>"I beg your pardon your majesty?"
>"Five thousand corpses a month, to be secretly exhumed from graveyards around the nation and shipped to the necromancer kingdom."
>"The same necromancer kingdom, who only a few generations ago, turned our northern frontier into a killing field?"
>The Emperor leans back on his throne.
>"Yes the same one. Times have changed, the orc horde from the north is relentless, without this aid the necromancers will fall within months, then we will have no shield on our northern front."
>"But our armies..."
>"Our armies are fully invested in the siege of the rebel capital now. The latest news from our generals say the rebel capital will fall within three month, then soon after that all of our overseas colonies will be reunified. The Empire will enter a new golden age, stronger than ever. THEN we will move our armies back to the main land and deal with our unsightly neighbours."
>"But why the adventurer's guild?"
>The Emperor smirks slightly.
>"Naturally the Empire cannot be seen helping our old enemy. A conspiracy of this size will no doubt attract the attention of the Paladin Order. Rest assured though any adventurers captured by the order will only suffer a show trial and a slap on the wrist, no one will be imprisoned or punished. Once we turn the table on the necromancers you and all your guild members will be richly rewarded. I give you my word."
What do you do?
I gather my demon and underground overlord allies to attack the kingdom from two different directions, then I poison the king with my sleeper agent to throw it off-balance. Then I ready my forces to invade. I hope my puppet ruler of the necromancer kingdom will not try to do anything stupid like imprisoning me, resurrecting the dead king as a lich, and getting himself killed in the process. I also hope that the king's daughter is not going to suddenly return and start wrecking the shit out of my allies, and secretly working with rebel necromancers to undermine my plan.
>>46610237
Man, the necromancers have to be doing really fucking shitty if they can't even make their own corpses, especially in a war.
Also, HoMMIV necro campaign will forever have a special place in my heart for having a reasonable, non power hungry necromancer at the helm just once.
>>46610237
>this entire post
>adventurers' guild
My emperor! For this task we need a champion!
Are we going to hire Loynis, the High Inquisitor of the Church of Heavenly Light with a squad of archers and spearmen, or a random green-faced wizard with a single gremlin?
>>46610237
Orcs are less dangerous than necromancers. You can pay orcs off and they'll just blow the money on booze. You're talking about directly arming a group whose power scales directly off of how many of us they kill. Once they have an army, why wouldn't they just maraud into our lands killing as many of us as possible to swell their ranks? It'd be more effective than accepting donations, and we have no army here with which to halt them, apparently.
I say let them die. Necromancers are less than worthless as allies, they cannot be trusted with anything.
>>46610237
Who am I even meant to be in this scenario? The Guildmaster? An adventurer? The Emperor himself?
>>46610507
Guildmaster
>>46610428
We hire them both, and also any number of other heroes available, to ferry bodies from one end of the map to the other in a huge chain.
>>46610428
How much moxie does that gremlin have?
>>46610237
Look, i told you already, if i wasn't worried about necromancers and orcs, i wouldn't have been giving such a big research grands to our fire mages.
>>46610355
No worse than
>Paladin Order
I don't think giving 5k bodies to the necromancers is a good idea, sire...
>cast Detect Evil
>smite this motherfucker off the face of the earth
>>46610525
Very well.
''Very well, my lord. If this is your command, it will be carried out. I will need roughly 500 wooden shovels, sheets of tarp, hooded lanterns, sacks and crowbars. I will organise a number of work crews everywhere with a significant population and have them extract one corpse every 3 days from a local graveyard. I will also about 500 carriages replete with numerous barrels of whiskey, to preserve and transport the corpses. If you can provide this, or the funding to surreptitiously acquire it, I can have people begin work immediately and have the corpses shipped out by the end of the month.''
I also make a mental note to train as many adventurers as possible in basic strategies for handling undead, in case the Necromancers turn on us. All adventurers not assigned to this task will be moved, over the course of the upcoming month, to the North and will be trained to organise effective anti-undead resistance if needed
>>46610625
You'll get 15 foot of rope, a safety pin and a used bubblegum.
