Running Small Battles in Oldish D&D

That D&D has its roots in wargaming is an old story. Thirty years down the road support for running battles larger than party-sized remains surprisingly and woefully uneven. A small not terribly spectacular range of compatible miniature and abstract large battle rules exist.

But holes stubbornly persist. The biggest gap I have encountered time and time again in the campaign is the lack of simple and fun ways to run battles that are larger than the standard kind involving the party and also too small scale or tactical to run with a wholly abstract system say like the Warmachine rules from the D&D Companion set.

What follows is the first part of what I tongue in cheek am calling By this Poleaxe, an adaption and extension of pen and paper small battle rules Deep Evan and I have been using in the Feudal Anarchy playtests into a more oldish D&D format. I plan on testing them in the heat of battle in the nasty brutish border war currently brewing in the Hill Cantons.

It's intended to allow a GM to run small-scale battles or skirmishes involving 15-120 combatants on each side in a hour or so without miniatures.  (If you want or need battle rules for miniatures you might want to check out By this Axe rules).  

If you would like to see the rest of the draft (this first part to give readers a sense of where this is going) give me a holler at my email address or on good ole Google Plus.

By this Poleaxe: Pen and Paper Oldish D&D Small Battle Rules

Each “squad” is made up of up to 5 combatants. A squad is represented by a single figure in a miniatures game and will generally be part of a battle or conroy (a larger unit) in battles involving more than 100 combatants. A squad must be at full strength (five combatants) if possible.

Squads have five attributes: Attack Value, Defense Value, Morale Value, Hits to Kill and Movement.

Squad Attributes

Attack Value (AV)

The measure of the squad's ability to hit on a d10. Total Hit Dice and divide by 5.

Base AV

1	0-level Human, monster under 1 HD
2	Man at Arms-1st level, up to 1+1 HD
3	2-3 HD
4	4-7 HD
5	8-10 HD
6	11+ HD

Mounted +1

Crappy weapon (dagger, club, hoe) -1

Two-handed weapon +1

Fighter or Trained Leader over 6^th level/HD “stacked” in unit +1

Attacking from the flank, rear or from surprise +1

Minor Special Offensive Ability +1

Medium Special +2

Major Special +3

Defense Value (DV)

The measure of the squad's ability to shrug off hits, used as a savings throw. Average the AC of the party.

Base DV

1	Unarmored (AC 9 or 10)
2	Light AC (AC 7-8)
3	Medium AC (AC 4-6)
4	High AC (AC 1-3)
5	Very High AC (AC 0 and lower)

hard cover +2

soft cover +1

Minor Special Defensive Ability +1

Medium Special +2

Major Special +3

Morale (MV)

The measure of a squads ability to not break and run.

Typical Base MV

Peasant levy, kobold, rabble	4
Average soldiery, orc	6
Veteran, hobgoblin, white ape	7
Knight or other elite	8
Fanatic, berserker	9
Undead	10

Modifiers:

+1 in a “secure position” (behind cover, in a pike phalanx, bless spell etc)

+1 leader CHA 15-17 (non-stackable)

+2 leader CHA 18 (non-stackable)

Hits to Kill (HTK)

The number of hits the squad can take before being Out of the Fight.

HTK

Human levy or half hit dice	1
1 HD or Man-at-Arms	2
2-3 HD	3
4-5 HD	4
6-7 HD	5
7-8 HD	6
9-10 HD`	7

-1 if squad has 4 members.

-2 if squad has 3 members.

Movement (M)

The number of abstract “move spaces” that a squad can move per combat turn. Movement is with the by-the-book standard rates if a map grid is is in use.

60 feet or less	1
90 feet	2
120 feet	3
150 feet or more	4

North Texas RPG Con After Action Report

Totally happened. 

Got back yesterday after a rather grinding trip home from this year's North Texas RPG Con. So amazingly bone tired that despite the deeply scandalous time that was had by me and the other degenerates that I call my friends there, I am going to pass on writing the full gossip column of North Texas Confidentials of years past and instead trot out this not terribly deep and utterly subjective list of high and low lights.

The Hill Cantons session pregens. 

Highlights

Hanging out in general with people from the blogging and G+ nexus. "Doc" Trey Causey, Robert “Half-Giant” Parker, Brad "Skullcrusher", James "the Mad Beekeeper" Aulds, Justin "The Sixth Blackrazor" Davis, "Shirtless" Jason Braun and others. Like real world conferences the event is made as much or more (no more) in the hallway conversations and bar table banging story swapping than in the official events.

Running my first full Hill Cantons Con game. This being a run through of the Golden Barge adventure site in the Slumbering Ursine Dunes mini-sandbox (which is in its last and final draft before editing). The party (Brad playing the talking bear, James Auld playing a feral dwarf and two Louisiana gentleman the Black Ratter and Ool the Dandy) managed to whip competently through the biomechanical barge in 3.5 hours and grab the long-lost macguffin of many a G+ Hill Cantons game, the Jewelled Codpiece of Radegast. Yay them.

