Military Organisation of the Keep on the Borderlands

Or, 'Can I do KotB for Oathmark?'

Part of the motivation for starting the Keep build was obviously to play more games with suitable terrain. The Keep is a framework for building some things - a Chapel, a Tower, an Inn, a Fountain as a kind of village centrepiece in the market square...

But also, wargames need armies. I started to wonder if the Keep could also provide a framework for troop organisation.

As with many things about the Keep, the 'force organisation chart' is very complicated. There are, listed for the actual compliment of the Keep proper (not including the guards of the Jewel Merchant or the fanatical Guild guardsmen or anything), 238 'soldiers' of varying kinds and 10 what might be thought of as 'officers' or heroes.

But my idea of organising these as Oathmark units was sadly dashed. Or at least, much more complex than it seemed at first thought.

40-42 of the troops (it's not quite clear what two 'men-at-arms' are actually armed with) are equipped with pole-arms. These, perhaps, could be organised into 'Linebreaker' units for Oathmark - Human heavy infantry with 2-handed weapons.

However, Linebreakers are equipped with 'heavy' armour; only 4 of the Pole-arm troops are wearing plate, and 12 definitely are not wearing heavy armour at all, as they are listed as wearing leather armour. The 24-26 remaining men-at-arms with pole-arms are listed as wearing chain. This potentially could be classed as heavy armour; in that case they could make up units of Linebreakers with the plate-armoured troops (30 all together could potentially be split into 2-3 units).

That would leave 12 lightly-armoured, pole-armed men-at-arms. That's not a unit-type that exists in Oathmark, unfortunately. The situation would be worse if chain is deemed 'light' rather than 'heavy'; in that case, only 4 of the (potentially) 42 pole-armed troops would be able to make up a unit - at least, if they kept their pole-arms. Most of these also have access to hand-axes or swords and shields, so could potentially provide 38 bodies for 'Soldier' units, with light armour (ie chain or leather) and shield, and sword or hand-axe. That would already be nearly two full units, which sounds like it would be a good start to an Oathmark Human army.

On top of that there are 54 chain-clad men-at-arms with crossbows and probably 46 men-at-arms with longbows (6 are just listed with 'bows' but all the other men-at-arms with bows have specifically longbows). This means there are 100 troops in chain with different types of bows.

If chain is heavy armour (see the Linebreakers above) then these 100 troops are not a legal troop-type in Oathmark. There are no heavy-armour Human troops with bows (there are no specific crossbow, longbow, shortbow units for Humans in Oathmark, just units of Archers with light armour and bows, and unarmoured, bow-wielding Rangers; all the various various crossbow and longbow contingents from the Keep would just have 'bows'). If the chain-clad troops can be classed as 'Linebreakers' (heavy) then the chain-clad 'Archers' (light) can't be legal for Oathmark, and vice versa.

Even if the chain-clad Archers are considered 'light', there are still 100 of them. This would give 5 units of Archers, as maximum unit size is 20. However, Oathmark has a limit of 4 units of any one troop type, so even accepting them as 'light' would disqualify 20 of them from being in a legal Oathmark army.

Whatever the classification of chain, the further 32 plate-wearing crossbowmen are automatically illegal under Oathmark rules, as there are no 'heavy' archers.

So, the best we can do so far is 30 Linebreakers and 132 disqualified bowmen in heavy armour along with 12 disqualified light-armoured pole-armed troops, or probably 38 lightly-armoured Soldiers and 80 (4 units of) Archers, also in light armour, and at this point only 52 disqualified archers, and a few 'heavy' troops that can't make a viable unit (the 4 actual plate-armoured, pole-armed troops).

After that, there are 32 men-at-arms with plate, shield and sword. These are a perfectly legal heavy infantry type, 'Warriors', the heavily-armoured version of 'Soldiers', and could make up two 16-man units of this type (or a 20 and a 12, etc).

That is (30+[12]+[132]+32=206) or (38+80+[52]+{4}+32=206) where brackets denote [illegal] or {probably unviable} units. Categorising chain as 'light' armour saves many more troops at the expense of dispensing with the pole-arms.

The remaining 32 troops are cavalry. 12 are heavily-armoured in plate armour, and carry swords and shields. In Oathmark, Human Heavy Cavalry is usually thought of as using spears or lances but their equipment categorisation is 'Hand Weapon'. It is perfectly possible to field these troops, though the maximum size for a cavalry unit is 10. Perhaps attaching three of the 'officers' and fielding three units of 5 Heavy Cavalry would be an option. Of the 20 remaining, 18 of the cavalry have chain and crossbows, but again there is the problem of armour and crossbows, but even more acutely than with the infantry - whatever chain is classed as, there are no mounted archers with any armour in the Human list. The remaining 2 cavalry troops are described as lightly-armoured couriers. It could however be reasonable to put these 20 cavalrymen together and make two units of Cavalry with light armour.

