The plate armour with which almost all basitin soldiers are equipped is one of the many reasons for their great success on the battlefield. It causes those areas protected to be almost immune to damage from cutting and piercing weapons and is only able to be seriously compromised by blunt impact weapons or those that concentrate a large amount of force in a small surface area, such as the hook of a halberd or war hammer. The only options for many of their foes therefore is to aim for the gaps in between the plates, a difficult task at the best of times, especially when their basitin opponents are not usually presented with such challenges. This is owing to the fact that most human and keidran armies do not feature many heavily armoured troops, especially among the peasantry that make up the bulk of their forces. However, this state of affairs was not always the case and it is in fact only relatively recently that such armaments became standard issue across the whole of the basitin military. For many centuries of warfare, basitins went into battle armoured not in plate but in gambeson and mail as they were the best protective equipment available at the time. The difficulty in gathering and refining enough iron and steel into large plates meant that such items usually went to senior officers, but even then there was certainly nothing large enough to turn into a cuirass or cuisses and so mail was the de facto standard across the military.

Shown here is a Shieldbearer from about the era of the Contact Wars, when the basitins first crossed the Grand Sea and encountered (and fought against) keidran and humans for the first time. One of the chief things to note is that it was not only the armour of the basitins that evolved with time but their weapons along with it. While modern Shieldbearers are equipped with kite shields and short swords, Shieldbearers of this era sport a large round shield and a spear. This is because, lacking plate, soldiers are much more vulnerable to enemy attacks of all kinds then they would be centuries later and so it made much more sense to keep your enemies as far away as possible with a long spear then it did to close with them brandishing a short sword. To that end, Shieldbearers of the era fought in a phalanx formation not too dissimilar from later halberdiers (which at this time did not exist), with the ranks behind the first pointing their spears through the gaps between the soldiers in front of them so that a charging enemy had multiple spear points to evade before they could even begin to threaten the men in the first rank.

Shieldbearers were armoured with an iron helmet, riveted together out of two pieces of metal and shaped with a conical tip in order to slough off blows to either side rather than absorbing the impact fully. Beneath the helmet was worn a mail coif attached to an aventail that draped over the throat and the top part of the chest and shoulders and under the coif itself was a padded arming cap to keep the mail off their fur and to provide additional protection from blunt impact. This setup was repeated for the body armour which was comprised of a quilted gambeson which extended all the way down to just below the elbows on the arms and just below the knees on the legs. Even by itself, the gambeson provided significant protection from cuts as well as minor blunt protection but when combined with the mail hauberk on top, these effects were magnified several fold. Extending to just above the elbows on the arms and about mid-way down the thighs on the legs, the riveted mail of the kind worn by the basitins during the Contact Wars was impervious to cuts from swords and held up well to piercing strikes from spears and long ranged arrow volleys (however short ranged volleys from powerful bows and crossbows were still liable to go through). Where it really suffered however is blunt protection as the non-structured mail links dissipated none of the force from a heavy impact weapon, leaving the gambeson as the only protection from such arms. Shieldbearers wore no lower leg protection but did have partial arm protection in the form of small iron plates covering the front of their forearms. This cloth and metal protection, when combined with the coverage from the large metal-rimmed wooden round shield provided a good defence against most of the hazards liable to be found on a battlefield some 300 or so years ago. It was certainly more protection than the meagre armaments given to the poor bastards standing against them and it helped establish the basitin’s legend as un-killable warriors for whom deadly blows that would have slain any of their assailant’s compatriots merely bounced off harmlessly, allowing the basitins to close in for the slaughter.

Armouring its soldiers in this manner lasted in the Eastern Basitin state for hundreds of years and it was only with the development of new metal-extracting and working techniques that the development of plate (and the subsequent transformation of the basitin soldiery into what they are today) really started. The obvious question therefore is what developmental steps will be taken next? It is likely that the current soldier’s pattern of armour will eventually evolve to be very close to that worn by senior officers: almost total plate coverage with virtually no gaps that would truly make the basitin legions invincible. However, there is another potential route to be taken. Rumours abound of strange goings on in the alchemist’s laboratories located deep underneath Hohlen Hold; of strange noises emanating at all times of the day, bangs and crashes accompanied by plumes of grey smoke rising from chimney stacks and the ever-present scent of sulphur hanging in the air. As once the miners and metallurgists enabled a military revolution, so too one day might these alchemists, who return to the surface with their fur blackened and singed and rubbing their ears to get rid of the ringing sounds which plague them. What the eventual form this might take however, none but the alchemists and the high command know, and they are not telling.

Basitins are the creation of Tom Fischbach over at http://twokinds.keenspot.com/