Hello all, and Happy 2023!
For those who follow the YouTube channel, you’ll recall that last year I started a project that would add a mass combat system to AD&D, specifically to reenact the battles between armies that have been described in various places in the World of Greyhawk. Not only have I started painting various armies of the Flanaess, but I made a lot of progress on a quick and simple set of rules.
Well, I’m ready to show it to the world.
What you’ll fin are the rules themselves, which are 4 pages long and intended to be printed out on a single sheet of 11″x17″ paper. They are not intended to be an exhaustive treatment of medieval warfare. They are intended to be quick, fast, and fun, capturing the flavor of mass combat with orcs and elves, and limited magic that has an impact, but doesn’t dominate, a battle.
There are then 4 pages of charts and tables, mostly giving the statistics for the various troop types.
This is followed by the start of a comprehensive set of army lists for CY 578. Eventually that will grow to include all of the nations of the Flanaess, and eventually I hope to duplicate the effort for CY 591.
Finally, there is a starter scenario, Gahru’s Folly/Grandwood’s Grandest, depicting an ambush of Medegian troops by a host of woodsmen and elves in the Grandwood (a battle originally described by Gary Gygax in the pages of Dragon magazine #63). For those of you who don’t have access to a bunch of miniatures to do the battle, I’ve also put together some simple tokens you can print out and cut into suitable counters. But those are a poor substitute for seeing painted figures on the table.
I hope you find this of interest and enjoyable, and welcome feedback. This is a 0.1 release, so definitely consider it an alpha playtest. Hold off on feature requests, though; I’ve gone about as detailed as I intend to, and adding a bunch of rules to simulate special corner-cases, add levels of realism, etc. aren’t in the cards. Feel free to add magic rules to DBA for that. 🙂
You can download the document here.
