Note: As with most of my other experiments, I begin this blog post noting that I've invented none of this. There were a lot of people that were helpful to me and I'll mention them at the end. It was new territory, and I made a lot of mistakes and look forward to mastering this new aspect of the hobby I'm learning about.
"Across Northern Tellgran, that great northern port of the Elder Isles, are the Atolls of Arik Brannia. In this year of the Light in the month of Noillag have those ports seen blood and war for the first time in 100 years.
The Black Clad Knight, Lord Madarok struck. An ancient Wyrm bound to his sword, he launched the black sails of the galleys of Sark for the first time since Valveros.
He made landfall at Pyade. There on that island did the ancient Arxine blade Tavaras' Bane become unsheathed by Sir Gervon against a demon taller than his keep's towers.
One of the last pillars of the Mage Towers that keep the Elder Isles from sinking for it’s sins could have held that day would the blade have struck true, but Sorcerers of Chaos wove magic to trick and sully the eyes of Gervon, and the demon grasped him and crushed him like a mere doll. So did blood, murder and chaos flood Tellgran.
Now we live thereafter. No help comes from Old Lyonesse. Foreign Knights jealously guard the central Isle and it's wineries while seeking obscure sacred artifacts that empower their secrets. Seas are infested with Pirates, being paid by both sides. On Pyade sits petty dark lords which intrigue one after another to ensure the next's downfall.
The Northern Isles are a sordid and evil place, but in their mountains lie the mighty treasures and weapons that could see it liberated.
Or directed to the service of the next one mighty enough to enslave it.
This is now the setting I will run in our years long running "Swords & Wizardry" campaign.
I didn't write or worldbuild it though.
We wargamed it. We played a wargame and this was the result.
The purpose of this blog post is to provide a glimpse into grand campaign, strategic wargaming which can move seamlessly from the strategic scale down to the scale of a party of adventurers in a dungeon or back again to kings and tyrants.
This blog post does not thoroughly break down the mechanics of the games mentioned, but explores the experiences we had.
At the end of the blog post I'll list some of the references, resources and person's I found helpful, as well as the general design and set up I used for the game. The latter should not be taken as a matter of expertise, but of experimentation on my part.
Grand Campaign
In my previous post I described how using a retro-clone of Original D&D along with some older gameplay conventions resulted in the most successful campaign of D&D I'd ever seen.
As I explored and researched this more, I began to dig deeper into that "Grand Campaign" era of play. What became obvious rather quickly was that the punk zine fiction culture along with wargamers at the time were indistinguishable from these early games of Dungeons and Dragons.
Why was that so? Isn't the very nature of Dungeons and Dragons about individual adventurers? Wargaming is about the opposite, the treatment of the largest scales of civil order or the breakdown thereof. How can these two meet?
In John Curry's book "Tony Bath's Ancient Wargaming" it reveals a lot very quickly about the ambition that some wargamers had in the 60's and 70's. For them, they weren't just playing "Axis and Allies", "Bolt Action" or "Warhammer."
This was not just a board of tactical units, nor was it a map like "Risk" moving assets representing whole continents or civilizations. People like Tony Bath were "Playing at the World" to borrow the title of Jon Peterson's famous book.
Bath didn't create scenarios for player factions to act on alone, but created the underlying rules of the world for everything else to unfold. For them, this was a real world, subcreated and honest. It was not merely a game, but presentation of real truths that allowed situations to arise and created emergent narratives and experiences. The world had realism, one might say simulation even.
