The Cargo War

The Conflict

Prelude

The Third Dwarven Dynasty had an arrangement with the disparate micronations of maritime humanity: Take our stuff from point A to point B for price C or we'll take our offer to ship D. This didn't allow a lot of accumulation of material wealth for most of humanity's history, but it was a living and better than conforming to a strict caste system on land or being gradually pushed out of all the good fishing grounds. This worked fine until the conflict between the main branch of the Dwarven Imperial family and the Sóþspeller branch got under way in earnest and both branches started press ganging humans in port to their own military vessels. To press gang a human away from their own crew is essentially to doom them to never seeing their family again, so the humans were big mad. This resentment could have gone the way of most peasant rebellions: a few improved laws after a hearty crushing, except an intrepid crew found the Recondite Islands at about this time and made the decision to share it in high secrecy among a number of other crews. Now, humanity had a place to run and regroup, with fresh water, and food, and the dwarves didn't know how to find it. Now, they could organize in earnest.

Battlefield

The battlefield was the open oceans, the coastlines, and the cargo holds of human merchant vessels themselves. The tactics the humans employed were widely considered dishonorable and cowardly: mutinies, hit and run attacks on Dwarven harbors, and a whole lot of making off with the stuff that they were supposed to take from point A to point B. They would do sneaky awful things, then disappear into seemingly nowhere, then appear with a new name and paint job in territory held by the other faction in the Dwarven conflict and do it all again. The Dwarves might as well have taken a fifth of their worldly possessions and thrown it all into the oceans themselves.

Conflict Type

War

Battlefield Type

Naval

Conflict Result

The piece-by-piece crumbling of the Dwarven Empires

Belligerents

The Recondite Pirates

The Dwarven Empire

Strength

Fast ships, superior navigation, ship-to-ship codes, secret archipelago with food and fresh water.

Big guns, sharp swords, better territory, vast wealth, the ability to conscript a large force at need.

Casualties

Sunk ships with all hands lost, kidnappings in port

Economic losses, sunk ships (quarter given), guarantors thrown overboard, throats slit and officers marooned during mutinies, pride.

Objectives

Revenge for and deterrent from press ganging, accumulation of wealth, the sheer joy of pulling one over on a bunch of snobbish tyrants.

Stay in charge, keep their stuff, make other species do what they want