I’d choose a big medieval battle like Agincourt or something. Medieval times interests me, and I’d like to see the long bows in action. Might pick a battle with Trebuchets though cos they’re cool

  • 🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦@ttrpg.networkEnglish
    8·
    4 days ago

    I’d go back to about 222CE to the period of the Battle of Yiling. Not for the battle itself, but for the aftermath.

    See, the novel Three Kingdoms mentions an incident where famed genius general Zhuge Liang ambushed an army chasing them down near Yufu, which is near present-day Zigui County, Hubei Province.

    There are two versions of the story. In the first he uses a “Stone Sentinel Maze” to trap the pursuing army of Lu Xun of Wu while his own and Liu Bei’s troops escape. They wandered, lost, in this bizarre arrangement of natural stones until they were guided out by a local elder, but by then the people they were chasing were long gone.

    The second version has him using an “Eight Trigram Formation” to confound and trap the Wei army commanded by Sima Yi, before magnanimously releasing it, demonstrating both that he could have destroyed said army, but chose not to.

    These are fiction, I stress, but they’re fiction based on folklore, and folklore often has a basis in tenuous, grossly distorted fact. (For example the story of Hou Yi shooting the ten suns is very credibly a story based on a calendar reform that introduced China’s solilunar taking ten days off a month to bring the calendar in line with the novel creation of the 24 solar forms. The shooting of ten suns may have been a folkloric encoding of a calendar change.) So for the facts of this clear work of fiction:

    1. The Battle of Yiling is documented very well, and is supported by physical evidence.
    2. Zhuge Liang is a historical personage who was noted as being a polymath genius, including, but not limited to, military strategy.
    3. The Battle of Yiling did not go well for Liu Bei (it effectively destroyed his army) and he was, in fact, chased by Lu Xun mercilessly after the fact.
    4. The territory around Zigui has some of the most confounding terrain imaginable with weird rock formations and treacherous nearness to riverbanks.

    So it is not out of the question that Zhuge Liang in desperation misled or trapped a chasing army in the weird terrain around Zigui giving the remnants of Liu Bei’s army (and Liu Bei himself) the opportunity to finally escape. Then, over time, as history faded and mythology grew around the giants of the Three Kingdoms era, a desperate, last-ditch effort to escape turns into a brilliant military plan in which Zhuge Liang toyed with a rival general in a catch-and-release program.

    I want to watch and see what really happened. I want to see the truth behind the millennia of myth.