I experienced this as I used the book. For example, in the section "How to set up a Wargames Campaign" Tony Bath says that by setting down resources and drawing the world map you can determine how your cities work. Settlements will sprout up around certain types of resources and by amount, with resource rich areas having greater populations they can support. For this he recommends rolling a certain sized die for each hex according to that hexes resource and what's nearby. (page 59 - Ancient Wargaming)
Cities of certain sizes should have certain populations. He uses degrees of ten and a number of D6's based on the type. A town has an order of 1,000 times the number of d6 rolled, with the size of the town calibrated by a number of d6's ranging from 1 for small to 6 for very large. Therefore, an average town would have 3d6 x 1000 people. (page 60 - Ancient Wargaming)
Once you have the town population size you can determine the maximum number of levies annually that can be pressed into military service. He recommends about 10% normally or 20% in a crisis. (Page 92 - Ancient Wargaming) Additionally, the town is supported by resource units that can be produced measured in Gold Crowns, usually a few hundred for each type of resource. (Page 92 - Ancient Wargaming)
These gold crowns can be spent to feed armies, the population, maintain roads, repair walls, build ships or siegecraft and a number of other things necessary to win at war on a strategic scale. Units each require a number of Gold Crowns per month to operate. Without resources, or in losing them, you threaten that economic output and martial strength of a people. (Page 93-101) Really, this idea of an economic unit of measurement made the whole process much simpler, even if it wasn't Gold Crowns being fed into the mouths of sailors!
He also has rules for how weather and terrain affect movement and even rules for personalities of leaders or random monthly events. (Pages16-17, 67-68, 106, 123)
This is all probably beginning to sound like a Grand Strategy video game like "Crusader Kings" or "Europa Universalis" and it certainly is! But what effect does this have on the wargame of the meeting of armies, and then finally on the roleplaying game of Thieves and Wizards within dungeons seeking treasure?
During the course of the Kriegspiel the weather turned bad for the winter around the 15th of Noillag. The land and bays froze affecting the movement of units and ships. Due to a random event, the available resources supporting a gathering army of allies became severely constrained, and the required support in Gold Crowns to house and feed those armies began to fall through. No expected cinematic moment of the Riders of Rohan simply showing up at dawn here, how could they be fed?
Players suddenly faced running out of food and resources within a week, and this on top of intrigues within and a hostile player seeking to bring about their demise without.
None of those things were pre-scripted or planned. Just like old school tabletop roleplaying games, this "playing at the world" approach to the map allowed for these dramas to arise naturally. Sometimes unexpected events would shatter player’s plans, or accelerate and enable them. Either way, it wasn't me scripting events and trying to provide narrative katharsis, but rather a living world with realistic rules presenting challenges that smart people were interacting with to overcome. Everything for me felt alive and realistic. When epic moments happened, and they did, they felt far more tangible and satisfying.
Some of the conventions I used to put the game together
The entire game was for participants already familiar with our open table, Gygaxian campaign milieu, classical OD&D game. Those that signed up would participate in a "play-by-post" campaign on our play club server. The whole group would recieve one report and then each player representing a faction would recieve their own tailored report weekly. Each week, based on that report, they could issue an order. I'd use the math in the game systems and look at all the orders to decide the outcome, actually playing through combats solo. Then the report for the next week would update them on results and so on. I planned to run this for about 6 weeks of play. Time would pass 1 for 1 in the real world between orders and events would occur during the week based on distance, rate and time.
(Simultaneously in this world two other Referees were running games on the same calendar, in the same world, in different places! But that’s a story for another time.)
I needed to pull from some OD&D supplements and our own retro-clone for some things like naval battles, underwater combat and aerial combat, and I also used two modules I will include at the end as they were already part of the campaign setting, but for the rest I had two primary documents
- Tony Bath's Ancient Wargaming by John Curry - Strategic scale gameplay. For the setup of the maps, towns, resources, personalities, random events, movement of armies, weather and terrain I used Ancient Wargaming.
- Chainmail - Tactical scale gameplay. For tactical battles between units, I used Chainmail 3rd Edition, 2nd printing by TSR - Gary Gyax and Jeff Perren.
How I set the game up
I began by issuing a general guideline for how the game worked and the fiction of the world. I used the "5 W" format for this "Who, what, when, where, why, how." I then gave a group wide, cryptic "newspaper" as Tony Bath calls it, in the group chat. The reports of bards and criers and such about what was happening known to most.
