I have been listening to several songs dealing with World War I (Sabaton--Angels Calling and Sabaton--The Price of a Mile), and have become intrigued with the idea of trench warfare. My question is can it be done with casters in a fantasy setting? If so, how would you pull it off?
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I was running a session once with a BBEG caster with a wand of magic missile. The PC druid cast expeditious excavation, creating a 5ft pit into which she fell.
So while the PCs were tied up with the mooks (and a couple of grease spells), the BBEG's turns went like this:
Move action: stand up, gaining line of sight to PCs.
Standard action: activate wand to zap somebody.
Free action: drop prone, breaking line of sight between her and the PCs, preventing any retaliation outside of readied actions (which they didn't use).
Thanks Jiggy! I could start it in an area with a few natural ravines, such as a dry riverbed in a relatively flat desert. Each side would take cover. What about making it the entire border of two magic-based kingdoms? I can see one magic item creation being a cannon that shoots some of the wizard big boom spells.
For magic kingdom warfare, I'd do three things: Trenches = cover (bonus varies between partial and improved); Fireball = artillery (though a homebrew magical cannon could be awesome); Cloudkill = mustard gas (with necklaces of adaptation as gasmasks). You might also think about some sort of sniper prestige class just for the "arrow with my name on it" feel.
Hitdice, love the cloudkill idea. There could even be an area in "No Man's Land" where it just lingers in the air from being used so much. I could put a few Hawkeye's and Legolas' out there picking people off, probably a few elite squads of them. Perhaps one of them is with the party?
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A few things made trench warfare possible IRL: barbed wire, machine guns, and the lack of tanks (once tanks came along, they could roll through barbed wire and machine gun fire).
In this kind of war, casters *are* the machine guns. And the artillery, and the engineers.
Wands of fireball, scorching ray, magic missile, and the like mean that lvl 1 warriors will be deathly afraid to go "over the top," as they should be. Sleet storm, spike stones, wall of fire, and the like could be employed to stymie charges (or, for added cruelty, retreats) Conversely, LOS blocking spells such as fog cloud become incredibly useful for obscuring enemy defensive positions, allowing attackers to close.
You will either have to keep it low level or have some reason fly magic doesn't work or is not widespread enough. Otherwise, casters will also become the Air Force, and the whole trench warfare thing goes out the window.
You might want to check out this thread as well:
Trench warfare: a magic warzone
Edit: As to running a trench battle, flyers can act as spotters. This was the original purpose of aircaft in WWI. With casters on the ground acting as artillery (fireball), flyers are not a big threat unless it is a big beast (dragon) or a mass of flyers.
Eberron had balista and crossbow constructs. Maybe something like that writ large? Likely a setting where artificers are more common. Not steampunk per se but more creation ability and inklings of industrialization.
I think that magic might take the place of snipers. With casters being used to discourage/soften up charges. I don't know off hand if any spells have super long range but I'd assume the trenches would be out of fireball range (after the first learning experience.)
Spells that create difficult/deadly terrain would replace barbed wire a bit. Summoning spells become a good way to start charges and I suspect the undead come into play at some point. I can think of several monsters that would become more popular for raids etc. And dimensional locks would become really important too.
Umber hulks would become really useful for tunneling and tremorsense becomes really important.
Overall I think doable either as "balanced" armies or with more "PCs" in them.
Charlie Bell, yes it would have to be low level. I've already taken teleport and the like out of my homebrew campaign setting. The nations involved in the war do not have large monsters, though there are a few units of elite dire eagle mounted warriors (my version of the Screaming Eagles). I may also take take away the fly spell and its companions (at least within the combat zone (some sort of curse or heavy duty ward).
Journ-O-LST, we must be thinking along the same wavelength. There are a few inventions in my world that have signs of early steam-punk. Undead armies roaming No Man's Land? I like.
The thing with spells like fly is that they can make the mage vulnerable. Any spell that the flying mage can cast might come back at him. Others might take to the air to chase him off/kill him. Some ranger/fighter might start filling him with arrows. And a mage who can cast fly, a 5th level one, is an expensive asset, represents years of work and is not the kind of thing you risk when you need them much more handing out invisibility spells, conjuring, digging and placing exploding rune mines.
As for certain spells (teleport) there could be a "gentleman's agreement" in place not to use such dishonorable things in battle. Setting the PC's up for moral dilemmas and with each side crying foul when the other gets caught using them.
OK, so now I have this scenario worked out:
Gustav in the north is currently in a stalemate with Nimue, my world's holy land. Two nations to the south of Nimue (Glithe and Umeria) are currently sending support troops up to support Nimue, basically funneling them into their death to stop the Northern War Machine. The soldiers say they are being sent to Hell. They've been locked in war for several years, with Gustav only gaining about 10 miles of ground. Now how to lure a group of PC's there without simply making them one of the units that were sent in...
There are several types of trench warfare. There is medieval style trench warfare, which is to say, siege warfare. That's certainly possible in PF in any number of ways - as long as castles and fortifications exist, they can be besieged. Magic can have powerful benefits for either the defenders (infinite food and water, magically reinforced walls, that sort of thing) or the attackers (summoning monsters to break the walls, flying over them, disintegrating them, etc...).
On WWI Western Front style static warfare, I would go ahead and say it is not something that I would expect to arise in a fantasy setting. The unique characteristics of the WWI Western Front were not machine guns, not high casualties, and certainly not trenches, but rather that the attacking side could only move and command troops at the speed of marching whereas the defending side could move and command troops at the speed of the railroad and (land line) field telephone respectively. The cause, then, lies in logistical lopsidedness in favor of the defender, which prevents the attacker from exploiting any of the various breakthroughs he achieves.
I don't really see these factors arising in a fantasy medieval setting. If anything, I would expect any warfare not involving an actual siege of a pre-existing fortified strongpoint such as a castle or city to be fairly mobile, following more the style of war from a few centuries earlier than that from WWI. Certainly I don't see an intrinsic logistical impetus towards static warfare such as that presented by railroads on the Western Front.
Journ-O-LST, we must be thinking along the same wavelength. There are a few inventions in my world that have signs of early steam-punk. Undead armies roaming No Man's Land? I like.
Those wouldn't happen to be cloudkill zombies, would they? (Look, I don't know, it's like a Yellow Musk Zombie or something.)
You can always go Eberron, picking up the trains and a world in a magical renaissance. And they have a book about their WWI analogue.
The undead roaming would be the kind that don't get picked off, a group of zombies get arrowed pretty hard, but creeping hands, shadows and skull swarms don't have that worry.
Same thing with oozes and other carrion feeders, they have to be low profile to live in the place between two armies.
Also the living spells would fit nicely.
Actually, some of the stuff in Eberron is currently "in development" with the wizards and alchemists of my world. Gustav (the aggressor in this war) has a lot of them in forced labor camps mass producing their inventions for the Empire.
The stalemate can still work because both armies are not in their home country. They are in the Holy Land of Nimue, which lies between their nations. With teleport out of the picture, it's a short journey by sea, then marching inland for both sides. Before the war is over, one side may develop airships (though they will be clumsy and not cost effective due to their ease of being shot down).
Cloudkill Zombies!! Yay! Perhaps victims of No Man's Land are cursed to continue the fight, even after being blown to 5 pieces by an exploding rune. Or there could be a rogue Cloudkill spell that has it's own zombies. Basically take the yellow musk creeper/zombie encounter, but replace the creeper with a cloudkill spell. The zombies are there to prevent people from running away from the cloud.