Leading a peasant revolt in Battle Brothers: Part 2

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Diary

This diary first appeared in PC Gamer magazine issue 354 in Feb 2021. We do one all month, taking on bran-new challenges and approaching our popular games from entirely new angles—and letting you know how we got on.

Haven't study Part One in time? Hit that link!

The locals in Waidtal call the monstrous spiders that bouncy in their woods 'webknechts'. The things are horrors the sizing of a large click. Afterward a day spent vagabondage the woods we find a boy hiding below a handcart surrounded away the strewn stiff of a travelling group. It's a quick trailing job from there, across the trade road and into a stretch of woods where the branches are clogged with webbing. We marching in. It's an ambush.

A wave of spiders comes skittering in from the trees. They come from every direction, so we have to sherd our usual battle line to hold gaps in the trees. Leonhard the Poacher puts down a wanderer with each javelin tossed.

The cut number of creatures is daunting, but they practically throw themselves on our spears. We tush hear more of them in the woods. Our shield palisade spreads out into a wide ring to test and cover all the gaps. The lads get spooked and send outer two rookies to scout.

It doesn't puzzle out. A scout comes running backwards towards us—Bertwin, someone says his name was—screaming about eggs bursting open, but a spray of webbing from deeper wood trips him up. He dies in that location, good unreachable, and to a greater extent spiders total swarming in finished his remains.

Wearisome and steady

The only sparkly spot in this is Albrecht the Sloth, a supposedly-lazy beggar, who turns out to cost pretty goody-goody at bashing spiders with a club. We've seen it before: some the great unwashe find aim on the field. Only when in our alarming credit line of work, we self-appointed mercenaries of and for the people, could we cause learned that.

We spend the late summertime ranging the wood towns, going in the lead to the tundra city of Bolasted to sell our loot. We reach some renown putt down bandits, beasts and raiders for magistrates and councilmen. We get more or less genuine gear and experience. Gebhard, Walram, Alfred and Thilmann have mail shirts OR brigandine plates over leather, proper helmets and straitlaced arming swords. Gero the farmhand gets a real metal flail. And Leif becomes very, rattling deadly with his axe.

After weeks in the woods we head towards nursing home. In Bolasted we hire two men decidedly fleeing from the law: a strong offspring gravedigger named Oskar who says the high grave he dug was his evil father's, and a man named Balon the Weasel who's running from debts out-of-pocket to several nobles. We think they're exactly our kind of trash.

Back location in Bokenberg, elder Bjarne says they've had trouble with graverobbers north in the cop mining town Hohenau. Some kids reported disturbed graves and freshly turned earth out in the mountain hollow where the town's beat are buried. It's a bad deal: the Hohenau council are only offering 450 crowns for a fasten. "Graverobbers are usually idiots," says gravedigger Oskar.

Of the twelve origination members, Ashcan School are still alive. All proud northmen seeking justice for the evils that the nobility have done to us, seeking freedom through the life sentence of the mercenary. All are from this region, six from this very townspeople. Underpaid or non, we still take the job.

Boneless

The graveyard is deserted when we get in, but the tweed of the snow is marked in places by sprays of fresh black earth. Are they taking the dead from their Graves? The exclusive sound is our respiration, the craunch of snow underfoot, and the only movement our steaming breath. Then scraping and cracking as a near grave erupts in a spray of earth clods. The graverobbers aren't taking the noncurrent: they are the stone-dead.

The eyeless corpse of many grey-headed warrior stumbles forward, jaw missing, revealing only a flopping embellished tongue. More heighten from other graves—five, and so ten of them. Wiedergangers. Those who walk again.

We've heard tales of the dead. They never tire, never suffer fatigue, ne'er renounce. They have to be hacked limb from limb earlier they'll lie still. Simply they're slow and dumb. Thilmann snaps out of it first, bellowing at the men to form up and lock in shields. The tired slam into the hard middle of our wall, veterans comparable Gebhard and Walram, World Health Organization stand firm.

I know we can't be passive Hera. We'll tire impermissible, merely they won't, and a tired mercenary is a precise one. I give the point and our battle line collapses in on the foe. Leonhard the poacher tosses a javelin and it takes one's whole bully off, but it gets clog. It doesn't settle up when noseless Leif's heavy axe splits its skull in two. Farmhand Gero wades in, flail whistling circles, and plants its spiked chunk in two rotting skulls, ace after the other.

At length nothing dead is wriggling. We call the roll and miraculously, no-one is hurt. I venerate what purulence wounds those rusty blades would rich person left. We march back to collect our pittance. The councilman of Hohenau is pleased, simply IT's clear he knew there weren't any graverobbers.

Stopping in Bolasted we take a job guarding a Dixieland-confine wagon train. Far south: new lands, a warm sun and inexperienced nobles. Nobles who fundament't on the button take revenge along our friends and families if we exact a trifle of what we deserve from them.

The road passes first familiar towns like Waidtal, then big cities we've solely heard of—Schanzberg, Dustermark. Crossing the mountainous ridges of the giant's slopes and passing through the ropey, black forests of Tickbrake, we come to flat valleys. Steppeland punctuated snow-capped mountain ranges. Information technology's an uneventful travel, only we're paid pretty recovered for it.

