The War Dogs

Our General Manager said they thought the War Dogs would be a good topic for a Patreon post…and I agreed! So here we go!

Warning! Do not read this if you don’t want to see behind the curtain and learn where I steal my ideas from!

The War Dogs are a new band of monsters in Draw Steel. Not based on anything in Flee, Mortals! Or any of our other products. They are intended to be the kind of scheming, evil, intelligent humanoid you can use at any level, without worrying too much about the ethical implications of fighting and killing them. So first level, tenth level, there will be War Dogs to fight. They are not literally dogs or even dog-shaped, all will become clear.

The Monsters book is going to be filled with classic monsters, most of them ported over from Flee, Mortals. That remains a popular monster book, people like that design, we have no intention of throwing it out.

But it’s always useful to have some faction of enemies that are intelligent, fun to fight, sneeringly evil and cruel, available at all levels (for more on this principle, check out the “Everybody Loves Zombies!” running the game video) for directors to use, and players to fight, and enjoy fighting because killing these guys? Is always a good idea.

You’ve already got monsters like Undead, Demons, Devils you can use at any level, but low-level undead tend to be mindless, and demons and devils are very weird. Extraplanar, not automatically well-suited to be dropped into any adventure.

At the same time, my own personal campaign had an ancestry called the war breed. What d20 fantasy calls Half-orcs. I never liked the idea of half-anything for reasons detailed elsewhere and preferred the “a wizard did it” explanation for a lot of reasons. I liked the idea that Ajax’s wizard Mortum created, Saruman-like (at least, Saruman-in-the-movies-like) their own evil magic supersoldiers to counteract Vitae’s good magic supersoldiers. 

As we were working on Draw Steel I decided the world of Draw Steel would not have the “half orc” War Breed. “We can do better,” I thought. But what exactly was better?

I was reading, or rather re-reading, a pulp SF comic I loved as a wee bairn–The Micronauts–because they came out with an omnibus collection in hardcover earlier this year. 

The Micronauts were awesome, still fun to read even if only as a curio, and to my mind one of the only Star Wars knockoffs that really got what we loved about Star Wars when it was still new and fresh.

The Big Bad Evil Guy in The Micronauts was BARON KARZA, basically Darth Vader but to my mind, way cooler. 😀 And his Evil Magic Supersolders, aka the Micronauts version of the Stormtroopers, were the dog soldiers.

I was like “Ahhah! That’s it! I’ll have some of that!” But the problem with the Dog Soldiers was: they are too much like Stormtroopers. All alike. Interchangeable. I wanted something more like a military regiment with different ranks and titles. Still infantry! Still the cannon fodder of the empire, but with more style. And higher ranks means more cool individuals with personalities which makes them more fun to hate! For which see the Time Raider writeup in the rules. 

I was imagining something like the Neo-Soviets from FASA’s 1999 miniature wargame VOR: THE MAELSTROM. Those guys were cool, and evil, and gross! Dog Soldiers + Neo Soviets and we’re already well on our way to something original, something sufficiently different from either of them.

Meanwhile back in the Micronauts, Baron Karza had this laboratory called the body banks. Karza used the body banks to make replacement organs for his dog soldier infantry, essentially turning them into soldiers who could not die, and used that same technology to replace failing organs in old, dying nobles at the end of their life, granting them immortality, if not actual youth.

In my hubris I figured I’d just steal all this and give it to Ajax. I particularly liked the immortality aspect because it helped me understand how Ajax conquers a region. It can’t all be Death From Above, he’s going to need some high-status locals to switch sides so he can conquer a place and move on, leaving them in charge. The offer of immortality would be too good for some of them to pass up.

At dinner during our last in-person get together, I turned to James and said “We need our own stormtroopers” and I pitched him on the Dog Soldiers and the Body Banks and he seemed very keen!

As we developed the idea, we ran into a few problems. First, the name. I literally just wanted to steal the name Dog Soldiers because I thought it was both sufficiently cool and inspiring (this is a matter of personal taste obviously) and it felt otherwise obscure. Sufficiently obscure that I could just grab it and go. 

But it turns out Dog Soldiers were a real thing from the real world! They were and in fact ARE a kind of Cheyenne commando tradition you can read about here. I no longer felt like it was wise to lift this idea.

As is often the case, I was so in love with the thing that inspired me, I couldn’t imagine ANY name being as cool and certainly no name could be cooler for what I wanted. I was discouraged.

Then James discovered the whole idea of dog soldiers and body banks had been lifted from The Micronauts and he basically said “Hang on, are we just stealing this whole thing?” Everyone has their own personal metric for what is ok to steal and what is not and this was redlining James’s meter. 

