Not all wars in Evil Land are fought by empires and sorcerers. Beneath the shadows of star destroyers, mobile suits, and demi-gods, a thousand smaller fires of conflict burn. Tribes, clans, kingdoms, corporations, and ragged bands of survivors sharpen their own weapons and devise their own stratagems. Their tactics are less about conquest than endurance. What follows is a compilation of doctrines, gleaned from campfire tales, dying warriors, and observers too stubborn to leave Evil Land behind.
Ashlanders, born of volcanic wastes and desert storms, thrive where others falter. They do not march in rows, nor do they build empires, but their war-bands are dreaded by all who trespass their ashen plains.
Ambush and Withdrawal: Ashlanders seldom commit to open battle. They lure enemies into lava fields and salt marshes, then strike with spears and poisoned darts, vanishing into ash clouds before counterattack can form.
Nomadic Supply Chains: They carry their logistics on the move — pack guars laden with water skins, salt-fish, and ash-yams. Enemy scouts pursuing them often find only smoke and footprints already swept away by desert winds.
Prophetic Command: War-chiefs are guided by wise-women and dreamseers who read omens in volcanic tremors and ash patterns. To outsiders these seem like superstition, but their predictions often align with uncanny precision.
Doctrine of Sacred Vengeance: Ashlanders never forget insults. They do not fight wars for territory but for memory: to avenge ancestors or cleanse trespasses. Generations may pass before vengeance is fulfilled, but the war-band’s blades stay sharp.
Across forests, steppe, and ruined cities, countless tribes contend. Their tactics reflect the environment that shelters them.
Beast-Rider Tactics: In jungles, tribes bond with giant insects or scaled reptiles, sending them to harass enemy caravans. In the steppes, mounted archers weave in and out like shifting winds, never lingering long enough to be encircled.
Feigned Retreat: A classic trick — small groups engage, then fall back into terrain traps: ravines seeded with spikes, mud-pits, or fungal swamps. Overconfident armies are swallowed whole.
Totemic Warfare: Each tribe fights under symbols that channel their spirit. Some carry totems made of bone, feather, and scrap metal, believed to house ancestral shades. Whether real or psychological, enemy morale falters when warriors fight with supernatural conviction.
The Doctrine of Scatter: Tribes never risk annihilation. If overwhelmed, they splinter into smaller bands that melt into the wilderness, waiting until attrition or famine weakens their foes.
Fragments of feudal order cling to Evil Land’s ruin, kingdoms clotted with knights, castles, and peasants dreaming of stability. Their tactics combine chivalric tradition with desperate pragmatism.
Fortress Warfare: Kingdoms thrive behind stone. Castles are designed less for beauty than survival — jagged towers bristling with ballistae, moats filled with corrosive sludge, gates reinforced with scavenged steel. Siege warfare dominates their strategies.
Knightly Shock: Cavalry remains the core of kingdom armies. Heavily armored knights charge to break enemy lines, followed by levied spearmen. Yet in Evil Land’s broken terrain, cavalry often falters, forcing knights to dismount and fight as grim infantry.
Heraldic Morale: Kings rely on banners and trumpets to maintain cohesion. When flags fall, armies rout. Commanders therefore surround banners with their fiercest warriors, turning them into both rallying point and death trap.
Doctrine of Holy War: Priests proclaim wars as divine missions. Faith becomes fuel, allowing exhausted men-at-arms to march for days, convinced that martyrdom assures paradise.
Though empires may rule stars, megacorporations burrow into Evil Land’s soil, seeking profit. They wield money as weapon, technology as shield, and mercenaries as pawns.
Corporate Militaries: Private armies wear polished armor stamped with logos. They fight not for loyalty but contracts, operating under strict cost-benefit doctrine: withdraw if expenses outweigh gain.
Drone Deployment: Corporations use autonomous machines — insectile drones with cutting beams, surveillance blimps, and security bots. Cheap, expendable, and endlessly replaceable, they grind tribal foes down.
Resource Denial: Corporate war is economic. Villages resisting extraction find their wells poisoned, crops patented, or caravans blockaded until famine forces submission.
Doctrine of Litigation by Firepower: Corporations justify war through contracts and loopholes. Declarations of conflict are filed as “resource disputes,” while massacres are labeled “losses due to environmental hazard.” They wage war not only on fields but in courts and boardrooms.
Beyond armies and banners lie the countless souls who simply endure. Farmers, scavengers, water-bearers, and nomads: their strategies are not grand doctrines but hard-won habits of survival.
The Doctrine of Hiding: When armies march, survivors vanish into ruins, caves, or beneath fungal groves. They emerge only when the smoke clears. Survival is not honor, but absence.
Improvised Weaponry: Commons wield whatever is at hand — sling-stones, sharpened scrap, alchemical brews from fungal vats. Entire militias form around the harvest of one rare resource: salt that burns wounds, or moss that blinds eyes.
Barter Alliances: Survivors use diplomacy as weapon. Villages trade food to knights, intelligence to Zeon raiders, or souls to Irenicus, playing enemies against each other while remaining beneath notice.
The Doctrine of Flight: When all else fails, commons abandon home and identity alike. Caravans of refugees drift like ghosts across the land, never defending soil but living through motion. Their strength is continuity: no empire can truly erase them.
Evil Land reshapes its peoples as much as they reshape it. From observation, certain hybrid doctrines appear:
Ashlander-Knight Alliances: Nomads teaching cavalrymen how to fight across volcanic terrain, combining heavy armor with guerilla cunning.
Corporate-Tribal Symbiosis: Tribes selling mercenary service to megacorporations, wielding drones alongside bone totems.
Survivor Guerrillas: Peasants who once hid now strike as night-raiders, poisoning water supplies and dismantling machines with improvised acids.
Folklore insists that even the land itself fights wars. Storms choose sides, fungal blooms strangle armies, and rivers change course to drown fortresses. Survivors often interpret such events as divine judgment or ancestral vengeance — but military tacticians quietly account for these “acts of the land” as predictable hazards.
The lesser wars of Evil Land lack the spectacle of starfleets or sorcerer-kings, but they are no less decisive. Empires crumble not from decisive battles but from the endless sting of tribes, the stubbornness of peasants, and the profit-driven cruelty of corporations.
A chronicler of Evil Land once wrote: “The great wars decide who rules, but the small wars decide who lives.” It is the survivors — ashlanders, tribes, kingdoms, and commons — who keep the land turning, their tactics weaving endurance into every century of ruin.