For the last several sessions the PCs have been assisting the Duchess in assembling an army to defend the duchy from an invading orcish army from the north. The most recent session involved final preparations and the two armies meeting on the battlefield with the battle to take place the next session. The PCs are going to attempt to take out the leadership of the orcish army, since they're the strongest group/unit on the Duchess's side.
I'm trying to figure out the best way to facilitate the PCs being able to fight the half-orc warlord leading the orcish army (Tsadok) and his retinue during the battle. I'd like to be able to convey a sense of actually being in the middle of a large-scale battle between armies without actually doing a bunch of dice rolling for stuff that's just going to be in the background, though I like the idea of the PCs having to deal with stray arrows being shot their way. I also like the idea of being able to pit them against an entire unit of troops in case they decide to be PCs and do something unexpected.
I have the numbers and types of forces for each army figured out, as well as stat sheets for important NPCs involved in the battle, but beyond that am a blank slate. I'm also trying to figure out logically how the battle will unfold given the forces each side possesses.
Any ideas are appreciated.
There are troops for abstracting large numbers of soldiers into something not unlike a swarm. Dunno if your use of the word indicates you know about them or if you're just using it as a general term.
The PCs will probably have to do something to fight the warlord, whether that's getting them to accept a challenge, slaughtering a bunch of mooks, or sneaking or teleporting in.
Once they have then some scripted events like Nicos suggests work. There might also be distractions - the cavalry charged the orc archers so the rain of arrows has stopped, but now they're getting countercharged! Help them or just accept their sacrifice?
If you have a fight in the middle of the battle, one thing you could do is make a table you can roll for random events each round (volley of arrows, stray spells, reinforcements, etc.) or for how the battle progress in different areas.
@Nicos, @Paulicus - Yeah that's what I'm going to do. The orcs have some monstrous units on their side, I'll be able to have some interesting events.
@avr - I've looked at the troop template and just can't wrap my mind around how it works. It seems pathetically underpowered.
______
I'm trying to figure out, given the compositions of the armies, how the battle would likely play out. Here are the compositions:
Duchess's forces:
3,500 skirmishers
3,500 heavy infantry
1,000 medium infantry
1,500 heavy cavalry
2,000 light cavalry
2,500 longbowmen
225 Sentinalia (Sentinalia are a prestigious fighting order; the average Sentinalia participating in the battle is 8th level.)
30 Amethyst Order mages (various levels, 3-14)
Tsadok's forces:
7,000 skirmishers
3,500 heavy infantry
4,000 medium infantry
2,500 cavalry
2,000 longbowmen
200 ogre shock troops (6th level fighters)
48 mutant goblins (14th level barbarians)
23 lava drakes
31 warmages (7th level sorcerers specialized in fireball)
The battlefield is even hard ground, mostly flat, about 2 square miles in size, with a river directly behind the Duchess's forces. The Duchess's army was waiting for the orcs to arrive and will attack before the orcs get a chance to set up their siege engines, so I didn't list them.
The Sentinalia will be dealing with the ogres while the Amethyst Order was brought in to deal with the drakes. The mutant goblins are pretty much uncontrollable once released and will likely be held back unless things go badly for the orcs.
Beyond that I'm not sure. I don't know much about battlefield strategy so don't know how the forces would be deployed. Knowing that would allow me to construct scripted events like Avr mentioned and make it easier to set the stage for the PCs fight.
I'm no expert in battlefield strategy either but ... assuming the skirmishers and longbowmen engage first expect the duchesses force to lose that first engagement (possibly badly) and have less longbowmen for the rest. The skirmishers won't play a big part from then until one side loses, when they'll harry/shield the retreating force. No idea how it'd otherwise go in the middle.
There are a lot of high-level casters on the field. The battle will be between them - any low level martials are simply going forth to die. In droves.
Speaking of droves, gosh darn is that one heck of a duchy, fielding an army more than ten thousand strong. 0.0
Something I was wondering - where'd you find a troop template? I think troops are hella neat, and it'd be cool to be able to make them quickly and easily . . . not sure how balanced they'd be, though. I'd have to see the template.