Do your best.
>>46610684
''My lord, the guild does not have the funding to make this happen on its own, not since you increased our taxes to pay for this war against the rebels. Hell, we barely have the numbers to carry this out, so many of our members joined the army. whether they wished to or not.'' At this juncture, I sigh and rub the bridge of my nose. ''We will attempt it if you wish sire but bar having some of our less savoury members learn rituals to raise the dead, we cannot manage this task with the provisions you have offered.''
>>46610237
"I believe there are holes bigger than your mothers vagina in that plan, my lord."
I get my lazy ass off the throne, and remind everybody why the hero of Oakville was unanimously installed on the throne.
>>46610320
I always thought necromancer kingdoms must suffer from fiercely low numbers of child birth. There's little incentive on generating infrastructure for keeping little (aka non-operation-critical) people on a good environment and most fantasy settings attribute some sort of death-contamination as a consequence of extensive uses of necromancy. So loads of regular people are super-important for necrokingdoms.
From that POV, necrokingdoms must excel in blitzkreig, but suck at long-term war.
>>46611388
>suck at long-term war
skellingtons generate no fatigue. even kids know that
>>46611406
Yeah but they can be shattered into uslessness and without births and shit their numbers wont go back up without kills.
A walled city with artillery must be like Stalingrad for most Necromantic armies.
>>46611406
My gut feeling is that, since orcs are a war-bred species, they must be more efficient at destroying skellies than skellies are at killing orcs.
From that perspective, unless the necrokingdoms have absolutely grotesque numbers of bodies going around, their whole shtick of replenishments in adversaries' bodies probable isn't enough.
>>46611388
Necromancers snowball something crazy. Even when they lose, they can just reanimate whatever they DID kill, and try again.
Also, when/if you do scorched earth, you better be burning the corpses as well, which isn't actually that easy.
>>46611441
They can literally wait outside range for all eternity, while the defenders starve. Or maybe set up a group of zombies to tunnel in; again, they are not in a hurry.
>>46611441
What you need is a necromancer with a level in the 30s. He'll be able to create skeletons that can breed.
>>46611441
do you even rattle?
>>46611509
Fair point but when have you seen a necromancer that didn't just want to rush his enemies and wipe them out?
>>46611543
All the time. I mean, that's the entire schtick of liches... admittedly, not usually in warfare.
Still, an undead army would be scary as fuck from an IRL logistics perspective.
>scorched earth doesn't actually stop them
>they don't need supply lines
>they don't need to stop marching to set up camp
>they don't give a fuck about the seasons
>they don't give a fuck about poisons or diseases or bad morale from being away from their families and spending the holidays in a ditch
And as a bonus
>ranged weaponry is less useful since they don't die from puncture wounds
Seems like there's no winning. You're in a war and need the necromancer for defense against the orcs to the north, but unless the necromancer and orcs both weaken each other to the point of uselessness, you're gonna have to deal with one of them eventually and your forces will be weakened after a long war. Not to mention public opinion if they ever find out that you were moving that many corpses around. People will likely rise up once they see entire graveyards being looted and dug up.
The best option is to give nowhere near that many troops to the necromancer and give him a tiny trickle of forces, just enough to keep him in perpetual war with the orcs and let them both ruin each other. Because who's to say they won't ally and fuck you over? If you wanna be really Machiavellian, sending a shitload of troops to a guy you know wants to kick your ass isn't gonna help. Especially when that enemy is a necromancer. If he's so powerful, he's got more than enough orc corpses to work with.
>>46610237
Is the picture who I think it is? is that Gualdoth half dead?
>>46611679
Well, scorched earth sorta affects them. They usually rely on kills to bolster their numbers against dedicated defenders, if you draw back everyone so you simply send your most powerful force at them rather than piecemeal then you'll do well enough.