Having Jim Ward buy us a round of drinks, sit down at our bar table and proceed to spin out a deep dark round of tall tales about TSR. I promised not to tell. Give me another week.

Great conversation with Chris Holmes, son of the dude who launched my long strange trip through this game (J. Eric Holmes naturally). Incredibly wonderful stories about he and his father's writing and gaming side careers (lots of fascinating unpublished and/or out of print stuff out there). Look for an official interview in weeks to come.

Running for a half an hour of Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid after an extended whiskey binge and before having one of the players (cough cough begins with a B) pass out SITTING UP. Then realizing that I was too far down into my cups myself to continue running the adventure.

Barely surviving the worst hangover of the past four years (related to that above) and playing a cutting torch wielding pleasure robot in James Aulds's Anomalous Subsurface Environment game (I being apparently one of the 8 people in old schoolish circles who haven't read the game). Props to Gus L for the nifty hand-drawn character sheet and James for putting up with my seasick self.

Also happened.

Lowlights

Skipping too many sessions. Seriously this happens every single time I am at a con of any subcultural stripe. While I don't regret missing some of the carousing, I missed a welter of hot gaming. No one to blame but myself.

Not as many pickup games. The last time I went to the Con there was a lot of impromptu side action that really was more fun than the official sessions. Either I wasn't paying good enough attention (a distinct possibility with the slow poisoning of alcohol) or it was that the larger number and wider range of official sessions were enough in themselves, but I saw very little of that action this year.

Too many dudes. I mean really.  

Hill Cantons Bestiary: The War-Ocelot

One of the most fun parts of writing up the Slumbering Ursine Dunes mini-sandbox has been putting together the now lengthy(ish) bestiary in the back. The booklet will have 15 unique monsters stuffed into it (that is if I have the willpower to stop cramming more in with each editing iteration).

One of the things I have tried to do throughout the campaign with mixed results is introduce a menagerie of new critters to challenge and amuse players with. Some have a foot in a fantasy reflected Slavic mythology, others have more than a bit of the gonzo (or just plain dumb) in them.

The War-Ocelot is one of the few that mixes a bit of all of them.

War-Ocelots

No. Enc.: 1d10

Alignment: Neutral

Movement: 150’ (50’)

Armor Class: 5

Hit Dice: 2

Attacks: 2

Damage: 1d6 bite, 1d8 helmet spike

Save: D2

Morale: 9

When the Boreans threw down their spears

And sprinkled Zem with their tears

Did Svat smile his work to see?

Did He who made the flumph make thee?

- The Ocelyt by Vilem of the Lake

The twin brother-heroes of the Old Pahr, Vlko and Romuilak the Lupine were the first to bring the dreaded cats of the steppes to this part of the world. With their horde of druzhinas, reverse centaurs and yes war-ocelots they carved a kingdom out of the black peaks and bottomlands of the South a thousand years ago. With such an entrance the war-ocelot demurely snarled into the pages of collected history—before vanishing anew along with that time-misted kingdom.

Centuries of selective breeding by Pahr nomads of their most beloved semi-feral ocelots had raised the adorable spotted critters into a bellicose, semi-intelligent companion. Bigger boned and wiry their feline frames were increasingly capable of sporting first elaborate harnesses and later full armored arrays complete with long piercing horn (not pictured in the transitional period array above).

War-ocelots are rarely encountered without their humans who they look upon as gullible marks who will dish out food and provide the empty boxes that make for prime napping in exchange for so little.

Barbaric Texas

“Vast treeless plains swept away to merge with hazy horizons. In the distance, to the south, a great black cyclopean city reared its spires against an evening sky, and beyond it shone the blue waters of a placid sea. And in the near distance a line of figures moved through the still expanse. They were big men, with yellow hair and cold blue eyes, clad in scale-mail corselets and horned helmets, and they bore shields and swords.”

- Robert E. Howard, Marchers of Valhalla

Marchers of Valhalla (1977) cover by Ken Kelly

I will forgive the reader for thinking the prose above is a scene from a lesser known Howard tale set in a Hyboria or Atlantis or other time-forgotten exotic place, strangely its setting is something much closer to home, Texas. Obviously it is neither the Depression-era Texas of his time nor the cartoonish trainwreck Texas that I live in, but an antediluvian mythically-projected Texas.

The deeply odd short story, which was rejected by Weird Tales and first published as late as 1972, is a strange melange of Swords & Sorcery adventure tale and creation myth. Reading it is an uncomfortable experience, the idea of blue-eyed Aryans swooping down to destroy a brown-skinned city of decadents seems too close to the well of bizarre race-based occultist ideas that the Nazis would also be drawing on in this period.

