My military style campaign is shifting from a siege, which has been the focus for the past 3 months of gaming, to a more open situation where the players have stated their desire to scout out an area largely occupied by the enemy in order to figure out what they want to attack.
My players are starting to show real initiative in the game and I don't want to mission orient the game entirely at this stage--I'd rather encourage them by having a series of adventure hooks. What I'd appreciate is a few ideas on how to change the current focus of the game and make it as exciting and tense as the siege was but in a different way.
A few thoughts of mine:
1. It is now late autumn in the game, winter is approaching. I am thinking that I'd like weather to be an underlying theme.
2. As far as the terrain goes: I need to fill in some blanks on the map. I know that near the city the players were helping defend it was good fertile farm country to the immediate north, a fair amount of rocky coast and then a riverine harbour for the city. A lot of the area was burned and destroyed as the defenders retreated. However I'd like a sense of terrain leading from beyond there to a harbour city and a city roughly 20 miles north of it inland and the areas between. both cities are occuppied by enemy forces; the harbour city was forcibly taken and pillaged for several days. The second was partly burned by a young red dragon and part of the walls destroyed but ultimately surrendered.
3. I have decided that the enemy forces are divided into three main divisions--one force is demoralized but whole and retreating from the city the players were defending. Two are occupying the cities I mentioned.
4. The general political climate of the Republic is this: part of the ruling Council wants to consider terms at this stage to halt further fighting. Not so much abject surrender so much as 'live today, fight tomorrow' since they would still control two major cities, the river country and the eastern half of the country. The other half is eager for sticking to their guns, maintaining that they broke the one siege, they can certain harass the enemy and meanwhile send for help from potential allies.
It sounds good to me.
The thing is, usually ancient armies didn't fight in winter. As I understand it, it was almost a time a tacit truce, likely because of logistics of moving troops across snow.
Crafty players could try to take advantage of enemies settling in for the winter.
It sounds as if you want the players to take charge of the forces of New Edom? If that's the case, your best option is to give them the chance to gather lots of information. Which means having the information on specific troop placements, the enemy commanders, likely weather (even through divination), and so forth. Really, though, from what I've seen, you pretty much have all this information. So the question becomes whether or not the player work to gather it all.
If the siege is broken, I'd say one way you can maintain the tension is to make it clear, if the situation has not improved by spring, New Edom is in lots of trouble. If the players know a massive invasion they cannot repel is months away, they have a time table to come up with a solution. Ever delay, setback, and obstacle offers a source of tension.
I actually want them to be in charge of gathering intelligence and scouting, not taking over altogether.
In the present case I was thinking that the tension might be more towards the fact that if say the capital of Touchstone also falls or the enemy grasp hold in the last months of autumn of potential agricultural areas then Fineberg would stand alone, be dangerously isolated and might be forced to come to terms.