by MDSnowman » Fri Aug 15, 2008 9:36 am
Organizations: Special #2
Name: The Tattered Legion
Nicknames: Peasant’s Legion, The White Banner, Rabble Rousers
Symbol: A Red Hand Print on a White Field, often on an old banner.
Structure: cell based
Description:
Five years ago a small army from Saltash crossed their Western Border with Beleme. This invading force was operating under the stated purpose to capture the port city of Saint Jerod giving Saltash control of the two largest ports on the Southern shore of Darkon.
The invaders made it as far as Black Blood Thicket before the crown acted. They conscripted an army of local peasants and placed Aegis Knights in command of them. This impromptu army was able to drive the Saltash forces back by the time they reached the Southern edge of the Thicket. With the enemy in retreat Beleme had won the day. Of course that didn’t dissuade the Beleme general, Lord Henri DuLaine. He ordered the army to pursue the Saltashian invaders. He pursued them North of the Thicket, and then East across the Saltashian border into the Great Mire. That’s where the trouble really started.
The Saltashian forces had already crossed the Mire once to get to Beleme and many of the soldiers knew the swamp like the back of their hands. When the Beleme army crossed the border they became the invaders and the Saltashian troops treated them as such. For months the Saltashian troops attacked the Beleme conscripts with vicious hit and run tactics. The Beleme commanders kept on stubbornly putting their men in the field however, and they kept on dying.
Finally DuLaine met his demise under mysterious circumstances and the legion of conscripts made an organized retreat returning the Beleme. They were heralded as heroes for completing their mission of driving out the invaders, but no one acknowledged that they’d actually spent more time in a swamp being picked apart by the enemy than driving invaders from Beleme.
The conscripts returned to their villages and towns and found them gripped in poverty. The taxes to supply the war effort, and a year of bad crops had crippled their way of life. Commoners were dying from malnutrition and the nobles threw grand feasts to celebrate their victory.
For the veterans of the war the situation was intolerable. One commoner, Jean Baker, had enough. He rallied several of his old friends from the army to take what the locals needed from the nobility. Jean’s unnamed group robbed nobles for months and used the proceeds to feed the people.
Eventually Jean and his men were captured and summarily executed. Jean was the last one to die. He was drawn and quarter, and with his last breath reached out for the executioner’s white robe, grabbed it, and died. The executioner stepped back and had a bloody handprint on his robe. The peasants gained a martyr, and a standard all in one day.
Since that day veterans of the so-called Black Blood conflict have operated as military groups within their own country making life difficult for nobles, trying to bring them down out of revenge for all that has been to commoners in the name of the nobility. The Tattered Legion operates in secret, hiding in plain sight throughout Southern Beleme, and striking with a single minded ruthlessness they learned fighting the Saltashian Army.
The Legion is supposedly being lead by Gerald Prideaux, a former Aegis Knight who argued against the invasion into Saltash. He’s far and away the best warrior that the Legion has, but the fact that all the members have recent military experience means that they are more deadly than most guards one is likely to meet in Southern Beleme.
Those demons are scary, would hate for my character to actually see them with normal sight.
