During the battle of Sustagul, the rangers faced more than their share of horrors from the advancing orcs and their elite fighters, the Guzzim Hazadi. The orcs pushed into the city with speed and violence of action, crossing the open ground out of the foothills in their attempts to gain the city gates. To stall the rangers from getting their long distance hate on, the orcs tried their best to employ longbowmen and catapults to lay waste to the city defenses. 

But all that bronze age, distance projected violence had nothing on the ranger mortar teams. 

Ranger companies typically operate a heavy weapons section, which includes the tube bloopers running high angle indirect fire to the enemy. Units looking to work lean, can equip the mortar teams with 60mm mortars. The lightweight, hand carried M224—60 mm mortar—can dish out their payloads at up to two miles, in favorable conditions.

As the orcs stormed out of the hills or tried to get their siege weapons into catapult range, the mortar teams went to work. Rangers hunkered down in wait for the enemy to pass lines of advance and pre-plotted targets. Dropping MAPAM—Mortar Anti-Personnel / Anti-Material—the rangers thinned the ranks of the elite Guzzim Hazadi and shattered the advance of their cavalry.

To keep the enemy from gaining advantage at night, the rangers used their advanced NODs to scour the terrain, followed by launching powerful illumination rounds over the target area to ruin enemy infra-vision to make them easier to spot. Dropping smoke rounds onto the area allowed for the rangers to mask themselves from the enemy, while still giving the mortar teams room to lob rounds onto their targets. 

In the end, the Guzzim Hazadi figured the mortars were like the catapults using fixed positions as targeting points. The orcs slithered away from the impact area to a different side of the city to make their advance, where Talker and his team improvised heavily to bring the fight to the enemy. 

Pick up, Never Shall I fail and get your dose of high angle hell!

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One of the great facets of tabletop RPGs is it allows for explorations of themes the books might not have covered, yet. This was surely the case in the play tests for the Forgotten Ruin Role Playing Game when the Ruin revealed some characters to be something other than human.

In one character’s case, the Ruin had been crippling him throughout the arc, until he finally transformed into a werewolf and ate one of his teammates. 

It begs the question, what’s a Ranger to do when his battle buddy, the guy he would take a bullet for, changes into a monster that can’t be controlled? 

In the main series, we see several instances where a character is "Ruin revealed" and yet their personality, their character, their heart, remains true to who they are. Tanner being the biggest example. Cursed in his grave, he rose to become a champion in undeath, fighting for the little guy who was still small as a ghost. Even though he became more monstrous as the series went on, the man, Tanner, kept his humanity and protected those who couldn’t protect themselves.

Monroe’s nature of constantly going beast mode led to him becoming a minotaur. Even though he towered over everyone and would become easily enraged in combat, the man inside the monster remained. He protected street urchins at the docks and eventually turned them into a hatchet force for the Rangers. Even as they became his personal aquatic assault team, he cared for them as if they were his own kids.

In the upcoming series DELTA KINGS, we get to see the reverse happen. In the first book, member of the crew supporting the operators begins her transformation. In the second, she becomes the focal point for an initial mission to a city where the operation to rescue her goes awry. But the team isn’t there to protect their friend from the world. In fact, the opposite is true because the Ruin revealed her to be truly horrific. Thus the mission changes as the team must now protect. protecting the world from her. 

So, how should the Rangers respond to the Ruin revealing true monsters in their people? Should they hunt their former friends and imprison them? Put them down? How would you handle your battle buddy going over to the dark side, like McCluskey?

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After the fall that separated Sergeant Joe and Talker from the rest of the Ranger task force, the last thing they expected to find was a legion of Accadian soldiers. As strange as their appearance was, it paled in comparison to being stalked by the Lost Tribe of Elves. 

Wearing desert garb and riding on giant spiders, the Lost Elves prowling the shifting sands of the Sunken Realms had discovered Talker and Joe tracking their way back to the Rangers. Seeing them as prey worthy of their attention, the Lost Elves hunted the duo through unrelenting sandstorms, even though the Rangers laid deadly traps to slow them down.

