Samson the Great

Summary
Samson the Great was an ancient Muddite warrior who eventually rose to the rank of Bannerlord and successfully united the Heartlander tribes into a confederation to expel the Chagyar Khanate from Eastern Elgenea. He is regarded as a God within the Samsonist religion and is viewed as the founder of the Kingdom of the Samsonites and the subsequent Samsonite Empire.

Early Life
Prior to Samson's birth, Muddah and the rest of the Heartlands had experienced nearly a century's worth of inconsistent harvests, leading to frequent famine and plague. At the time, this was blamed on the impious and greedy leadership of several of the region's strongest warlords, which had angered the all-mother. The famine was, according to ancient theologians, a curse placed upon the tribes until they regained their piety. During this time, Much of the Heartlands had come under the occupation of the Mokosh horde under the Chagyar clan. The Chagyar horde had forced the heartlanders to become their tributaries, taking a bounty of food from each of the tribes, worsening the effects of poor harvests.

The Muddite prophet, Leopold, had been leading his tribe in annual sacrifices for 8 years, hoping the gods would free the Muddites from their Mokosh overlords. In the 9th year, a comet passed over Muddah during the sacrifice. In the coming spring, a woman in the tribe became pregnant with the child of an unknown Kitzbuheler man. The Muddite Bannerlord, Baldric, demanded that she be sacrificed for her act of impiety. Leopold, however, came to her defense and refused to allow the execution. When winter came at the end of the year, another comet passed over the town, and by the next morning, the woman had given birth to a son. He was named Samson and his mother opted to place him under the care of Leopold.

Samson's early life was dominated by the constant rejection by his fellow Muddites. Accounts of his early life mention several instances of other Muddites mocking him for his curled, brown hair, which distinguished him from the other Muddites who were typically fair-haired with straight locks. This constant ostracisation by the other Heartlanders resulted in Samson adopting a standoffish disposition. Frederic Böhling described Samson in his writings as "A stoic and just soul, but also one that is stubborn and incapable of compromising his own convictions, even if doing so is advantageous."

Early Adulthood
Leopold educated Samson in spiritual matters and in leadership skills, in the hopes that the young boy would one day become a great leader for the tribe. However, this was made difficult by Samson's own disdain for the other Muddites who constantly tormented him. Samson went through a streak of rebellion against the tribe in his early adulthood, ultimately resulting in the accidental destruction of the tribe's altar, where sacrifices were presented. This further worsened the tribe's opinion of him. After this event, Samson had a change of heart, knowing that he'd potentially incurred the wrath of the gods, he spent the rest of his life hoping to reconcile this act by living as piously as possible. When Leopold presented him to the Warriors as his new choice of Bannerlord when Samson was at the age of 20, the Muddite warriors scolded Leopold, and many even refused to acknowledge him as their head.

Samson, however, acknowledged their criticisms and accepted responsibility, and in the seasons before harvest, he spent every day working to construct a new altar. By the time winter had come to an end, Samson had constructed a larger and more intricate altar, which contained the ancient stories of their faith etched into the stone. This act secured the allegiance of several of the warriors who had previously scorned him, including Henric, the most renowned warrior of the tribe, who had previously mocked Leopold for presenting Samson as his choice for Bannerlord.

Bannerlord
In the first raiding season, Samson led the Heartlanders on raids against the Mokosh, rather than other Heartlanders. This was unorthodox, as the raiding season was typically meant to gather materials to help carry the tribe through winter. Samson's raid on Mokosh posts across the Heartlands became the first act of defiance against the Mokosh, and word quickly spread throughout the rest of the Heartlands. When Samson returned to Muddah at the end of that winter, he offered the horses of three Mokosh captains he'd slain in his raids as a sacrifice to the Paternal Spirits. Throughout the next two seasons, he began dispatching representatives to the nearby tribes, seeking to form a pact against the Mokosh.

This process was very slow in its early years, as Muddah was a tribe renowned for its fierce raiders, and many of the nearby tribes were hesitant to join Samson's confederacy. However, his marriage with the Helene, the daughter of the Chief of Chavin, made many of the tribes in the Eastern Heartlands begin to respect his movement, and shortly after, those in the west began to join him as well. In his 5th year as Bannerlord, he gathered enough support to create an organised resistance against the Khan. In this time, the Old Khan of the Chagyar horde died, and his many sons began fighting between each other to become the sole Khan. This splintering of the Chagyar Horde provided the best opportunity for Samson to begin his attack on the Mokosh, and so he made ready for war.

The Iron Warband
In 26 AS, he dispatched couriers to each of the tribes he'd allied himself with, each of them carrying an Iron Armband. These bands were a symbol of the Muddite's commitment to liberating the many tribes and were made of the limited iron supply in the region immediately around Muddah, which would have otherwise gone to the production of weapons and armour. When the Warbands of the many tribes rallied at Immenwerder, the Bannerlords of the various tribes arrived wearing these bands. The combined force of the Heartlanders under Samson, at this time called the Great Bannerlord, was from then on referred to as the Iron Warband.

Expulsion of the Horde (26 - 30 AS)
The early campaigns of the Iron Warband revolved around the expulsion of the many Mokosh encampments and posts throughout the Heartlands. Samson meticulously led his troops on a campaign from the East to the West, pushing the Mokosh out of the Heartlands and into the Elgen Mountains. Mokosh forces in the heartlands were mostly small cavalry forces which relied on ranged attacks, and Samson made effective use of dense shield wall formations to negate their fire. Mokosh forces were unable to combat his force effectively and very frequently would flee, and in some cases would attempt to charge his men only to be quickly dispatched by Heartlander spears. By 30 AS, he had swept from Chavin all the way back to Immenwerder, effectively purging the Mokosh from nearly the whole of the Heartlands. The tribes in the east began sending their tributes to Muddah to supply Samson's Warband, and the warband's size began to steadily grow as Samson continued to show success in battle.

