Quote:
Originally Posted by jason taylor
Foraging, if well disciplined can be no worse then severe rent collecting. It's the "if" that is the problem. Nonetheless if you expect to campaign in the same province next season, you should probably be fairly tight with it. Best of all(besides bringing it in from outside which clogs your supply tail), of course, is if you can buy it but not all commanders have a large reserve of discretionary funds. Wellington did which is one advantage of being a nation of shopkeepers.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SRoach
I remember a Magic Item from either the Forgotten Realms setting, or generic D&D, that basically killed a tree but fed a small force for one day. It was based on the "Goodberry" spell. I can't remember which book it was in, however.
It was the clerics and the druids of the invading force's ability to call upon magic to keep the troops fed that I was referring to.
Certainly Portable Holes, at least the 3.x version, would allow for massive levels of provisioning for a force. That is, if they were being bankrolled by a wealthy patron, (which I'm assuming the PC's are.)
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The PCs
are wealthy, but wealth doesn't last if you are profligate with it. And even twelve billionaires are not really on the scale of wealth that Mulhorand and the Pharoah personally can dispose of.*
Feeding all their men with magic is impractical for the PCs. It requires a ratio of priests to combat troops that is about an order of magnitude higher than they have now. It would also render these priests much less useful in battle, as they were devoting a not insignificant amount of their memorised spells and energy reserves to creating food.
The Mulhorandi have tried this tactic, dispatching a small field army reinforced with a lot of extra priests on a forced march without supply wagons. It ended badly, as when they encountered a force of Tiamatians, Bane-worshippers, Dragon Cultists and servants of the Dragon-King of Old Unther**, the priests were not able to provide nearly as much support as Mulhorandi doctrine requires. The army was shattered and the survivors hunted by dragons, bandits and enraged Untheri shepherds across the Methtir.
What the PCs do is use their naval superiority to move supplies to the theatre of war. So far, they've operared only on the coast. They buy their supplies or they capture them from the Mulhorandi.
*Though capturing ship after ship of Mulhorandi supplies, not to mention ransoming captives back to Mulhorand, has enabled them to finance the war entirely out of Mulhorandi treasure so far.
**The PCs fought on the side of the Tiamatians; though there is no love lost between them. As long as the Mulhorandi are an immediate threat, the various factions of Free Unther might work together. After they are driven out of northern Unther, however, the threat of civil war looms larger, as there are irreconcilable differences between most factions, especially the ones that aim to establish a theocracy with their god in place of fallen Gilgeam.