That’s fair! Happens all the time! It just meant I had to dig a little. It wasn’t that we were stealing this, it was that we were stealing ALL of it. 

So I thought about the body banks and what I liked and I asked “what if the body banks are more like the Lazarus Pit from DC Comics. They aren’t an organ bank, they actually grant renewed youth and vigor?” I think they’re probably closer to an actual sci-fi genetics lab, but with magic. They can do things to people. Make you youthful and vital, or do other things to you. 

For some reason, and I neither can I explain this, nor am I particularly motivated to try and do so, I thought the Dog Soldiers should be “patchwork soldiers.” Sewn together bits made up of prisoners, captured enemies, dissidents. 

I think, with the body banks, it works something like this: we toss all these bits in, and get a new person out, but the joins along the skin never heal properly, so someone has to get out the literal needle and thread.

James seemed to like that! Now I just needed a different, ideally better, name for the Dog Soldiers, which I was very skeptical we’d come up with.

Collaboration saved the day. I just described the problem and how thorny I thought it was, and folks started brainstorming. We talked about how they get less weird and ugly the higher-level they are, the higher-level ones are prideful of their appearance. Almost human! They’re fanatically loyal to Ajax. 

Gertz said “They remind me of the War Boys from Fury Road.”

“Wait!” I said. “War Boys, Dog Soldiers. That’s it! THE WAR DOGS!”

That seemed an immediate hit. I had gone from thinking “Dog Soldiers is too cool and cannot be topped” to finding something, thanks to Gertz, that seemed maybe even cooler. 😀 All of this came out of James pushing back on me just copying and pasting lore from a now-obscure 1970s pulp sci-fi comic. The dog soldiers in the Micronauts are faceless and generic clones of the Stormtroopers. The war dogs are interesting and distinct and unique, not only from Stormtroopers, but also from each other!

Writing the Time Raider fiction I realized I needed to know how these people named themselves and what their ranks would be. Well, making up a new naming conventions and ranks from scratch sounds hard, so I thought “Ajax is from Phaedros, Phaedros is our High Fantasy Hellenic Greece analog so they’d have Greek names and titles!”

From there I was one google search away from “Taxiarch” which is a real ancient Greek word meaning like brigade commander and “Lycaon” which is just a person’s name. “Taxiarch Lycaon” looks cool! Problem solved!

So we had our War Dogs conceptually. Fanatical infantry in service to Ajax. Patchwork soldiers with a soviet-era vibe. At higher levels, prideful and preening. 

Time to figure out how they work. What do War Dogs do in combat? Djordi (the ‘D’ is silent) did the design. Djordi, how do they play?

Djordi: How They Play

“These guys should be terrifying and kind of gross to fight, like walking war crimes.”

“You got it boss!”

Riffing off of Matt’s fiction I dived into ways that we could give the War Dogs a feel inspired by world war and soviet era vibes, while being our own. A few ideas popped to mind immediately: flamethrowers, poison, acid bombs. Brutal weapons that had more of a WWI vibe. The interesting thing about the First World War is that it was an inflection point where 20th Century technology confronted mostly 19th Century military doctrine. That felt right for fitting a terrifying faction with a new way of fighting into a fantasy world.

The term stormtrooper was first used for elite infiltration soldiers who specialized in trench warfare for WWI, so the heritage seemed correct.

A hook that immediately came to mind was an idea I used in an old campaign I ran for Matt and some friends in an earlier version of Matt’s campaign world. It was a riff on the Suicide Squad where Ajax’s officers recruited a bunch of prisoners to send on a dangerous mission. I used the idea of explosive collars to give the campaign a hook and to stay true to the Suicide Squad inspiration.

It made sense to extend that concept into the War Dogs. Ajax fitting his soldiers with explosive collars felt mechanically correct and appropriately brutal, but there’s a tonal shift to make them work for the War Dogs. The War Dogs aren’t really reluctant participants, except for newly “recruited” conscripts who aren’t fully indoctrinated. To reinforce the feeling of fanatics I had these Loyalty Collars detonate on death doing 1d6 damage to all adjacent enemies. This made them feel brutal and also made them feel dangerous in melee.

Building on that hook, I added an ability called Posthumous Promotion to all War Dog officers. This let them detonate a target War Dog’s collar while they were still alive, allowing them to sacrifice an ally (ideally a minion) to do damage to vulnerable heroes.

