Harborhead, Nation of

This is a reproduction of the same info in the Game Notes Document.

Two weeks to the east of the Varang City of Talt, in the foothills of the Summer mountain range and the veldt below, lies the warlike nation of Harborhead.  It is allied with the Realm but constantly feuds with the Varang City-States and is about to launch a war against them.  Harborhead is also attempting to expand southeastward and has recently launched a series of prolonged campaign against nearby jungle tribes.

Besides the normal trophies of land and cattle, the Harborhead armies take their defeated enemies as slaves, and these slaves make up almost a quarter of Harborhead’s population.  Only criminals or battle captives and their children can be lawfully enslaved, but a constant stream of them goes to the slave markets in the capital city of Kirighast – and from there to the Realm or across the South and East.  In the cities, slaves are the servants of the wealthy and middle classes.  On the vast farmsteads and cattle ranges, they perform all the necessary menial tasks.

This practice frees the people of Harborhead to train for war, and every native learns from childhood how to use weapons and to fight.  While both men and women can join the armies, the Royal Guard is an all-female elite military force that accepts only the strongest, fastest and fiercest young virgins in Harborhead.  Any young woman who meets the Guard’s exacting physical standards may join, but she must swear to neither marry nor take lovers outside the Guard while she is a member.  For the duration of their service, Guardswomen are considered the sacred brides of Ahlat, Southern God of War and Cattle.  Breaking their vow of chastity with anyone outside the Royal Guard is punishable by painful death.  The Guardswomen act as the King’s special shock troops, train ceaselessly and drinks the blood of their enemies.

From the “Scroll of Kings”, Page 17

Of all the nations in the South, Harborhead has the largest number of people under arms.  Harborhead is not the largest, richest or most populous country in the South… but ancient custom says that all citizens, male or female, should train with weapons throughout their lives.  Harborhead’s society has two castes: the free, who carry weapons, and slaves, who don’t. From the monarch to the midwife, every free Harborheadite is ready to grab her weapons and fight.

And the citizens do fight, with great enthusiasm.  After all, how can you prove yourself as a warrior without a battle? Harborheadites live in a constant, low-intensity war against their hereditary enemies, other Harborheadites.  The Five Peoples of Harborhead all have old rivalries with each other, and each village raids its neighbors.

Harborhead holds literally thousands of separate combat units.  Most are little village militias that steal cattle from other villages and defend against other bands on the same mission.  Harborhead also has a large national army, but no one can guarantee that its divisions would obey a general mobilization order.  The most powerful and disciplined military force is the Royal Guard – thousands of elite female warriors, every one sworn as a Bride of Ahlat, Southern God of War and Cattle, and fanatically devoted to their husband.

Arsenal

Harborhead relies almost entirely on the sort of weapons that villagers can easily make for themselves.  Everyone has a short spear, javelins and an iron knife.  Most people own a single-edged short sword – a stout machete that they use as a daily tool as well as a weapon.  War axes are also common.  Raiders use clubs when they intend to take slaves instead of cattle, as the blunt weapons are more likely to leave enemies alive.  For missile weapons, Harborheadites use easily made self bows and slings.

Harborhead makes little use of firedust.  The Royal Guard trains with firewands and firedust grenades, but these do not form the Guard’s chief weapons.  A few units of the national army keep these weapons on hand as well, but only for the officers.  Harborhead does not make or use any of the larger incendiary weapons found in other parts of the South.

For defense, most Harborhead citizens own a large ox hide shield (equal to a tower shield) painted with tribal symbols.  They do not wear any sort of armor – not even the soldiers.  They prefer mobility to defense: on a cattle raid, being able to run away matters more than improving the odds of surviving a blow.  Officers, chiefs and other leaders sometimes wear armor in imitation of the Realm legions that have occupied the land for so long.  Harborhead leaders favor lamellar armor rather than the Realm infantry’s reinforced buff jacket, though, since lamellar armor is cooler and less fatiguing to wear in the hot climate.

