Calibration War

Overview

The Calibration War was a large-scale military conflict in the Scavenger Lands, occurring between RY301 and RY303, between Realm-aligned forces led by Great House Iselsi and forces from members of the League of Many Rivers, primarily those of Lookshy.

Preceding Events

Following the Realm’s defeat in the Third Invasion of the Scavenger Lands, many on both sides felt that the Scarlet Empress had given up on open conquest of the River Province. However, in RY104, the Realm tributaries of Marin Bay and Goodharbour petitioned for membership in the League of Many Rivers, a move strongly supported by Lookshy. Their Imperial garrisons withdrew to Port Calin, replaced by Seventh Legion advisors.

This move concerned many... Goodharbour was the major port for Realm shipping routes to their holding at Greyfalls, while the manse-lighthouse at Marin Bay had been an important dock for Imperial Navy shipping… even if the Empress did not launch a war of complete conquest, the Realm might be driven to make more local strikes to recapture these key strategic locations. Most of the city-states of the League did not want another war if it could be avoided. More concerning as the years wore on was the fact that the two new states were tightly linked to Lookshy, a highly militarized power that most thought had imperial ambitions of its own, controlled by soldiers whose interests lay not in peace but in further battles.

But while Lookshy did indeed gain by keeping the League and its purses tense for war, the Realm was hardly innocent… loss of Marin and Goodharbour prompted the Empress to divert funds and the attentions of a Great House, House Iselsi, to Her beachheads in the Scavenger Lands. Port Calin and Thorns, both regional powers, were encouraged with Realm funds and attaches to engage in campaigns of militarization: in the latter, aristocratic jousting traditions were encouraged to see the raising of more numerous Austrech heavy cavalry, while in the former the need to fortify against attack from Marin and Goodharbour meant developing fortifications and the means to break them. Few think it coincidence that heavy cavalry would be key to an invasion of the River Province northward across the Marukani Plains, while siege engineers would be vital to breaching the Lookshy.Wall to assault the military heart of the Scavenger Lands.

As the third century since the Great Contagion began, circumstances in both Realm and River Province shifted towards war. On the Blessed Isle, the Scarlet Empress and her Imperial Legions had recently suppressed Trae Leng’s Revolt, but the widespread destruction of granaries had raised concerns over the supply of food to the Realm’s cities, and had reduced the power of the Scarlet Dynasty’s military Houses, strengthening the Deliberative and the Houses with most power within it, House Iselsi and House Morigaturqi, who had formed a legislative alliance to push for the Throne to grant greater powers to the Greater Chamber.

In the River Province, the simmering conflicts and skirmishes between the various powers of the League had become increasingly active and violent over the preceding decades, breaking into open conflict which had seen the forces of Lookshy spread thin, and while the War of Blood and Water had finally been won by the Seventh Legion, to do so they had expended many lives and terrible weapons from their stockpiles of First Age armaments. Most felt it would be decades before the Lookshyans and the River Province armies they had fought against would be able to work together as a cohesive military force.

Belligerents

Realm-Aligned

While House Iselsi, a Great House of the Realm’s Scarlet Dynasty, was the driving force behind the Calibration War, and while many in the River Province still term the conflict the ‘Fourth Realm Invasion of the Scavenger Lands’, the Realm itself did not participate in the conflict, and the Scarlet Empress did not sanction it. Even without sanction, however, House Iselsi could bring to bear its House Guard forces and numerous Dragonblooded Exalts.

Alongside the Iselsi House Guard, the largest contribution of troops and materiel was Port Calin, an Imperial satrapy whose military had been pushed and funded by the Realm and House Iselsi to master fortifications and siege warfare in preparation for future attacks on the River Province. In addition to Calinti artillerists, ranks of heavy infantry made the formations deployed an unusual reverse of those typically seen in Imperial conflicts, with satrapal infantry holding the center and supported by Iselsi House guard, equipped as auxiliary cavalry and skirmishers for the Imperial Legions.

Additional Realm tributaries under Iselsi control contributed forces to the campaign, including axe-wielding infantry and raiders from Azerban, alongside scouts and missile troops from Madura, Ceben, Valis, and others.

At the time, there were rumours and accusations of Imperial Legion involvement, in the form of 4th Imperial Legion units whose officers had moved them into position as mercenary units on the Iselsi payroll. However, given the Empress’ control over her armies, such a thing could hardly have been true given that she offered the war no official sanction.

League-Aligned

The forces from the League of Many Rivers which fought in the war were rendered lesser due to the political disputes dividing the League at the time of the conflict. The main combatants from the League were the states of Marin Bay and Goodharbour, both of whom had defensive fortifications and formations favouring pikemen, though with officers trained by Lookshy . Lookshy itself was initially supplying those two realms with numerous ‘advisors’, and its military forces intervened directly as the conflict escalated, though soldiers were still bloodied from the War of Blood and Water and tied down in the occupation and policing actions which had followed.

Other members of the League were less eager to muster… they too were bloodied, and many beaten, from the War of Blood and Water, and some felt that Marin and Goodharbour (who had remained in the Lookshyan camp during the war and in League meetings afterwards) deserved a mauling. The war might also lessen the Seventh Legion’s military dominance of the Province, though few imagined Lookshy itself would suffer defeat.

Great Forks, though not opposed in principle, was still a young city, and had few bodies or funds to contribute to any war effort.

Course of the War

RY301 – Outbreak

In RY301, House Iselsi and Port Calin launched a carefully coordinated attack, meticulously planned. While forces had been mustering near the border for months, this had been common throughout the War of Blood and Water, and most Lookshy officers considered it to be an attempt at intimidation by the Realm, not preparation for true invasion… intelligence had, after all, confirmed no Imperial Legions had been redeployed into the theatre. With the onset of Calibration, vigilance was further relaxed, as armies did not march in such an inauspicious time.

