The garrisons are the soldiers city-states keep in the settlements they cover. Each garrison answers to its own city, and each city has its own name for it. General speech across the Logathriad Sea calls all of them garrisons.

Membership

A garrison has two parts, the post and the muster, and the city recruits each separately.

The post is about ten regular soldiers. The city equips them and sends them to one settlement for a term of a few years. They are on duty every day. Because monster raids kill soldiers, the city recruits for the posts continuously.

The muster is about fifty townspeople drawn from the settlement itself. They farm, fish, and work other trades the rest of the year, and they drill on a schedule the post sets. Most people in a settlement have fought in a raid.

Structure

The garrison headquarters is in the city and handles pay, recruitment, rotation, and supply. Several posts make a district. A district officer travels between the posts in the district, brings the relief force, and decides during a raid whether a settlement holds or evacuates. One experienced soldier leads each post.

Funding

The city-state pays for its posts, including the posts in its smallest settlements. The city provides the muster with armor and weapons.

What the Garrisons Fight

The garrisons defend settlements against the weaker monsters that get pushed into the frontier settlements during monster surges.

The Strongpoint

Every settlement with a post has a strongpoint: stone or banked earth, one door, water inside, and stores for several days. A garrison defends the strongpoint and leaves the rest of the settlement to the monsters.

The drill is the same in most settlements. The post signals, the residents move into the strongpoint, and the garrison either holds it or evacuates the settlement. Once the monster surge has passed, the settlement rebuild the structures.

Raid Frequency

Monsters raid most settlements at least once a year. The garrison stops most of them.

Monsters sometimes overwhelm a garrison. The settlement then evacuates to the next largest city.

Relationships

A garrison reports its own sightings into The Sentries' network and takes its warnings from that network.

Local Variation

Posts differ from one city-state to the next.

Pallas keeps no posts. The Wall closes the narrowest point of the Pallas peninsula, and the land behind it is clear of monsters.

Ambar has few outlying settlements, because the land behind the city is desert. Ambar sells the garrison service to the small settlements along its coast. It defends the settlements that pay and can withdraw the post from a settlement that stops paying.

Character

A garrison defends the people and abandons the buildings.