To each faction I gave one long "Operations Order" using the SMESC format ("Situation, Mission, Execution"...etc..) Then I gave them their first weekly report. Operations orders, reports and clarifications I did via private messaging with each faction.
To make it more of a "game" and since I ran it for a defined period, I gave each of them a "end state" in their Operations Order that would be their "win state." These were assymetric, sometimes smaller factions might need to achieve something ambitious, other factions might want to keep the status quo etc. The pathway to accomplish these goals would also vary and factions had varying strengths and weaknesses.
They then would ask for clarifications on things. Based on the clarification they'd issue a single order of about a paragraph or two. It could be to any number of their units, personalities engaged in courtly intrigues, the sending of messages etc. Anything that made sense. If it wasn't covered in the rules I'd use the "open system" and simply make a ruling, almost never using dice rolls or making up rules but just determining outcomes. If there was a rule, I’d use it. Usually if it makes sense in the open system I just say "yes" if a rule doesn’t cover it. If there's risk involved or it's a "no" I'd define and clarify that with the player more (Free Kriegspiel model).
Once they were happy with the clarity of the fiction and issued their order I'd look at all the orders and do the math of the weather for the next week, the movement of non player character elements and the movements of armies. If an army met in potential combat I'd notify the players involved and resolve it. They would not recieve a report of the battle by rider until their next weekly report. I kept track of all of this on a calendar for time. If an event occured before a report was recieved I'd note that etc.
How the game turned out - Musings and feelings on it
This game style can burn a Referee out!
I had a great time with this, but it turned out to be a lot more work than I had expected.
I love Chainmail
I actually adore Chainmail, and can really see how it's entirely sufficient for use with Original D&D on it's own. This tiny little game system covers all sorts of things and leads to a really fair, interesting, fast and heroic game. Dislike all the whiffing you do on a D20 back and forth to hit each other in D&D? Not a problem in Chainmail! And that's something I think people really have the wrong impression of so here's a spicy take: Chainmail is simpler to use than D&D. You just use the charts, chuck some D6's and find out what happens really fast. It's hard to imagine a faster, easier mass combat system that at the same time manages so many details too. We got to do some jousts, wizard duels and all sorts of funny things packed into this tiny book.
Tony Bath's Ancient Wargaming seems perfectly compatible with Chainmail and Original D&D.
The distances used are about the same, the references to various units are very similar, the size of regiments are the same. I didn't use them but many of the tactical rules are identical. I think it was a good call to use Ancient Wargaming for the strategic scale of Original D&D.
Lessons I learned
If I were to run a "Braunstein" or "Free Kriegspiel" of a strategic scale war for Original D&D again, here are some things I would do differently.
Take the time to clearly develop the game in advance
By not doing this, players often needed clarification of situations, which from what I understand is perfectly normal in a Kriegspiel. However, sometimes players would issue very long or comprehensive orders to cover me being vague or missing important details. The worst outcome is when a player doesn’t understand the situation and makes decisions, later to say "That's not what I thought was going on?"
Whenever this is due to them not understanding the rules or guidelines that is one thing, but it's an awful feeling when this occurs because I failed to provide guidelines or rules.
I think this kind of game deserves a good layer of preparation and perhaps a robust gazateer for everyone involved to be on the same page at the beginning, if not a pre-game chat about expectations and scope etc.
Limit the number of fantastic elements
I didn't know it but we bit off way more than is probably typical for a game of Chainmail. Multiple wizards, flying fantasy creatures, siegecraft, sea battles, aerial combat, Balrogs and Dragons...it was a lot. It still worked, but it made for a lot of work. Some of this greatly unbalanced the game and with fantasy or hero units often the game simply came down to an epic 2d6 roll-off between two or more hero types. While that was dramatic, players who either had more conventional forces or made intricate plans for the wargame were left sidelined.