And finally, to complete a gameplay engine, I gave the War Dogs ability that evolved into a Villain Power called Reconstitute. This ability allows a patchwork War Dog to use an adjacent corpse to get replacement parts for their body, healing themselves. This explode and reconstitute gameplay engine gives War Dogs a universal inhumane feel.

Once that base mechanic was in place then everything else sort of clicked. I created a flamethrower unit, called the Crucibite, that had a dangerous flamethrower that affected all creatures and got an edge on attacks when it created friendly fire. I made a Phosporite that threw a Caustic Detonator which was a sticky acid bomb that had a chance to go off on a random turn until someone helped the target remove it. There’s a Pestilite that has a Plaguecaster that covers the battlefield with pestilence.

Then to take things further I went beyond the gear and leaned into the War Dogs concept of being patchwork creations. What donor bodies were grafted into the War Dogs from the Body Banks and what weird effects could that create? There’s an Amalgamite, which is an abomination with several arms that is a living siege engine, kept in control by minions with tether chains. There’s the Cognivite which is made mostly of humanoid bodies, but has a rare graft from a Voiceless Talker brain giving it psionic abilities. A Portalite that has a demon organ grafted into it that gives it teleportation powers.

Now we have something that I think works for Matt’s original prompt. “Universal donor” bad guys, with a diversity of abilities, that are a kind of menagerie that reflects Ajax’s strategy to collect and make use of whatever it takes to achieve his goals.

Time to figure out what they look like which means, it’s time for MCDM’s Art Director, Jason, to take over the story!

Jason: What They Look Like

“Nazis. I hate these guys…”

Was the first thing that popped into my head while listening to the pitch for our new band of baddies.

It's a great line and a fun reveal as the plot thickens in The Last Crusade. Both upping the stakes in Indy's adventure and poking fun at these fascist A-holes. It reminds us that Indy has dealt with these villains before, and gives us his world-weary attitude toward them. For a normal person, the Nazis are villainous and evil, an existential threat. For Indy? Fighting Nazis is de rigueur. From here on out the film has its bad-guys! And we the audience are fully onboard with Indy kicking some Nazi ass. 

Visually, Nazis make great baddies, they look evil!

Ever since the Goose-stepping morons first marched, their uniforms, iconography, and equipment have influenced fictional villain design. Star Wars Imperial soldiers and officers being notable examples. With their skull-faced stormtroopers, exaggerated Stahlhelms, field caps, riding breeches and jackboots. black, gray, white and a dash of red. When you see something Imperial in Star Wars, you know they’re meant to be the bad guy.

Heading into the visual development of War Dogs, I told myself I’d like to borrow upon those same principles, lean heavily on organized military structure that relies a bit on its pageantry to intimidate. I also wanted to integrate some unique iconography for our bad-guy army. I knew that meant uniforms, and emblems designed to intimidate, or impress, so I began looking through historical references of periods that have often interested me.

Coincidentally! I had taken a trip to France earlier this year with the express purpose of historical military tourism. I took literally thousands of photographs of European war equipment, uniforms and battle sites throughout France. The French preserve and share this history and it’s artifacts extremely well, and so I couldn’t help but take pictures of this Red Lancer Shako from 12 angles, that Hessian Jäger uniform from 15, Close-ups of the engraved spontoons of the Nine Years’ War, A Belgian mitrailleuse from the 1860s, 40 pics of the connection joints and binding of 15th century Stechzeug jousting armor….you get the idea. I love this stuff, I love how it works, the hand-made human ingenuity in putting it together and making it work, all the while incorporating artistry and unique visual identity - STYLE - for the sake of style. Incorporating these real world elements into your fantastical concepts, can help make them more believable. Real stuff is often more wacky, detailed and insane than one can imagine on their own. 

I have my reference depot and a starting point. 

Additionally, within many of the war museums I visited, hung terrific collections of Romantic Era paintings. Some depicting battle, others the elements of soldiering life in between the fray. Some paintings showed celebration in victory, others, the despair of war. Artists such as: 

Paul-Louis-Narcisse Grolleron  

Étienne-Prosper Berne-Bellecour 

Alphones-Marie de Neuville 

James-Alexander Walker 

While the works of these artists have much merit, I was inspired by their realism, the grounding in real world events, full of emotion and consequence. It makes the people in these paintings more than just visual designs, they have an energy, life to them, even if standing still. The paintings I was most concerned with were depicting time periods, and regions of very unique warfare. Events from the past driven by political turmoil and insurrection. Desperate attempts to maintain hegemony within feuding states, territories controlled by Barons, Princes, Kings, Queens, and even Emperors! I decided I wanted the War Dogs to feel a bit like that. To look like 18th and early 19th century regimental armies 

Now that I have my inspiration.

