===== The Dark Empire =====
~~NOTOC~~


===== The invasion forces and leaders of the Dark Empire =====
The invasion forces consist for a large part of mercenaries. The leader of our forces, the **Prince of Darkness**, heir apparent to the throne of the Dark Empire has limited time to conquer the city of Urr. He has a principal council to advice him consisting of the following members:

  * The Prince of Darkness (presiding over the council)
  * The Mistress of Delight, Messalina (The Dark Prince's favorite concubine)
  * The Grand Necromancer, Lord of the Undead Forces
  * The Bretwalda of Recruiting & Keeper of the Treasury (primarely responsibly for hiring mercenaries and paymaster for the campaign)
  * The Chief Whip & Bretwalda of Equipment (Matron of the F.M.B. and responsible for the baggage train)
  * The Chieftain of the Living Forces (a Hobgoblin warleader, commander of the Raving Redcaps and the Harriers)
  * The Master of Draught
  * The Lord of Vapours
  * The Master of Poison
  * The Lord of Merry Making
  * The Master of Food (Cannibal Halfling Head Chef)
  

Worth mentioning. If the way the Dark Empire is run is anything to go by, infighting is not going to be discouraged in the principal council. Discreditting the plan of the current closest advisor to the prince, to be the next closest advisor to the prince, is almost traditional at this point. Even: Murder the other battle hardened general, to be the only real tactician present, has been tolerated in the past. This is all before the fights over, who gets to have their wicked way first, in what way, with which pow's start.
===== Forces drawn from the standing army of the Dark Empire & feeding them =====
The following forces are the core of the Dark Prince's forces. He does not have to worry about paying them (his Imperial Father takes care of that), but he must provide them with food during and after the campaign. Every 10 units consume a food token per week (Rounded up). In the unlikely event that the Prince can't come up with the food to feed his core forces, they will return to the Dark Emperor with his head on a pike. The **Dark Emperor** will not blame them for that.

The personal entourage of the Dark Prince consists of his principal council and the following 4 raider units, attached to this council.

  * The Dark Prince's Own, his personal guard,  (1 raider unit).
  * The Bretwalda of Recruiting controls The Recruiters and The Treasure Guard (2 raider units).
  * The Grand Necromancer controls The Blood Thirsty (1 raider unit, made up entirely of Ghouls).
  * The principal council can itself function as a raider unit (Using them requires casting a Strategic Turn magic ritual to power up all of their magic gear)

The Core of the invasion army.
  * 1<sup>st</sup> to 4<sup>th</sup> Hobgoblin Raving Redcaps (4 regular infantry, Imperial Guard regiments)*
  * The Hobgoblin Harriers (1 archer unit, Imperial Guard regiment)*
  * The baggage train, a collection of clerks, sutlers, carpenters, vivandières, healers, cantinières and other assorted camp followers. It also includes an engineers corps. The whole baggage train including the principal council consumes 1 food token each week.
  * 2 trebuchets, Its crew counts as part of the baggage train when it comes to allocating food tokens. This does not apply to mercenary siege engine crews hired later.
  * The Fancy Mobile Brothel or F.M.B. It is technically part of the baggage train. The Fancy Mobile Brothel exists to ensure that the Prince of Darkness and his cadre of officers can get their freak on in appropriate opulence and decadence on their way to, during and after the siege. Access to it can be a valuable bribe when dealing with certain parties. Suggesting that it is a nasty drain on the resources is the best way to audition for a spot with the next human sacrifice. This unit is treated as free (all payments needed were made before play starts). Calculations by the Urr chamber of commerce suggest that a full 20% of the funds made available for the campaign were spent on the F.M.B.

*Hobgoblins are a barbaric species that has strong cultural & biological similarities to orcs. These units have sworn personal loyalty to the **Dark Emperor**, who they see as their tribal leader.