Building on some of the prior suggestions, I would script out the general flow of the battle that you can then describe. No need to roll dice, events just happen a certain way unless the PCs take steps to intervene in a particular event or part of the battlefield. Sort of like Nicos and avr suggested. You want to create a sense of agency for the Party - where and when they act can turn the tide of the battle.
As for general tactics, the orcs have a decent numerical advantage and, well, they're orcs. Unless their leader is particularly intelligent, run the orcs as a little more reckless, particularly since they can field a wider front than the ducal forces, which risk being flanked. Perhaps the orcs start with a straight-forward charge by some of their infantry, only to be thrown back by the longbowmen and warmages. But perhaps one side of the line is hit by the ogre shock troops, creating a brief breach that other troops start to pour into. Meanwhile, the orc cavalry and drakes are flanking the other end of the line.
Where does the Party go - who do they help? If possible, have NPCs they know involved in certain units, so they have an emotional stake in protecting them. Just prepare a series of combats, depending on where the Party decides to intervene, perhaps concluding with a dramatic breakthrough by the orc leader and his cavalry, threatening to overwhelm the duchess unless the Party intervenes and saves her. Run it like a movie - not everything in the overall battle needs to be rolled out, just the key events involving the PCs.
@Asmodeus's Advocate - It's a combination of forces from around the country. The bulk of them are the Duchess's and from a neighboring duchy, the country has a population of 15 million.
For the most part, the casters are going to cancel each other out. Any battlefield control type spells will quickly be dispelled by the opposing casters.
The troop template is described on page 265 of Beastiary 6.
@Seems - Tsadok is the key, which is why the PCs are going after him. The orc army is the combination of 4 different tribes of orcs brought together by Tsadok. If he and his second in command are killed, they're going to revert to fighting like disorganized orcs. Ideally I'd like to present them with opportunities to aid in forces around the battle in ways like you mentioned before they fight Tsadok, if I can come up with some ideas of ways to make it work.
@avr - That's a good point, I may have to adjust some numbers to make the fight a little more even.
I probably came across as ruder than was my intent, apologies! I tend towards the acerbic, but that's just me being socially inept, pay no mind.
Page 265 does not have a troop template. It has a number of templates that can be applied to troops, such as Phalanx or Rabble, but there are no rules on that page for turning, say, a troll into a band of trolls fifty strong, as far as I can see. And I just read every page on it, so, barring any evil demons in the matrix, I saw everything that there is to see.
Re: the effect of high fantasy on medieval battlefield tactics: It's safe to ignore me, I'm weird and bad. The rest of this post is me being weird and bad, there's no need to bother reading the whole thing. Also, I'm going to misplace a number somewhere. It's what happens when I start with guesstimations and use increasingly dubious methodology from there. These are ballpark figures.
There are only ~5000 square feet to a square mile. If the battlefield is ~2 square miles, and the armies are ~10,000 people each, that's two people for every square foot. Not a lot of room to maneuver. More to the point, cloudkills will cut through the rank and file like a chainsaw through a can of sardines. Just those 31 7th level orcish sorcerers - each of them stands to kill ~800 people per fireball. (10 people per five foot square.) If each of them gets a single fireball off, there went the neighborhood. We're looking at well over 10,000 dead, most of them on team not-orc.
Of course, while they're doing that, the level 3-14 spellcasters will be using equally, if not moreso, devastating magic against the orcs' rank and file. No one with less than five hitdice on either side will survive this battle. None of them will survive the first combat round of this battle. There are senseless wastes of life, and then there's sending 10,000 people who never stood a chance of affecting the battle one way or the other out to die for no good reason at all.
