tend to be better at this than movies, but there are also things that I don’t see that often in books either, that I’d like to see more of.

SPEARS!

Look, you know that the ancient Greeks didn’t really like swords that much? They had them, obviously, but that wasn’t the weapon of choice for warriors--the spear was. The sword was what you used when you were too close to use the spear. The iconic weapon of the king of the gods, Zeus, was a spear. Mind you, that spear was also a lightning bolt. But it was a polearm that he hurled at people!

And I’m not saying that fantasy must follow the rules of ancient Greek hoplites or Greek culture at all (although I would really like more Greek-flavored fantasy), but think about spears! Think about the advantages that a spear has that a sword doesn’t. No, it doesn’t have the same connotation in modern culture as swords, but it’s a weapon with more range than swords, and it’s a lot better to use in a shield wall. 

In fantasy there are a lot of opponents that you’re probably better off fighting with a spear. Giants, for starters--a long lance or spear is going to be a lot safer than walking up to him with a sword. Dragons as well. And spears are probably the first weapon you’ll be using if you’re on horseback, rather than a sword. And if you’re riding an animal larger than a horse--well, a spear is going to be helpful.

MAGIC!

While playing The Witcher 3 during the Battle of Kaer Morhen there’s this thing--when Geralt’s in trouble, the plan is to shoot up a flare and get Triss to rain down fire on your position. Basically, use magic as heavy artillery to bombard a location. And that’s… really cool.

I feel as if despite the fact that magic and wizards are common in fantasy, they’re not used that tactically? Generally, it’s about a lone wizard going into a fray and throwing lightning or fire or something, and maybe coming up against another wizard and doing a wizard duel. And that’s okay I guess. You get some great scenes like that--Dresden Files has quite a few.

Inheritance Cycle has a thing about mages always seeking each other out in battle, because they’re all so ridiculously overpowered that they’re trying to cancel each other out with telepathy. Which is kind of a cool idea, but they make for not as interesting magic battle scenes, because it mostly amounts to two wizards glaring at each other until one of them breaks (or some normal guy walks up and smacks them with a hammer).

But what about tactical magic? Wizards have a tendency to be a lot more frail than hardened warriors in battle, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t be in the thick of it, using magic for other purposes (and NO, not just as healers, although that’s not a bad use). These are the big guns! Use them to bombard enemies with fire, or shards of ice, or something! Have them call up mist to block opponents’ visions, or erect barriers from the ground to divide the battlefield.

AERIAL UNITS!

In a world with dragons, or griffins, or whatever, there are remarkably few aerial units in war? Or preparations for them? To be fair to something like Lord of the Rings, when Fell Beasts show up, no one has ever seen them before so they’ve got no preparations for them other than to shoot arrows. And we see what happens: when a Nazgul shows up on a Fell Beast, he utterly decimates Gondor’s horsemen on open ground.

And The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has a bit in the big battle where we see that the Narnians under Aslan have a bunch of their flying creatures drop boulders on the White Witch’s army. The only counter her army has is to shoot arrows (which can somehow reach that high?); in the sequel we see the Telmarines deploy ballista against griffins, which shouldn’t be as effective as it is (that should take some really quick aiming for such a small and nimble target), but there ya go. We also see the Pevensies use the griffins to airlift them in and out of Miraz’s castle, which is pretty brilliant I think.

Flying units should be Instant Win cards in a lot of fantasy, especially when you have dragons that can breathe fire. Or, if the world has been dealing with dragons and other flying creatures for a while, they should have some way to counter that. Maybe it’s not a perfect way of dealing with it--we still don’t have perfect ways for dealing with tornados or earthquakes here, for instance--but it would be something, especially if it’s expected. You’d think a lot of fantasy armies, knowing they’re going up against dragons, just hope that the dragons stayed home that day.

Do they get their wizards to develop fireproof armor? Are there castles designed with defenses from aerial attack? Spikes all over to stop flying creatures from landing? Ballista designed for downing large flying animals? An aerial corps to fight enemy flying animals? (This last one is the premise of Temeraire by Naomi Novik.)

TERRAIN!

I remember seeing a Tumblr post criticizing a sword fight scene in Game of Thrones (on Sam Swords’s page) that points out that despite being in a rocky environment, the fight itself takes place in the flattest part of the terrain, and so it’s kind of boring because of that. No one uses the rocks or differences in elevation to try to one-up each other. It makes me think--plenty of fights don’t happen on flat ground! You wouldn’t get that from fantasy films and television though, in which most of the fights take place on plains or lightly rolling hills. Maybe in a forest, though those don’t tend to use those very well either.

There’s a lovely bit of monologue in 300 in which Dilios talks about the pass they’re stationed in, and mentions that in that narrow gorge “numbers count for nothing.” Except then they go and fight out in the open and kind of ignore their greatest tactical asset. Mind you, it’s maybe meant to be fantastical, as it’s a story being told to sound awesome, but still--the whole point was to the enemy into a place where they can’t all show up at once.

Where are ambushes in mountain passes? Where are the people hiding in treetops? Where are the fighters climbing up rocks and such to gain a height advantage over opponents? 

And more importantly, where are the armies that adjust the terrain in order to use against enemies? I suppose sometimes you see people digging trenches or pits to make enemies fall in, which is good, but they don’t really go beyond that. Pits with spikes? Treetop canopies to fire from? Building barriers? You don’t see it that often.

EXPLOSIVES!

