Defending Medieval Villages From Gluttons and Savages

Question

This sequal to How Can I Protect Medieval Villages From Chompers? concerns only one thing: Chomper Evolutions.

Yeah, that's right, those potentially man-eating walking eggs evolve into even more terrifying monsters. So let's see how deadly these are, shall we?

1. Glutton Gluttons are about the size of a small car, and most of that is their big belly. Their egg-shaped bodies are round in front, coming to a razor-sharp point in the back, and are not only segmented (their shell has bands, like an earthworm's body) but reinforced, in order, by: 1. a thick, tough, rubbery membrane, 2. a layer of shock-absorbing blubber, and 3. a cartilaginous skeleton.

This body ends in a set of sunken eyes encased in a thick "lens" of translucent shell and a huge mouth, a bowl-shaped cavity in the body rimmed with recurved fangs and endowed with a long, tough, strong, and prehensile tongue (basically an octopus tentacle). This mouth is almost always open, but if needed, the Glutton can close it tight. When the jaws open again, a vaccuum is created that sucks in nearby food (think Dunkleostus).

This body is held up by six flexible (but also armored) tube-like legs, each ending in a tripod with suction cups (a tripod of octopus tentacles). Oh, and that shell is fourteen times tougher than tooth enamel and an inch thick, Gluttons can climb walls, and they can spew a bathtub's worth of acid (acid 4x stronger than a regular Chompers). They are also capable of understanding and mimicking human speech, have chimp-level intelligence, and can walk on walls and ceilings despite their weight (akin to that of a hippo).

As if that wasn't enough, they can eat three times their weight in food in one sitting.

2. Savage The real heavy-hitter here. This stocky, dinosaur-like monster is about the size of a bear and has the strength and attitude of one as well. Like a bear, even if you inflict a fatal blow (or shot) on a Savage it will ignore that and try to maul you instead. However, bears aren't covered in biological plate armor that's three inches thick and 28x harder and tougher than tooth enamel, with all the reinforcements of a Glutton above and caustic blood that is nicknamed "liquid fire" for its capacity to "burn" through any organic matter it comes in contact with (excepting the Savage itself, of course).

Savages also have armored eyes, like a Glutton, and they also spit powerful acid, but they have four sets of talons (each one equipped with razor-sharp claws) instead of six tripod legs and can stand upright (which they're usually doing, always watching for prey or danger) or go on all fours. They can climb trees and stone walls, but they're not nearly as good at climbing as Gluttons.

However, Savages are much faster (and smarter) than Gluttons. They can read an adventurer's movements, then dodge, counter, or strike with enough skill to make a master swordsman nervous; make and use simple weapons (Ex: using their claws to turn a large log into a stake, then throwing it like a spear), and even recognize, mimic, and adapt human tactics. They are suspected to have intelligence rivaling that of a human, and Savages have been documented using human speech.

The Question: Simply put, my question is How Can Medieval Villagers Protect Themselves From Gluttons and Savages?

Please Note: These peasants have access to certain enchantments; to see what enchantments these are, you can look at link one, link two, link three, link four, and link five.

Criteria for best answer:

1. The best answer will include active and passive methods; methods that require human action to work and others that work without interference. I count behavioral patterns as active methods.

2. The best answer will thoroughly cover multiple viable methods and explain why they'd work.

3. Said methods should be viable for medieval villagers, something they can actually come up with and produce. That being said, human ingenuity is quite something, so I'm willing to be lenient on this one.

One last thing: reading the previous question (its above, at the beginning) is strongly recommended, as it should help you immensely when crafting your answer. For your input and feedback, you have my appreciation and thanks.

Answer 1

Monster hunters

With all these dangerous monsters one thing becomes very clear to me. There seems to be no real way to protect yourself in your world. Any way to protect yourself costs a ton of resources and would make living the world it very infeasible. Walled/moated villages and cities are incredibly expensive to build and maintain. The peasants require constant vigilance so there is likely a relatively high death toll in the fields. Population control of the enemies is only a bit possible, because even if you kill them all they can spawn back. Imagine being in a rural village in medieval times and every few days a pack of wolves attack. Even if you kill them all most of the time, the higher death toll, injuries (which were more easily fatal in those times) and higher difficulty to get resources like food make it near impossible to live. To get the amount of people to sustain a good position you need a lot of resources, so this gets impractical as you need more dangerous farming and other resource gathering. Even the houses, which represent a large investment, can be destroyed by the acid. Only stone houses seem to be an option, which aren't feasible in a large part of the world.

The people in your world stayed likely in a nomadic state far longer, as sitting down to farm is quite dangerous. A nomadic style can at least move away from enemies with help of their tracking abilities, living off the land a a bit from hunting.

