Isegrádian Military
Epithet: The Hammer of the Empress[edit]
To understand how Isegrad fights, one first needs to understand how it views magic. Balin xiv Sketch, when he created the Empire, bequeathed it with four guiding tenets:
- 'magic is the key to the stars'
- 'an individual must pursue their own success'
- 'legends connect us to our ancestors'
- 'godhood is obtainable for those with the will to pursue it.'
The picture this would paint, if viewed in a vacuum, is of a horde of glory-hounds, driven on by mage-commanders, slavering for the chance to earn recognition and honor in the eyes of their country. Fortunately or unfortunately, that is not the reality.
Soldiery's Structure[edit]
While the Hammer of the Empress is most famed for its mighty mage-warriors, the Adepts, Magisters, Grand Magisters, and Inquisitors, they by far do not make up the bulk of the Hammer. Most of the Hammer is made up of men and women, humans and wildkin and sundry others, who are not able to wield mana. In official parlance, these individuals are known as 'regulars'. Isegradian regulars are a mix of both career soldiers and levies--albeit, with better training than one would generally expect of conscripts.
Any settlement in Isegrad above a certain size, set by the Imperial court, is obligated to send a proportion of its men and women of fighting age to be trained as soldiers. Often, these people are chosen by lottery--though a volunteer counts towards the obligatory count of conscripts, and there is no shortage of stories of someone volunteering in place of a hesitant loved one. These warriors-to-be, the Recruits, filter into forts established across the Empire, controlling trade roads and rivers. Recruits spend weeks drilling and drilling, under the watchful eye of long-term career soldiers, the Sergeants, who typically hail from either the household soldiers of noble families, or martial academies in the largest cities of Isegrad. These Recruits, once sufficiently trained in the basic skills expected of them: the use of the pike, the manarifle, and the shovel, are anointed as Soldiers, and designated by their specialty: Pikeman, Rifleman, so on.
A Soldier then, is returned home. They are registered as trained men and women of the Hammer, and kept in their peaceful lives. Outside of times of war, the registered Soldiers are rotated through active service in forts and outposts, so as to not overburden the nation with providing for them, and to not have healthy men and women kept from farming or mining.
These Soldiers are organized into Cadres, groupings of a dozen or so troops that train together, bunk or tent together, and eat together. Although ideally these units are lead by a professional Sergeant, this is often not tenable--the most experienced (or charismatic) Soldier may take command, in these cases. Cadres are organized into Companies, of a hundred men, lead by a magic-wielding Magister. Most fighting takes place at the level of a Company. Companies, further, are sorted into Cohorts, placed under the authority of a Grand Magister. Finally, Cohorts are assembled into Echelons, commanded by great Inquisitors. Echelons are massive, strategic groupings and are essentially a total of all Imperial troops in an area--such as the 1st Capital Echelon that defends metropolitan Isegrad.
Soldierly Garb and Gab[edit]
Isegradian troops often seem to show lax discipline, compared to what a foreigner might expect of them. They chitter and chatter amongst themselves, they slouch, they smile and joke. This is an aspect of Isegradian culture--a bent towards individualism that has never been beaten out of the people. While the Hammer's regulars do have a uniform--a red-hued sallet helm and basic cuirass, worn over a dull golden gambison--little accoutrements often decorate the uniform, such as scarves and cloaks. Furs and coats to shut out the harsh cold of Isegrad are common, as well.
Equipment, meanwhile, consists universally of a sidesword and a shovel, with troops equipped with, depending on their role in their unit, a tower shield, pike, or manarifle.
Soldier's Stratagems[edit]
Isegradian tactics are defined by one thing: the manarifle. Once this weapon was invented, Isegrad took to it with sheer joy, recognizing how it could improve their existing pike and shieldwall doctrines. Crossbows were comparatively ungainly, even if the ability to throw hails of quarrels at an approaching enemy was useful. But the sleek, and easy to use rifle was a far better fit than the crossbow.
The main form of combat used by Isegrad's regulars consists of using walls of tower shields, protecting pikes and rifles, to whittle down enemy forces in a victory by endurance, with cavalry and light skirmishers moving as needed to press hostiles into the pike-and-shot lines. While this tactic does fare well in Isegrad, where it makes attacking soldiers entrenched in a river valley or mountain pass a tactical nightmare, it is less effective in forests and great open lands, where the lack of maneuverability this form of combat engenders becomes all too apparent.
The Knives of the Empress: Noble Houses[edit]
The Hammer is not the only military organization in Isegrad. Many noble houses, particularly the marcher lords that can be found around the borders and wildernesses of Isegrad, hold their own house soldiers. On average, these forces are better equipped than the average Hammer fighter, but not necessarily better trained. Rather, house soldiers are trained differently. Noble houses often drill their soldiers in disparate and esoteric combat styles, ranging from mounted archery to dual-wielding, either to fit the realities of having to operate in their house's lands, or as a mark of prestige. Some of these noble houses send their own men to fight in the Hammer as professional Sergeants, though they rarely become higher officers.
Snow and Spears: Isegradian Elites[edit]
Though the vaunted Isegradian individualism generally sees its mages pursue whatever combat form strikes their fancy, two particular styles have become ingrained in the Empire as quintessentially Isegradian, the stuff of storybooks and tales told to children in their beds. These are the storied white, or snow mages, and the dragoons.
Snow mages are a sort of water-druid, one that arose in the wake of the Night of Frost. Channeling both water mana and the energy of the land itself, they would turn the ice-ravaged landscape of Isegrad to work for its people, instead of against them--converting snowdrifts into roadways and dissolving sheets of ice into clean, pure water. Initially, these magi limited their healing techniques to simple medicine, but soon realized the power inherent in the new cold of Isegrad, bending the mana to mend and renew the sick and injured. Even if no one enjoyed the sensation of numbing cold a snow mage's healing left, they enjoyed bones and muscles restoring themselves under the mage's chilly touch.
Dragoons, meanwhile, are a tradition of warriors originating from Isegrad's mountainous regions. Forming from non-magical spearfighters, that used the reach of their weapons to strike from unexpected angles in the rocky crags of far western and eastern Isegrad, as magic spread throughout the land, they embraced it as surely as the rest of the nation did. Dragoons often wandered the mountains, fighting for those that could pay or house them, using magic to enable fearsome maneuvers in the passes and ravines of the mountains. Over time, as the fighting tradition became codified, dragoons became associated with a specific sort of armor and weapon--the spiked skyplate and the lance. The skyplate armor of a dragoon, with its spikes and spines, helps them adjust their course in the air, while the long, thin lance can be used as a rudder to steer during a dive.
Curiosities![edit]
Isegrad has long had issues with cavalry, given that many beasts have difficulty moving through the dense tundra snow. As of late, however, a technological marvel has come to ease the burden on Isegradian riders--the steambike! Powered by arcane crystals, and featuring wide, metal wheels, the contraption has been heralded as a potential revolution in transportation technology by futurists, while decried as a dangerous machine by others. The occasional picketing of steambike riders is in no way connected to Isegrad's existing merchant guilds, who mainly rely on river barges or frozen-river sledges for moving goods.