Since we are White City posting, I thought I would put down some thoughts about the standing army of the Emperor.
The army and the city police are the same institution. Soldiers are professionals, and paid well. They are formally forbidden from playing the city's image game, but this is not something that is taken seriously.
The White City has a few modes when it comes to state conflict. Mostly it handles its neighbours with subversion, black ops, and indirect warfare - this is the provenance of the Courtesans (where they need boots on the ground), or the Pragmatists, who are basically specialists in population control/ecocide/targeted assassination/psyops. The Pragmatists teach these skills to the Courtesans, who are their field agents when they need them, and both institutions report directly to the Emperor.
When these methods fail, the army is called in. The White City will always tell you that this is going to happen, and will always give you the option of complete surrender. This must be unconditional: if the White City wants to enslave the entire population, or kill the oldest son of every family, or crucify your political class, they will do so. In practice they often simply install sympathetic puppet governments and allow life to go on as usual for the majority, but they are also known to do awful things to populations that have been problematic or shown unusual defiance.
Once an ultimatum has been delivered and rejected, and the army has been deployed, the White City practices total wars of annihilation. Usually this means that each individual soldier is given a quota of people to kill (they make no distinction between enemy combatants and civilians) - the number is reached by simple division: projected number of people in the area / number of our soldiers = your quota. Soldiers who exceed the quota are rewarded with honours and bonuses, those who fail to meet it have their pay docked.
Soldiers are uniformly equipped in distinctive suits of unadorned and mass-produced fluted plate armour, which are built around the injector harnesses that they use to administer combat drugs of various kinds. Their armour will usually have been graffitied onto and painted with devices and images of the soldier's own devising - this is how they play the image game with one another while in uniform or on campaign.
Their weapons are likewise mass-produced; most usually they use large two handed swords or long steel lances, heavy arbalests, and satchels full of specialised grenades, but they are trained in many forms of combat and will often pick specific weapons to match the opponents that they expect to face.
Within the ranks of the Imperial army there are many citizen-angels and citizen-demons - service in the army is one of the ways that these entities can earn citizenship in the White City. There is nothing in the world that God or the Hating Engines despise more, but the traitor-beings are said not to care, because the White City, uniquely, has no fear of the things that live in the future.
Within the military there are elite units called Espatiers, who operate from lighter-than-air balloon-craft, and deploy to earth using parachutes. It is said that both the Material Heaven and the Material Hell are located in the sky, so the Emperor has seen fit to bring them within the reach of His legions. It is not known how far into the future the instantiations of God and the Hating Machines actually are - it is for this reason that, while the Pragmatists develop their methods and designs for future-projection-warfare, the Espatiers train for the day that they will storm the celestial heavens and lay them waste.
We are all of us moving into the future together; that day could be tomorrow.
When the battle is joined the noise machines start their terrible droning and the war drums beat and beat and the killing begins. The war music will not stop until there is nothing left, and this could take hours, days, or weeks. The soldiers will not rest, eat, drink, or speak until everything is over. They are terrible, twitching steel things running across battlefields scarred with fire, acid, smoke, and ruin.
What matter if you kill them or they kill you. The Empire is vast, and, when put to torture, both angels and demons will tell you that it is eternal.
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WHITE CITY SOLDIER
HD 3, armour as plate, speed: fast, disposition: Doppelsöldner high on methamphetamine.
Usually armed with a heavy two-handed sword (d10), an arbalest (d10), and a satchel with d4 grenades (all of the same type, see below).
White city soldiers are equipped with injector harnesses with 8 doses of combat drugs. They can administer a dose as a free action, which lasts for an hour. While under the effect of the drugs, the white city soldier gains +1 attack, +1 to hit, will fight to the death, and will try to kill anything that isn't another soldier. They will use the harnesses to stay dosed for the entirety of the combat, or until they run out, when they will take [number of doses consumed]d2 damage.
Their grenades come in a few different flavours (the soldiers are not immune to the effects of their own grenades, but their combat drugs allow them to roll the CON saves with advantage):
- Explosive: deal 2d6 fire damage in a 20ft radius.
- Poison Gas: creates a cloud with a 10ft radius that disperses over three turns in the open air, immediately in strong wind, or over 10 turns underground. If you start your turn in the cloud you take d10 damage, with a CON save for half.
- Blinding Gas: creates a cloud with a 10ft radius that disperses over three turns in the open air, immediately in strong wind, or over 10 turns underground. If you start your turn in the cloud you must make a CON save or go blind for the next d10 hours.
- Choking Gas: creates a cloud with a 10ft radius that disperses over three turns in the open air, immediately in strong wind, or over 10 turns underground. If you start your turn in the cloud you must make a CON save or spend your turn incapacitated.
A soldier's suit of plate has a 1 in 20 chance of acting as an image from the Citizen of the White City's Player of Games ability. The DM will decide which effect is coded into it.
If the war music is droning, all verbal communication must be shouted to be heard. All hirelings and other normal humans will test morale at -1.
CITIZEN-ANGEL
Angels loyal to the Emperor. Usually possessing a war puppet-body of some kind, almost always blowing a horrible drone-trumpet in harmony with the battle music of the noise machines. Stats coming soon, in an upcoming angel/demon post.
CITIZEN-DEMON
Demons loyal to the Emperor. Usually possessing a war puppet-body of some kind, almost always drone-screaming in harmony with the battle music of the noise machines. Stats coming soon, in an upcoming angel/demon post.
WHITE CITY ESPATIER
Identical to the Soldier entry above, with the following changes:
- Espatiers are HD 4.
- They have a single dose of psychotics that allow them to ignore all damage for a full combat turn, but suffer d6 damage when the effects wear off.
- They are deployed from balloon craft using parachutes.
- They always have four grenades, and tend to throw these before they hit the ground, to prepare the landing zone.
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