Effortposts Around Chapters We Like (From Custom Campaigns)

Chapter 3: Chevauchee (Drums of War)


(First and foremost, I promise I’m not biased at all towards the creator of this thread. No favoritism whatsoever. Promise.)

In the past year-and-change, Parrhesia’s Drums of War has shot to prominence as one of the most popular hacks in FEU and its adjacent communities. It’s known for a compelling plot of political and personal intrigue, a cast of fun characters with fully-written supports, and some tightly tuned gameplay and map design. Unfortunately, there’s no effortpost thread for writing (yet), so it’s only the last of the three we’ll be focusing on today.

Chapter 3 is very early in Drums of War’s story, and is one of - if not the - best chapters in the game. It keeps its size very contained and manageable, with most of the chapter’s action taking place within the walls of the town, and packs that space with challenging enemy formations that are satisfying to take down. The three entrances to the town provide room for several different approaches to seizing the settlement, and the shops on the right provide an additional reward for pushing further and putting yourself closer to the riskiest parts of the map.

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(I may or may not be using the FEBuilder debugger to skip around and grab these screenshots.)

Above all else, though, Chapter 3 is defined by its unorthodox objective: to provoke one of the commanders of an overwhelming enemy force into charging you, then flee back whence you came into the wilderness. While this general level flow - darting out to complete an objective, then back to an escape point at the chapter’s starting position, facing time pressure all the while - isn’t entirely unheard of in ROM hacks and custom campaigns, it’s still very rare, and always makes for a memorable twist on moving through a map.

Even among its already-rare compatriots, Chapter 3’s specific objective at the far end of the map provides a pleasant array of methods with which to get the job done. All you need to do is provoke a commander, not kill them - just triggering a boss quote is enough. You can have a tanky unit like Baros the Paladin lure them into melee before fleeing to safety, get Helje the potential ransom Pegasus Knight to soar over the fence while taking her shot, or even commandeer an enemy ballista with which to snipe at your quarry from a safe distance.

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The turn after you provoke one of the main army commanders, yet another force shows up from behind - a small company of reinforcements emerging from right near your starting point, lead by a powerful mini-boss in his own right. As your army’s frantically fleeing back the way it came, they have this new guy to deal with.

Auclair and his men are a pretty reasonable threat on their own, but they’re almost guaranteed to catch your weak backline troops - after all, the good units are the ones who’ve needed to push on and survive baiting a boss. This can, admittedly, really blindside a player - if they don’t have anyone near the starting point to reasonably fend off Auclair, they might just die. Still, the core concept of this reinforcement squad showing up by the escape point and providing a final challenge to the fleeing party stands out as an addition to this already clever objective.

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On top of that, this chapter also contains comedy! (The word’s still out on if two milkmen are going here.) Deep into the town, a mini-boss Knight guards the gate of an Arena, something many GBA Fire Emblem veterans recognize as an incredible source of money and experience points. Drums of War has several Arenas throughout the game, but they’re also the source of a running joke - none of them are actually usable.

When you try to enter the arena here in Chapter 3, the gladiators don’t take kindly to your intrusion, and one emerges to fight you for real on the map. (After all, why would they? You’re invading a foreign country. They’re not going to let you participate in local bloodsporting events.) Like Auclair, this does have the unfortunate problem of potentially blindsiding a player, but this is made up for by just being really funny. It also introduces the unusable arena as a recurring concept, setting up the future iterations of it all the way to the end.

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My favorite thing about Chapter 3, though? The way it justifies this whole unorthodox setup in the plot. After an arduous journey just to reach the front lines of the Confederation’s invasion force, your party is immediately sent on a near-suicide mission by a callous general, trying to distract part of a much larger army so his main body of troops can win the battle. Provoking a powerful enemy into pursuing you is usually a stupid move tactically, but taking that risk is the whole point of the chapter - the broader schemes of war, which don’t value your life, don’t give you a choice in that matter. That callous attitude towards sacrificing the lives of Roxelana’s company is the whole point of Act 1’s story, and this chapter uses gameplay to directly convey that and build up towards the main character’s pivotal decision just a few chapters later.

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One of Drums of War’s big mechanical gimmicks is the boss ransom system - after each chapter, you’re given the opportunity to either recruit one of the chapter’s bosses, or to turn them in for cold, hard cash. In Chapter 3, you get Lucetta the Monk. I don’t have the word count to talk about her as a unit here (though maybe my friend @bpat does over in Parr’s other effortpost thread), but rest assured that she’ll be a compelling addition to the team if you take her.

When she’s not in the party, though, she’s a neat little threat at the very start of the chapter, wielding a horse and armor-effective tome that punishes charging ahead with mounted units from behind the safety of an armored squadron. Using a named miniboss to accentuate her role in this encounter makes the specifics of that fight memorable, even as you keep on pushing into the town. She’s a fun addition story-wise too; as I discussed earlier, this chapter and the one shortly after are a particularly tense, serious section of plot. Damn near every word out of Lucetta’s mouth, comic relief character that she is, defuses the tension of the chapter just a little and helps you prepare for the danger and moral grayness to come.

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(This is, apparently, the only time the word “absolution” appears in all of DoW’s script.)

My previous post in this thread, about Chapter 9x from Absolution (by ZessDynamite), was also focused on the nature of a chapter’s objective and how it shapes play. Chevauchee and To a Dark Place take almost opposite approaches to that same concept, though; the Absolution (by ZessDynamite) chapter turns a staid and well-understood Fire Emblem objective into something very different with clever party composition and enemy design, while the Drums of War chapter uses well-executed but basic foes and its own unique take on unit balance to manage a very new and ingenious objective.

When you, dear reader, continue designing your own chapters, there’s lots of potential inspiration to take from both schools of thought (and from more conventional FE objectives and map flows, too). In any case, even if you don’t plan on making any hacks of your own, chapters like these just might change how you think about the nature of map objectives as a whole - and even if they don’t, they’ll still be pretty darn fun to read and play.

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