Looking through my reference of Nepolionic, French Revolution (all of them), Crimean War, and Franco-Prussian War uniforms and equipment, they all had a lot in common: Pageantry! Soldiers in these wars were dressed to kill! 

Even though theaters of war like Crimea saw a rapid change toward modern warfare; rifled weapons, artillery supported trench warfare and even amphibious assaults from armored warships, sometimes in the shadow of a great castle; some soldiers still charged into battle on horseback, in piped jackets and plumed helms swinging giant sabers. The Russians wore long trench coats with crossed white sashes and black picklehems adorned with brass double-headed eagles and huge top spikes. Rad!

The excessive decoration, the flamboyance in these uniforms offered no protection or camouflage during the bloody conflict, but rather was meant to bolster the morale of the soldiers wearing the uniforms, resplendent and glorious, hopefully diminishing the morale of their enemies. This was still a time period when a military uniform’s 3 basic functions, found as separate uniforms today: Combat, Service, and Dress, were all rolled into one. 

As I sketched and looked through reference, I decided to dial back on the Dress just a tad, bringing the designs closer into Franco-Prussian era war attire. Threw in some Navy-style epaulets and shoulder boards. I then borrowed a bit from French and German WW1, especially the long trench coats, double breasted frocks, the Adrian helmet and Stahlhelm, kind of mashing it all together.

Iconography: While much of my reference featured symbols of shields, crossed swords or eagles, I knew I wanted to invoke similar vibes to all that brass bling and gold filigree incorporated into those uniforms, but use less heroic imagery. I thought about Ajax’s symbol which includes a ram. I thought about symbols associated with death or evil, such as skulls and bones. And about repeating patterns with bold impact, such as greek meander keys. From this I ended up with some basic design language for the War Dog iconography. Front-on stylized rams heads with angry browlines, surrounded by linear patterns. Negative cut outs in the shapes of a ram's head, to also invoke skulls. These same elements are affixed inside circles or diamonds and placed on uniforms in similar locations as Wehrmacht uniforms in order to allude to those similarities. 

Pleased with my own art direction and some rough sketches, I shared what I had with the art team. The reaction was mixed! They were noticeably unenthused. 

So Nick, Grace, Lars and I chatted a while about the designs and their reaction and other things I wanted to try. Other members of the art team had their own ideas of what a War Dog should be, how they would have approached it. And through sharing those ideas and listening to the team’s feedback, I realized I had spent a lot of time on the concept of uniforms and regimental identity, but not character. I was designing an army, and hadn’t really given much thought to the guys inside the clothes. I was focused on those love-to-hate bad guys from Indiana Jones movies and failed to focus on the ‘monster’ part of the assignment. I hadn’t reviewed the individual design entries, the abilities within the stat-blocks, the things that make War Dogs unique, and fun and exciting to fight at the table!...

So I went back to the drawing board (literally, not figuratively), I didn’t need to throw out what I had, I just needed the rest of the visual design principles. What Djordi came up with for War Dog gameplay is great and helped me a lot in progressing the visual design.

They all have exploding collars!? 

After reviewing the specific names and abilities in the rules, I went back and started concepting these unique bad-guy characters; incorporating their quirky traits, inspired by their names and the tactics they’ll employ against those who aim to disrupt Ajax’s will. 

Equipment-wise, I wanted a collar that wasn't actually a neck collar, so I went with a low cut gorget. Form inspired by 16th-17th century armor, but with shapes and implications borrowed from German WW2 ceremonial Feldgendarmerie. Only bad-guys wear those fake little gorgets! Within these decorated pieces of metal, lay sandwiched plates of magical explosives. 

Since these guys are built or modified from the Body Banks, and are amalgamations of conglomerate people, I took a stitched together approach. I figured War Dogs could sometimes have odd proportions, longer arms and legs than might fit their torso. Elongated necks and disproportionate faces. One of their eyes is human, another something else.

However, I wanted to avoid typical Undead vibes. These guys are not mindless zombies, or reanimated monsters. They are the ardent soldiers of Ajax, and they have ambition, desire, they WANT to kill the heroes…it makes them feel good!

I figured the best way to maintain the distinction between Undead and War Dog was to make them people! To give them faces, and expressions, and to show that they can communicate in very human ways. This is subtle, and not always something you can maintain in Quarter Page book art, but when possible, it is my intent to have expression in the posture, hands and especially the faces of the War Dogs we depict; even if it’s a dude made out of nine different people and has one giant Dragon Knight eye in his head! 

