Yrthrian Naval War

[jason taylor]

In real life Mediterranean naval war, galleys were equipped with bow chasers and boarding spurs. This preserves to some degree the demand for maneuver that the waterline ram once had-even as sinkings became less popular than captures due, among other things, to smaller budgets.

How could a naval system be made for Yrth? A battle mage could substitute for bow chasers but the maneuver element is reduced by him being anywhere he wishes aboard.

One possibility is that a warship is magically shielded. It follows that a battle mage could only get the deck with plunging fire and the best way to bring an antipersonal battle spell is to have him mounted in the fore castle bearing on an exposed deck.

Any more suggestions?

[Michael Cule]

I would imagine rather than a single mage doing everything you would want a trained team of specialist ritual magicians who can support each other to provide both defence and attack, switching their personal and stored energy reserves between members of the group as needed.

How you do this with current GURPS Magic systems is left as an exercise for the student....

[Rolando]

A big deal revolves around the spells available and the energy available to a ship or fleet.

If a fleet have enough energy naval battles will look like nothing we know, ships will be very different even.

In Yrth ships are assumed to be recognizable medieval ships, that is one of the tropes of the setting, magic didn't changed society nor technology enough.

But even then, you have to decide what spells each navy uses and for what purpose, how much energy it needs and how they get that energy.

I can see some rituals using the entire crew as spectators and helpers supplying 1 energy each for a ritual, and during actual combat powerstones will be available, at least in Megalos.

But most importantly than any logic or rules is HOW YOU want your naval battles to be and feel.

Because the setting already is skewed to be recognizable medieval earth with magic, you want your naval battles to be clasical, realistic, pulp (even with a few air navies having aerial combat like biplanes and dirigibles, and the odd "rocketeer" flying mage), you decide why it is the way you want.

After you have decided the style of fleet battles you may have half you battle won and may come back to the forums for more ideas of how to make it so.

[Pursuivant]

A Water mage as a battle mage for naval combat would be nasty.

They'd also be potentially useful for damage control, since they can use spells to douse flames, prevent water from penetrating hull breaches and remove water that got into the ship before they could close the hole.

Movement mages would be potentially dangerous, but Movement College enchantments which allow ships to move against the wind or move faster would be more effective.

[jason taylor]

The main thing in all Yrthian war is not to let mages dominate it but to give them enough of a role that it is slightly different but still recognizeable.

[Sam Baughn]

With only 0.2% of the human population having even the potential to develop Magery 1+ (Banestorm, p. 23), I don't think many navies will be able to deploy a serious battle mage on each ship, yet alone multiple specialist mages. Only the largest medieval warships would carry more than a couple of hundred men, so one trained mage and a handful of magery 0 assistants is probably the best you can hope for. Nor would I expect throwing fireballs to be their top priority; weather control (or even prediction), logistics support (e.g. purify water), navigations, intelligence, long-range communications, etc. are far more efficient ways to use a mage than just substituting for more archers or an artillery piece.
So, general battle tactics are likely to be similar to early medieval or classical ones; lots of ramming and boarding. The main differences will be on the wider strategic level, where fleets will probably be able to operate much further from land, and engage in more 'modern' style operations enabled by long-range information gathering and transmission. Being able to track and hunt down specific ships over hundreds of miles is kind of a big deal, allowing for a lot more commerce raiding, piracy, anti-piracy, etc.

[jason taylor]

So Araterre would have a magical cincyrth with a crystal ball sending messages to a crystal ball fleetcom?

[Rolando]

Yes, but then a nation that develop a large amount of navy mages will have a big advantage during an engagement, specially if they also have the resources for a lot of powerstones.

Megalos and Araterre jump to mind as the kings of the seas.

I imagine Megalos may have a few ships with a larget amount of battle/navy mages.

Weather spells can be devastating. Fire on the other hand, unless applied vigorously will be extinguished fast as I imagine all magical navies will have at least one mage with extinguish fire on board. Water spells like freeze water or something that control currents will be powerful. Simple spells like shape air can also be very powerful if applied correctly.

I think Megalos may require mages to be in service during times of war. And if the seas are the main theater of the war they will field a large numbers of mages in ships.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

In real life Mediterranean naval war, galleys were equipped with bow chasers and boarding spurs. This preserves to some degree the demand for maneuver that the waterline ram once had-even as sinkings became less popular than captures due, among other things, to smaller budgets.

How could a naval system be made for Yrth? A battle mage could substitute for bow chasers but the maneuver element is reduced by him being anywhere he wishes aboard.

One possibility is that a warship is magically shielded. It follows that a battle mage could only get the deck with plunging fire and the best way to bring an antipersonal battle spell is to have him mounted in the fore castle bearing on an exposed deck.