Strategy and Tactics

Most of Harborhead’s warfare is internal.  Raiders make hit-and-run strikes between villages to acquire slaves and cattle. Harborheadites also raid neighboring tribes and the Varangian city-states, mostly for slaves to sell to the Realm.  So far, the Realm prevents Harborhead from attempting conquest.  If hotheads have their way, though, hundreds of thousands of Harborheadites – not just the national army and Royal Guard – will flood across the border to attack Varang in a vast, disorganized horde.  The army and Royal Guard, however, practice tactics of their own.

Defense

Harborhead’s defense rests on its national army, which mans mud-brick forts throughout the country and along its coasts and borders.  The Realm garrison, meanwhile, supplies port defense for Kirighast, with extensive fortifications and firedust artillery.

The real threat to an invader, however, comes from the deeply hostile countryside.  Villages have only thorn-bush kraals for defense, but every adult is a soldier, and the Harborheadites believe the best defense is a vigorous counterattack.

Other Assets

Harborhead has no Celestial Exalted patronage (so far as anyone knows), and the Realm stripped the country of any First Age weapons.  The population of Terrestrial outcastes is low and lacks training in the synergistic fighting that is the greatest strength of the Dragon-Blooded.  Harborhead has a normal proportion of God-Blooded and thaumaturges, but no more.  Harborhead doesn’t even have any allies that would come to its aid…

…except maybe Ahlat.  The Southern God of War and Cattle receives more worship from Harborhead than the rest of the South put together.  If Harborhead’s very survival were at stake, he might break his usual policies and assist the country.  Only a massive assault by creatures of darkness (such as an entire Fair Folk court or an invading Deathlord) could bring Ahlat himself and his war aurochs from Heaven, but in other circumstances, he could recruit Exalted champions, loan out divine weaponry and supply bureaucratic cover for any small gods who wanted to fight.

The Armies of Harborhead

Officially, Harborhead has five separate armies: one for each of the country’s four geographical divisions and one stationed around the capital of Kirighast.  Each army has its own command structure.  The Realm and its puppet ruler, locally called the Leopard Seat, like this arrangement because it prevents one general from commanding too great a fraction of the nation’s armed forces and, perhaps, getting ideas about mounting a coup.  In addition, each army is widely scattered throughout many garrisons.

Organization

Both men and women join Harborhead’s armies.  Recruits must pass a set of physical tests, but the hard and active life of farming and cattle-herding means that few applicants fail.  Once enlisted, recruits engage in weapons drill, using the same weapons commonly found throughout the country.  Recruits also learn the art of camouflage, if they aren’t already well versed.  To instill discipline, new recruits spend a lot of time on menial labor such as cleaning the barracks and maintaining the grounds of their forts.

Each of the four regional armies is supposed to have 25,000 soldiers.  Actually, they probably have a bit less: officers at every level invent “ghost soldiers” to pad their payrolls.  The armies each consist of five commanderies of 5,000 soldiers.  Each commandery is in turn divided into 25 captaincies of 200 soldiers. Captaincies may break into units of 100, 50 or 20 for smaller operations, led by noncommissioned officers.

In a commandery, five captaincies occupy a permanent fort in the center of their province.  This fort is the army headquarters for the region.  A “high captain” takes overall command of these units.  This force of 1,000 soldiers consists of light infantry and cavalry, so it can respond rapidly to emergencies.  The other 20 captaincies occupy border forts and watchtowers.  They guard important roads and crossroads, passes, bridges, towns and other strategic locations.  Platoons of 20 may go on patrol; centuries or the whole captaincy are mobilized to hunt bandits.

Some captaincies are woefully under strength.  Their captains do not exercise their forces enough, or they don’t get paid enough, and soldiers desert to go home or go raiding on their own.  In fact, whole captaincies may become little more than bandit gangs.  Border garrisons, on the other hand, often exceed their official numbers because these soldiers get to supplement their pay by raiding across Harborhead’s borders; the army does not discourage this because their job, after all, is to fight the enemies of Harborhead.

The armies are paid from tax revenues and the Realm’s cut of the slave trade.  Each level of command supplies the payroll for the next layer down.  Since the Empress disappeared, the Realm’s payments for slaves have become… irregular.  The net loss of revenue is debatable, but it makes a great excuse for a commander or captain to keep some of the payroll – the commander blames the shortfall on the Realm.  Increasing numbers of soldiers turn to freelance cattle rustling, slave raiding and other forms of banditry to supplement their income.  Eventually, the Realm satrap and the Leopard Seat disburse extra funds to bring salaries up to date (and pay off rogue officers), and the military quiets down, but Harborhead has seen eight such episodes of mass brigandage in the last five years.

