New From Wizards: When Armies Clash

When Armies Clash is the latest Unearthed Arcana article from D&D head honcho Mike Mearls. This nine page pdf document is free to download at Wizards. Having read the article a couple times over, but not actually playtested it, I get a feeling this item is still highly experimental and that's why it's been dangled out there early on for the public to peruse. Of course this is the stated goal of the UA articles and so I'm giving the designers a pass on creativity and polish. The game is intended for mass combat using the exact same 5E rules you would for normal encounters (AC, hp, attack, damage, and so on) except scaled up in groups , or"stands" of roughly ten creatures.

The scale chosen for this new "Battlesystem" is key because it incorporates skirmishing units and solo hero involvement. Why? Because it makes sense within the logic of fantasy RPGs that one fighter for example could go toe to toe with ten lesser orcs or one big monster could threaten a small army. Stands are combined into larger units but in general still keep their average stats. Movement and spells are similarly scaled to account for the size of a battlefield. Heroes are given options to lead forces and give orders.

Terrain is handled in a rather easy fashion and mission objectives are touched on as well to give opponents a scoring system in order to see how decisive a victory ends up. The most important addition to these scaled 5E rules is the Check Morale feature which can make or break a battle. Of course solo heroes can try to step in and rally those broken units. All these rules suggestions have the making for good skirmishing battles. I would also hope there's some way to better represent sieges in the rules at a future time.

My take on When Armies Clash? Compared to the old AD&D Battlesystem it's a good start (I still possess all my counters and use them endlessly) though I highly doubt I'll use it in this current form. I wonder how much magic can break this game since 5E spells seem to be frontloaded for damage at lower levels now. I'm also mainly concerned how well 5E rules hold up as you increase the size of regimented units. A small army led by play characters against the Horde of Elemental Evil is fine by these rules. However, I'm biased to large epic battles when it comes to my Greyhawk campaigns since Gygax was originally a wargamer and set up things for conflicts on a continental scale. There is easily more than a dozen battles in Greyhawk canon that involve thousands of soldiers per side. Never mind historical examples of mass combat, a typical trope in fantasy warfare is the vast enemy horde which always seems to be 10,000 strong. That translates to 1000 "stands" in this system. Now whether you use minis or counters, that's rather difficult to present and I'm sure heroes might want to stick to their regiments instead of going it solo.

For this reason my mass combat system of choice has always been the less flashy War Machine rules from the OD&D Companion Set or the card-based but cleverly organized mass combat rules from Birthright. Sure you could scale up stands to 20, 50, 100 men but then you lose the game balance for solo hero or monster combat. Basically it comes down to the story your DM is trying to tell and how much time you want to invest in a major battle. Of course what do I know? I play Warhammer 40k! If anyone tries these rules let me know!

Behemoth Greyhawk Map

Anna Meyer's grand Flanaess map quest is still in its final stages. Her monster wall map is a huge download but may well be worth it to lovers of Greyhawk and fantasy cartography in general. Check that out and more on Anna's own regularly updated blog.

Ring of Five Questions: Chris Pramas

Normally the weekend is a good time to rest, but instead I'm here to bring my fellow Greyhawkers another fine episode of the Ring of Five Questions! Last time out I completed an interview of Living Greyhawk's Eric Menge. Following up on Eric, I now turn the spotlight on another big name in the gaming industry. This developer worked a short but productive stint with Wizards of the Coast including work on D&D 3rd Edition and the Greyhawk setting's Slavers (with Sean K Reynolds). Then in 2000 he set out and forged his own company in Seattle, the award winning Green Ronin, known today for great products like Freeport, Mutants & Masterminds (my favorite) and also Dragon Age RPG and A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying. Despite running Green Ronin he still managed to publish several articles in Dragon Magazine for Wizards' short lived Chainmail minis skirmish game, developing the setting for much of Western Oerik. Beyond Wizards and Green Ronin he has also branched out to do work for Games Workshop on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition as well as write for an MMO, Vigil Games' Dark Millennium Online. Not a bad decade! Please welcome into the Ring, Chris Pramas!

Q1. I'm sure you're familiar with the Darlene map. What area of the World of Greyhawk is your favorite?