Ranged weaponry is less effective, to be fair, but artillery can probably be pretty devastating. If you used the old carriage ballistae that the romans had launching spherical ammunition you could make a force to just constantly harass them
>>46611762
>if you draw back everyone so you simply send your most powerful force at them rather than piecemeal then you'll do well enough.
Right, that's where the whole "doesn't need to rest or give a fuck about supply lines" thing comes into play. Unless the undead march really fucking slow, there's probably no army (especially no army also carrying warmachines) that can outmaneuver them.
Although it depends on source material, undead are also often shown to function in the dark without light without any problems, so not only can you never catch them sleeping, they'll be at full force even when you set camp and are resting.
I'll give OP that, dreams do seem to be a pretty bad matchup, as they also seem to be quite hardy, and also have dark vision, and prefer the strategy of the dreaded death-ball... but then, one must ask what the fuck they are doing attacking the necromancers, when they probably don't have much to sack from them, or at least sure as hell not enough food to plunder to feed an army of orks.
>>46612031
Well, Im not so much talking about outmanevering them and rather avoiding wastefully sending forces at them piecemeal rather than meeting them in force.
>>46611441
>A walled city with artillery must be like Stalingrad for most Necromantic armies.
Not really. They don't require much in the way of resupply, they don't suffer from disease or starvation, and a war of attrition potentially makes them stronger as their living enemies die off.
Unless we're talking gunpowder mortars, there wasn't a lot in the way of defensive siege artillery. Big trebuchets and catapults were pretty lousy at defense, the enemy could encamp beyond their range yet still be close enough to besiege the fortification. Their slow rate of fire (15-30 minutes) also means that they have a very small window to actually fire on approaching formations before they get to the wall.
Wall mounted bastilas (quite rare; ammunition is specially made and not quickly replaced) and traction trebuchets (the little ones; they fling a lot of small rocks) were highly effective because they could cause an enemy formation to scatter and become disorganized for fear of their lives, making them more susceptible to arrows and shitting up unit organization (causing the approach to take longer and be more costly). Undead don't have lives, so you're mostly just banking on them taking a rock to the head.
>>46612081
Right, but you can't really force them into a confrontation, if you can't outmaneuver them, barring some really impassable natural choke points (and they better be REALLY impassable, even more than usual; undead can traverse terrain other armies really can't afford to as well).
They don't actually need to take cities and defend a supply line, so they can just roam around and attack anything your non-split-up-to-minimize-losses army isn't protecting at the moment.
>>46612081
But the problem of strategy is that you can't move all your people into one castle. Even if you could do it, it would take much longer than the skeletons would need to catch up and attack the stragglers.
So you have people in the open that the necromancers can recruit. If you try to encircle the undead army to stop them from attacking anybody else you have the problem that not only are they faster than you, you have also created a weak line of soldiers that they can easily kill.
In short: They are moving through your country unchecked.
>>46611542
I like to imagine that all those skulls are animated skeletons who lost their bodies and are just happy to get to see the world
>>46611486
But orcs don't have DR, can't be constantly on fire, frost covered, spewing acid, or one of the many many more varieties of skeletons that can be made, not to even mention the types of zombies that can be made. God help you if they sent incorporeal undead, then the orcs are really fucked.
>>46612166
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/undead/beheaded/severed-head
>>46612166
Murray?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9xLoTXC5fk
>>46611679
Well that could matter depending on the level of living tenders the army needs, daring guerrilla raids could be highly effective against an undead force that requires skilled tenders as they are not replaced easily especially is the lines of communication have been cut.
>>46612264
>depending on the level of living tenders the army needs
I mean, going by HoMM (and most fantasy settings really) the tenders can be also undead; still that doesn't mean they can't be killed, so your point still stands about eliminating them being an effective tactic.
>>46612081
The problem with meeting undead in force is that they are not really subject to the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns, but you definitely are. The larger this decisive force is, the bigger the strain on logistical and organizational structures are. If we're talking dudes with swords and shields and no sixteen wheeler trucks, trains and helicopters regularly delivering them massive amounts of food and material they aren't going to last in the field very long once they have exhausted the surrounding area's food supply.