If we expand the size of our battlefield a little (and by a little I mean by a factor of ten or more) (20,000 is a lot of people - a medieval country of about France-size, population 15 mil. (I'm assuming your campaign world is pre-Green Revolution?), could maybe field an army that big, though the logistics of getting them all in one place is still fairly staggering. But that place better be pretty damn big to fit them all, and the battle that everyone's resources ever are being exhausted for better be pretty damn important. I like poking fun at other people's home games, it's a bad habit, mine're a mess too, feel free to ignore me), if we expand our battlefield enough that people can spread out, everyone can get a five foot square for themself, the fireballs are still killing 80 people . . . damn, fireballs are not cuboid. I told you my numbers would be ballpark - the fireballs up above would be killing 640 people each, not 800. That's still more than enough evocation for the job. Anyhoo, everyone has their own five foot square to stand in, and they're dying 64 at a time. 60 by 30 is 1,800; if every one of the orcs got one fireball off it'd be enough to kill ~a tenth of the Duchy's forces. They probably have really lousy Charisma, so let's say they only get four fireballs a day. It'd be pretty challenging to get to and execute all thirty-one of these spellcasters in four rounds, so let's say they get all four of their fireballs off. That's a ballparked half of the assembled defenders. Even if no one else kills anyone at all, that's a pretty phyrric victory right there.
I tend to assume a vastly lower level of magic for my own worlds. In the campaign I'm running right now, there's a single tenth level wizard in the same country as the PCs. Other countries have similar demographics. But as far as what battle tactics would look in a world where 10,000 people can be gathered to fight off an invading hoard of similar size, where thirty seventh level sorcerers can be gathered to annihilate an army of peasants armed with sharpened sticks, and wizards plural of ninth level or higher are free to retaliate with chemical weapons, it'd become standard battlefield tactics pretty fast to leave the low level schlubs at home. They can't help here. They can only die.
In droves.
AA, your math is way, way off. A square mile is something like a thousand times a thousand squares, i.e. a million of them. Which means you're likely to have lines of archers or light infantry where a fireball takes out like eight of them, or areas of skirmishers where a fireball takes out four or five. Save the fireballs for the heavy infantry where you might get twenty if they're not engaged with your own troops, maybe a dozen if they are (assuming you don't want to hit your own). Cloudkill is above the level of most of the casters here, thankfully, or the wind direction would determine the victor.
Xeryx, it's OK for one phase of the battle to go against the PCs side if others go a different way, in terms of dramatic tension. It also gives the PCs an incentive to intervene. That says nothing about actual military theory of course but I don't think that's necessary here. Maybe the next phase is a glorious cavalry charge clearing away the goblin skirmishers? Which might be countered by a barrage of fireballs at the cavalry and orcish longbowmen firing on the infantry following up, which might be followed by something else.
AA, your math is way, way off. A square mile is something like a thousand times a thousand squares, i.e. a million of them. Which means you're likely to have lines of archers or light infantry where a fireball takes out like eight of them, or areas of skirmishers where a fireball takes out four or five. Save the fireballs for the heavy infantry where you might get twenty if they're not engaged with your own troops, maybe a dozen if they are (assuming you don't want to hit your own). Cloudkill is above the level of most of the casters here, thankfully, or the wind direction would determine the victor.
Frick. That's what I get for trying to do anything at two-thirty in the morning. I'm going to sleep.
I would recommend at least having a general sense as to how each army is laid out on the battlefield, e.g., the ducal forces might try to stretch out their main defensive line with alternating units of heavy and light infantry. Skirmishers could be in front to volley with javelins etc. and then fall back to circle around the flanks. Mages behind the main defensive line, with heavy cavalry serving as a reserve, and archers on either side of the mages to support the flanks or crossfire the middle. Light cavalry set far to one flank to circle around and strike at archers or mages as the opportunity arises.
Orcs, even with a strong leader, might be a little straight forward. Send the skirmishers in a massive first wave to waste the defenders arrows and spells, with archers behind them to do as much damage as possible while the defenders are distracted. As soon as that attack falters, a second wave led by the ogres hits the line, with heavy infantry following close behind while light infantry merely tries to hold the rest of the defensive line in place. Meanwhile the drakes attack the Sentinalia mages to try and keep them busy. And Tsadok waits with his heavy cavalry to see where he can best intervene to turn the tide his way.
