Tactical Annals of the Shogunate

During the times of the Shogunate, it was traditional for Dragonblooded generals to keep ‘tactical annals’, campaign diaries of their operations. Such annals contained a wealth of information: notes on deployments and figures useful to historians, alongside lessons of strategy, tactics and descriptions of particular foes. The annals of armies rarely entered the public eye, recorded in tomes labeled with Legion and date or volume and kept in vast military archives, but sometimes a retiring general would collate some of their content for publication, expanding on tactical examples to create an educational text which might appeal to Creation’s various officer schools, and presenting a biographical text to share their own life story, often weaving in memorials to fallen friends or glorifying tales to buoy a political career.

In the present Age, a number of these manuals have been preserved, though they tend to be too specific to their era to be of significant use to modern commanders. In the Scarlet Empire, they tend to be dismissed (outside a few exceptions such as by scions of House Tepet) as misguided Exalts writing texts coloured too much by hubris, with lessons more correctly taken from the Thousand Correct Actions of the Upright Soldier. Tactical annals are, as one might guess, highly popular in Lookshy, and there is a legend concerning battle diaries and personal notes that would combine to produce the Tactical Annals of Chumyo Nefvarin , though this text has never been recovered.