War with Ikha Chagyar (30-32 AS)
After Ikha Chagyar, the youngest of the old Khan's sons, made a pact with his eldest brother to divide their lands evenly, he began turning his attention toward Samson's rebellion. In 30 AS, after having lost control over much of the lands in the East, he gathered the forces of the many clans beneath him, forming a large Host of warriors to crush Samson's Iron Warband. He gathered a large number of experienced cavalrymen, many of them lancers, and marched East toward Muddah.

Samson's force encountered some of Ikha Chagyar's scouts in 31 AS and captured one of them. From this captive, he learned of the Khan's march to Muddah and moved to intercept the enemy force. After consulting with Frederic Böhling, one of his close aides, he decided to divide his force in two, leading a force to directly engage the Khan while another maneuvered to flank him.

Battle of Alricswald (31 AS)
After several weeks of trailing the Khan's force, Samson eventually met with the Khan's horde at Alricswald. The Khan had mistakenly begun marching to the east and eventually found himself deep in the dense woodlands near Rothringen. The Khan's cavalry couldn't use their typical tactics of ranged combat in this terrain, forcing the Khan to directly engage Samson's force in melee. Samson chose not to contest the defensive ground in this battle, instead positioning himself in a valley. Ikha, looking to achieve a swift victory, decided to charge Samson's force after seeing this, believing that Samson was a poor commander. However, this charge proved devastating for the Khan's men. Samson's infantry made effective use of clever formations, which placed spearmen behind ranks of irregulars, hiding the spears from view and fooling the cavalry into charging against them.

After the cavalry charge failed, much of Chagyar's forces began to fall into disarray, acting individually and ignoring his command. This allowed the Heartlanders to slowly pick off small groups of the Khan's horde rather than face an organised attack. The Khan, seeing that his disorganised force would be unable to combat Samson's in its current state, made a withdrawal hoping to regroup and pose a more organised attack in a successive battle.

Battle of the Elgens (32 AS)
The secondary Heartlander force, under the command of Frederic Böhling harrassed the Khan during his retreat toward the Elgen Mountains. They regrouped with Samson shortly after, and the Iron Warband chased the Khan to a plateau at the base of the mountains. There was very little forest there to inhibit the Khan's cavalry, and while some small hills were present, none provided especially defensive terrain. Samson's force opted to exhaust the enemy, and Samson gave a speech to his men before the fighting commenced. He accepted that the Khan's horsemen were dangerous foes, and that the terrain was not on their side, but told his men that if they held their ground, regardless of whatever happened, that the gods would lead them to victory. Shortly after this speech, a thunderstorm began to roll in over the battlefield.

The Samsonites deployed wooden stakes in a triangular formation, and they formed shield walls along each of the sides. The few archers they had sat at the centre, and fired at whatever they could. The Khan's horse archers, however, rode in circles around the Bannerlord's triangle, slowly whittling down his force. This continued for a while, until the Mokosh ran out of arrows to fire and made ready for a charge. The Khan, now seeking revenge for his humiliation by Samson in the previous battle, personally led a mass charge on the Heartlander position, in spite of their defensive formation. Böhling's account of the battle listed "As many as 1000 Horsemen charging at few hundred men left in Samson's warband." The first wave of this charge failed, but caused much damage to the stakes, creating paths for the next wave to come through. This wave, led by the Khan, attempted to break through, but when they met the Samsonite force, they couldn't break their formation.

At this time, Samson himself came to the aid of the men fighting the Khan's horses, wielding his great two-handed sword. Legendary accounts state that at this time, he cut his way through several men before reaching the Khan, and once he met the enemy commander, lightning flew through the clouds as he swung his blade through the air, knocking the Khan from his horse and into the mud. Seeing the death of the Khan, the Heartlanders let out a "deafening war cry," which caused the Horde to fall into disarray and flee into the countryside, according to Böhling's Chronicle.

King of Muddah
After the successful repulsion of the Mokosh from the Heartlands, Samson's Warband traveled across the various tribes, celebrating their freedom as men returned to their homes. When they finally reached Muddah at the close of 32 AS, Samson was named a hero by his people, who unanimously decided to declare him permanently bannerlord, and the King of the Muddites. Samson took this responsibility and spent the rest of his life strengthening Muddah and building defensive structures around the tribe. He also maintained good relations with many of the former members of his confederacy and maintained a defensive pact with all the Heartlander tribes in the event of a Mokosh retaliation, which never came.

In 49 AS, his wife Helene bore his son, which he named Konrad. He groomed Konrad in the same fashion as Leopold had groomed him, teaching him the many lessons on leadership and religion that he'd learned as a child. However, in 64 AS, Samson and his family vanished without a trace, which led to a period of Chaos in Muddah and across the Heartlands, as rumours of his capture or assassination began to circulate. Several others, however, began to note Leopold's words regarding Samson and began to believe that Samson was a divine guardian sent by the Paternal Spirits to liberate the Heartlanders. The Cult of Samson, which later came to be known as the Samsonites formed the basis of the Samsonist religion and the Samsonite identity.