As it stands the troop-types in KotB are not a great fit for Oathmark but a relatively-simple solution would be swapping some crossbows or longbows for pole-arms, particularly, or sword and shield when not possible. Given that the maximum number of lightly-armoured archers is 80, the 'current' number of 132 archers is too high for a viable Oathmark force, whatever their armour type. The 52 unviable troops are divided between 32 plate-clad and 20 chain-clad troops. The 32 in plate could take up some of the abandoned pole-arms to become Linebreakers (with the four actual plate-and-pole-arm troops), and the remaining 20 could join their sword-and shield, chain-clad brethren to be another unit of Soldiers.

This would give something like the following list:

3 units of Soldiers - light (chain or leather) armour, sword or axe, shield - 58 (+1 officer)

4 units of Archers - light armour, crossbow or longbow ie 'bow' - 80

2 units of Warriors - heavy armour, sword, shield - 32 (+2 officers)

2 units of Linebreakers - heavy armour, pole-arm - 36 (+2 officers)

2 units of Cavalry - light armour, shield, hand weapon - 20

3 units of Heavy Cavalry - heavy armour, shield, hand weapon - 12 (+3 officers)

The majority of the officers or other 'heroes' in the Keep are unproblematic - seven of them, from the three corporals to the Castellan himself - are armed with swords and shields and wear heavy armour. There are also seven units with heavy armour in the proposed list. Perhaps the Castellan leads one unit of Heavy cavalry, a Captain the second and a Corporal the third; the Bailiff leads a unit of Warriors and a Corporal the second; and the remaining Captain the first unit of Linebreakers and the last Corporal the second. There are at least 40 pole-arms in the Keep, as 40 (or possibly 42) are armed with them in the original list, and I only have 36 'Linebreakers'. There are enough pole-arms for anyone joining the unit, such as the Corporal, to be armed with one. The Sergeant, who wears chain (and therefore, probably light) armour, could join a unit of Soldiers. 

But this is not the only possible way to slice the organisational pie - just a first, reasonable-looking pass. I'm sure I could tinker greatly with this list, if I ever get any games in anyway. One problem with it is that I have magicked up a few extra warhorses. There are only 30 in the Keep, according to the original list, along with some riding horses; I have somehow managed to conjure 15 Heavy Cavalry and 20 (Light) Cavalry without a problem, which is perhaps slightly cheating, given the constraints I have set myself. On the other hand, Human Cavalry in Oathmark are not noted as riding 'Warhorses' specifically, so perhaps it doesn't matter. The heavier horses are prioritised for the Heavy Cavalry and the last line of (Light) Cavalry has lighter horses, perhaps.

Though several of the officers and 'heroes' of the KotB garrison have magical weapons, this would not really be permitted in Oathmark. Oathmark has a system for unit officers that allows special characters to be the commander of a unit, but there are limits to how many of these special characters can be taken, and only these special characters can have magical weapons or equipment. It is likely that a standard Oathmark force-organisation chart would only allow 3 or 4 of these 'officers' to be special characters. The others would just be normal representatives of their unit-type. Perhaps the Castellan and Bailiff could be considered as 'Captains' in Oathmark terms and the two Captains in the Keep would be considered 'Champions'; or perhaps the Castellan would be considered a General, and the Bailiff and one of the Captains (probably the one leading the Linebreakers in the example above) would be Oathmark 'Champions'. The other two officer/hero-types that might be considered are the Castellan's Elven advisor and Clerical scribe; these may be considered as spell-casters in Oathmark terms (neither, I think, would be allowed to wear armour in this role). They somewhat stand outside the normal 'force organisation'.

This, of course, pre-supposes emptying the Keep and engaging an enemy on open ground. And what enemy? Well, in Oathmark terms, maybe the enemy should be the inhabitants of the Caves of Chaos. That would be an entirely different beast in terms of force-organisation, and will require much thinking about...

Not Building a Chapel

A while back (link here), I had an idea for trying to build some of the buildings in the Keep on the Borderlands. I started - at least, as far as trying to do a mock-up of one of the buildings. My idea was to start with the Chapel (building 17 on the Keep floorplan). This, I was certain, was a good start. I thought I could use it as a free-standing chapel or temple building if I needed such a thing for gaming. A chapel is always useful, right? My plan was to do it in a style that would more-or-less fit medieval Europe, a Warhammer-y fantasy early-modern Europe analogue, could be in Middle-earth with a bit of squinty side-eye, would serve as an old chapel in more modern Victorian sci-fi-ish gaming, or could even be a non-ruined building in the 41st Millennium, if they have non-ruined buildings. A generic stone hall-type building of vaguely religious bent - that could cover a lot of genres of gaming. Re-using anything to do with wargaming always seems like a good idea to me (I don't have infinite space or money, so anything has to be potentially able to serve a variety of functions), so, enthused with the idea that it would fit with almost anything I was likely to do, I embarked on the planning process.