Chris: I’m fond of the Sheldomar Valley. I’ve more had campaigns in that region than anywhere else in Greyhawk, and in fact it’s where the game I’m running for my family right now is located. I started them in Keoland with the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh.
I like it because it’s a good central location. Plenty to do in the valley itself, and you can have characters travel down to the Amedio Jungle, or into the mountains and the Sea of Dust beyond, or up to the Baklunish Basin for some Arabian flavored adventures. Of course, we’ve been playing for months and my PCs are still in Saltmarsh!

Q2. Greyhawk has dozens of deities to choose from, but if you could actually be one of them which one would it be?

Chris: Tempting as it is to say Heironeous, as I do enjoy some righteous ass kicking, I’d get tired of fighting all the time. Really, Delleb is more my speed. Reading, researching, and uncovering forgotten knowledge would be a lot more fun for me in the long term.

Q3. The lands of Western Oerik, featured in your Dragon articles about the Chainmail minis setting, have recently gained new interest in the fan community. What inspirations did you draw from in designing the cultures of the Sundered Empire?

Chris: It was a bit tricky because I was trying to design an interesting new setting, but it also had to have all the core elements you expect from D&D. In particular, the minis had to double as generic D&D minis. I had argued that we should keep the separate line of RPG minis we had started in 1999, but my boss did not agree so ours had to serve two purposes.
The most out there thing I was able to do was the People’s State of Mordengard and the influence for this was my own lefty politics. One day I was thinking about how most fantasy settings have traditional kingdoms and empires, but why not something else? Then it occurred to me that dwarves would make great communists and that was the idea that led to Mordengard. The shame of the minis was that I wanted their look to be based on old Soviet propaganda posters. For the reasons outlined above, we had to give them a more generic dwarf style.
For other factions, my choices went no deeper than favorite monsters of mine. I can’t really explain my fondness for gnolls and hobgoblins, but it goes back to my earliest days of playing D&D. So it was only naturally they should figure prominently in the factions. Also, it just made sense to me that the hobgoblins would be the ones to organize the savage humanoids into an effective fighting force.

Q4. You took part in developing the excellent sourcebook Slavers before starting your own company. Did any classic Greyhawk publications influence your work at Green Ronin?

Chris: Oh, sure. In fact, I just finished an essay for Wolfgang Baur that talks about the influence of the Greyhawk folio on me in some depth. When I was designing the World of Freeport for the Pirate’s Guide to Freeport, the folio was my inspiration. To that point, Freeport had always been a city meant to be dropped into the fantasy setting of the GM’s choice. However, many fans wanted to see what an expanded world would look like, so I wrote an optional chapter in that book doing just that. Since I had limited space, I used an updated version of the folio format.

Q5. Pretend for a minute that Green Ronin got the license to reboot Greyhawk. What major change would you make to breathe new life into the setting?

Chris: I would roll the timeline back to 576 and leave it there. I think the setting was not only more interesting then, but it was easier for newbies to get into. All the products that came after the Greyhawk Wars had the unenviable task of trying to summarize a lot of complicated history. That’s a barrier to entry that just doesn’t need to exist. And frankly, if there are going to be world shaking events in Greyhawk, they should be things individual GMs decide to do in their campaigns.
I had this issue when I was designing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition for Games Workshop.  When we were putting the game together, GW was in the midst of this big event called the Storm of Chaos and they wanted the RPG to reflect what had just happened to the Empire. I’d rather have let GMs choose when to set their campaigns. We easily could have done a Storm of Chaos book that showed you how to play through it if you wanted, rather than make it the default setting, but it wasn’t my call to make.

Greyhawk Needs Skaven

So yeah...Earlier this year I fell into the abyss that is Warhammer Fantasy Battles. In this table-top minis war game, I tend to like playing quirky, dirty, evil armies (like Orks in Warhammer 40k) so naturally I was a good fit to play the Skaven. Now for much longer than this new hobby, I've been involved in Games Workshop games for a long time, including their RPG and one thing has always struck me about Skaven that I've been reminded of since buying into this monstrous race: the Greyhawk setting would be an awesome fit for Skaven.

"The Skaven are a race of bipedal ratmen that are so rarely seen that many deny their very existence. The majority of the man-sized vermin are slight of build and, if they abandoned their slinking haunched gait, stand bewteen four to five feet in height...Skaven are covered in close fur, save for their ears, muzzle, hands, and fleshy, worm-like tails. The eyes of the ratmen gleam red in torchlight and their mouths are lined with wicked teeth..."