What’s weird to me in Shadow of War, and I realize it’s a nitpick, is how common explosives seem to be in Mordor? If this is set in the continuity of the movies, or something like it, then that shouldn’t be the case, because we see Saruman invent bombs for military usage, and at the Battle of Helm’s Deep it seems to be a complete gamechanger, the likes of which no one has ever seen before. I suppose explosives existed before that point, given that Gandalf used fireworks, but they’re not common, and no one’s used them for military applications.

If explosives exist in a fantasy universe, whether they be magical or mundane, the fact is that they should become a major part of warfare. Once Europeans started getting a grasp on gunpowder, it wasn’t long before they started making crude firearms. At the very least, we’re talking bombs or rockets.

Combine this with magic? People who can start fire with just a flick of the wrist? Explosives should be all over the place. You should be something like the Powder Mage Trilogy, in which mages make use of gunpowder to wreck armies. In that series, the more traditional Privileged absolutely hate Powder Mages because of the way they can take out enemies much further away and use nontraditional weapons (and some other things, but not relevant to our discussion).

Explosives should change the playing field considerably.

---

I also had some ideas about horses, and volleys, and shield walls, but I’m late on this Note and I’m behind on a bunch of other things already, so for now we’re leaving this here.

Over the Garden Wall is Amazing

 I had an endoscopy. It… it wasn’t so bad, actually? It’s everything around the procedure that’s not fun. Having to clean out my digestive system, for instance, was terrible. It sucked. And then all the paperwork beforehand. And then the weird feelings I’ve been getting since. But actually sitting on a hospital bed, getting wheeled around? And going to sleep for a bit? That was okay.

But forgive me if this feels rushed; I wrote this Note this morning because I was burned out last night after filling out my NaNoWriMo word count.

Anyhow I started reading Sins of Empire and I forgot how good these books are and I’m excited to see where this one goes.

I had an idea for a Note on Assassin’s Creed after reading The Fall, but I thought two weeks in a row is too many Assassins.

Apparently something happened on Supernatural this past week?

---

Over the Garden Wall is Amazing

Over the Garden Wall is pretty darn close to the perfect animated miniseries.

I rewatched Over the Garden Wall recently. It’s on Hulu. For those not in the know, it’s the story of two brothers, Wirt and Greg, lost in a very weird set of woods called the Unknown. They want to get home, and the only guide they have is a talking bluebird named Beatrice. Early on, they’re told by a weird, creepy Woodsman that out there in the Unknown is a creature called the Beast, and it will do its best to entrap lost souls.

As the story goes in, it becomes obvious that there is something… off about the people they run into in the Unknown. I mean, other than a talking bluebird (which is weird, even in this world). There are anthropomorphic animals that don’t talk but wear clothes and go to school. There’s a village with people who wear scarecrow outfits and have wagons pulled by turkeys. There’s a tavern full of people who only go by the occupation and don’t seem to compute someone with an actual name. There’s an old rich man who has a house so big he admits he doesn’t even remember building all of it.

The Unknown is a very weird place. Some of the ads try to paint it as a world of old fairy tales. I don’t know if that’s quite true. But it’s a place of old stories, a place in which you meet people and animals who wouldn’t feel out of place in American folklore from a hundred years ago. 

And with that premise, you’d think that this would be a very dark fairy tale type story. And in some ways it is! Look, there are parts that are (to me, at least) genuinely terrifying. But more than that, there are scenes that are just… unsettling, in ways that are hard to describe. I’m weirded out by the anthropomorphic animals, because they’re wearing clothes and go to school, but none of them talk, and often stare out at the other characters with blank expressions. And then there’s the Highwayman’s song and dance, which isn’t scary, but it’s… it’s weird. It’s disturbing. A guy shouldn’t be moving like that while he’s talking about mugging and killing people. Or really be singing about how he’s mugging and killing people.

But hey, this series is also really, really funny. Part of it is the sheer absurdity, and the way that it bounces off all of our leads. Wirt, the socially awkward teenager, is utterly confused and trying to make sense of everything, while also trying to keep his cool. Greg, the younger brother, doesn’t seem to even notice that what’s going in is all that weird, and is taking it all in stride as long as he gets to have fun on the way. And Beatrice is utterly done with everyone’s nonsense and just wants to get this all over and done with. So we have these three characters going through a world which doesn’t make much sense and reacting to all the weirdness out there.

And it is glorious. We are gifted with great scenes such as this one.

The decision to make each episode its own little story also works in its favor. They all connect, of course, but they also let the characters grow in their own self-contained narratives. It all leads to Greg and Wirt’s journey home, but they’re also memorable stories on their own. And they give you great moments building up how these characters act, interact, and set up how they’ll develop going forward.

Also this is a story that is, at its core, about two brothers, and for the longest time (including when I first watched it), Sibling Stories were My Jam. The relationship between Wirt and Greg takes center stage; mostly, in that Wirt has to learn to see his brother as more than an annoyance, and Greg has to take responsibility for more of his actions. It culminates in a touching and very uplifting climax.

It’s really good. It’s also deep. I mean, maybe not that deep, but there’s something going on with the Unknown that’s probably not much of a surprise if you pay attention from the get go. I mean… guys lost in a dark forest, being led by a figure named Beatrice… it’s not that subtle, I suppose, but it is fun, especially by the time you get to the end of the series and it all adds up.

This is honestly one of the best cartoons to have been released in the last decade. It’s brilliant, it’s fun, it’s funny, and I could watch it over and over again every autumn. It’s a fantastic thing to watch for the season.

---