If you want some tactical ideas, check out the following Tactics Tutorial and animations of famous medieval battles.
I agree with AA that magic, even if some is dispelled, is going to cause a lot of casualties. Even indirectly, such as creating pits in front of charging cavalry, obscuring mist or darkness to cover an advance, teleporting shock troops to attack suddenly behind the line, etc. Again, most of this can be planned out ahead of time and simply described as part of the flow of the battle.
Interesting tactic for the orcs. While the initial wave of "cannon fodder" skirmishers ties up the entire defensive line, the warmages use Dimension Door to teleport in the mutant goblins behind the defensive lines and then Dimension Door back out. The chaos of the surprise attack would be a good event for the Party to respond to while the main attack of ogres and infantry hits the defensive line and threatens to break through. They then respond to the ogre/infantry charge, led by Tsadok's second-in-command, by defeating him. Then Tsadok makes a last ditch attempt to win the battle by charging with his cavalry, breaking through and threatening to kill the Duchess unless the Party saves her in their third and final combat of the battle.
Lots of potential variations. Just create threats, possibly more than one at a time, that the Party needs to respond to and the battle unfolds based on their decisions. To streamline it you could use the flowchart that Jeven recommends.
If Tsadok is a typical orc leader, he'll be well out of the way and the PCs are going to have to either cut their way through a vast mass of mooks, or get to him another way. He's not going to fight them voluntarily. But if he's forced to fight in person, he won't be able to turn down that fight lest he be perceived by his own troops as a coward. That won't stop him from using every possible advantage, of course. This isn't a matter of honour, just of prestige. And he'll still try to run if he has to.
So the PCs will have to locate him and drop in by Fly or Teleport or something, and he'll probably have defences arranged against exactly that. So they'll need to get near and wade through the mobs with rapid ultraviolence before he gets his own defences or escape route sorted out.
I assume he'll have a personal guard of loyal(ish) troops, a pet wizard, a couple of priests and the like around him, as well as an effectively infinite array of cannon-fodder to clutter up the map, morale permitting.
Meanwhile, the battle rages. You can give the PCs secondary objectives such as messengers (like the signal post on the hill in the last Hobbit movie) or responding to other critical events on the battlefield (I assume the Duchess herself is not present...), but only if the PCs have some way to identify them.
Do the PCs even know what Tsadok looks like?
Treat the battle between the Pcs and Orcs as a lumberjack match. Have some type of boundary penalty. Also I would like to see a squad template. A 5 to 10 being grouping.
@Scott Wilhelm - Cliff Notes version: The northern border of the country of Abagaard is defined by the Edge River. Beyond the Edge River is the Wildlands, an uncivilized region controlled by five orc tribes. Tsadok has united the five tribes with the goal of invading Abagaard, and is marching his army south toward the border. The Duchess's duchy is on the border, so it fell to her to raise an army to repel the orcs. With the help of the PCs they discovered the general path of Tsadok's army and created a suitable battlefield to challenge it. She challenged Tsadok to meet her army with his and announced that if he didn't accept the challenge his cowardice would be known to his troops, so he was pretty much forced to accept it.
Beyond that both sides are expecting a vicious, brutal battle. The Duchess's army is fighting immediately on the northern shore of the river, so there's no way to retreat. The orcs are orcs, and many of them will fight to the death either out of fanaticism or discipline (the orcs of one of the tribes, the Rending Blades, are typically lawful evil and militaristic).
@Asmodeus's Advocate - Oops, you're right, that page in Beastiary 6 doesn't give the full write-up for creating troops. I can't remember where I saw it, but I remember it was a pretty bad template. Something like a CR 15 troop is only supposed to do 5d6 damage per round or something, which is laughably pathetic.
@seems - Thanks for the links; I'll check those out. Simply figuring out how the Duchess and Tsadok are likely to deploy their troops is going to help me visualize the battle and create specific encounters from there.
