GURPS Fantasy Warriors Session 18: The Battle of the Flooded Fields

Characters:

Granmarg The Striking Vanguard, The Boulderstruck, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate
Pomegranite The Treefallen, The Spymaster

Mielikki The Field Marshal, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

Thicket The Grandmaster Terramorpher, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

 

Initial Maneuvers

As the earthling armies finished crossing to the floodplains outside Kaskorata, sheets of rain began to pour down.  Empty fields and abandoned villages separated them from and the Segretans' undead forces, as well as a single abandoned fort in the middle of the battlefield.  Those walls would offer protection against arrows and offensive magic, and so the earthlings resolved to take it.  Swiftbreeze, one of Granmarg's attendants, was dispatched to the frontlines to lead the charge.  His formation charged the fort and eradicated the freshly-exhumed undead holding it successfully.

 

Luana charged up to the frontlines and from quite some distance reanimated many of the undead that had been slain; fortunately, Swiftbreeze was not caught off guard and his troops held the line.  The rest of the Segretan commanders advanced more cautiously, keeping their troops in dense formations.  In a thunderous charge, Granmarg's formation slammed into the Segretan center and slaughtered them, men and undead alike.  Thicket and Mielikki marched north to meet Duccio and Aginor, while Pomegranite held the southern flank opposite Dina.

 

The stone bridges bridges they'd so hastily constructed with magic were disrupting the flow of the river, and with the added pressure of the rainfall, water surged up over the bank and the farmland behind the earthlings rapidly flooded.  Pomegranite's formation launched a hail of boulders at Luana's troops that killed hundreds, and she and her guard retreated, while Aginor's orders fell on deaf ears as Ulrich's assassins disrupted the chain of command.  In a stroke of luck, Luana's troops were too shocked to act as well, and rallying them apparently distracted her enough from her dark arts that no more dead arose.  Meanwhile, Duccio's magisters froze the rain above Mielikki's troops, causing spear-sized icicles to rain down on and skewer them by the dozens as they struggled through knee-deep water.

 

Granmarg led his troops on a charge out of the fort and towards Luana, the two commanders soon meeting on the field.  She asked why the earthlings were fighting for the usurper, who had accused them of killing her father while he had likely done so himself in a grab for power.  Granmarg said that Ulrich had told him that he was innocent.  Luana shot back that he was clearly just saying whatever he had to to survive, to which Granmarg replied that she was doing the same thing.  She chuckled darkly, saying that she wasn't in nearly as much danger as him, and then pointed her oversized executioner's axe at him.

 

A skeletal hand made of darkness launched toward Granmarg, and it grazed his hip, causing the outer layers of stone to crumble away.  He lunged forward and launched a flurry of blows, but she nimbly dodged back out of the way before retaliating with a swing at his neck that went wide.  They attacked back and forth, neither able to land a blow, until Luana caught Granmarg in the side of the head with the side of her axe.  He stumbled back, then fell over, unconscious (having crit-failed his HT roll).  With their commander out of the picture, Granmarg's troops were quickly scattered by the Segretans, and his attendants carried him from the field to recover.

 

 

Notes:

The PC objectives for this battle are to have more troops left at the end of 8 rounds than the enemy, to destroy the artifact responsible for raising the dead, or to kill Luana.  Normally, they wouldn't be able to deliberately kill a high noble of another province, even on the battlefield, without violating the Empire's code of honor, but the threat that a horde of undead represents means that most other people will (publicly) recognize such a killing as an unfortunate accident. 

 

The enemy objectives are to seize the southern flank of the battlefield, which would represent them successfully executing an oblique order which they could then use to wrap up Ulrich's army and the Changed to the north.

 

Granmarg crit-failed his perception roll to notice which of the artifacts is giving Luana her necromantic powers.  All he knows is that she has a shiny crown and a big axe.

 

In the duel, Granmarg spent most of his FP on a few big combos in an attempt to crit-fish or overwhelm Luana's defenses, but all of them were dodged, which meant that he couldn't afford to spend any FP on defense in later rounds.  Luana was the opposite, spending very little on offense and constantly using Feverish Defense to make her dodges more reliable.