Visually designing the War Dogs came down to being inspired by both individual interests and exploration as well as concerted team effort and feedback, as well as trying to capture the intent of the design. These are meant to be bad guys, guys you never feel bad about getting their comeuppance.

What We’ve Learned Since

Thanks Djordi and Jason! Super fun to have several folks writing one patreon post. 

Meanwhile in War Dog Land: I posted some fiction a few days ago I was inspired to write. It presented a scenario where, for reasons not explained, a captured War Dog remembers their pre-body bank life. Some of you read it!

Well, this prompted a whole discussion among basically the entire team around “is that possible?” James asked “Which bit of the War Dog contains the identity?” I said, probably the brain! But maybe the heart? Djordi suggested, what if every bit of a war dog contained some essence of the person it originally belonged to? He wanted to know; what does Ajax do with the souls? I thought…maybe they’re how Motrum keeps the Crysopolis flying?

But as I watched the team go back and forth on the implications of what I had written I realized “This is bad.”

The whole point of the War Dogs is: there are no ethical implications involved in killing them. It’s a fighting monsters game, we need to make it fun to fight monsters and that means making sure directors always have a supply of “they’ll love this” monsters. Meaning “they’ll love fighting these guys.” I played Baldur’s Gate 3, I don’t like fighting Dumb Animals, even in a game, even when they present a lethal threat.

But, critically, I want War Dogs to have personality. Higher level War Dogs have names, personality, attitude. It’s fun to kill them because they’re so over-the-stop sneering, mustache twirling Movie Villains. Or Comic Book villains even!

So this caused a whole NEW conversation. “What is a soul in the Timescape?” We know souls are real, they have arcane value. Devils sign contracts where you gain power, they gain your soul. Demons consume souls and eventually gain identity and power from them. 

Furthermore, I didn’t want to say “only the speaking peoples have souls.” Nah, I think lots of creatures have souls. Birds, mammals, some reptiles maybe. Whatever a soul is, it is not the exclusive purview of language-using, self-aware organisms. 

Summing over all this you get: whatever a soul IS, it can’t be the source of “personality” otherwise war dogs would HAVE to have souls (since we want them to have personalities). I proposed that souls are where the spark of creativity, original thought, and empathy come from.

War Dogs? Lots of personality, but they can’t make new things, they take orders well but sort of fall apart left to their own devices (lack of original thought). They have no empathy, hence they delight in being cruel for cruelty’s sake.

If someone steals your soul (always a possibility in a fantasy game) you still seem like you! For a little while at least, but people who know you would notice you were becoming sort of..dull. Flat. You had all your memories, identity, but the spark of life has fled you and, over time, you become an echo of your original self. Memories fade, even identity fades.

The team seemed to like this and I propose we add a new keyword: soulless. War Dogs are soulless but not undead. Zombies and skeletons? Undead and soulless? James liked this and said “hey this could explain why characters like Count Rhodar von Glauer are different from a normal undead! Count Von Glauer, Khorsekef the Infinite, ghosts, other named undead, are undead with souls! That’s the difference between a Ghost and a Specter. Both are undead, but a Ghost still has the original person’s soul stuck in there.

The definitions here are not hard and fast. Demons collect souls until they gain identity and memory. War Dogs have identity and memory but no souls. Losing your soul doesn’t immediately cost you your identity, memory and personality, but it will over time.

But these seem like exactly the kinds of details real-world theologians debated for centuries and some of the ideas they came up are SUPER weird! 😀 

So this works for us. The idea might still evolve? But it has all the hallmarks of a Good Idea. We felt like the distinction between souls and undeath helped us understand things we already knew about our world. The difference between a War Dog and a normal person, the difference between a Spectre and a Ghost, between a mundane undead and one with personality like Count von Glauer.

The End!

That’s it folks! I think this was a pretty cool post, but even with all this detail, a lot of the War Dogs’ design both the concept, the gameplay, and visual presentation, happened in discussions and meetings. It’s sort of impossible to track every single point that went into the final product and record them all in a blog post.

It also took months to get all this done. We’re lucky we have the staff that can ideate and iterate on this stuff to produce something sort of novel. The monster book is going to be mostly stuff you’ve already seen before, and now you can maybe see why! Just getting one original faction done from scratch takes a LOT of work. If we wanted a new, wholly unique monster book where every monster had the same quantity and quality of ideas, it would take years which gives you some idea why video games take so long to get done!

Thanks for reading folks, hope you got a kick out of this!