It was not a good start. 

I'm going to quote from the description of the Chapel in the module:

"This building has a peaked roof two stories tall; the interior is one large room. The altar is located at the eastern end, with a colored glass window (worth 350 g.p. intact) above it; the window is 20’ tall and 8’ wide."

This was all fairly understandable, I thought. Looking at the map, the Chapel is 60' long and 20' wide, with doors at the west end. So far so good.

Excerpt from the plan of the Keep in The Keep on the Borderlands (c) TSR/Wizards of the Coast

I got into a bit of a flap about what a 'peaked roof two stories tall' meant however. Did it mean the roof was two storeys tall, atop a building of unknown height? Did it mean the building was two storeys tall including the roof? These speculations came back to haunt me later, but I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm pretty certain it was intended to mean, 'a peaked roof that makes the building two storeys tall at its peak' (the quotes obviously are in American English but I'm British, a 'story' to me is a told narrative, the floor of a building is a 'storey'). On this interpretation, I just need to know what 'two storeys' means. I decided that to keep things simple I would treat each storey as 10' (though I did flirt for a while with 12' - see below for 1:72 v 1:60).

This gave me the basic (in-game) dimensions of the building - 60' by 20' by 'two storeys' = 20'.

But what does this look like in practice?

I have generally applied a 1:72 or sometimes1:75 scale to my gaming involving miniatures. Both D&D and Warhammer use Imperial measurement, so I assumed that 1"=6' (one inch = 6 feet/72 inches). This after all was the scale of minis back in the day - if 25mm = 1" (it doesn't but close enough) then a 1" or 25mm mini represents a 6' (72") person. All well and good, that's 1:72. Later I decided that 4mm might equal 1', but as I never got round to building anything related to that scale it didn't matter. My D&D playing never really got to the 3rd Ed+ 'battlemat'-style of play (maybe that was 4th Ed, I don't really know) so I didn't do the 5' square thing that became very popular. I'm an old-school-10'-blue-squares-kinda guy.

So, how to convert 10' squares into terrain? It never bothered me before, I just made what I had and hoped it would kind-of fit. But now I was making a model to a pre-existing plan, based mostly on 10' squares, and occasional descriptions to fill in details.

I spent a lot of time going backwards and forwards between 1"=6' and 1"=5'. I should not have bothered. The sheer faff of trying to 5/6 or 6/5 everything was a baffling ordeal. I decided in the course of the planning for this build that from now on, 1:72 be damned, 1:60 is the way to go. 1"=5' and that's an end to it. I think this is the scale of the D&D battlemats so that's good... though the Keep in plan is 365' north-south - if I ever get the whole thing built, that will be 73", which is an inch over 6 feet; at 1:72 it would 'only' be a shade under 62", or 5-foot-2. But even though it increases the size by 6/5, it's so much easier to work with 1'=5" so that's what I decided would be the scale. And will be for all future builds I do that concern minis (and why would they not concern minis?).

So I decided on a scale, and started with a model-of-my-model. I have some foamcore - I bought it quite recently for building models, but have not used it yet, so thought I would use it for this build. But before I started hacking up my foamcore I thought I would plan out the build in cardboard just to see if it looked right. I can get cereal-box card out of the recycling, so I decided rather than jump straight in with the somewhat expensive foamcore (more expensive than 'free', anyway) I might as well build a test model to make sure I was happy.

So, I went back to the description. OK, questions about the exact meaning of 'two storeys' aside... peaked roof... well, that's pretty clear isn't it? It's not a flat roof; the roof is not a single slope from a higher wall to a lower; it's not a barrel-vault. Fine. I can work with a peaked roof (probably easier than working out how to do a vaulted roof). It doesn't say if it's a moderately-steeply-peaked roof, as in a more 'Gothic' style of architecture, or if it's a shallower angle of roof, a more 'Romanesque' style that you might find in Ravenna, let's say (which, though not so well represented on game-boards, is something of the model for Gondor, for example, both in Tolkien's imagination, and in terms of the visual language of Jackson's films). So I thought I would explore both. These are two of the potential designs I came up with for the west (entrance) end, based on 'two storeys' being 20' (bear in mind I've now gone from 1 square = 10', as in the plan, to 1 square = 5' = 1", for modelling purposes).

