January Ask The Dudes Roundup!

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Each month we want to take a moment and highlight some of our questions from our Discord community here in our Patreon Posts to spark conversation or share knowledge to with our tight knit community. We look forward to bringing these posts to you each month and hope you find it valuable. As a reminder, with your Patreon membership you have exclusive access to our Discord as well.

Question: from @Archaeopteryxn on Discord. 
(In Dungeons of Drakkenheim, you wrote that) "Mannfred and Cecilia Von Kessel nearly bankrupted themselves by launching multiple large-scale military expeditions attempting to reclaim Drakkenheim, all of which failed." What would you say this looked like if you were to paint a picture of these expeditions for your players or another GM? I imagine thousands of troops marching into the city under banners, slaying monsters block by block but falling to the haze and contamination as they try to remain in the city for more than 24 hours. But they'd know enough about this by the second and third expeditions to go in shifts, right? What were the major killers or points of failure there? It's a far-out-there question that doesn't matter in the context of the current setting 15 years later. But it helps me visualize the changes in the city as it evolved into its current state. (Paraphrased)

Answer: From Monty Martin
You give them too much credit. These original expeditions didn't know anything about the Haze or Contamination. They had only scraps of information from survivors of the initial disaster about what sort of threats and monsters might lurk in the ruins. Although Contamination and the Haze were well understood at the start of the campaign, it was not easy or obvious how it worked on the initial expeditions. They thought contamination was a poison or infection, perhaps something they could avoid by protecting themselves from breathing in the Haze. They were profoundly wrong, and it took multiple failed expeditions before they realized that. Every day, soldiers are not monster hunters, so they are unprepared to face the eldritch abominations of Drakkenheim. The Hooded Lanterns have hard-won experience, but the vast majority of the original expeditionary forces were regular soldiers trained for entirely conventional warfare against other humans, with zero experience with supernatural threats.

The initial expeditions did not go "block to block" slaying monsters. They carefully strode into the mists with fear in their hearts, and panic quickly set in when they were beset by the mutated creatures of Drakkenheim, which were unlike anything the soldiers had ever seen before. The expeditions often became terror-stricken routes as the soldiers got lost in the mist when their morale broke and fear set in, where all their organization and discipline crumbled in the face of the supernatural horrors of the ruins.