Raising Armies
@ Methods to Raise an Army
You can raise armies in 3 ways.
- You can raise an army from an existing Settlement. This produces an army approximating that Settlement’s cultural retinues — the soldiers its society naturally creates. This costs MP.
- You can equip green troops to create retinues. This creates an army of custom design & training at great up-front & ongoing cost.
- You can hire mercenaries. Mercenaries demand ongoing pay per month — $10 per BR.
Move: Raise an Army
While in your Faction’s Capital (or otherwise able to issue orders to your officers), you may call to raise an Army as a Move.
Raising an Army incurs a Manpower Debt (MP Debt). You are taking the healthiest, most capable men of a Faction & marching them off to war. This is more severe than simple silver; it takes a long time to replace a young man & there are few substitutes. In financial terms, 1 MP Debt is equivalent to $1 in economic impact. When measuring the impact of a Debt on your ability to loan, convert accordingly.
Your maximum MP Debt is equal to your Faction’s Capital’s Families. The Duration of the Action depends on your Families; it takes around 1 day per 100 Families to raise an army, up to 10 days at most.
| Families | Recruitment Time |
|---|---|
| ≤100 | Just a few hours |
| 100 | 1 day |
| 300 | 3 days |
| 1,000 | 10 days |
When the Duration expires, you automatically raise the Army; no Success Save required.
If you need a bigger Army than your Capital alone can provide, consider having your loyal Retainers raise Armies from their Capitals so that you can combine your collective forces.
Army BR
@ By default, you get your cultural retinues’ base BR per MP Debt taken on.
You have a human Settlement of 34 Families. The human Glassian army retinue has 17 BR baseline. You can raise 34 × 17 = 578 BR worth of soldiers at once by taking out 34 MP Debt.
Recovering from MP Debt
Procedure: Disbanding an Army
If an Army with soldiers from a Faction is within that Faction’s realm, those soldiers can be disbanded. All surviving troops are subtracted from the MP Debt owed by the Faction to its Followers.
If an Army is disbanded outside its Faction’s territory, only half of the surviving MP is subtracted from the Debt owed — the rest of the soldiers desert & disappear into the world. In extreme cases (i.e. disbandment on another continent), the GM may rule that no MP is returned to the pool.
Family Growth & Replacement
If a Faction grows in Families via other means, for every Family it obtains, it may erase 1 MP Debt.
In addition, at the start of every in-game year, each Faction’s MP Debt is reduced by 10% of its current Families, rounded up.
@ Desperation Recruitment
If a Faction is truly desperate to recruit soldiers despite massive outstanding MP Debt, there are at least two notable routes available.
Create a New Subfaction
New Subfactions start with no MP Debt, but you can’t easily erase them once they exist, and creating new Subfactions may anger any existing Subfaction whose interests are threatened by the gesture. It also requires that you as a Leader have spare Settlements, competent & loyal Retainers, and enough time to spare to go through the procedures of setting one up.
Subfactions partly represent administrative efficiency at the cost of loss of control. Delegation offers advantages that centralized control doesn’t have — such as tapping into manpower that wouldn’t otherwise be available.
It also dramatically simplifies the math by preventing cascading population calculation dependencies, and you can never get enough of that when you have to do most of the math in your head.
Hire Mercenaries
You can always take out a loan and hire mercenaries, if you think you’ll be able to pay them off.
@ Raising the Armies of Your Subfactions
Rulers can & often rely upon Armies raised from their Subfactions to supplement their forces. In fact, this is one of the main benefits of having Subfactions.
To do so, simply contact & ask whichever of your Retainers is in command of that Subfaction to do so. This is treated as any other request to a subservient NPC. Try not to rely on Retainers who have grown angry at you lately … or who have reasons to stick a knife in your back.