In the future, I would probably allow no more than one magic sword per faction, maybe 1-2 heroes, and 1-2 fantasy units, even on a strategic scale.
Use of a VTT or shared battle map / sand table
Eventually I started using Roll20 to resolve combats and roll dice. Roll20 is really helpful because anyone can log on even if I'm not running the game and look at the log or roll dice if needed. I was also able to not clutter up the chat by having all the combat play out on the VTT. Roll20 has a hex map feature which I needed when we started doing aerial and naval warfare and it was just more satisfying to use when gaming the combat solo. I would imagine if someone had the means actually having a sandtable or diorama would be even more fun, but not having that or playing online using a VTT helped a lot.
Limit orders and scope or limit the time of play
This turned out to be quite a lot more work than I expected having 5 players. I had imagined simply issuing a report to each, one overall "newspaper", clarifying the report and recieving one simple order in return and processing them, then repeating that process. As things became more dire, complex and large in scale this began to breakdown and toward the end it became nearly a live chat, 25% of which was me clarifying details of which there were A LOT.
By the end of the campaign I needed to accelerate things, which the players were kind enough to accomodate. We sped up past 1:1 time and moved ahead once orders were resolved. I think if playing with friends on a long weekend (for those who can still do that sort of thing) you could have a really epic wargame with friends on a strategic scale that could do this anyway.
For someone busy like me, I think it would be best to clearly define things in the beginning, stick to the game, and have simpler orders and a more limited scope in the future.
Conclusions
I can't imagine a better way to start a campaign now. I know I'm not the only one that has done this, but if you have the time and are going for a big, grand, living world, with realism and simulation in it (the way we who play in our “Otherworld” OD&D campaign like it), what better way than to have a strategy game with friends decide what the world looks like? Starting with a strategic wargame and then dungeon crawling in the aftermath is incredible.
This is a really ambitious form of gameplay. The Referee could also use a simpler execution and system, one in fact is mentioned in Ancient Wargaming. (page 204 - Ancient Wargaming).
Obviously, should your Original Dungeons and Dragons campaign arise to 9th level, I could see "Ancient Wargaming" being really useful as well for providing details about things like the conditions of roads, infrastracture and adding all kinds of realism.
I highly recommend above all Tony Bath's Ancient Wargaming - by John Curry for tools and ideas for strategic level gameplay for OD&D and other grand campaigns, and see below for additional resources I found useful.
And if you run a classical game with an ambitious grand campaign scope, how do you depict or resolve strategic scale concerns?
Thank you to the players willing to endure this experimentation!
People and groups who were helpful:
Clerics wear Ringmail - https://clericswearringmail.blogspot.com/
Rick Stump “Don’t Split the Party” - https://harbingergames.blogspot.com/ and the fine people at the “Don’t Split the Pary” Discord (Best Discord server ever)
The members of the Mythic Mountains Tabletop club, especially the players in the game
Joy of Wargaming “Chainmail on Campaign” -
Tony Bath’s Ancient Wargaming by John Curry - https://www.amazon.com/Tony-Baths-Ancient-Wargaming-Including-ebook/dp/B01N2HI27I
Chainmail 3rd Edition, 2nd Printing by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren - Available on eBay and other 3rd party sellers
Resources used in addition to those:
Swords & Wizardry Complete: Revised by Mythmere Games - https://www.mythmeregames.com/collections/swords-wizardry?srsltid=AfmBOooi4waBNvrqS7I26PinC25g38JqS_En8PKy5Itu8ML6sQLZAqHo
Adventurer Conqueror King Imperial Imprint - https://autarch.co/
Echoes from Fomalhaut #9 - The Gates of Sorrow - https://emdt.bigcartel.com/product/echoes-from-fomalhaut-09-beyond-the-gates-of-sorrow
The Isle of Pyade - Bat in the Attic - https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/470159/the-isle-of-pyade
I would LOVE to read the full series of play reports of this, including the "newspapers" and operational reports
Great write up!