So far I'm thinking Tsadok will send in the ogres and drakes first to soften up the center of the Duchess's army while the skirmishers maneuver to the flanks. The archers will exchange fire as well, but I'm not entirely sure how archers were used back then. Did they simply shoot at the enemy until their melee units engaged? The warmages will be given an overwatch duty to attack any unit that tries to maneuver behind or to Tsadok's flank. The mutant goblins were brought along to be released into a besieged city in order to wreak havoc; Tsadok will be reluctant to use them in the battle because once they're released they really don't differentiate between friend and foe.
On the Duchess's side, one big advantage is that due to a spy in Tsadok's army, the Duchess (and the PCs; they were the ones who met with the spy and relayed his intel to the Duchess) has a pretty good sense of Tsadok's troop composition and can position her forces accordingly. And despite being outnumbered the Duchess has the NPC level advantage, mostly due to the aid of the PCs (they're 15th level).
@Jeven - I like the idea of creating simultaneous crises for the PCs to respond to and having different sets of consequences depending on what they do. That's complex to set up though; I'll see what I can do.
@mudfoot - Thanks to the Duchess challenging Tsadok, the PCs now know what he looks like. And you're right, he's been well defended, which is why they haven't already tried to take him out. He won't run though, so win or lose he's going down fighting. I think I'll have him hold back and be battlefield general unless he gets the opportunity to fight the Duchess directly.
I am always a big fun of using notecards for some added depth. Before the battle I'd draw up some notecards that alter the fight in some way to represent the chaos of fighting amid a full blown battle. Here would be some suggestions...
An enemy bard comes into range. Your enemies recieve +x to attack and damage rolls, until you do y damage to target with z AC
Allied spellcaster cast's mass cure light wounds on you and surronding soldiers.
Artillary begins firing on your posistion, roll randomly to determine which squares are affected and deal damage.
Calvary charge, all combatants are subject to a trip attack with a CMD of x
Stray fireball (Or really any sort of area of effect spell.
If your using wild magic rules, have two dueling casters set off a wild magic event.
You get the jist. This solution helps sell the idea that the players are swarmed by a myriad of people all fighting for their lives, while at the same time not taking the focus of the pcs and their fight.
Rather than using fireballs, use Thorny Entanglement. It is still 3rd level, but has an effective 55' radius rather than a 20' radius. It also applies damage over time.
Then there is Lesser Curse Terrain which can get even larger areas, but at a less predictable time. Rain of Gore is a good curse.
Check out the Looking for low-mid level army killing spells thread.
/cevah
Normal real world medieval tactics generally do not work in a world of powerful spell casters.
Bunched soldiers will just die.
Walls will be toppled or disintegrated.
Soldiers feared.
Compelled officers gives differing orders.Smart generals will have their soldiers spread out so as few as possible will be taken out by AoE blast spells. (Unit of 4-6 men with significant spacing in-between).
This of course means the shield wall & infantry line do not exist unless some custom magic is used to block blast spells (say a Firewall spell cast on line of shields : blocks most blast spells & rays).
At least when it comes to AOE spells, it's not all that different from dealing with artillery in the Napoleonic wars. There was no way to avoid it, but soldiers were still bunched up in formation because that's the best way to control them and they still have to worry about the opposing melee forces, which will decimate them if they don't have unit cohesion.
Yes, all the other magical effects are things that both sides would have to worry about, making the mages high-priority targets. You don't necessarily have to take them out, but if you can make them worry about defending themselves or having to deal with some other threat to the army, they won't be slinging as many fireballs or creating walls of fire. And keep in mind they only have so many spells. The Amethyst Order mages range in level from 3 to 14, and like most units there's likely far more lower level than higher level. Say their average level is 8 - that's only 3 fireballs each. Sure, they'll do some damage, but that's some pretty limited "artillery". The orc army has a lot of cannon-fodder it can throw at the defenders to make them waste their spells.