Marauder Migration.....
 

For Twilight 2000 or Twilight 2013, I've been thinking about spring and fall roving brigands in my "civvie" campaign. South for the fall, north for the spring. Even with different routes, they would still be stamped out. But these bands would hamper rebuilding and drain resources.

I like it. I hadn't thought about migrating marauders before but it makes sense and there are tons of historical parallels. The Huns, Magyars, Mongols and other steppe horse tribes were all, in effect, migrating during their eras of territorial expansion. It wasn't always seasonal or round-trip, but it was migration. Several of the more warlike nomadic or semi-nomadic American plains indians like the Commanche and the Sioux also migrated frequently to follow the herds of American buffalo and that movement (and territoriality) often led to clashes with white homesteaders, miners, merchants, etc., often with deadly results for both parties.

Figure North to South as the seasons roll on the East Coast. I mean who wants to raid somewhere with three feet of snow on the ground?

So, the South, especially Florida, will have a big problem with gangs fighting each other over turf, and then over food & fuel. On the one hand, a lot of marauders will be killed off. On the other, the strongest will be forming super-gangs.

Come spring, the enlarged gangs, with all of the dead marauder weapons concentrated in fewer hands, may migrate north, triggering lots of battles with locals, state & Federal forces sent to block/deter/arrest them.

That sounds like a campaign worthy of European veterans!

Mad Max on the East Coast more like.

Hmmm, battle-hardened veterans of the European theater of WWIII vs. the apocalyptic raiders of the future wasteland? It might have potential. ;)

"Greetings from The Humungus! The Lord Humungus! The Warrior of the Wasteland! The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla!"

Whether the locals fight or not, critical resources are lost during these seasons. This hampers reconstruction and makes real refugees lives exciting.

he most important thing that will be lost is the ability of the locals to grow food. If the raids are timed to correspond with harvest time, the locals will be forced to abandon the fields to defend their families. I can see the gangs working their way north in August - October to gather as much food as possible before heading south to avoid the winter. A plague of locusts would cause less devastation that the gangs.

My $0.02

Mike

The timing here is everything. Are the marauders going to harvest and process the crops themselves? Not likely. So the raid will have to occur shortly after the harvest. Intelligent marauders are going to wait until the work has been done for them before pillaging the spoils. That said, when the marauders do roll around, it's still going to suck to be a producer.

I agree. The marauders are going to wait for the harvest to be done. May be even wait as long as for food prep is done. Canning, salting, smoking, and the other ways of preserving food have been at least started.

My $0.02

Mike

I'd recommend reading "Empires & Barbarians" by Peter Heather http://www.amazon.co.uk/Empires-Barb...and+barbarians This is a really good study of "barbarian" migrations in the first Millenium, and there are lots of ideas that could be mined there.

Pressures from marauders will prompt the appearance of fortified settlements. They may not have literal walls, but they will have fighting positions, obstacles, and cleared fields of fire. As marauder pressure intensifies following the withdrawal of military manpower in 1998, suburbia will become a no man's land. Much of the United States will take on characteristics of medieval Europe. In a sense, "The Road Warrior" models this development in some ways. Marauders being who they are, bands of brigands will wipe out the easy prey first. Once the surviving towns get too tough for smaller groups to tackle, the bandits will prey on each other and/or join forces to raid the bigger and better defended targets.

Military efforts to stamp out these groups will face some of the problems conventional militaries face when fighting insurgencies. However, it's not reasonable to expect that the local population actively will support marauders unless those marauders provide protection to the locals. At that point, the marauders start making the transition to warlordism. Warlords, being governors in their own right, might actually cooperate with other government forces to eliminate marauders. It's a complex and evolving dynamic rich in potential for "civvie" adventuring.

One of the 2nd Edition encounters was such a farm. As these marauder bands weaken, perhaps some communities will be preying on them!

The marauders have a problem.

If they take too much from a community the community will starve and they can't "feed" on them again. Same thing happens if they fight back and the marauders kill too many of them.

So...

They need to look strong enough or suprise and take over the place before the locals can retaliate AND take only some of the loot, or to take all of it and then try to find a new victim to replace the last one.

If they are just gathering "protection money/food/supplies" and do a migration pattern they need a lot of victims and need to scout ahead and somehow keep them from banding together or escaping.

Really, to me it seems like either they would want to attack a place and use up all of it's resources before moving to the next one (leaving only ashes behind them) or just settle down and rule a place.

I think that is a very rational way of looking at a situation that will inspire rational thinking in some, irrational thinking in many others. I agree that a strong enough marauder band will want to take over a locale and set themselves up as warlords. From 1998-2000, the situation will be fluid everywhere but (I believe) generally trending towards consolidation of the surviving population into defensible cantonments surrounded by crops and forage land with perhaps space for intensive gardening inside the defenses.

Marauders may go the way of the Holnness (The Postman) and extort supplies from a large territory. A group like this would not be involved in direct rule. They would simply collect their tribute at gunpoint and move on to the next tributary. They would provide "protection" by preventing other marauder bands from moving in and collecting tribute. This sort of arrangement might be seen as a sort of hybrid between the true marauder band and a warlord who governs a territory more or less directly.

ON THE OTHER HAND...

Would those marauders think rationally?

Ruling over a large group of people is hard work. Shooting up a farmhouse and possibly taking just a few slaves on the other hand is EXITING and cool and let's them rest there afterwards.

"Boss Billy-Bob did always find new victims for us before so I'm sure he'll do so in the future as well. So let's keep on following him. Even if he insist that we call him Gengis Khan now."

This all reminds me of recent events in Mexico. Apparently, a wave of large scale vigilantism in Michoacan state directed against the Knights Templar drug cartel was the result of pent up frustration on the part of regional business owners and farmers who got fed up with being strong-armed into "selling" their goods to the narcos at below cost. According to some reports, these business people decided that it would be more cost effective to raise and arm a militia than it would be to keep giving away their products and/or make protection payments. At least, that's one version of the origin of these anti-cartel militias.