DariusSolluman/Recruitment
Recruitment- Getting your troops together as an Army
In order to get an army, you're going to have to convince people to fight and die for you. That's not the easiest thing in the world, but you'd be suprised at how many people are willing to make just such a deal. Course, if you've got the muscle to back it up or the legal and social support, you can also just conscript soldiers. Although an army composed of conscripts doesn't fight as well as a volunteer army, it has advantages- namely, being able to be formed very, very quickly.
For voluntarily recruitment, most recruiters take one of two tacks. They either wander in a circuit, sending out drumers and singers to encourage young lads that their future lies in blood and glory, or they have a semi-permanent recruitment station and simply make sure word gets around. To either end, playing a crowd and spinning the positive side of soldiering is the most important part of building an army, and therefore Recruitment falls under Performance.
Recruiting volunteers is a Charisma or Manipulation+Performance check, with a difficulty ranging from 1 to 5 or beyond, based on both the size of the local population and their willingness to fight.
Example: It's virtually always a difficulty 1 to raise an army in Nexus- lots of people, desperate to escape their trapped lives. Lookshy would be a difficulty 2, although that would drop to 1 if the army was defending the River Lands from the Realm. Raising an army to crush the Perfect in Paragon, however, would be a difficulty 5 or more- although there's lots of people, there's virtually none willing to sign on to such a goal. Likewise, trying to raise an army in the northern wastes is a futile task- there's just not enough people to make it worth while.
Recruitment checks require one month of downtime, and may be made concurrent with Training (see,DariusSolluman/Recruitment/Training), if different people are in charge of the various parts of the Army. The degree of success indincates the number of health levels the army gains in recruits. An army gains can only up to half it's HLs from Recruitment.
Recruiting conscripts is another matter entirely. In general, a vilage can contribute one HL to a conscript army per year, and larger populations can contribute both more and faster. If a draft could somehow be forced on Nexus, it would contribute nearly 20 HLs a year on it's own. On the Blessed Isle, there's about one village every ten miles- although villages are more spaced out than that in the Threshold, this measure serves as a good approximation. Every hundred square settled miles can typically produce between 8 and 12 HLs a year, and requires a month of downtime to organize.
Conscript troops aren't as good as volunteers, however- they're much more likely to break, and generally fight worse than an equal number of volunteer troops. Conscript armies have no -0 HLs, and subtract one from their Communication, Training, Equipment and Spirit. This penelty can be aleaved through further training. (SeeDariusSolluman/Recruitment/Training).