Any more suggestions?

I have not heard them called chasers. The purpose of the guns on the bow was to smash enemy ships and fortifications and clear their decks before boarding. That was the main armament of a galley, whereas the main armament of a roundship was in the broadside and any guns firing fore and aft were specialized. See Guilmartin's Gunpowder and Galleys for the details.

There were lots of war and pirate galleys in medieval and 16th century Europe.

[Sam Baughn]

Originally Posted by Rolando

Yes, but then a nation that develop a large amount of navy mages will have a big advantage during an engagement, specially if they also have the resources for a lot of powerstones.

There's going to be a break-point at which it isn't worth packing more powerstones onto a ship, but yeah, you can probably afford something like 100 FP worth to act as a force multiplier for a ship with a six-figure price tag.

Originally Posted by Rolando

Megalos and Araterre jump to mind as the kings of the seas.

I imagine Megalos may have a few ships with a larget amount of battle/navy mages.

Megalos doesn't have any more mages to work with than anyone else, already has strong commitments to supporting its land forces with them, and doesn't seem that interested in naval power compared to Araterre and Al-Wazif. Only flagships seems likely to carry more than one serious (Magery 1+) mage, although they may have a bunch of Magery 0 dabblers.

Originally Posted by Rolando

Weather spells can be devastating. Fire on the other hand, unless applied vigorously will be extinguished fast as I imagine all magical navies will have at least one mage with extinguish fire on board. Water spells like freeze water or something that control currents will be powerful. Simple spells like shape air can also be very powerful if applied correctly.

Bear in mind that the Battle Mage template in Banestorm probably represents a fairly gifted mage (IQ 13, Magery 2; he's maybe 1 in several thousand people just for his magery, at least top 10% for intelligence, probably rarer even with generous assumptions about what is possible from education) and he's got 18 spells, only 4 of them at skill 15. Most ship-mages are going to be worse than that.
Fortunately, many useful spells have low prerequisite counts and don't require more than Magery 0! For example: Purify Air, Create Air, Shape Air, Windstorm, Wind, and Predict Weather are all at least somewhat useful aboard a combat vessel and form a simple prerequisite chain that anyone with any degree of magery can learn.
Seek Water (not terribly useful at sea), Seek Coastline, Purify Water, Create Water (again not great if you are at sea and already have purify water), Shape Water (good for managing leaks), and Destroy Water together give you enough to get Current, which isn't quite as good as the Air/Wind chain but still very handy. If you know both, you can easily pick up Breathe Water, which has obvious utility. EDIT: Shape Water also leads to Ice Sphere, which is one of the few missile spells learnable by those with Magery 0, and well suited to naval combat, doing decent amounts of crushing damage with reasonably good range.
Fire spells tend to be a bit demanding in terms of FP, but a handful of magery 0 casters can keep Fireproof going over a whole ship, effectively protecting it against both fire spells and mundane fire.
Keen Vision, Hawk Vision, and Night Vision all help with spotting hazards, as do Air Vision, Bright Vision, and Water Vision. Various light spells are good for this too, as well as signalling.
Tell Time is a zero-prerequisite spell which solves a major problem in low-tech navigation. If you have Magery 1, you can learn Find Direction, but I imagine that Yrth compasses are good enough that you don't necessarily need it. Know Location bypasses basically all navigation technology, but competent mages are rare enough that it probably isn't standard.
Now that I actually look into it, it seems that serious long-distance information gathering is pretty hard. There isn't a simple 'just see things over the horizon' spell, requiring the use of Mage Eye and the like as scout aircraft. There are spells which allow communication at great distances, but you need amazing skill for something like Mind Sending to call back to port reliably (and just casting repeatedly in the hope of success eventually leads to critical failures, which could cost you your ship). It's mostly useful for ship-to-ship communication within a fleet.

EDIT: the plant college offers some excellent spells for seamen. Seek Plant is almost as good as Seek Coastline if you know what kind of plants grow in the area. Shape Plant is amazing for ship repair (or destruction during a boarding action). Identify Plant tells you if it is edible (a lot of age-of-sail explorers died from not knowing that).
The food college gives the handy chain of Test Food, Decay, Preserve Food, and Purify Food. If you're willing to invest a lot of training in it, you can add Ignite Fire, Create Fire, Cook, Seek Food, Create Food, and Essential Food.
A more specialised mage might learn Sense Foes, Sense Emotion, Persuasion, Beast-Soother, Beast Summoning, Fish Control, and Repel Fish (I believe that under the default magic scheme counts barnacles count as 'fish'; get Vermin Control and Repel Vermin, or whatever, if they don't).