Combined Arms

This week we continue our exploration of military combat in the Tome of Whispers. So far, we've examined army combat and vehicle combat. Each one works well on its own, filling an important niche in the story ecosystem. Today, we explore what happens when you put them together.

Both modes make use of phases instead of initiative and have the same time scale and size of hexes. While vehicle combat has more phases than army combat, it is not an accident that all the phases of army combat are found with the same names and with the same order in vehicle combat. The extra phases of vehicle combat, Helm and Throttle, are both preparation phases, like Orders, and are therefore not phases in which anything physically happens in the world. If both armies and vehicles are present in the same encounter, the whole engagement can use the full suite of phases from vehicle combat. Armies simply skip the phases which do not apply to them.

Because all entities in both types of combat resolve one hex at a time during the Execute phase, this means that all armies and vehicles begin by acting at the same time. Armies that engage and slower vehicles drop out quickly, leaving faster vehicles to finish out the round by themselves. Moving fast in a vehicle has a tactical advantage this way, without needing any additional rules complications. Similarly, all damage to both armies and vehicles are held and applied during the Aftermath phase, ensuring that units which stop resolving hexes early are not put at such an extreme disadvantage that they are completely outclassed.

Adding armies and vehicles together opens up some additional utility and tactical complexity, all while keeping the same types of character involvement that make each type of military combat special. On land, you can have troop transports bringing armies around the battlefield much faster than they can march and vehicles providing bombardment to support allied armies. You can also use army combat rules to resolve boarding actions between large crews. A ship's "generic" crewmates can function as a troop and the ship itself serves as the hex of engagement. The Marines army perk, for example, gives a troop bonuses when it engages another troop as part of a boarding action.

Monsters can also be integrated into military combat, as well. Some monsters in the Menagerie are naturally inclined to form into troops. Very big monsters, however, can be integrated into military combat on their own. This typically only applies to gargantuan and colossal monster, but these creatures have alternate rules that convert their behavior in standard combat into the phases of military combat.

This opens up whole new ways of running encounters with these monsters. A crew aboard ship can engage directly with monsters that are known for being shipbreakers, like a kraken. Similarly, a nation might raise an army to take on a threat that would require a whole lot of individuals to fight anyway. One or more troops makes such large-scale encounters simpler and more engaging to run than having dozens of initiative entries.

Both types of military combat are fun and engaging on their own, but having the option to put them together makes the world feel even more cohesive. The option of adding gigantic monsters into the mix adds even more flexibility. Being optional rules, they do not overburden those learning the game until they're needed. This concludes our exploration of military combat, for now. Next time we'll start introducing the new ancestries in the Tome of Whispers, so stay tuned!