Worth remembering.
  * All mercenaries will abandon you at the end of the game, or the second they realize there is no more money. The regiments listed above are primarily there to guard the gold needed to pay the mercenaries during the siege and to occupy Urr afterwards. These are not expendable. The ones below are the expendable ones.
  * It is harvest time at the start of the game. Screwing Urr out of food tokens should probably be a priority. 
===== Mercenaries, feeding them & their payment=====

Below are the potential mercenary units for hire during the first turn. Basically, payment works through a 50% up front and 50% at the end of the campaign principle. The standard price is 2 gold units per week: 1/2 up front and 1/2 after the end of the siege. **Turn 1 takes 4 weeks, every strategic turn afterwards is another week.** Gold units payed up front disappear from the game. Nobody expects the Dark Prince to honour the second 1/2 of the payment, if the unit is destroyed before the end of the game. Also, nobody complains if he repurposes the dead as zombies, sacrifices to Moloch, or food, except if he tries to feed the wrong guys with such food.

Speaking of food. Every 10 units consume a food token each week. If the prince can't come up with food. The units leave immediately after having received full payment for the siege up to this point. 

If it becomes clear at any moment that the mercenaries are not going to receive the second half of their pay, or they have been cheated on the first half, they will switch sides to anyone who will feed them for free. It is however o.k. for the Dark Prince, to decide halfway through the siege, that he doesn't need all those soldiers, pay them in full for the part they have participated in and send them on their way.

Some advice. 
  * It is almost certainly cheaper to hire mercenaries from the area around Ur, than to drag them all the way from The Dark Empire to the valley. However, hiring local mercenaries means negotiating with other players, while the cost and reliability of the ones picked up back in the empire are more of a sure thing. 
  * Dead mercenaries can be recycled as zombie soldiers and you stop paying them the moment they die. So hiring more mercenaries than you can afford and making sure enough of them die before you run out of money to pay them all is a perfectly reasonable strategy.
  * The Dark Prince has the final say, but he should really focus on the bigger picture than on the finer details of mercenary procurement. There is also the fact that the unique spells the prince has, work best early in the game, when most of the recruiting is going to happen.

=== Available Troops ===
  * 20x 100 mercenary soldiers (20 infantry units), these units can be hired separately.
  * 10x 100 mercenary bowmen (10 archer units), these units can be hired separately.
  * an unending horde of Kobold Skirmishers (2 infantry units) These form a package deal.
  * a lot of ogre berserkers, or you know 20 of them for those of us who can count. (1 infantry unit)
  * 400 Cannibal Halflings (2 archery units) These form a package deal with cannibal chefs listed below. 
  * 200 Cannibal Halfling chefs (they function as a militia unit if pressed into the front ranks) These count as part of the baggage train. They work for 1 gold unit each week (up front) and don't expect a payout at the end of the game. Their real purpose is their power to generate 4 food tokens if they are allowed to prepare a unit worth of bodies. Those bodies cannot be animated, or sacrificed to Moloch thereafter. Halflings, Kobolds, Elves, Ogres and the baggage train have no qualms about using the food created by this unit, everybody else will rebel if they figure out what (or, rather who) they are eating.
  * Rumblebotty's Flying Nightmare. The orc warlord Rumblebotty controls a huge airship held aloft with 6 hot air balloons. He leads a traditional warband (an infantry unit), 2 bands of warslingers (2 archery units) and a crew for the airship (2 militia units). They can conceivably do a full airborn landing in the market square of Urr on round 2 of the game, with the warband touching down receiving air support from the archers on a platform in the sky. It will probably be wiser to actually try this later, attacking when Urr is weakest, or used on a pesky dwarven kingdom, or orc tribe, either as a threat, or to straight out try to knock it out of the war. Rumblebotty's Tuath must be hired as a group costing 20 gold units a week.   
  * A team of Duergar Sappers. These demand full payment for the entire campaign upfront. That is 26 gold units, disappearing from the game immediately. From the turn Ur is surrounded they start to undermine a section of the outer wall. If not stopped they collapse the tunnel after 6 turns of digging, causing a breach in the wall. Afterwards they (try to) leave, whether they succeed or not. They count as a standard Dwarven infantry unit, (including Engineer Corps capabilities) if ordered to do something else.
  * A Disassembled statue of the god Moloch + attending priests, acolytes and dancers. It must be Reassembled before the walls of Urr and human/dwarf/orc/elf/etc. bodies (dead, or alive) must be thrown into its flaming mouth. Afterwards those bodies are no longer available for animation as zombies, because they have been cremated to a fine gray powder. For each unit worth of bodies burned get 1 extra mana for a ritual spell this turn. It counts as part of the baggage train when it comes to allocating food tokens.