First point to get out of the way, it's my belief the "Old World" of Warhammer and the gritty World of Greyhawk of Gygax's creation have always been contemporary publications and so hold alot of similarities in theme and mood. Heck, it's probably the reason why GW's Carl Sargent was brought over to add his grim touch to Greyhawk in 2nd edition.

Second, you can argue that D&D and thus Greyhawk does have ratmen already in the form of wererats. Wererats have been around since the beginning along with more lycanthropes than I can count. These however don't count in my book because they don't go far enough to be true Skaven. Wererats are cursed humanoids whereas the Skaven are a race-born unto themselves. Also, in D&D wererats are also not portrayed as the shadowy horde in waiting that is the Skaven...

"Although not regularly seen by surface dwellers, the Skaven are arguably the most numerous of all races. With a population of titanic proportions, the Skaven remain hidden away underneath unsuspecting nations."

The Skaven are more than a nest of monsters lurking in Greyhawk City's sewers ready to steal your purse. Yes indeed they can do that, but there is more to the Skaven than surface dwellers realize! The Skaven practice a blend of sorcery and science, a mockery of their hated enemy the dwarves and also quite similar to D&D's Derro. Thus, you'll see strange, warpstone powered warmachines and many lesser contraptions built to bring ruin and slaughter to the surface world. Other clans specialize in the spreading of pestilent plagues or the alchemical manipulation of their own kind into frenzied killers and altered into monstrous brutes like rat-ogres. Just as numerous and easily more cunning than D&D kobolds, the fastest of the Skaven of course, are masters of stealth and assassination with their poisoned weapons.

How's this work good for Greyhawk? Well as stated before they are similar to both Derro and Kobolds which are staples in Greyhawk but neither of which have the gravitas to be a true threat on an epic scale (unless you count the module Doomgrinder, yes I went there). The Skaven could be the power behind common wererat sightings, and a precursor to a much worse infestation to come. Muse over these scenarios:

Opportunistic Incursion: The Greyhawk Wars have just winded down and all the nations of the Flanaess are tired and low on resources. Suddenly bursting from beneath the ground of several key nations comes the coordinated attacks of a well-armed and endless horde of Skaven...

Congratulations On Clearing Zagig's Ruins: The heroes have killed all the monsters, taken all the treasure and returned to the city to celebrate. A year later the Skaven fill the void, scavenge what magic is left behind and stage a surprise attack on all nearby civilizations, perhaps even tunneling all the way to Greyhawk City itself!

A New Nation To Deal With: Iuz has been the omnipresent threat in the Flanaess for generations so who would suspect a new evil arising from below? Without warning things begin crawling out from under an unlikely region (such as Ket or Riftcanyon) and the Skaven soon have a foothold in order to attack both good and evil lands alike.

Vault of the...Skaven? Here's a twist for your campaign. The heroes have braved many miles of caverns and corridors and soon anticipate a big throw down with the dreaded, yet popularly known Drow. Only, they were too late. The Skaven got to Erehli Cinlu first and now they are going to track the PCs back to where they came from!

Another Gencon Survived

Well folks, Gencon is over. It's back to the daily grind. I can't say I have much to report from the World of Greyhawk at the event, what with the news of Wizards resurrecting the long neglected Forgotten Realms setting (snark). It wasn't all bad, my time was productive if not memorable.

Canonfire at the RAM Brewery: According to my friends I spent half the convention here. Maybe so. I did Thursday and Saturday night meet-ups here with Greyhawk contributors Baronzemo, Robbastard, Sir Xaris and the TPK Games crew and of course my cohort Valkaun Dain. Food was ate, beer was drank and Greyhawk was discussed. I even managed to talk to a few total strangers who were in town for a different convention and teach them about Gencon. Good times.

Soliciting Interviews: I got a good influx of authors to agree to answering my email interview for the Ring of Five Questions. I had been looking forward to this all year. Stay tuned for these in the hopefully near future.

My Haul: I snagged a copy of Mark Morrison's (aka baronzemo) new module, Stonepick Crossing from the OSR booth. Here I met Tim Kask and narrowly missed seeing Frank Mentzer. Going through various WotC locations I got 4/6 special drow themed dice available. My friends were troopers and got them all. I of course spent an inordinate amount of time around the GamesWorkshop/ Forgeworld booth because basically they are never at Gencon. I improved my weak Skaven army and upgraded my Warhammer 40k army with a badass Biker Boss. