Returning to our extracts from an old Birthright game I was involved in, playing the communist goblins of the Bluepeaks islands. Writing this up as a drop-in realm for anyone who might need a competent ally or a dangerously persistent foe - although these tactical ideas could probably suit many smaller scale foes as their 'grand plans' also.
Recalling the realm concept was of goblins having a vision and realising their ill-treatment at the hands of the world, then setting out on a hallucinogenic fueled messianic conversion spree and finding welcoming ears in the scattered minions of a recently deceased dark wizard.
The dark wizards old citadel became a Wizards Academy - the Labyrinth - and was a research powerhouse on the general theme of what can be done with shard-crystals - the crystallisation of magic and its use in various kinds of techno-arcanic lunacy. Large quantities its fairly harmless and inert - i.e. a shardstone vein would sit quietly under a village without having much effect beyond causing a fair few seers and two headed calfs - but broken down to crystals its causes mutations, nightmares, trees to walk, poisons wells, and if you go as far as powdering it, its explosive, unstable, addictive, and when snorted, spiked or smoked gives you incredible power - which you either use or it melts your brain.
In-game this was Birthrights meigbheal being used as these wicked crystals which went into both chargable magical items (straight lifts from Eberron Dragonshard) and into crazy Skaven and Cryx tech - Warpfire throwers, Jezzails and Deathjacks.
- Weaponry – Jezzails with shardcraft bullet, shardfire throwers, shardlightning casters, poison wind globes, explosives, incendiaries
- Artifice – mimirs, navigation arrays, scrying devices – mostly derivatives of well known things except that they would use shard-crystals as fuel and be inert without – real ‘Skaventech’ feel
- Breeding – using shardcraft to develop means to improve beings – would be reflected in ‘grafts’ both surgical and mutated – brains in jars to create rudimentary ‘computers’
- Augmentation – developing a subtler level of use of shardcraft – ingestion focussed. This would be the combat drugs, shardsnuff for magic enhancement
- Winnowing – magical plagues, shard-dust poison gasses
- Eternity Project – retaining the skills and knowledge of the talented through soulcapture
Essentially, the Bluepeaks were very conscious of being very small and very few, so anything that could fight and die in our place, from bacterium up to Helljacks, all to the good.
Below are some of the direct action concepts prepared against the day of need:
1. Wise Grouse - Dispersal of poisonous agents using undead/magically controlled vermin or birds to get into water supply with diseases or poisons. Examples would be an undead raven with its ribcage hollowed out and filled with cyanide, or a cloth soaked with bodily fluids from a cholera-victim. The bird would fly to a cistern or reservoir - even the rain tanks on the top of a house - then jump in and let the poisons dissolve into the water.
2. Shining Star - A ship arrives offshore of an enemy river port and a small group of zombies are dropped off on the sea bed with glass urns of water-borne plague. They are commanded to walk along the seabed, up the river until upstream of the river, then break the urns. As a precaution the zombies are dressed as some other faction
3. Certain Spear - Convert opposing personnel over to the Vision using psychadelics, hypnotism and other non-magical mind-control techniques to be undetectable by magical means. Convert remains in place as agent, acts as normal until activated. Low frequency, sleeper type.
4. Brazen Spear - As with Certain Spear, but convert acts as agent-provocatuer, trying to frame other enemy personnel as agents for third party (neither Bluepeaks or target nation). Since Bluepeaks is not obvious beneficiary, hopefully significant damage will be wreaked before agent disabled and operation entirely deniable
5. Tilted Mirror - Combine one or two loud, obvious mind-control incidents with extensive spread of rumours that enemy personnel have been replaced by doppelgangers/magically mind-controlled. Aim is to prompt time-wasting and costly mole-hunt and spread mistrust within the enemy ranks.
6. Toxin impregnated bugs, run/fly into fire to create poisonous smoke
7. Dancing Lotus - Variant A - A ship at anchor is gassed - using Cloudkill/poisons etc then a rowboat crewed with undead tow it out of toxic cloud, then live crew salvage the derelict.
8. Dancing Lotus - Variant B - A toxic cloud is driven onshore from sea, rolls over & neutralises target building then soldiers coming afterwards boat-borne marines/aquatics/undead etc. attack from the sea, kill any survivors and steal everything including dead enemy personnel
9. Ravening Enlightenment - A flock of undead ravens soaked in pitch with slow matches stuck on flock to a target and make their way into vulnerable bits before going on fire. Applied in combat against ships, fortresses the ravens provide distraction in rear areas, draw away archers attention. Can be used directly to distract cavalry charges, etc. but not going to do much on their own. Also useful to fire a city – Raven will find their way under eaves and into difficult to put out places. One raven is ¼ hit dice – using oil of animate dead, a user could control forty – for three salvoes of a bakers dozen each.
10. Ancestral Counsel - Standard ‘fifth column’ tactics for an agent within a city would be to use a number of phials of ‘oil of animate dead’ to create a mob of zombies and skeletons to cause general mayhem and distraction.
11. Also used as “The Stitch-Up” – deployed as a response to an opponents getting involved in a fight with a third party. This would be to tar the opponent as a user of necromancy and generally cause a distraction for someone who is being a nuisance.
12. Illuminated Counsel – after reanimation, zombies are steeped in pitch, tar or other incendiary substance, then handed a slow-match and sent to walk into places and self-ignite. Every stable/powder-store/bonded liquour warehouse in a city goes up one night. Given the nature of materials required, this works best by either shipping in barrels of pitch with the undead within or shipping corpses in the pitch barrels and reanimating them on delivery. Emptied barrels can be used to set another fire.
13. Joyous Harvest - spread positive energy shards into sewers of enemy cities to induce virulence, plague.
14. Just Bounty - spread negative energy shards into a foes croplands to reduce yields, induce famine.
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