The Capital Army is much smaller than the other four and has a somewhat different arrangement.  The army occupies 40 camps of 250 soldiers each, scattered in and around Kirighast.  None of these units may do more than patrol within their assigned district, serving as the police force for the capital and about 100 miles around it.  They guard caravans headed into and out of the city, keep order in the marketplace, break up riots and quell other civic disturbances.  For what it’s worth, the Capital Army is the most ethnically balanced and integrated of the armies, and the least corrupt.  It’s also the military force most closely watched by the Realm’s garrison.

Captaincies frequently go on maneuvers to practice tactics on the scale of 20s and 50s.  Sometimes, a whole captaincy practices combined tactics such as one platoon drawing out a hypothetical enemy while the others wait in ambush, or encircling a bandit encampment before attacking from all sides.  The warlike temperament of Harborheadites and the tactical practice give the captaincies excellent drill and morale.

The armies hardly ever practice with multiple captaincies, as banditry and border skirmishes hardly ever call for anything larger than a captaincy.  The Realm garrison also does not want the Harborheadites gaining too much experience at the mass combat that is the Realm’s greatest strength.  On the rare occasions when the army engages in large-scale maneuvers, each captain and commander has a Realm officer to advise, interpret the orders from higher up the chain of command and coordinate with other captaincies.  Harborhead has never attempted any war games involving more than a single commandery.  As a result, none of the native officers have real command experience in a full-scale war.  Could the commanders even hold the armies together in a crisis? No one knows.

As a result, Harborhead’s armies have no combat units larger than a captaincy (Magnitude 4).  The legion-sized commanderies (Magnitude 8) are only theoretical entities, unless someone can teach the Harborheadites the craft of large-scale command, control and strategy.

Sample Captaincy

Description: This captaincy could be located anywhere in Harborhead. It’s supposed to have 200 soldiers, but 20 of the soldiers are accounting fictions. The captaincy occupies a small mud-brick fort. Although the soldiers are quite disciplined in combat, they are thoroughly undisciplined in every other way. Instead of a uniform, Harborhead’s armies use a distinctive shield. Army shields are painted with a stylized leopard to show their allegiance to the monarchy, with other symbols for their commandery and captaincy.

Commanding Officer: Varies

Armor Color: Ordinary clothing with an ox hide shield; skin may be scarified or tattooed.

Motto: “Battle for the Bull!”

General Makeup: 180 light infantry with light spears, a pair of javelins, a knife and either a self bow or sling.

Overall Quality: Good

Magnitude: 4

Drill: 3

Close Combat Attack: 3
Close Combat Damage: 2

Ranged Attack: 3
Ranged Damage: 2

Endurance: 6
Might: 0
Armor: 0 (-2 mobility)
Morale: 4

Formation: Army units normally fight in skirmish or relaxed formation. They do not train at close formation fighting. Each captain has four officers as heroes and another four relays; these are heroic mortals. The rest of the captaincy consists of extras.

The Royal Guard

Harborhead also has a separate military force of frightening power: the Royal Guard, better known as the Brides of Ahlat.  Its three commanderies of 5,000 women guard the Royal Palace, the great temple called the Fane of the Upswept Horns and Kirighast’s Old Town around it.  They are nominally attached to the Capital Army, which they outnumber, but no one in that army would dream of giving an order to a Bride of Ahlat.  The Brides of Ahlat also sometimes accompany the regular army on battles against Varangian city-states or nomads who drift up from further South.  Everyone in Harborhead knows the Royal Guard’s red-and-black kilt, tasseled cloaks and horned steel caps wrapped in red-and-black turbans. Harborheadites view the Guards as paragons of the nation’s warrior ideal.

Guardswomen range in age from 16 to 27.  At 27, they must retire unless Ahlat himself appears and commands that they be allowed to stay; such fortunate women usually become senior commanders.  The Brides of Ahlat have no trouble meeting their recruitment quota thanks to Harborhead’s fervent piety.