In noting their attire and tactics, Talker recognized the bedouin elves for the menace he’d been warned against. Last of Autumn had briefed him on the races of elves, noting that of all the different tribes out there, none were so vile and malicious as the Lost. 

Normal elvish tribes chose to live apart from mankind because of their deep-rooted traditions  and centuries-long lifespans. Their nature was such that it made it hard for humans to relate to them, fostering distrust between the races. But Autumn had explicitly warned Talker about the Lost Tribe. 

To stop the Lost Tribe from gaining dark powers, the other elvish races banded together to check their evil designs. Generations of warfare eventually led to the Lost Tribe being driven underground, where they were free to practice their dark rituals away from persecution.

Autumn explained that they both worshiped and hated the Spider Queen, the dark goddess responsible for the state of the Ruin. The Lost Tribe hunted every corner and shadow for signs of the Queen’s passing, in hopes of killing her and taking her powers for their own. 

In the wind-swept sands of the Sunken Desert, Lost Tribe warriors might have met their match when they happened upon Sergeant Joe using his predicament to teach Talker what it meant to be a Ranger. The elves thought they were hunting the pair, instead becoming the prey at the mercy of time-tested tactics, guile, and a Ranger’s stubborn refusal to die. 

See the battle unfold in The Book of Joe!

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As members of the Ranger Task Force drift ever closer to the Land of Black Sleep, some of the teams come into contact with the very motivated Accadian Legions.

Quickly acknowledging a kindred spirit in these fighters from the last of the great human outposts, the rangers are quick to fold them into their push to take out HVT Mummy, also known as Süt the Undying. The Legionnaires’ willingness to close with the enemy, firm battlefield doctrine, and their undying hunger to bite off more than they can chew make them a force multiplier for the Rangers.

Especially with their dwindling numbers.

During the battle against the Lost Elves beyond the sunken desert, SGT Joe and Walker take refuge with the last members of an Accadian Legion cut off from the main body of their own mission.

When the lost elves come, the Accadians work their soldiers into phalanxes. Men with shields interlock them together to form a barrier, and the men behind use sword, spear, and arrows to drive back the fast and deadly elves. When the enemy elves deploy massive war spiders against the phalanx, Talker and Joe learn to work within the phalanx to address the problem and drive on to escape the X.

With a thirst for warfare that matched their own, the legionnaires’ leader, Captain Tyrus, saw the benefit of the two errant rangers and their weapons. He folded them into his battle plan, working the new fighters in and through his phalanxes wherever a hole would form. In rescuing the last of the legion from what would have been certain death, Joe and Talker secure the Accadian’s allegiance for the fight to come. 

As they made their way into Süstagul, the rangers once again used Captain Tyrus and his legionnaires to create phalanx formations to fend off the Guzim Hassadi, allowing the rangers to flank and use their superior firepower to clean the special forces orcs off the battlefield.

Check out more of the Accadian Legion joining the ranger mission in The Book Of Joe!

Not all Ranger Operations involve kicking down doors or swinging a Carl G round into a hill giant’s grill. Sometimes, they have to create a killing ground for their enemies, and that’s where all the fun of the scouts comes along with the lethality of a honey badger on crack. 

While traps, snares, and deadfalls are easily constructed, they take immense amounts of time to fabricate correctly, so they’re not spotted and the target falls prey to them. And when a ranger doesn’t have that kind of time to put to task, he can improvise with more than his share of High-Ex!

One of the best ways to cover a back trail against an advancing force of Orcs and Ogres looking to do the Rangers dirty is to set explosive munitions as traps in their path. Methods for emplacement will differ because of time, terrain, and tactical factors, but one thing can be sure, anyone coming after them who hits the switch ain’t gonna have a lot of time to regret their poor life choices.

Chief, and easiest among these methods, is the M-18 Claymore mine. Originally fielded during the Vietnam War, the Claymore is a directional explosive munition that fires 100, 3.2 millimeter steel balls at a speed of close to 4,000 feet per second. The balls are cast into a resin and packed over packed C-4 explosive.