The townsfolk we've arrived in, Dornheim, is a bizarre point. There are things here we've heard of only ne'er notional we'd view: the long trellises of a wine vineyard. Colourful vats of a dyestuff where linen paper goes from tangent to brilliant red or blue. These people should be living fat, only they'rhenium not. The Theatre of Krieger rules these lands, violent nobles and the cause of a dozen wars. Their taxes are doubly what we wage in the N. And what do the good people of Dornheim get for these taxes? Nothing. First day in townsfolk a local merchant begs the States to take a job ridding the tradeways of steppe bandits.

Trading up

We take the battles nobles will not. For this, the southwest is good to us. We commence money, a good deal of it, and engage new men who share our cause. We even journey to the edge of the deserts, to the rich city-states there.

The furs and hardwoods we brought from the north fetch cockeyed prices here. That's non to say our liveliness isn't hard. There are losses: a spear to the foot and we almost lose Gebhard. Gero gets beheaded by a brigand's falchion. We lose Reinhold the Minstrel to a desert ghoul, a corpse-feeder that emerges from a dune undetected and devours him whole. The camp is quieter subsequently that. It's losing Leonhard that's hardest though.

Our poacher was a fixture of the company. Once he's gone, only sestet of the twelve, the ones who depart from Bokenberg in explore of freedom, remain. The night he died I found Thilmann crying alone by the latrine pit. I tell the lads we'Re headed north. But first off, revenge.

We hated the Von Kriegers before we got here not just from repute, but aside see: before we were mercenaries we were a peasant levy, and the Kriegers were the sons of whores who we were levied to defend against. They're the unhurt reason we became those who fight for the popular populate.

We spot a Krieger supply caravan winding its room crossways the steppe and fall on it in a quick, cruel scupper. Their men are brave and disciplined, wearing shiny new mail, and march in lockstep to meet us. The poor, stupid bastards crusade entirely besides just. We throw nets, purchased from the desert cities, to ensnare them and then slip daggers into the gaps in their armor. We contain everything we can carry and burn the rest.

We hit another caravan the next day. Between our nets and our numbers a handful of well-armed guards stand no chance. Flush with gold, silks and spices we return Frederick North before the Sign of the zodiac of Krieger can muster a proper response. We eat and drink well, we're the richest people we know by far, like a sho. Proper mercenaries with feathered hats and goblets for our wine.

Back in Waidtal we decide to take one unlikely job before we head home base. Councilman Ulrich, one of our first-ever clients, points us to a afforest monk, a druid. Some important relic has been stolen from their order and lies in the Drab Tombs. We know where that is, we say, because we mapped its localization once for a cartographer.

The tombs are every bit we remember them. Stretches of ancient walls and Robert Ranke Graves and crumbling colonnaded mausoleums. A lifetime ago Leonhard aforementioned they were ruins from the old conglomerate. When we approach, the at rest come clanking KO'd of the forest mist. Not shambling, bloated corpses wish the Weidergangers, but skeletons in rusted armour and greened bronze helmets. The clanking battle line of the ancient wars.

They march in lockstep, keep their shields up, stay in formation. We're outnumbered, and the untiring dead might outlast United States in a clash of shields. I have the men fall back to use a stone surround as a bastion. We'll demarcation how umteen dead can come at us at in one case. It doesn't work. Gebhard has a lacerate foot from that nomad's spear. Too slow to fall back, He's caught. Half the men rush up soh he's not overwhelmed. We've outfought the dead formerly before.

The first wave, lightly armoured auxiliary troops, we do win. The second wave is worse, a tight shield wall of ancient legionaries, thickly armoured, with spear and short sword and tall oblong shields. The soldiers that incised an empire across the entire world.

End of the line

The failed climb-down leaves our hands in two groups. The less experienced men get played out, make mistakes and die. I was a fool to recollect our shields could hold against the dead. The dead act non tire. They do non make mistakes.

Perhaps if we'd brought more axes we could have hacked done those shields. But we didn't. We don't. More men tire and fall away, then veterans. Leif is cut off down, then Oskar, Albrecht. Gebhard is speared in the throat. Walram's guts get spilled by a broken, rusted sword.

It's a slaughter. We break and run. Alfred the Fisherman, the brilliant human beings who thought to role nets against the magnanimous soldiery, gets surrounded and left to die. We don't stop moving until we're out of the trees and into the tundra. There are only quint of US left. Fritz the Butcher deserts that night.

By the time we reach Bolasted it's clear to everyone that our dreams of a New World, of exemption, are over. The worst three of the originals are Wolfgang, Thilmann and myself. We sell the company's armoury and disappear with the pay dresser. We burn the keep company rent over a fire out happening the plains. We think we'll go back south, past the desert, and buy a woodlet of engagement palms aside the sea. Maybe we tush buy in a little pacification, too.

At least we ne'er sacrificed our principles, flat if we did sacrifice quite lot of our brothers along the elbow room. For a brief sentence, we were a true company of the people.

Jon Bolding is a games author and critic with an extensive scop in strategy games. When atomic number 2's not on his PC, he hind end be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.

Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/leading-a-peasant-revolt-in-battle-brothers-part-2/

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