The Curse of Geography, or, Thinking Out Loud

So, I've been leaning hard on certain models while laying out my story, and cheating as the needs of the narrative dictate for the details. Nobody needs to get the exact layout of, say, Bison Country, or how much of a Western Sea there is out past the far west. Especially since the way the story's been breaking, we're never going to lay eyes on an actual bison.

But I've run that string out about as far as I can go without actually nailing down some exact science here. I've been very vague about exactly how many provinces are in the north, or the precise geography of the riverlands, but now that things need to get fluid, I have to do tedious zebrashit like determining the relative relation of the great river, the "Rima" and "Housa" rivers to each other, exactly how far the field armies' fortifications extend, and what they're all anchored upon. Because my model's geography would make an early-modern or even mid-modern military's attempt to lay out continuous fortifications between the original models' waterways absolutely ludicrous. We're not doing that horseapples.

Also, my second chapter's description of the back-country of Rime is... problematic. There are mountains tall enough to have alpine meadows somewhere east of Rime, where our protagonists' exit-portal lurks. For those of you who keep insisting that the Company ought to get out while the getting's good, it's literally a month and a half's march from where they're currently located. Right past the biggest city in the world, and between that city and the lich-empress's Dark Citadel of Doom. That's a long march through what would be very hostile country, assuming that they were fleeing Imperial wrath.

Also, exactly how large are the field armies? Given a middle-modern period logistical system - pre-rail, which I think I've established, but very efficient when it comes to water transit - I think they could easily maintain field formations in the range of 120-200k each. Since those armies are spot-welded to the river-lines, they're really, really not mobile. Their own crushing logistics require them to be tied to those river lines of communication.

Well, aside from all of the undead filling the ranks. Maybe as much as half or even two-thirds of the moving bodies in those armies are dead? For mortals and non-Company ponies, it's *hard* to put down the undead. Battles up to a few years ago in this war basically went on until too many undead have had their thralls broken, and too many living soldiers had been killed out of the ranks for the two armies to maintain their positions against the enemy-from-within. At this point, the field is left to the newly-risen undead. The petty necromancers nibble around the edges of the new hordes of fresh and freed ghouls until they're back under control, and both sides re-form their lines, held with a couple thousand more undead instead of the living.

Sieges generally end when the dead inside outnumber the living defenders, and they can't control the walls. If the besieging force is strong enough in necromancy to gain control of the teeming hordes inside the walls, they take the town. If not, then the besiegers pull back and regroup, and maybe the defenders' allies parachute in necromancers and re-build the position and clear out the undead themselves.

What this means is that the field armies have a massive sort of logistical inertia. They can't easily be dislodged from their positions around the Rima, for either side. You can raid their rear areas, but those rear areas aren't their logistical supports, not really. They're drawing on direct supplies from the river-line back to the big city, not anything in their immediate rear. Same goes for the White Rose, which is drawing on a solid supply-line down to the First Mouth on the great river.

The White Rose occasionally tried to peel back the right flank of the Imperials by landing strategic raiders from upstream on the great river. The Imperials likewise landed raiders on the north bank of the Housa, northwards into the right rear of the White Rose. Neither could support a raiding force large enough to seriously threaten either's core supply line, not across dozens and dozens of miles of ghoul-ridden wasteland, and not when the other guys could just reel back their canal-boats and barges out of range until a force could be shook out of the fortifications large enough to crush the raiders.

The real threat in these raids was whether either side could get the other to weaken their defenses facing the other army during one of these raids sufficiently to allow a frontal assault to overrun the main line of resistance. This has happened several times during the war, on average about once every five years, every time in the favor of the White Rose so far, although Imperial counter-raids from the Housa have generally kept those victories from breaking the main Imperial field army itself. So they're about due for one of these shuddering heaves where one of the armies loses its 'line' and is driven back.

The Imperials having lost the lower Housa - and it's very unclear just how much control over the Housa they've lost, exactly - weakens the Imperial position in an absolute sense. But maybe not in an immediately catastrophic sense?

Look, most of this might not get into the story. Think of it as all of that big-world place-setting that Tolkien poured into his note-books about the War of the Ring, and then left most of it entirely out of the actual books. But I'm trying to figure out exactly how this machine is operating.

How else could I make it go smash convincingly?

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[totallynotabrony]

The curse of worldbuilding: the world becomes too large.