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In my Golarian campaign Grask Uldeth has risen above the other orc warlords in Belkzen Hold and has united the tribes through shear might.
The PCs have reason (i'm not going to explain the whole campaign) to prevent this.
Grask is launching an attack on Lastwall to finally put an end to their annoying blockade from the more decadent nations south of Lastwall.
How would I handle a war in the game?
opinions? ideas? creativity?
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You could start with Warpath, which is a ruleset for Mass Combat. Its decent, but I feel you will need to expand upon the rules.
The Kingmaker AP also has very basic rules of how to handle this as well.
If your looking for non Pathfinder rules I have a few I can recommend.
You will also have every gamers' dream of uttering the phrase, "To WAAAR!"
How would I handle a war in the game?
It doesn't matter how the war is handled, it matters how the PCs interact with the war. That's two slightly different things that have a major difference in how you prepare.
My advice is to figure out how the war would play out if the PCs were removed from the equation. Where would key battles be? Who would win them? What cities would be captured and when? Would there be any assassination attempts, and would they succeed? You don't need to script the whole war, but you should know who would win the overall war and have a few key turning points.
Once you have that framework, figure out what the PCs are going to do to interact with it.
- If you do this, you'll be building caravans, small towns, units of reinforcements, maybe training camps, etc. This would probably be the closest to the type of fights that normally happen in a D&D game.
- Alternatively, they could be roving trouble-shooters behind their own lines, guarding caravans, escorting people, hunting down bandits and enemy scouts, etc. Same encounters, different side.
- At this level, you'd be rolling dice for individual combatants, possibly with a smattering of large-group rules ("Ok, there's 30 guards. They don't look like they can beat you one-on-one, but there's a lot of them")
- This is probably the least like standard encounters, as generals rarely get involved in battles directly. It's much more about planning, tactics, and using resources creatively ("Ok, we'll keep all the spellcasters out of the fight until the orcs take this hill, then they'll all fly out there invisibly, and simultaneously fireball the center of their army.")
- At this level, you would be rolling dice for armies attacking each other, rather than any individual or mass combat.
- This would be things like "Our right flank is caving - go support the troops there" or "We need you to be in the center of the line in this fight and lead the charge to push through them. We'll be right behind you."
- It'd be reasonable here to have a few NPCs under the players' command, or one stronger NPC directly in charge of them who participates in fights with them.
- At this level, you'd need mass combat rules ("Their unit of 200 archers fires arrows at your group.")
- This is only useful if they're actually good socially and politically connected enough to be able to help in this way.
- If they are, this is probably closest to what you did before the war, rather than Individual combat.
Hopefully that helps get you pointed in the right direction. Once you know what the PCs are going to do, you can figure out how their actions will affect the framework you originally set up - do they participate in the battles directly, or just have their actions change the outcome? What does that mean for later fights?
i encountered something similar to this when i was a PC in a WFRPG campaign. my dm was running an adventure mod set in talbaheim with the skaven invading. instead of just saying that the skaven overrun the whole place and your stuck in a cellar waiting for it to blow over, we ended up in the temple of sigmar and volunteered to help defend the small temple complex.
what the dm did was he set up a table that youd find playing warhammer fantasy. Each PC was put incharge of 2x 10man squads and were given simplified stats for the squads. and then he pulled out the skaven minuatures. ALOT of them.
Then we basically played a hybrid version of wfrpg and warhammer fantasy. with our rolls being so high and better, we were able to help the small security force hold off the skaven, forcing the dm to change up the adventure mod to show that the temple of sigmar was holding out. in the mod, it was overrun and destroyed.
i know it may not be what your looking for, but i think its a hell of an idea and a great way to show the pcs how fun a war battle is and how itll affect their pcs.
I took part in a war in an old campaign. We were put on the front lines and tasked with "holding the pass" ala 300. The way it played out the enemy could only come at us ~7 at a time. We had to fight wave after wave of enemy warriors, each wave consisting of ~21 enemies (goblins/kobolds/orcs I believe). It was brutal for both the DM and the players. Every time we took one enemy out another took his place.
Given 25 farmers turned archers with limited ammo and a bunch of spears to stop a heavy charge we had to not only fight but we were in charge of telling the archers when to fire and when to retreat.
After the 4th or 5th wave I remember having to roll constitution checks to make sure we didn't begin to suffer from fatigue. Every time we wanted to fall back or take more ground we had to do morale/leadership checks.
I have to admit it was one of the funner moments I had with that group of players. Lots of tactics and lots of battle field control maneuvers. Your wizards and clerics have to make important decisions. If they use their spells to quickly they pretty much guarantee that the party will fall.
In the end we were routed by a group of ogres and ogre mages. However we were able to hold the pass long enough to allow the village beyond to evacuate. I believe we had a staff with 3 charges of dimension door on it allowing us to escape and resurrect the 2 of us that had died.
Bobson has good points. I would encourage you to track down a copy of Heroes of Battle (3.5) if you can. It does a good job for presenting war at the PC scale instead of the mass combat side. In short you can break the war, and even a battle, down into a series of individual combats encounters that have different impacts on the outcome of the war/battle.
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I ran a campaign where the players were part of an elite unit ( think Seals or Delta force or A-team) in a small but fortified country defending against a larger country. Sort of Switzerland vs Germany in that the smaller country had control of critical mountain passes.
I had planned the war in succeeding stages from the enemies point of view. At levels 1-5 the enemy started with incursions of small groups to scout and infiltrate. If the players found and defeated the groups the aggressor was denied critical information which made their tactical situation in the next stage a little more tenuous.
In levels 5-8 the players made an incursion into enemy territory to discover information about their big invasion plan. The enemy nation was super fundamentalist about their special god (this was set in Greyhawk which had such a place and god) and I extrapolated that using arcane magic was also forbidden as all they needed was their god's power. So when they found enemy soldiers training for flying maneuvers they were very surprised. Now here they had a choice. They could go back and report this to their leadership or try to destroy the stock of flying potions in the enemy camp. They chose a surprise tactic and alerted the 'pope' of the aggressors. He showed up and put a stop to all this arcane magic nonsense. He also put a stop to the war plans.
My basic point here is to outline critical points in the enemy's war plan and set the players up to affect those plans. Then have the enemy react to that. When big battles were called for I used the same method. Actual history shows the reality of small groups messing up big plans: 300 Spartans, little round top at Gettysburg, various insurgent group behind the lines like the French resistance, Sergeant York in WW 1.