Smacking all your dudes into one big army and going for the single decisive victory is a sure fire way for the Necromancer Lich Badguy to decide to simply withdraw his forces and kill you with attrition warfare, or split them into maneuverable elements that bypass your area of control and attack your supply line. Unless his objective is literally to defeat your forces in a decisive battle, he can achieve his objectives and win the strategic war easily by never giving it to you.
Seriously, the only way to beat an undead army with an intelligent leader is to hope that the leader isn't actually intelligent.
You can't win a siege against them.
You can't win a decisive battle against them.
They will always strategically outmaneuver you because they don't stop to eat, sleep, shit, or cry.
>>46612388
Well, if we're talking dudes with swords and shields vs a lich there has to be some mages that can hurl fireballs, heal the wounded, and perform other army support functions. Otherwise we're talking about an inevitable defeat.
>>46612444
Besides some clerics, I can't imagine orcs having wizards or sorcerers, considering that int and wis are usually dump stats for most.
>Orc rights activists suddenly start flowing out of the woodworks
>>46612490
Int and cha*
There are other advantages, depending on the type of skeleton.
>Undead are unthinking monsters, thus presumably unable to be casters. Use your own.
>Undead are fully intelligent, thus presumably they have morale and division problems.
>>46610332
Yeah this is clearly /pol/crap about Iran and nukes again. I'll admit the disguise is pretty good and I didn't spot it at first.
>>46612566
Nah intelegent undead, at least in dnd aren't effected by moral effecting effects, both positive and negative, so no deserters to worry over, that's the best part of undead!
>>46612644
I'd probably put that down to 'same word means different things in different contexts'. Skeletons don't run and hide at a Cause Fear spell, fine. After weeks of standing on the bone dust of their friends as they stare at a castle wall, they might.
>>46612444
Yeah, but unless those mages can conjure at least 3lb of food per person per day you're kind of fucked in the long run.
War with the undeadin the way I envision it anywaycreates an interesting situation where you are not fighting an army but in fact one person and their general staffif they even have any. It's an intensely personal battle where knowing the habits and the character of the enemy leader is the key to victory.
I like it this way because it opens up very nice avenues for drama where knowing the undead leader personally would be a huge boon but one they to might be aware of resulting in absurd mind games. If the enemy persisted over several generations whole treatises could be published on the psychology of one man.
>>46612675
Nah man that shit fall under the whole "immune to mind affecting effects" thing. No ones gonna have fucking undead start crying home to mama, maybe in your strange setting, but certainly none I've played/would play in. They are dead and fueled by negative energy, your insults/ standing around isn't going to phase them.
>>46612237
That really depends on the setting - I can't think of many settings where fire, at the very least, doesn't have some use for taking out undead
An army of the undead could be defeated by assassins. All those undead need to be controlled. Cut off the heads and the body will fall for an undead army. This assumes that the undead army is necromancers controlling unintelligent undead and not just an army of intelligent undead.
>>46610237
I rape the Emperor.
Chaotic Evil!
Hey, if you're going to make an ally out of someone who raises the dead, you might as well pick the one whose soldiers don't smell AND are actively fighting the forces of hell.
>>46612841
Skeletons? No, but they're usually too dumb to care.
Can you imagine some louche vampire sitting through a decades long siege? Nah, they fuck off back to wherever the nightdress-wearing bitches are located. Same with liches, they can't spend that long not researching shit. Ghouls get flighty and go looking for easy meat. Morghs and wights the same. Mummies are area defence only, so unless the city was built inside an ancient temple they're no help.
Basically if it's undead and it has an Int higher than O it won't sit still for a siege.
>>46612627
>Yeah this is clearly /pol/crap about Iran and nukes again.
Joke's on OP, I don't follow world politics so all his clever rewrites are meaningless.
