helsmuth

Auldhame Gnod Yriah and his army of 1000 orcs had captured a village on the river Brallen, 70 miles downriver from Marchion. They used it as a staging point for raids on neighboring thorps and hamlets, as well as blockading the river and capturing any merchant caravans or ships that came past. Yriah, being a barbarian, is illiterate (as are most of his army). However, the adepts (orc shaman) are not. The village itself has a diameter of 1000ft, so roughly 18 acres (785,398 sq ft) A village has an adult population of 401-900, with 2 adults per acre (43,560 sq ft) of crops 450 acres of arable land (150 acres left fallow + 150 acres of winter wheat), irrigation ditches 14 acres of forest and 18 acres of meadow I created this map using  Campaign Cartographer: City Designer 3 CD-ROM  and exported it to PDF. I installed the printer driver for the HP DesignJet 4500 postscript plotter and defined a custom page size of 1066.80mm wide (the maximum) by 1930.40mm, equival...

Fields of Blood: The Book Of War Eden Studios have created a truly impressive pen & paper resource management sim. They describe in detail how a DM and players can incorporate these rules into their D&D 3.5 campaign. For 10th-20th level characters who decide to establish a stronghold and raise an army, this book provides a comprehensive, coherent basis for adding wargaming to your roleplaying. However, there are aspects of these rules that are unsuitable for my own game: the rules operate on a fixed level of detail and impose certain assumptions on the way that settlements function. Mass combat involves units of 100 basic troops, or their equivalent (a handful of giants, or one dragon). Resource management employs hexes with maximal diameter of 12 miles (just under 100 square miles in area). Since the empires in my game span millions of square miles, it is infeasible for me to describe every hamlet and outpost in such painstaking detail. Likewise, clashes between armi...

Open Mass Combat System Mongoose Publishing introduced the OMCS in Seas of Blood (2001), then expanded upon it in Quintessential Fighter (2002). Of all the mass combat systems I've come across for D20, this one is the easiest to convert a creature stat block into its corresponding mass combat statistics. Unit Hit Points (UHP) are equal to the total number of hit dice for all members of a unit, adjusted by Constitution modifier (and possibly by Toughness feat). Cavalry units receive a 50% bonus to account for their mounts. Particularly large or small units receive a modifier to damage from their ranged attacks. And then you're basically done. You roll a single to-hit roll for the entire unit, which is just the ordinary to-hit modifier for a single member of the unit, adjusted by the relative size of the unit and its target (eg. if a unit attacks another unit half its size, it receives +1 to hit and a x2 damage multiplier. Conversely, it's opponent is at -1 to hit). You...