For the rangers, tagging their back trails for Orc hatchet forces to run afoul of the Claymore, the standard remote firing device (RFD) is really substandard. That would require a ranger to be on overwatch on the path and trigger RFD, setting off the implanted blasting cap to trigger the mine. Instead, running low visibility tripwire across the most probable path of pursuit will ensure a good number of casualties among the Orcs, Ogres, and gobs running after them.

When the mine detonates, it spreads the now deformed steel balls and the resin packing as flack to shred targets in its cone shaped blast, up to a distance of 50 meters. The explosion also spreads the fragmentation at a height of 2 meters (over six and a half feet), so those taller gobs such as Ogres and Trolls are getting cut out at the knees.

Gobs are just plain toast. 

Modern innovations such as radio remote detonators, laser trips, and trail cams to watch the lane of approach on armor mounted battle boards are all kit the Forge techs can print for Rangers on the ground. But as most places the rangers go are massively underdeveloped, a good ol’ tripwire should do the trick and cut down on the amount of kit each Ranger has to carry. 

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One of the iconic weapons from “back in the day,” was the simplified, man-portable grenade launchers that made their debut during the Vietnam war. Firing the forty millimeter grenade, these single shot, shoulder fired launchers lent a degree of lethality uncommon seen in the average infantry squad before. 

Innovations quickly followed, where the hooligans that created the XM style rifles (short AR-16s, also called the CAR-15) developed short, single shot, reloadable launchers that fit to the underside of the rifle with the removal of the bottom handguard. 

Not to be outdone, the manufacturers at Springfield Armory told the army they could fit the M-79 (which was more user friendly) to the soldier’s carbines AND their M-16 rifles. Thus, the star of TV and movies galore, the M-203 was born.

Capable of firing a multitude of different grenade types, the military employed this weapon system for decades as the premier launcher for infantry units. For special operators who liked to keep their weapon packages smaller, they often just ran with the old school hand held M-79 to lob grenades out to 300+ meters.

Grenade types included High Explosive (HE), High Explosive Dual Purpose (HEDP), Illumination Rounds (Parachute flares), and even specialty munitions. The special types were innovations that came in fighting in urbanized areas, such as the Air Burst (for enemies behind deep cover) and Thermobaric (when you absolutely have to cook everyone). 

In Underspire, we see the successor to the M203, the M320 come into play at several points during the story. While fighting a giant golem and their lizard-men handlers, the side loading, tech heavy launcher was used to great effect to punish the enemy and back them away so Big Lou’s fire team and the Dwarven Sappers could get a better bite on the target. 

Later in the story, dwarven ingenuity plus some forethought on the part of the Rangers let us see the difference between the low-velocity launchers carried by the team, and high-velocity forty mike mike grenades used to great effect.

Want more grenade lobbing Dwarves in action? Check out Forgotten Ruin War Journal: Underspire!

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During their first few weeks in the Ruin, the Rangers coming through the QST were instantly seen as a threat by every warlord and dark power in the region. When less than a hundred men successfully hold off an entire orc horde and their magical support monkeys (mages) for days, someone’s bound to take notice.

In comes the dreaded lich, Toth-Azom.

Running thousands of undead as an ad hoc fighting force to wipe out the rangers before they can become a threat, the lich had marched his forces on FOB Hawthorne. The rangers had detected the incoming assault via drone reconnaissance, prompting Captain Knifehand to send out scout teams to probe the enemies. In the ensuing violence to put the lich down, they’d encountered many versions of undead and been forced to learn on the job the differing ways to kill them.

One of the deadliest and hard to kill versions were the wraiths and specters. Malevolent spirits cursed in draining life from the living. Both types appear as wispy shadows on the terrain, like ghosts. At close range, specters appear as a twisted version of their former selves while wraiths are the silhouette of who they used to be. 

Their danger comes in their touch, which in Kennedy’s game of funny dice and books, each strike robs the victim of character levels, making them less powerful on each successive strike. For the Rangers, the wraiths and specters robbed them of years, draining their life force so that a man who might have lived into his sixties or seventies would only make it to his thirties. That’s if he lived through the encounter.