==== Available food ====

  * There are 50 rations of soldier food available for a price of 1 gold token.
  * There are 10 rations of quality food available for a price of 3 gold tokens.

==== Available gold ====
 
   * Gold: 400
   * Treasure: 20

The Treasures are personal belongings of the members of the principal council. Most members have the equivalent of 1 treasure. Messalina, the Mistress of Delight has several highly decorated chainmail bikinis (3 treasures). And the Chief Whip is the matron of the heavily decorated F.M.B.(containing 8 treasures). It is clear that these can't be sold under any circumstance, or there would be trouble.
==== Moving your forces to Urr ====

Turn 1: You have full use of your ritual Magic, bands of raiders and diplomats in the valley of Urr. Your armies however haven't reached the valley at this point. Local mercenaries and supplies for your forces can be hired/bought in the valley, but cannot be delivered yet.

Turn 2: Your armies show up in the Prince of Darkness counters box. Meaning scouts can now spot the invasion force, but they haven't entered the valley yet.

Turn 3: Your troops have entered the valley and can surround Urr this turn. Supplies and local mercenaries can now join the invasion army.
===== How the Dark Empire sees its lessers =====


==== The City of Urr ==== 
This is a minor city state that earns a lot of money by levying tolls on the trade going through it. We want to conquer it to extend our border to the nearby mountain range and add the toll to our tax base. More importantly, they claim to have a free citizenry. A disgrace, that cannot be allowed to continue. They need to be brought to their knees before the Dark Emperor just to correct this crime against nature and the dark god Moloch. 

Urr is only lightly defended and should be an easy conquest. Do however keep in mind their militia will have some magical support. 

A dozen or so years ago the city spent a fortune to erect a massive ziggurat in the middle of the town square (not to be confused with the market square Urr also has). It is not known why they did something so pointless. It is unlikely that they actually sacrifice people up there.

==== The Orc clans ====
They mostly eke out a living on the local hills, but a bunch of them have given up their traditional ways and now  work as street sweepers and rat catchers in Urr. They are a good source of mercenaries and have a foothold in Urr, opening the door to some juicy betrayal. You can make whatever grandiose promise to them you want. There is nobody who will take up their cause if you betray them afterwards.

==== The Longbeards ====
The Longbeards are the only a proper Dwarven kingdom in the area. They mine gems and precious metals and turn these into small quantities of very high quality goods they sell all over the known world. They have a massive chip on their shoulders, about Ur charging a fee for helping to facilitate their trade deals. It is a wedge issue we can use to turn them against the city. They have no friends, we can probably screw them on any promise we make.

It is said that their army is undefeatable if fighting for a righteous cause. So maybe they are a good source of mercenaries?

They are the disgruntled owners of the finest siege engine in the world. Built at the request of the late Abranoth of Grinch, who, after signing the contract, decided he did not need it. Being dwarves they certainly did not recycle it for parts. Maybe we can lease it.

There is a rumour about their having a secret passage into the city. 

Maybe we are looking at this the wrong way. They are rumoured to be obscenely rich, maybe it is not Urr that should be put under siege.

==== The Redbeards ====
These are very poor and unsuccessful dwarves. The economy of their princedom runs on making cheap, decent quality goods in bulk. A lot of them earn a living as guest workers in Ur. Some of them have even been reduced to farming.

They clearly are a potential source of mercenaries.

That Redbeard guest worker program means they have a foothold in Urr, opening the door to some juicy betrayal. 

There is a rumour about them having a secret passage into the city. 

==== The Gnomish Confederacy ====
This bunch of nuts is a small collection of outcast dwarven clans that have taken refuge under a volcano. They apparently survive by making music boxes, fruit preserves and cuckoo clocks. They are utterly insignificant.

==== The Elves =====
Despite their reputation as great foes of the wicked, we have only experienced very minor pushback from the Elves over the years.

They do however know we are coming and they will be present in the city, pretending (?) to give some sort of support to Urr. Try to politely minimize their influence.