Role-Playing in Wartime
Ready, aim, flee.
Fantasy stories often involve vast wars, grand conflicts of elves, men and dragons. Whether they fight for territory, freedom or to destroy the One MacGuffin To Rule Them All, fantasy war stories can be exhilarating and capture a truly epic feeling like few other scenarios. Handling a war in an RPG campaign can be difficult, though. Here are a few ideas for sending your PCs off to war (with specific examples drawn from my own war-focused campaign).
There are a couple of guidelines to note before we get into specifics when dealing with RPG war. Every rule is meant to be broken, but for the most part, these will make your fantasy war stories more fun for your players.
Rule 1 — The PCs are not rank and file soldiers. Even if they’re low level characters, they are special and have special abilities far beyond those of the average peasant with a glaive, or even a trained man-at-arms.
Rule 2 — The PCs can’t participate in mass battles. It’s a problem of scale — you can’t effectively run a scene with hundreds or thousands of combatants and still somehow focus on the actions of a few people. Aside from the bookkeeping nightmare, it would be very easy for even powerful PCs to die if you ran things realistically. I’m betting some of you are saying at this very moment, “I’ve run scenes just like that very successfully!” To this I say, it’s a just a guideline. Experienced and creative DMs can make anything work.
Rule 3 — The PCs can influence the course of the war. Whatever errand the PCs undertake, it should affect events in the world, even if only subtly. If their grand adventure to assassinate the evil baron’s adviser doesn’t change the fact that the orcish army is pillaging and burning Halfling Hollow, the players will feel cheated.
Rule 4 — The PCs can’t influence the war too much. War is big. War often becomes a mindless beast that refuses to bend to the wills of generals or politicians. The PCs can push the war in one direction or another, and they might even succeed at a pivotal moment that effectively wins the war, but they never do it alone. If the elves hadn’t showed up with their archers, or if Stevon the Scarred and his brave horsemen hadn’t made a noble sacrifice and held off the hobgoblins, or if the city walls hadn’t held up under the barrage for so long, then all would have been lost. Make sure the PCs actions are part of a larger story (which actually makes them seem more important rather than diminishing them).
So, what can the characters do if they can’t enlist and fight on the front lines?
Act as Commandos. There are plenty of missions that a small band of specially equipped and trained wizards and warriors could undertake to aid in the war effort. Steal the enemy battle plans, close the portal to the Abyss where all the bad guys are coming from, sabotage their fortifications or assassinate a powerful enemy leader. In our campaign, the PCs were sent to kill a black dragon that was acting as a field commander for an invading army of orcs and other evil creatures. The traditional adventure trope of infiltrating a dragon’s lair and slaying the beast was bolstered by the mission’s importance in the war. Victory shattered the organization of a whole wing of the evil army (Rule 3), although the scattered monsters were still spreading chaos throughout the countryside (Rule 4).
Diplomacy. Sometimes taking part in a war doesn’t involve combat at all. There are kings, knights, wealthy merchants or powerful wizards pulling the strings and manipulating armies or even entire kingdoms. The opportunities for role-playing, espionage and clever use of rituals and skill challenges are ripe and plenty in this situation. Perhaps the characters want to avoid further war and negotiate a peace treaty. Maybe they’re trying to convince a new ally to join the cause, or arrange the delivery of a stockpile of healing potions. Our 3rd edition campaign had the PCs trying to convince a nation of elves to send as many troops as they could, all while another empire was trying to undermine the entire alliance. Later, the characters tried to convince an emperor to unleash what was essentially a magic atom bomb in the face of an oncoming demonic horde. They failed, but that’s a whole other story.
War as a Backdrop. Sometimes, you can break Rule 3 and run an adventure that doesn’t really have anything to do with the war at all. Any adventure suddenly seems more urgent and threatening when the countryside is filled with marching troops, and every other town is a burned shell littered with corpses. It might literally become urgent if an army of ogres is only two days’ march away from the abandoned wizard’s tower the PCs are looting investigating. In our war-torn campaign, the PCs found themselves in the capital city of a kingdom under siege, investigating a mysterious series of vicious murders. The availability of goods and services, the attitudes of the people and the overall sense of danger were drastically altered by the fact that hordes of monsters were mere miles from the city walls. This adventure was actually tied to the war a bit more closely than that, as the murderer (a shapeshifting demon, it turns out ) was killing diplomats and making a mess of the whole scenario described in “Diplomacy,” above.
PCs Are an Army. If the characters are high level enough, you can break Rule 2. In this case, the characters aren’t part of an army, they are the army. With enough summonings, powerful magic items, huge spells and interesting combos, five or six characters can actually take on hundreds or even thousands of enemies. They just have to be careful to hit from range and use defenses to keep from being swarmed. In our case, the PCs defended a garrison from an orc army using spells that dammed a river, created illusory terrain to get the orc army marching in the river’s path, then undammed the water at the perfect moment. The orcs weren’t wiped out, but they lost a major portion of their strength before the PCs finally got back behind the walls of the fortress.
Sir, Yes Sir. Put the PCs in command of a unit of troops. Your players probably don’t want to spend every game session making strategic plans and positioning troops, but it can be a fun encounter once in a while. Hide the archers in the trees, or place them on the high ground? Or use an illusion spell to make them look like trees? When is the right time to unleash the cavalry for a devastating (you hope) charge? The PCs in our campaign had released a large group of ancient warriors from long-term medusa-caused statuehood, so they were outfitted and trained and served loyally for many adventures.
Cry “Magic Missile,” and let slip the Orcs of War!
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October 8th, 2009 8:27 AM
Awesome list! I’m about to start running an 4th ed Scales of War campaign, so this may come very much in handy!
Legend of the Five Rings dealt with mass combat fairly well, and combined a few of the rules you had here. PC’s were recognized as above the fray (they were Samurai, after all) but lead from among the troops. Each round of battle was a summation of hours of conflict, and the PC’s each had to decide, each round, how close to the front they were pushing. The closer, the more likely they would have an event, like a call-out or something, that would focus on that PC for a brief moment. The success or failure of each round would provide modifiers on the next, and each PC’s actions could effect the others.
It worked well in L5R, mainly because of the Roshamon\Ran kind of epic of the genre, but its a model for a mthod that might work in other styles of fantasy.
February 3rd, 2010 11:31 PM
A good set of examples of the way to put a party of adventures into a war without swallowing them up or overwhelming them is Bernard Cornwell’s methods for the Warlord chronicles and the Saxon Tales. His Sharpe’s series is also excellent though its set in the napoleonic wars. Essentially he has a main character, sometimes in the first person, who is a member of the existing military (or nobility etc.) who is set apart from his peers in some sort of compelling way.
For instance, Uhtred, from the saxon tales, is the disposessed heir to a northern earldom in England. He is a Saxon who has been partially raised by Danes and hates his own king. But neither the king nor the danes will give him land, so he knows that he has to fight against the danes until he can stand a chance of retaking his earldom. He frequently leads small armies, but only on a temporary basis and he has a lot of small action adventurer goals that are really good fodder for wartime adventures.
Anybody thinking of running a war themed campaign would do well to read some of these books!