Last time we had a quick look at officers, and in the installment before that we touched briefly on the subject of mounted soldiers. In a roundabout sort of way, this article ties the previous two installments together by addressing cavalry and knights.
Cavalrymen are easily the most dashing members of an army. Consider Queen Boudicca fighting from her chariot, jousting knights, sabre-wielding soldiers in the nineteenth century, the riders of Rohan; history, fiction and legend is rife with examples of warriors on horseback striking fear into the hearts of their enemies. They are the élite; they have horses and superior equipment, usually because they belong to the nobility or are at least reasonably rich. Correctly used, cavalry can give infantry units a really hard time. Misuse them and you end up paying a higher price than you imagined: you'll have pissed a load of money up the wall, rubbed out a generation of young noblemen and demoralised the rest of your army to boot.
Like the other articles in this series, I'll begin by giving a brief account of the skills and feats that are the most useful to a cavalryman, regardless of rank. After that I'll diverge from the usual format and present a few historical examples of horsemen: the Romans, the Parthians, the Normans and medieval knights, discussing briefly their usage on the battlefield, and conclude with ideas on how non-human races might use cavalry and give a few pointers on using cavalry properly.
Bear in mind that this isn't an exhaustive or definitive treatment of cavalry in the d20 system. History is positively riddled with variations of the basic cavalry types, and I simply don't have the time to address them all. If response to this article is encouraging enough, however, I can easily see myself putting up a sequel of sorts. The Samurai certainly deserve attention, as do the Huns, the Mongols and the Polish Uhlans.
This article contains little about the code of chivalry, as vital as it was to the training of medieval knights. That subject merits an article in itself, and to keep research for this piece down to a manageable level I have chosen to confine my efforts to looking at the military advantages of cavalry and game-mechanical interpretations of these abilities. With that in mind, let us start by looking at cavalry skills in the d20 system.