The Weekly Warfare   Musings martial from across the SCA

The Plan

For the record: the alcohol, enthusiastic newbies (Hi, Gawin!), and enthusiastic baronages DO mix, but sometimes in unpredictable ways.

For instance, they can (but have not in Windmasters) led to some scandals.  Or they can lead to dancing that should never happen.  Or they can result in somebody saying “You know, next year is Pennsic 40… what if we had 40 rapier fighters, 40 heavy fighters, and 40 A&S displays…”

When this idea failed to follow the hangover into oblivion, dissipated by the morning light, it then became The Plan, and has now been widely announced to the barony as The Plan.

And as the over-energetic baronial rapier… oh, wait, I got rid of those titles.  And yet… somehow I’ve decided I’m going to be the one to make 40 rapier fighters (yeah, nobody else has a say).

Now, as has been said by Fred Thompson onscreen, and as is one of my mantras, “Ruskie don’t take a dump without a plan”.  Don’t enter range without a plan.  Don’t try to double the most fencers we’ve ever had at Pennsic without a plan.  Not much of a plan, but…

How to get to 40
First, I have a list of the SCA names of the barony’s authorized fencers that Our Favorite MoL gave us.  It turns out there are more than 50 authorized rapier fighters in the barony.  50!  Of course, the hard part is getting more than a third of them to show up.  Plus, some people have moved/drifted away (especially with a military base), so after getting the list I removed the names I/the other marshals didn’t recognize, and that put us down at 50.  Then came the honest assessment:

As I count it, we have slightly less than 10 guaranteed to turn out for a large-ish Pennsic.  We have another 20 or so who have turned out at various Pennsics in the past, but no guarantees are made.  Dragging them out and dragging some of the non-Pennsic going fencers out will get us close, but not there.

Going over the list showed some interesting names.  Many, if not most, of the knights of our barony are authorized rapier (and I know some not appearing on the list have been authorized in the past).  We won’t get to 40 fencers without some of those being heavy crossovers, and my impression of the armored community is that the best way to get heavy crossovers is to get knights to crossover and bring their squires (the best way to get fencers to crossover to heavy involves booze.  Sometimes for the fencer, sometimes for an over-enthusiastic free scholar.  Hint hint, your Excellency).  Those rapier-authorized knights rarely, if ever, turn out for Pennsic battles.  That’s the next step, and that gets to be His Excellency’s problem.

And then there are the new-to-fencing fighters: Not heavy fighters, just loyal Windmasters.  Master Nikulai, Pelican and Our Favorite MoL, has picked up a rapier (and is picking up a rattan stick).  She Who Must be Obeyed is even giving it a try.

So, the numbers are doable.  But then what?  The Chinese “Human Wall” would be AWESOME to throw at the enemy, if a) the humans weren’t my friends and b) the enemy wouldn’t drop a pantload having 40 blue-tabbarded bastards run them down with little concern for parrying.  Gotta find something else.

How do you teach a non-fencer how to fight?

I’m pretty sure I’ve got this one covered.  But what is materially important to cover in the next 11 months to make a fighter an asset on the melee field?  Really, they won’t need to win a single one-on-one fight in their entire lives (unless they start liking fencing).  What can be filtered out of the curriculum, or deprioritized?  This is the first consideration.

How do you teach 10 non-fencers how to fight?

At practice the past few weeks, we’ve had upwards of 6 unauthorized fighters, with experience ranging from ready-to-authorize to “this is called a ‘sword’.  S W O R D.”  We’ve got a set of senior fencers to work with them in one-on-ones, but I’m also having to pull from my dusty strip-fencing memory the line drills I used to do.  So the second consideration, and one for which I am more than willing to accept advice, is: How do you train a shit-ton of new fencers simultaneously?

How to teach non-fencers to fight melee?

This has a couple of sub-questions:

For those newcomers who, as mentioned, are unlikely to ever need to win a one-on-one fight, do I bother teaching them to lunge and other nuances of tournament fighting?  Or should I focus on the point control and reaction time to gain handshots in a line fight?  Do I consider that they’ll still have to authorize (heh… Mass Melee Authorization… it could be so miserable but such a… no, no it could only be a CF).

For the cross-overs, do I start with the assumption they will their heaters as an off-hand device (unless a different intent is expressed), essentially as a misshapen rotella, and then work through how to fence and fight melee without switching into Old Castle?

Once they authorize, do we go with an all-melee practice?  And what fundamentals should I work on?  I’m thinking line fighting, exploiting numerical advantage, surviving when outnumbered?

And lastly, there was that idea from a month or two back: Unit attacks into tempo.  I wonder if I can train 40 newly minted fighters to do this.