These assumptions proved incorrect. On the first day of Calibration, the ruling family of Goodharbour saw many of its members, who had gathered at the family manse for the dark days at year’s end, struck down by a virulent illness. A few others, merchants and officials and common folk also fell ill, and rumours of a Calibration plague spread through the port city, causing significant panic, with soldiers called into the streets to keep order.

Calibration would march on before the true plan would be made clear, and when it did it came in the form of Iselsi knives at the throats of Seventh Legion advisors across the armies and settlements between the Tears and the Sea, as Calinti boots thudded across borders to besiege the townships of Marin and the city of Goodharbour.

RY302 – Stalemate

The Siege of Goodharbour lasted only a few days… while the city was readied for siege and well-supplied, the plague panic gripping the population increased dramatically as the inhabitants saw themselves being locked into a plague-ridden city and clamored to get out. The Calinti and Iselsi offered amnesty and freedom to depart in exchange for the city’s capitulation, and as the riots inside the walls grew more violent, the illness-hobbled rulers gave in. The Siege of Marin Lighthouse lasted longer, but its location meant relief was more difficult, and the defenders both there and in the hinterlands were demoralized by Goodharbour’s fall and disordered by casualties in their Lookshyan advisors. The Seventh Legion itself scrambled to pull back forces from the east, and watched for a Southern assault from Thorns and the advance of Imperial Legions and the Imperial Navy. The initiative seemed to be in Iselsi hands.

It was not to be, however. The Iselsi mustered their House fleet, and a number of transport barges, in preparation for a crossing of the Yanaze but a daring Lookshy raid saw the entire assembled fleet wiped out in the port at Goodharbour, blocking the port to shipping and preventing a crossing until more ships could be built. The mass of manpower that were needed to siege Lookshy thus remained tied in the south, waiting, with those further north locked down suppressing Marin resistance and unable to sweep across the River of Tears past Sijan into the eastern River Province. A stalemate developed, with armies facing each other across the Yanaze but only raids and skirmishes, not pitched battles, as House Iselsi pushed the Empress to deploy her own fleet and armies or to permit a northward push from Thorns and Lookshy insisted that the League of Many Rivers rally their own troops for battle, neither side able to succeed at their respective goals.

RY303 – Reversal

The end of the Calibration War came in early RY303, and when it did it came as a shock to the leading belligerents on both sides. In the month of Resplendent Air, Port Calin joined the League of Many Rivers.

This turn had been carefully negotiated between several members of the League, particularly Nexus, and a number of the prominent noble houses of Calin, and involved not only Calinti membership in the League but recognition of its wartime conquests in Marin and Goodharbour… creating a member state too powerful to be pulled into lockstep with the Seventh Legion as had been the cities it had conquered. Though confident it had a good chance of liberating those cities militarily, the General Staff in Lookshy recognized that the political landscape was not in their favour: invading a fellow League state, which had support of many members, was far different than resisting Realm invasion. The Seventh Legion added demands for a demilitarized border area on the north bank of the Yanaze opposite their city (where the town of Centak has arisen in the present day) and the granting of the Marin Lighthouse to serve as a regional post (that would become the Marin Bay Redoubt), both of which Port Calin readily granted.

Betrayal by the Calinti was a terrible blow to House Iselsi, whose forces in the conflict were the lesser next to their former ally. A host of Dragonblooded are a potent threat indeed, but many of the Dynasts involved were either scattered about the theatre or grouped at their headquarters in Goodharbour when their allies turned on them, and had not had chance to carry out the extensive preparations characteristic of their House. A number of assassination attempts were carried out against the Calinti ruling families, but many were improvised and faced politicians well trained in surviving such things through their constant play at the ‘Great Game’, meeting little success and petering out as perpetrators were caught, or more commonly made their escapes northward or westward to safety. The Iselsi in Goodharbour faced an even more ignoble fate: the vast Calinti army they had gathered to attack Lookshy instead besieged their own walls, while Lookshy’s naval forces advanced to cut off retreat through the newly-cleared port. With so many daughters and sons, and a few elders of the House, surrounded, the Iselsi leadership was compelled to pay a significant ransom so that Lookshy vessels would allow Imperial Navy ships to enter the port and carry them back to the Blessed Isle.

Aftermath

The Calibration War was a resounding defeat for House Iselsi… casualties had been suffered in the conflict, but more devastating were the near complete emptying of its coffers and the massive loss of prestige within the Realm, where the House fell from perhaps the most potent in the Scarlet Dynasty to the weakest, the other Houses circling like Siaka biting off holdings and positions the Iselsi could no longer defend… doubtless these pressures and the pending possibility of destruction motivated some House scions to launch an attempt at a coup by the end of the year in the Night of Broken Daggers. Though they had not suffered losses themselves, vocal support for the war from Iselsi allies in House Morigaturqi saw that House’s status become increasingly precarious as well.

The war may also have saved the League of Many Rivers from fracturing… while this conflict and the War of Blood and Water that preceded it had proven Lookshy’s military might, the end of the Calibration War showed that diplomatic action could be just as potent a weapon in defending the River Province, powers such as Nexus and Sijan more confident the arrangement was one of equals not mere clients of a potent warlord-state. The membership of Calin also helped to counterbalance the Lookshyans when emissaries of the League negotiated, seen as far better than the slavish obedience shown in councils by the Marin and Goodharbour city-states.

Port Calin gained territory, and a strong position in the League, in which it was a major power. It also gained pride… some on either side of the Inner Sea mutter perhaps too much pride… with the ruling Daimyo of Port Calin declaring that, having defeated both the Seventh Legion and the Scarlet Empire in battle, he could lay rightful claim to the title of Shogun, founding the Calin Shogunate.