To start villages and cities, they first need to become more safe. How? The enchantments. Some people started to get these enchantments in both themselves and their weapons, giving their people an edge against the monsters. If enough people have them, they can become effective and destroy the monsters with relative ease. At that moment, the nomadic tribe can start to grow. If grown enough, they can start the process to stay in one place, building a village and agriculture. This would lead to a relatively normal society, with a class of monster hunters to keep all monsters at bay. They hunt both to kill and for the enchantments. Some weapons and armour will get better and better, allowing also non enchanted people to join. This stockpile of enchanted weapons will become so powerful at a certain moment that it would be more dangerous to wield them than the monsters themselves. To enchant more people, some people in enchanted armour can grab a (small) monster and letting someone else safely kill it with his/her bare hands. After enough enchantments they might even kill some of the bigger monsters like that. You can get people who get the sevenfold enchantment twice or even more, allowing them to subdue any monster later and either slay them with their bare hands or hold and nearly kill it so someone else can get the enchantments. Same counts for new weapons and armour (bash the head in with a big chest plate). These hunter parties keep everything in check, moving swiftly around the city. They don't need to be awake day and night, as just a few night sentries can protect the at night concentrated population and wake the monster hunters when needed.

When a village/city grows large enough that the agriculture is too spread out to protect the farms effectively, parts would split off with some monster hunters to go somewhere else. Much like bees will split when the hive gets too big. They will take a party of monster hunters with enchanted items with them for protection.

In the end you would have villages and cities that likely have some more fortification than traditional villages and cities. Especially if they have the resources. But what is most important is a stockpile of strong weapons that are passed on through the generations for monster hunters, where some will be imbued themselves as well. No wall, moat or spike trap will defend against all of the creatures, but with monster hunters effectively hunting and destroying the monsters you can reduce the threat to much more acceptable levels.

Strangely enough, in a long enough time frame there might be too many enchanted weapons. They multiply until they are so abundant that nearly everyone can bring an enchanted hammer of flattening doom while they work in the fields. They might even farm the creatures for this and their flesh, making it more like a controlled economic part of the world, where some cities might be in more dangerous parts of the world specifically to farm these enchantments and sell it.

It's a weird world of extremes. At the start it's nearly impossible to survive, but later the flood of enchanted people and weapons make most enemies trivial.

Answer 2

What's wrong with the usual mix of fire and stone?

Stones, used to build high walls, are a significant hurdle to overcome, and can be shaped to make climbing purposefully difficult. Walls can use the stereotypical set of booby-traps and moats to hinder anybody approaching them.

Fire can scare any wild or domesticated beast away when used in the right way.

The point of your defense is not to make the target absolutely safe, but to make the target harder to get than something else: why would you struggle to open a canned beef lacking the tool, if you have a fresh steak readily available?

Answer 3

Your monsters are unkillable with medieval technology

The impact toughness of tooth enamel averages about 4 MPa. Modern medium carbon steels generally have an impact resistance of 200-1000MPa, but the stuff knights wore would have been of a lower quality than modern alloys (probably closer to 100-200MPa) and it was about 1.5-3mm thick.

This means that your gluttons have 56 MPa armor, but at ~50mm thick you are looking at something roughly 7 times as difficult to penetrate as a Knights armor, and as is, knight's armor was impenetrable by medieval technology. Nothing short of a renaissance period cannon (not musket) would stand a chance of taking down a glutton.

Savages are even worse at 112 MPa. Their shells are as tough as a lot of medieval steel, but it is about 75mm thick! Savages would be almost as hard to take down as a Civil War era Iron Clad. This means even if you give your peasants the best cannons available at what would be considered the very end of the medieval period, they would still be unable to kill a Savage.

Use the Savages as Guard Dogs.

Throughout history, peasants have been at the mercy of warlords who, like Savages, are 100% unable to protect themselves against in a fight, but they have survived by giving food to the warlords in exchange for not murdering them. Likewise, there is no effective way to battle either Savages or Gluttons with the tools and weapons available to peasants with any significant chance of survival, but the fact that some of these creatures have the intelligence to rival a human warlord works to the humans' advantage.

Intelligent creatures understand the value of a passive food source; so, the Savages would come to understand that humans are worth more alive than dead. Likewise the humans would understand that it is better have less to eat than to be dead.

So, what the Humans would do is work with the smarter, tougher, (less hungry?) savages by feeding them. Then the savages, being able to understand that the available food excess is limited, would protect their territory by chasing off any gluttons or other savages that might want to pillage the place. Having a few Savages roaming your village at all times may end in the occasional mishap of someone getting mauled or eaten for catching the creature on a bad day, but by-in-large the survival of the village itself is much more assured than if they had to fight off their own monsters on a regular basis.