When a woman joins the Royal Guard, she swears an oath of service and is ceremonially wed to Ahlat.  The god himself invisibly attends these ceremonies and whispers his acceptance into the Bride’s ear.  Royal Guardswomen know they fight for their god, and their god appreciates their loyalty and valor.  They have superb morale.  They stiffen the morale of any unit they accompany, too, since angry Brides sometimes accuse the secular army of cowardice after a defeat, and decimate them as a way to warn soldiers to fight harder in the future.  The Brides absolutely terrify Varangian forces, since the Brides drink the blood of their fallen foes and sacrifice human captives to their divine husband.  Even the Realm’s legionnaires find the Royal Guard unnerving.

The Realm garrison commander, General Cathak Lazera, does not like the Royal Guard.  Every woman in this army has pledged herself to the god Ahlat, in gross defiance of Immaculate doctrine.  More importantly to Lazera, the Royal Guard does not accept supervision by Realm officers and shows considerably more reverence for its divine patron than for the monarch the Guard supposedly protects.  One word from Ahlat could unleash a highly disciplined, elite fighting force against Harborhead’s government – or the Realm garrison itself.

Organization

The Royal Guard occupies three sets of barracks near the Royal Palace.  Each commandery consists of eight watchgroups of 625 women each: two sleeping, four training and two on guard duty.  The three commanders take orders directly from the Leopard Seat… and that monarch hopes they will continue to do so.  Harborhead seldom commits more than one watch-group to a battle.  Each watch-group has its own captain. Watch-groups in turn break down into 25 groups of 25 Brides of Ahlat, each with a lieutenant who can take command if the unit must act on its own.  These groups of 25 are called “Horns of the Bull.”

Every one of the commanders and captains can channel Essence, whether because they are outcaste Terrestrial Exalted, God-Blooded or as a gift from Ahlat himself.  Some are also thaumaturges, as are many of the priests and priestesses of Ahlat at the Fane of the Upswept Horns.  In time of war, Royal Guard combat units always carry a variety of thaumaturgical talismans and alchemical drugs to enhance their combat prowess, from walkaways (see Exalted, p. 379) to blood-staunching compresses (see The Books of Sorcery, Vol. III – Oadenol’s Codex, p. 130).

The Royal Guard includes several outcastes Terrestrial Exalted who was born in Harborhead.  These outcastes view their Exaltations as gifts from Ahlat rather than the Dragons, and serve their god as long as he chooses.  After retirement, they usually enter Ahlat’s priesthood.

Royal Guard Watch Group

Description: Under normal circumstances, Brides of Ahlat seldom fight in groups larger than a single Horn – but how often do circumstances stay normal for heroes?  When Harborhead goes to war, entire watch-groups take the field.  Whoever they fight faces hundreds of fanatical young women trained to the peak of combat prowess and screaming for blood.

Ahlatsehun (“Ahlat Keeps Promise” in an old tribal tongue), a third-generation Bride of Ahlat and God-Blooded daughter of one of her gods’ war-aurochs, commands this unit.

Commanding Officer: Ahlatsehun

Armor Color: Red-and-black kilt, red-and-black turban around horned steel cap, tasseled cloak, some leather straps.

Motto: “Blood for Ahlat, blood for the Bull!”

General Makeup: 625 light infantry armed with spears, knives and ox hide shields.  They also have one or two minor items of protective or healing thaumaturgy per Horn of soldiers, and the hecatomb blessing.

Overall Quality: Elite

Magnitude: 5

Drill: 5

Close Combat Attack: 4
Close Combat Damage: 3

Ranged Attack: 3
Ranged Damage: 3

Endurance: 9
Might: 1
Armor: 0 (-0 mobility)
Morale: 5

Formation: Brides of Ahlat usually fight in close formation, stabbing their spears in unison.  In addition to Ahlatsehun, the watch-group has five lieutenants with sufficient skill and charisma to function as heroes and rally groups of Magnitude 2 or 3 around themselves, if need be.  Another five Brides are trained as relays; they send messages using colored streamers tied to their war-goads.  All Brides are heroic mortals.