[stressfear]

The Red Shoulders

In my chest with rusting knives,
I've left the names of comrades
Who will not return.
Lend your ears to the dream
Of a wretched man,
Stumbling,
After wandering away from his flock.
When I close my eyes,
I am calling for someone...
There is a downpour of tears,
Collecting sorrows,
In my heart.
I drew the losing card, didn't I?
Even my last moments
Are crushed beneath a wheel.
I remember your face,
Smiling when you said all men
Are fools.
My life is proved by
endless fighting,
experiencing the world
through my sword.
It hurts,
Holding my shoulder to the sky,
Offering my mourning to the men
Who have become stardust.
It hurts,
The storm of swords falling from the heaven
Are to me the tears you are shedding,
Crashed around me.

The Red Shoulders were meant to be an elite fighting force - the best of the best. Only the most promising of soldiers were recruited into the ranks, and put through the brutal training of a Red Shoulder. As they were unaffiliated with the Legions of Thay, they were better trained and better equipped - privately funded by Nowe San, an ambitious Red Wizard.

The grizzled veteran Mors Tanos, himself a Knight of Thay in Nowe's service, took command of their training. The recruits drilled for long hours, learning exotic weapons, tactics for various terrain, and - most importantly - the easiest and best ways to kill a man. The result was, more often than not, a physically and emotionally drained wreck - but there were also the rare few who not only survived, but thrived.

Of the dozens brought in by Nowe and Mors, only a handful became Red Shoulders in full.These became the true subjects of the Red Shoulder project - an experiment designed to produce one perfect, un-killable soldier. None of the soldiers in their employ knew the true purpose of the unit's existence. They were worked to exhaustion, corralled each night, and worked again the next day.

Such was life in the Red Shoulders.

on Recruitment in the Red Shoulders - an excerpt from the journals of Royse Hull
Race didn't matter in the Shoulders - not as much as it does in other parts of Thay. Nobody cared overmuch what size a recruit was or how pointed his ears may be. Recruits came in from all walks of life, and went out on their backs in more or less the same way. The only thing the recruiters cared about was aptitude and experience.

First, no recruit was admitted who hadn't received at least some martial training. No peasants with pitchforks, or hopeful pig-farmers carrying their fathers swords. Soldiers, militiamen, novice monks and duelists drawn from the gutters and streets of distant cities - we all had some training in common, a base of sorts to draw upon.

Second, no veterans were ever sought out or included. Having fought a campaign and survived was a black mark, as were kill records exceeding five, and membership in established legions or church forces. Thus, every Red Shoulder was, initially, both unproven and unknown.

Third, no consideration was given to any volunteer - recruits were sought out uniquely by the Warden and the Commander, and none who asked to join were ever admitted. Thus were the fields limited to those with the unique aptitudes the Warden sought in each drive. This, he put forth the assertion, kept the ranks 'pure'.

Finally, no recruit was ever known to have surviving family beyond the most distant of leaves on their family tree. Not one man in my squad, or even my company, had either wives, children, siblings, or parents. We were functionally orphans all.

To recap - every recruit was a soldier with no prior victories, each recruited singularly by both Nowe and Mors according to criteria known only betwixt those two, and had none to miss them when they had gone.

It seems now as it did then - we were an army of fiercely trained expendables.

The Red Shoulder Command Structure
There were a little over a hundred men in the Red Shoulders, organised into five companies, themselves divided into five individual squads comprised of five soldiers. Each five man team was lead by a Sergeant-at-Arms, with four regular soldiers beneath him. These Sergeant-at-Arms reported to the Lieutenant in charge of monitoring and administrating the squads under his command - one for each company. These Lieutenants likewise reported to the Company Captains, who in turn reported to Mors Tanos, the Commander in Chief of the Red Soldiers as a whole.

Mors, in turn, reported to the man the soldiers referred to simply as the Warden - Nowe San.

Nowe was the ultimate authority in the training facility, his reach extending beyond the mere authorities of the Captains and Lieutenants. What he said was final, an order that couldn't be ignored or overturned on pain of death. He alone knew the true purpose of the experiment, and he alone knew the ultimate goal of the brutal training he subjected the troops to. That authority and knowledge ended with his death, his chambers left a smoldering ruin in the wake of the attack.

How to Train Your Own Red Shoulder - a Hull retrospective
Are you familiar with the concept of squad-level cannibalism? It's the practice of pitting two squads against each other in a fight to the death and organizing a new strike team out of the survivors. In the Shoulders, that was day one.

Day two was lockdown, trapped in a room with the same men you had just the day before been attempting to kill. Day three was a cold wash and a hard meal before morning marches, weapon drills, and mock combat against other survivors who, like you, had been deprived and then worked hard. That night would be trail rations and sleep deprivation, followed by another day just the same as the last.

Those who couldn't last the first four days were thrown in a pit and left there. Those who had were led to the warm, comfortable barracks where they were allowed to wash, dress, and eat at their leisure.

The next day and the weeks that followed would be filled with brutal drills that left you vomiting blood, mock battles that brought scars and lessons in equal measures, and live engagements with captured enemies every seventh day. Goblins and Gnolls featured largely, followed only marginally less often by dwarves and elves.

And at the end of every month, a new batch of recruits was brought in and the cycle repeated for everyone.

Survive a year of this, and you were officially worthy of being called a Red Shoulder. Survive many more, and you were me.

DM Notes:
Again, I wrote this as though I were preparing for a tabletop session. In fact, I might use it for a tabletop session, now I've gone to the trouble of typing it out. It's essentially just background information about the Red Shoulder organisation, written mostly in Royce's character. Still, I'd invite anyone to go ahead and use it for their own characters, if they so chose. I'm sure Roy would be very interested to learn of any other surviving Red Shoulders. Wink

If I had to give the group prerequisites (and I don't, since it's not technically joinable) I'd say characters would need all weapon proficiency feats (simple, martial, and exotic) and two ranks in the Discipline skill to reflect the specialized training every Red Shoulder receives. You'll note that those are requirements that most martial classes can reach very early - and that's exactly the way I meant it to be.

Finally, sorry about the length of the post. I'm a writer first, a role-player second, so I tend to jot up long, complicated posts as a matter of course. After this, it will be in character posts only, I promise!

---

An excerpt from the journal of Royse Hull, Survivor

A long walk from Tyraturos to Pryador and back again, when you're bleeding. Longer still when you have to turn immediately south and walk to the City of a Thousand Temples, all at the behest of a beggar covered in as much flies as skin. That's the last one, I swear to you - no more running around for that bum.

I have made Tyraturos a base of sorts. Where better to find information than the crossroads? Every creature to come through Thay finds his way here eventually, and someone has to know something. The list of names isn't long nor inexhaustible - it shouldn't be hard at all to find word of the missing three.

But I need to survive in the meantime, and a roof and three squares a day matter more than my new freedom. My options were theft and Legion, and I can't afford to find myself in a gutter or a pen, so... Legion it is.

Perhaps I'll find a clue here in Tyraturos - Alai spoke of the Legion once or twice in his barracks tales. It's better than hunting the wilds for Zull or staking out the temple of Cyric for a sign of Vander - hunting some sign or those traitors is tiresome and risky.

Thank the gods Kourayne at least has come back from wherever she wandered. Her, at least, I can trust.