thekristhomas wrote:
Jacquleine Renier is old, but her Becoming Plague is either ready or near to it
Falkovnia attacks Richemulot
Richemulot is considered the strongest militarily so in order to isolate it, Borca will be taken first, then Dementlieu.
Okay lets talk about this, because I lord knows I never get tired of talking about Richemulot! (Non sarcasm)
First of all the problem is that we've got no "benchmark" for how the past invasions went exactly/why/how they failed.
We know that Falkovnia invaded twice, but we don't have any idea about how serious they were.
The only thing we know for certain was that the first time the Reniers went up against Drakov was in Silbervas back over the course of the Years of the Impaled Rats.
It took Vlad three years to drive the wererats out of a city with a civilian population that was in theory on his side.
Silbervas has a population of 5,800 and lets assume populations don't fluctuate a lot in Ravenloft or else all this is just so much conjecture, even more so than already.
Further more lets assume that Richemulot represents more or less the peak wererat to human ratio possible without it becoming obvious to the point that no one can deny that there are way too many wererats for people to want to live there. That ratio (in Richemulot) is roughly 10 humans to every one wererat. (45,330 humans to 4,390 wererats)
I'm going to assume the ratio is of wererats to humans in Silbervas was lower, maybe somewhere between 20 to 1 or 50 to 1? Lets say maybe around 200 wererats? Granted those numbers fluctuated up (as soldiers/people were infected) and down (as wererats were killed) over the course of those three years, and the Renier's were probably down to about 50 wererats (who by that point were all natural lycanthropes (infected being much easier to hunt down and kill) the initial number includes both natural and infected).
This is once again pure conjecture because we don't have any numbers for how many troops Vlad used to conduct his battles, or how many losses he's took in the process/how many of his own men he had to kill off for fear that they were infected wererats.
What we can roughly tell though, is that it's a very difficult task to say the least to drive wererats out of a city. Also the Years of the Impaled rat was now over half a century ago (right?), so its safe to assume all the soldiers who actually came out of that battle with anti-lycanthrope battle experience have been taken out of the equation by time even if Darkov's other wars didn't get them first.
So, Jacqueline's best move from a tactical point of view is probably a rope a dope/scorched earth.
Any Falkovnian invasion of Richemulot that is taking the most obvious path would be to mass your biggest force at Silbervas using the city as a staging area, and then march them south and slightly east towards Pont-a-Museau and try to end the fighting as quickly as possible/secure a major victory early on by seizing the largest city in Richemlot, the capital, and the home of the Renier family who also happen to be the chief force holding the nation together.
If Jacqueline wanted to be a complete bastard (and given that she's a darklord the smart money would tend to drift in that direction) she should let Darkov think he's winning, let his armies march into Pont-a-Museau with relatively light opposition, let them raise the Falkovnian flag over Chateau Delanuit, then turn the city into an urban warzone the likes of which would make Stalingrad seem like a walk in the park.
The city has a huge sewer system that the Renier family knows the ins and outs of, it has a population roughly three times the size of Silbervas (16,550) and that means roughly 1,650 wererats. If you want to learn the true definition of Rattenkrieg, imagine trying to invade a city where every rat is either an enemy spy, an assassin, or both.
It also doesn't help that according to Van Richten's Guide to Lycanthropes, wererats tend to vary in what substances they are vulnerable to, so you can't just give every Falkovnian soldier a silver sword/pike and consider that particular job over and done with, this wererat may be vulnerable to silver, this one, gold, this one copper, this one a weapon made out of wood, this one a weapon made of sharpened bone.
Now Jacqueline's biggest problem is how to make the her right hand (the human population of Richemulot who are quite loyal and actually probably give her at least something around a 70% approval rating which is much better than most Darklords get) cooperate with her left (the extended Renier family/all the wererats she's invited to Richemulot over the years) because having those two sides kill each other is obviously somewhat suboptimal for her to say the least.
Also there's the issue where in the previous wars/general past she's earned herself a reputation as maternal defending figure, which could take a severe hit if she decides to implement a strategy that basically throws all the open countryside in Richemulot to the wolves (well hawks) so that she can turn its cities into meat grinders.
One way that she might be able to avoid that is to pull off the following scheme.
Fake illness/sickness just as the war is starting and recover only just in time to escape Chateau Delanuit before Falkovnia captures it.
Then you tell one of the most outrageous lie that has ever been told in the history of Ravenloft.
That Falkovnia having been defeated by her/her family twice before while trying to invade Richemulot, had agents within her city get in touch with the evil wererats that had been plaguing the nation for so long as part of some super evil plan and had one of them try take over the nation by incapacitating her by biting/scratching her/making her an infected wererat.
What the beasts did not realize is that her will and love for Richemulot is too strong to be corroded even by a magical disease and so she fought it off and in the processed imposed her unshakable will upon first her own body, then the rat that dared to infect her, and all then all the wererats in Richemulot since the beast that infected her had been some scheming mastermind that was secretly directing all wererat activity in the entire city, (this especially ties into my general theory that Jacuqeline or to be more exact her agents have long been spreading rumors of there being a master wererat in the sewers of her city, which is the Ravenloft equivalent of Spider from The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents) which means she is now in control of the wererats and so long as she is in control Richemulot's human patriots/armed forces/irregulars will "play nice" with the wererats and vice versa.
Now this isn't the only approach she could take to the problems above, but you have to admit, if she pulls it off, it would resolve the issue of how to properly fuse the two separate chains of command that she's been dealing with.
Granted some people might ponder "lnfected lycanthropy doesn't work like that, at all..." to which she can respond by either A: having them killed or B: doing the ingame equivalent of pointing out that according to Gazetteer IV (4) if an infected lycnathropes takes five levels of the Moonchild prestige class they then count as a natural lycanthrope.
Also at the final battle to shatter the Falkovnian army in Richemulot she'll need to either fake her own death or at least claim that the master wererat creature ended up being killed which caused her to loose control of the rest of the wererat population which explains why they go back to being "evil" after the battle, but still allowing her to stay in power, and possibly even thumbing her nose in the Dark Powers face by coming up with a way to stop having the entire transforms in the presence of those she loves without control being such a deal breaker, assuming that her own vanity and hatred at loosing control don't still drive her to homicidal rage whenever it happens which they very well might.
Now, I'm not saying this has to happen, or will happen exactly this way, but I think unless Falkovnia really brings their A game and Vlad Drakov has by this point figured out that "The Clawed One" from Silbervas who ran the thieves den/wererats was actually Claude Renier (we know so little about the various wars between Richemulot and Falkovnia that it's hard to say if he does or not) then it's entirely possible that the Falkovnian armies will end up getting quite literally eaten alive.
In short invading Richemulot is in its own way just as difficult as invading Darkon. You know how Verbrek is thought of as this wild part of the Core that humanity/civilization has no chance in because there are just so many werewolves running around? There are roughly four time as many lycanthropes in Richemulot as in Verbrek, and wererats seem to be every bit as as prone to working together well as werewolves are.
If Jacqueline can find a way to keep her rats and her human subjects from fighting each other, Falkovnia is in for a very rough time to say the least.