But there is a deep level of mythic resonance to the tale and some compelling fantasy touches, as there is to much of Howard's writing, something that has been explored here before. The semi-famous old school Texan historian (you know the kind that used to write histories as great sweeping narratives) T.R. Feherenbach once wrote that there was a “vast residue of violence leftover from the making of Texas” a theme that heavily inspired Cormac MacCarthy's masterpiece Blood Meridian.

Weirdly reading Marchers this weekend it made me want to game it. Well not “it”, not the actual story itself, but a early medieval fantasy version of this state.

It's an idea I have flirted with before. You can see some throwaway, jokey references in the Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid to the Duke of High Brazos, the Big Thicket and the Free City of Houston. That all reflects a weird transition time circa 1981 for me when my dungeon-focused Holmes campaign was busy morphing into AD&D. I hadn't bought the World of Greyhawk yet (or the Players Handbook for that matter) where the campaign would eventually find its home and was too intimidated about creating my own world whole cloth. What I had instead was a thinly-veiled and vague place set in the cedar-covered hills and plains around my birthplace Austin Texas.

Coming back to this is a deeply broken idea from the get go, but hey bear with me as I try to exorcise this idea-demon to stay focused on the current campaign.

Barbaric Texas

The campaign would open a 1,000 or so years after a less horrific version of the Marchers of Vahalla. Somehow it is a place stuck out of time tens of thousands of years ago but with reflections of today.

The vast big plateau sundered and flooded by Poseidon and Ishtar's wrath at the end of the story has been broken and reborn as the tiered tablelands and hills of Texas's current biomes. I would use an actual bioregion map of the state to fill out a large-scale hex map.

The dark-spired city of Khemu exists as taboo set of ruins mired on flats of one of the long Texas barrier islands (read ruined city pointcrawl). Private in-jokes make me want to put it right where Port Aransas sits today.

The current majority population of the region—those afraid of miscegenation can piss off back to their Stormfront forums--are now mostly the mixed descendants of the blue-eyed raiders from Nordheim and the presumable Native Americans of Khemu. “Purer” descendants of both people exist but are in the minority.

These “Old Texans” live in a patchwork of early medieval-like (read Dark Ages) petty kingdoms with nothing more than rough palisaded towns as seats of power. Longhorn cattle raids, bloody feuds and other border violence are weekly occurrences. It is a violent rough place.

Religion is a bizarre syncretisic mix of Norse, Mesoamerican, DDG Native American and Hyborian deities (so you'd have Snake Man rubbing shoulders with Ymir). I am tempted to throw in a Pecos Bill equivalent and other dumb Texas tall tales but that line perhaps should not be crossed.

The residue of violence has some actual existing supernatural manifestation. Driven mad by it beserker bands roam around and the undead are fueled by sheer hate.

Megafauna from Pleistocene Texas abound. You've got Columbian mastodons, gylptodons (giant proto-armadillos), giant sloths, giant bison, dire wolves, sabre-toothed cats and the like. Hell maybe there is a lost valley of dinosaur critters in Palo Duro canyon out there.

A Comanche equivalent rules the high plains and raids the hell out of the Old Texan settlements. These horse nomads aren't the brutal savages of Texas Anglo myth nor noble savages, just some highly dangerous folks with their own thing going on. Part of me wants to go goofy and say they are the wolf-riding Elves of Elfquest (this whole tone being way, way grimmer than what I enjoy in the Hill Cantons).

Rules? Hmm...Stormbringer first edition or full circle back to an uneasy and ungodly mix of Holmes Basic and AD&D.

Idea-demon exorcized, back to writing about Slumbering Ursine Dunes.

Alternative D&D Next Covers Released

Great peacemaker that I am, I have drawn some alternative DIY aesthetic covers for the new D&D Next. Feel free to photocopy them and duct tape them over the hardcover originals if they offend thee. Sadly I ran out of paper and lunch break time before I could finish the new DMG.(Kickstarter?)

Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid For Free, Yo

At the end of last week I dumped a major project monkey off my back, by finishing the draft version of my mini-sandbox, the Slumbering Ursine Dunes. It's clocking in around 26 dense letter-sized pages that feature a wilderness pointcrawl, two dungeons, a Chaos Event generator, and a metric crap ton of new monsters, spells and items.

Expect to see a modest little Kickstarter next month to pay for fancy pants art, maps, editing and other costs (only going to do this when I have a near-publishable draft in my sweaty little hands.)

Punchline is I am feeling great, so here's something free for y'all, the infamous Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid. The two sessions playing through it were hella fun (at least on my end) even if the finished product felt more bad-bad and good-good then the intended good-bad, so this is the sound of my shoulders shrugging. You get what you paid for it.

Download the module here.

If you do run it (what's wrong with you?), drop me a line, feedback is the best reward. And if you really want to be a mensch and make your mother proud, you can make a $2 suggested donation over here at Autism Speaks. 

But if you don't...well...I guess that's cool. It's not like it's chump change compared to what you spend on Steam or that pricey crappacino or whatever. (And why don't you call? We never see you anymore.)