Board Thread:Roleplay Ideas/@comment-26863727-20170226015409

March 12th, TA 3019, City of Atmora.

"The border is pierced, the capital is threatened, and what do you do? You sell out the garrison of Fort Abrazân and leave Atmora wide open for a siege so the enemy will spare your hide. Well, it's about damn time your evil comes back to bite you in the ass!" - Decimus Meridius Maximus, just before executing Emperor Sextus.

March 15th, TA 3019, City of Atmora.

"The infernal bombardment! They've been at it for days now. I'm not sure how well the wall's holding up at this point. I'm terrified it'll just collapse under my feet while we're up manning the battlements." - Your decurion, Marius Marcus Caesar.

The darkest time in any of your lives was the siege. The first ring was taken in the initial "hurricane of steel", as a poet would later put it. After that you fell back to the second ring. Many of the buildings in the second ring of the city were already turned to ruins by the ferocity of the normal shot fired by the enemy artillery which had been set up in the first. When they started shooting flaming, pitch-covered balls into the city, it got simply horrific. The second ring was a densely packed, haphazardly arranged collection of primarily wooden structures back then. Only a few of those survived. The buildings made mostly of stone became ruins, their wood supports gone, but you remember how you planned to them as a last-ditch makeshift fortification if all seemed lost.

Food was not too great a concern; the second ring was the least dense, and the largest in the city. It was built to be a great fortified plain below the hill the original city sits on, meant as farmland. An ingenious strategy, to be sure- one only Numenoreans could have pulled off. That came at a price though- the walls are not as strong as what you'd find at Minas Tirith. Given time and effort, they can be destroyed- though it would be easier to repair them than the Tirith walls!

The enemy army's composition explains for the Gondorian scholars what happened to reduce the host of Mordor to under 20,000 at the Black Gate, in lieu of all the estimates of the total strength of Sauron's armies suggesting that more than 60,000 should have remained even after Pelennor. The enemy at Atmora consisted of some 40,000 assorted Orcs, Uruks, and Trolls, backed up by around 5,000 Khandish cavalry archers and some 10,000 Easterlings spared from Erebor.

It was the 21st when the bombardment ceased. They had finally run out of ammunition. You knew you were likely to die soon. It was a simple question of how it would happen and what you would do before it did.

Your unit is not a traditional one. It was cobbled together from the remains of seven broken companies left after the first ring was taken. You're one of the troop types listed under Atmoran Empire on the faction troop count page (but not the ones from Tacitus' reforms- that's a different army from a later time period!). That means you have that soldier's listed gear plus anything they would reasonably have or could have picked up for whatever reason during the battle.

Name: It goes like this- personal name, father's name, family name.

Age: It should be somewhere between 20 and 30 for professionals who are still in active service. 30 to 60 is a reservist being called on to fight. Younger than 20 is a volunteer.

Gender: While women are not permitted to join the army by Atmoran law, that hasn't stopped a few from disguising themselves and joining anyway. Such a character can't be a Praetorian or a Servio, however. They would have been discovered the second it was time for the armor fitting, and besides, Praetorians are selected from the boys at an early age, and Servios are just exceptional Praetorians picked out for heavy cavalry training. Any female character, of course, is using a fake name.

Troop type: This tells me your skills and your equipment.

Additional skills: Anything you can do that isn't in the job description. An example would be a Praetorian who's also an expert on siege equipment or a Triarii who can ride a horse. If you ask, I'll tell you what's already covered by your training.

Misc: Everything else you want me to know.

By the way, you can all live or you can all die. It depends on your choices. <ac_metadata title="The Battle of Atmora RP"> </ac_metadata>