Factions

The Nature of Warfare

This is Not Clean War. There are no rules of engagement in Ashenfell. No Geneva Conventions. No concept of war crimes.

Common Tactics

The warfare of Ashenfell follows no civilized rules of engagement, only the brutal pragmatism of survival. Scorched earth policies are standard practice, armies burn everything in their path, from crops to villages denying resources to the enemy even at the cost of devastating their own lands. Mass civilian displacement serves as both weapon and tactic, with invading forces deliberately driving populations before them to overwhelm enemy logistics and create chaos in defended territories. Poisoning wells has become so routine during sieges that no commander expects to find clean water in a contested city. The concept of taking prisoners exists only in theory; few armies can afford to feed captives, and most surrenders end in swift execution, with bodies left as warnings or burned to prevent necromantic reanimation. The dead receive no dignity in Ashenfell, corpses are systematically looted for anything useful, left to rot as psychological warfare, or disposed of in mass pyres when disease threatens the living. Even childhood offers no sanctuary from war's demands, as the Duchies begin military training at age twelve, and by sixteen these children stand in battle lines alongside veterans, their youth sacrificed to the insatiable hunger of endless conflict.

Why It's So Brutal

The warfare consuming Ashenfell transcends mere political conflict or territorial ambition, it has become an existential struggle where each faction genuinely believes defeat means total extinction, making surrender unthinkable and peace treaties worthless promises that no one expects to last beyond temporary advantage. Resource scarcity drives much of the brutality, as Ashenfell groans under the weight of overpopulation while farmland grows increasingly limited and food becomes scarcer with each passing year, transforming every mouth to feed into a strategic calculation and every harvest into a military objective worth killing for. Beneath the practical concerns lies something darker and more intractable: the cultural hatred that has calcified over generations of propaganda and atrocities, creating genuine mutual loathing between Humans, Orcs, and Elves that eliminates any possibility of reconciliation or coexistence. Yet perhaps most terrifying is the shadow that looms beyond the immediate carnage the slow, inexorable expansion of the Deadlands, whose reality storms grow larger each year, a creeping doom that promises if the factions don't destroy each other first, the breakdown of reality itself will consume them all anyway, lending every battle a desperate edge of doomed futility.