Here’s the point of view of a Western knight who grew up on all day resurrection battles. They were *not* my favorite type of war: my favorite battle is a set open field battle,a nd you can’t have that in an all day res war. But they are fun! So when Acre proposed to host a 4 hour res war with combat archery and killing from behind, well, it was like I’d come home!
It was set up just like Eilis would have set it up in the old days. There were six small forts that represented six cities: Navare, Grenada, Cadiz, Seville, and Salamanca. The crusaders started with Navare and the Moors started with the rest. You could resurrect in any city that you controlled and that was not under siege. You controlled a city when you had planted a banner (yellow for crusaders, green for moors) within the city. A marshal in each city would raise a red flag if a city was besieged, meaning all the gates were contested and you could not resurrect there. Also, you could not resurrect in a city in which you had just been killed. At pre-selected times a whistle would blow and they’d count up points, one per castle, plus two per castle at the end of the battle. There werealso royal banners that were worth three points, but nobody captured these.
The Northern Region Army’s first division was the Moors and everybody else was the crusaders. They had at lest six knights on their side, including Duke Lucan. We had four SCA knights: Prince Conrad, I, Stephan von Dresden, Sir Douglas, plus Bob Fox and King Pedro of Acre. I think the Prince of Acre, whom I don’t know, was shooting on our side. We had superiority of archers but they had unit and command cohesion. I had Timur and Elan with me, and we were nominally attached to Ostgardr, but it was a res war and none of that survives first contact anyway.
It was a blast! As these things will usually do, it broke down into a big skirmish battle between the two most hotly contested forts, but the most fun fighting was in the gates. They figured out really fast how to run a skirmish line. Any time you advanced on one of their guys he’d retreat and their other skirmishers would kill you from behind. Only D Sebastian, the Queen’s Champion, got the hang of the left-coast trick of turning invisible to get behind your opponents. The Moors won, 13 to 10, and kept most of Spain. I think the main reason is because they started out with four of the five cities. We captured one city and two others each changed hands at least onece, but we ahd a very tough row to hoe.
Me, I didn’t do any killing from behind, even though most of their knights were doing it. For someone who had made this his bread and butter for more than ten years it was real hard to resist, but I just figured I wouldn’t go there--and I support killing from behind as opposed to the Pennsic method of needing eye contact. I just didn’t want to. But *that* meant that I mostly ended up in polearm duels with either Lucan or Oskgar, all of which (I think) I lost. When I had my five footer it wasn’t as much fun, but when I switched to a seven footer and we were at the same range it was great! It’s fun to take on the best. After awhile my pinky got busted and I switched to a kite shield and sword, and my kill ration went way up even though the kite was strapped all wrong for me (when it guarded my leg it was too high up for me to see over. Weird). Turns out my pinky is fractured, but no biggie. I still had a blast. It was like the old Mysts/Cynagua wars back home. This Westerner gives it his seal of approval!
3 comments:
sounds cool. There is talk of making this spring's M/C war an "all nighter". Titus is trying to work out details with the Princes and mashallate.
I don't usually kill people from behind unless I cannot get their attention by yelling.
The "trick" of invisibly hanging out behind enemy lines to KFB falls under the category of "cheesdick" manuveres - ESPECIALLY in a rez battle.
To me, that's the kind of thing that earns you some beatdown for the rest of the day.
But maybe that's not what you meant.
There will be another event similar to the reconquista on May 31st. I really enjoyed this past one, although the obvious VDK unit cohesion made it an almost pre-decided contest. I was in an An Dub tabard fighting lefty/centergrip. Hope to see you at the next one.
Going back to a previous post of yours, I found out the hard way too that centergrips get blown back by spear/pole, and I had the same sore wrist to prove it.
Lucas
Hey Who you call in the best? Certainly Lucan falls into that catigory but that Osgkar guy not so much;)
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