DUDES FIGHTING FROM WAGONS

The Peasant Rebellion thread turned into a thread about dudes fighting from wagons. Let's expand upon the topic of dudes fighting from wagons and devote a whole thread to it.

In fantasy games I also find myself fighting from wagon, stage coach, or carriage a lot. A Ravenloft adventure I lead was known as the "Coachmen". Do other adventures find themselves in this same position and have you invested in a swivel cannon yet?

This started as a pirate thread, from discussions about the black flag it became a peasant rebellion thread, now it is a wagon thread.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blood_River
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Here are some other classy pics of dudes fighting from wagons.

My big question is, were the roads finally good enough in Europe for to pull this kind of shit? Because It feels like people would've gotten away with these shenanigans a lot earlier then they did.

Sure the guns are nice but the whole platform puts you on the same level as a knight. It just feels like the kind of thing people should have been doing for 1000 years before fire arms.

I'm not going to go nuts and say this would have had an effect on Roman Legions or anything. But it sure feels like a bunch of battle wagons and a mix of bows and crossbows would have put a kink in Feudalism.

Totally know the Syrians were pulling this kind of stuff but we don't have a lot in the historical record to tell us about it. Which gets back to my earlier statement; ROADS.

When I'm thinking about his tactic, it feels like the kind of thing Merchants would have developed first. Is there any evidence to point to this?
It just seems like a merchant caravan would be a lot safer with one of these tagging along.

Fuedalism was dominated by castles, which were better fortresses than wagon fortresses by merit of being actual fortresses.

As the guy who accidentally turned the peasant revolt thread into a discussion about Hussite wagon forts, allow me to make it up to you by making your wagon thread about Italian military tricycles.

Just kidding here's a Sumerian war wagon.

I had a player make a kingdom based on Scots and Hussites who defended the known world from hordes of monsters. They were betrayed by the closest kingdom (another player) and became a horde of roving mercenaries looking for a home. Though they were never a dominant power in the world, they were instrumental in most of the greatest wars. Their pikes, matchlocks, cannons, and wagons eventually set the standard for every player army that couldn't afford magic.

It works well for anyone who needs to move a lot of stuff by land with a ton of people. Migrating "barbarians" made wagon laggers, migrating Americans circle their wagons for defense, and I could definitely see high-tier merchants using the tactic. The thing is that you need a lot of wagons to make it work. The merchants don't even need to make a huge number of cannon wagons, just enough to augment their normal ones. They can just modify their normal carts to have better-armored sides and make sure that there are places for ranged and polearm troops to stand on top.

Also some bitchin' Hussites for your trouble.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blood_River

See the thing about Feudalism is that you lack enough population density for a rebellion to truly work out. And even though the roads may not be an issue, the main thing is that it makes harder to pack density.

Also worth noting that, like with many things, the Chinese were the first to try this wacky shit.

See, as mentioned previously, the wagon fort is almost exclusively an anti-cavalry weapon, and the Ming Dynasty had to deal with lots of nomadic steppe people on horseback. So they got a lot of mileage out of the concept.

In addition to the whole "cart you hide in and shoot from" deal that would show up later with the Hussites, they also used quite a few varieties of what might be more properly termed "war wheelbarrows." Like, literally a giant wheelbarrow with a bunch of spears and sometimes light cannons at the front.

Which sounds like the most hilariously dumb idea ever until you imagine charging at one on horseback.

I would love to see someone use this in a setting as way for regular-ass dudes to stand up to some bigass monsters. It's so simple that any old carpenter could churn them out in decent numbers and it would be a decent way to deal with some big nasty thing that wanted to eat your village.

NOPE NOPE NOPE, totally off topic. You have to bring up something interesting if you want to go off point.

What's this white supremacist propaganda. Fucking Boers.

>When you never experience Dungeons & Wagons

Thank guys, now I want guns and fight from wagons.

God Damn, why didn't the Chinese use these more? This kind of shit would piss Mongolians right the hell off.

You know I'm thinking about it and you also have to mind the horses that pull all those damn wagons. That is something you don't see in all these Hussite pics. All the hand cannon fire must have drove the horses inside these circles crazy. Did they always form these wagons into circles? Most the the circles interior must have just been horses? Unless you payed a bunch of Cossacks to heard your wagon horse elsewhere during the battle or turned them into temporary calvary.

Alright, first of all, if you think motorized military tricycles with mounted machine guns isn't just the tightest shit ever then you need to take a good long look at yourself.

And secondly I already brought up fucking *historical battle wheelbarrows*, I don't know where else I can be expected to go from there.

Ok we have been civil enough, we can start to talk about the War Wagon.

I'm glad you asked this because yes, the Hussites did do exactly what you're implying, and I forgot to mention it before.

While being primarily a peasant movement the Hussites did have a fair few knights in the mix and these guys would use their own horses to tow the wagons out to the field of battle and then they'd spend most of the battle inside the fort. When the enemy starts to lose momentum from smashing into your wagons and getting shot with guns and crossbows, bam, you've got some heavy cavalry ready to go out the other side of the fort to make a sortie against the enemy just like you'd do from a real fortress.

Look at that duck, drinking from a cup like some fancy aristo. Who the fuck does he think he is?

Snooty waterfowl were a popular theme amongst the Hussites, just ask Bohuslav here wearing his hockey jersey over his plate armor.

Now that what I call mechanize infantry

>I'm not going to go nuts and say this would have had an effect on Roman Legions or anything
Not as large of one as you might think.

>dudes
>Coachmen
sexist

ULRICS WRATH ON THEM

Ulrics toorn op hen!

>dudes fighting from wagons
Chariots. Really just chariots.

To be fair, if you've ever met a Goose? It's basically a tiny dragon

>Ctrl F
>Not a single mention of tabor
>Zero hits for laager
Guys...

Wagon forts + cossacks = PROFIT!
Wagons + Boers = impossible to achieve victories by a handful of men

Not really and not at all

So if we get a wagon and put a cannon inside it, is it a tank?

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>Not a single mention of tabor

>Zero hits for laager

There's only a few replies, user, it wouldn't hurt you to read.

>ancap knight

We need more wagon on wagon combat

You want chariots for that, they're faster.

But how many troops can it carry?

You're thinking too small, my friend. It's not about how many troops your chariot can carry, it's about how many troops you have to ride in chariots.

I want fast troop transportation, not an army of chariot racers.

In that case, we've come full circle.

I was once in a GURPS Fantasy game where the first session we acquired a wagon. I can't remember if we bought it or were given it as part of the adventure but someone made a joke that we should turn it into a war wagon. There were four wizards in the party and a few sessions later we had a flying war wagon that was bigger on the inside as our mobile HQ.