During the assault and due to being woefully under supplied in magic weapons, the ranger force had to rely on high explosives and mortar strikes to rid themselves of the dangerous spirits. Calling down the steel rain on targets seemed to do enough damage quickly enough to destroy the wraiths, while shattering hordes of skeletons and zombies as a bonus. 

To see more of the battle as it unfolds, check out, Hit & Fade! 

[Galaxy’s Edge Insiders have complete access to the audio book for Hit & Fade on their Insiders Launch Pad]

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Stomping through the wilds of Europe as they ran toward the southern coast, The Rangers fought their share of Orcs and Gobs. While monstrous fighters like ogres and trolls are fearsome because of their strength, the goblinoid races make up for such qualities in sheer, overwhelming numbers. 

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Unconventional Warfare sometimes calls for unconventional ways to insert to target. And while airborne, and posing as a local sees the most use, sometimes a Ranger’s gotta get wet.

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An unsupervised private is like leaving the door open for a tornado. 

The old NCO saying couldn’t have been more true when Talker was trying to get his mind right during the battle for Sustagul. A young PFC approached the Ranger linguist, looking for some help in an obscure dialect, leading the pair to explore the more exotic markets deeper into the city.

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One of the most dangerous threats the Rangers could have faced was discovering one of their own had gone to the other side of the fight. The side that uses oppression and outright evil to accomplish its goals, to the ruin of everything they were supposed to protect. 

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When the Rangers first hit boots on ground, they faced hordes of enemies all looking to overwhelm their position. Of all that fighting, they only managed to take a single creature prisoner to gain any kind of intel.

Jabba, the Goblin.

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Magic is the biggest game changer for the rangers dumping out of the QST. But not every ranger is a Kennedy, so willing to embrace the fantasy that casting spells comes easy for them. 

In Underspire, we see a group of dwarves dispatched to retake a fallen dwarven city below Sustagül prior to the second battle. The fantasy sapper team had scoured the Forgotten Ruin for over a decade to find a host of magic items to give them an edge over their enemies. Of what they brought with them, the most useful to the Rangers were the potions.

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Powerful, majestic, and extremely territorial, the sphinxes in the Lands of Black Sleep are a real pain in the fourth point of contact for the Rangers looking to get their hit on for HVT Mummy.

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One of the biggest challenges to ongoing operations in the Ruin is communications. Long distance commo isn’t the formulaic matter it was before the Rangers dropped into the QST. Even though the forge keeps the boys from the Batts flush with new gear to keep them talking, radios are a constant problem as they continue to face the monsters at their gates. 

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The enemies of man in the Forgotten Ruin have plenty of tricks up their sleeves to make things difficult for the rangers. Luckily for our experts on all things violence of action, the rangers have a few pieces of tech to offset their enemies’ ability to push back.

Now in the Ruin over a year, the rangers worked running a Speed Ball down into a science.

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Although magic is a major driving force in the Forgotten Ruin, there is no more terrible version of it than a curse.

We get our first taste of them in the premier novel, where a young ranger manning a fighting position encounters a witch that lays her hex on him. This Rock Star PFC, only twenty-one years old, is rapidly aged into the body of a man in his fifties. 

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Early in the Forgotten Ruin, Talker comments on the Task Force Rangers embracing the fantasy.

While at the time, he was referring to using the Hunter’s Fellowship and Kurtz practically swallowing a bottle of Pepto to get over his discomfort at the magic on display, many of the Rangers couldn’t ignore the utility they were seeing. 

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During their first steps in the ruin, the Rangers learned that although they had ultra modern weapons and gear, this didn’t make the less advanced enemy kit any less dangerous. 

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In the Ruin, anything of a tech level higher than most Bronze Age equipment will erode over time, eventually becoming useless. Synthetic flight suits will degrade, modern firearms break, and anything with a circuit board is doomed to its eventual destruction. Having a working Forge will keep the characters supplied in modern gear for as long as they have access to it. 

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