'Gothic' and 'Romanesque' (Classical?) west elevations

But the description also mentions a stained glass window, 20' tall in the east end. But the whole building is only 20' tall (ie, two stories) isn't it? Maybe I'm getting my storeys wrong. 2&1/2 inches? 3 inches? This moves my 10' storeys to 12'6" or even 15'.

I can't change the storeys that much. That would make everything far too tall, I think. Maybe I could make the walls of the building two storeys, with the roof on top of that? So I started playing about with elevations for the east end. There's no indication that there's any kind of internal differentiation; in fact, in the description it says 'the interior is one large room' - no mention of subdivisions or towers or anything. So my assumption is, the east and west elevations must match. Therefore, I need to find an elevation that works at the east end, with the window, then take out the window and add the doors for the west end. Simple. These are two of the elevations I came up with (there was a third intermediate form with a 45° pitch) - now abandoning any idea that 'two storeys' meant the total - it had to be the hight of the building without the roof... maybe... because I couldn't see how the stained-glass window could start at ground-level, it had to be raised somewhat, surely?

Potential east elevations

So, this is where I got to with the elevations. I took the (perhaps arbitrary) decision that the window would start 10' up the wall. Suddenly the building was not 20' tall, but 35' tall, in order to accommodate a 20' tall, 8' wide window. And, the Romanesque version at least looked like it would be 30' to the top of the wall - that was starting to look like three storeys, and that without the roof.

But it got worse. Consulting the plan again I realised that the Chapel butts up against another building at its east end - the end with the window. Checking against the description of location 4 - the Stables, which are the building immediately to the east - one finds this information:

"4. COMMON STABLE: This long building is about 15’ high, with a 3’ parapet* atop its flat roof, so that it can be used in defense of the gate. The gateside wall is pierced for archery..."

So the parapet (leaving aside the notion that it's only 3' high for now, that can't mean what it appears to mean) is used for defence, and is on the opposite side from the Chapel. But the whole building is still 15' high and has a flat roof. The side that is adjacent to the Chapel is 15' high.

Now there is no possibility that the window starts below the level of the building immediately to the east of it, that is absurd - unless the window predates the stables, and the latter was constructed against the wishes of the Chapel authorities... I could go with that but it seems pretty far-fetched, and I don't want to waste time explaining that the building 'mistake' isn't my mistake, it's part of the history of the castle. So the window must be at least 15' above ground level, and add a further 20' on top of that, and it can't go right the way to the roof, there must be some clearance at the top... and that would put the bottom of the window on the same level as soldiers fighting on the roof of the stable, risking them toppling into the window if they were injured up there...

The simplest solution to the whole problem is to assume that the building itself was 'two storeys' - that is 20' - and the roof was on top of that, and also, that the height of the widow was included in the roof and not the height of the building (ie, the bottom of the window was also at 20').

So I came up with the following elevation...

West elevation with 'tall' roof

Gone was any notion I could do a 'Romanesque' version of this. I could just about sneak a 'Gothic' arched window under a steeply-pointed roof; the possibility to do the same with a rounded window on a roof with a shallow pitch would have meant walls 40' (four storeys, not two) high.

So this is what I went with - a 45' high, 20' wide, 60' long Chapel, with the window taking up almost the entire height of the roof, starting 20' above ground-level. It was the only way I could see to get all the pieces to fit.

And it looked rubbish.

The whole thing was a daft, spindly thing that was far too tall (and long) for its width. I hated it.

I can only assume that Gary Gygax never build cardboard models of all of this (or maybe he did and he thought it looked OK - which is fine, we all have different appreciations of aesthetics). Either way... this was a success, in that I didn't waste the foamcore (it's still in the loft in its pristine state, and I'm still playing with cardboard), but also, a failure in that I didn't get a model chapel either for my 'Keep' gameboard or for anything else.

So I shelved the plans until I came up with a solution.

My favoured solution at the moment is, there is no stained-glass window. Maybe I will revisit this sometime and see what other solutions I can come up with but if - and it's a big 'if', now - if I build the Chapel, I will probably do it without the window. It's the only way I can see to make it work. And in that case, I might do it in a Romanesque style for two reasons. The first is that I like the look of it (I went to Ravenna on a college trip in 2010, it was absolutely amazing, architecturally and historically) and don't see it on many gaming boards; and the second is that I still have plans to drop the Keep into northern Gondor (as I first hinted at nearly a decade ago here) and see what happens. In that case, the Ravenna-ish feel of the Romanesque frontage might be more appropriate.

And that is where I left the Chapel, and for a while, the task of building the various locations in the Keep.

So, then, I tried to build a tower...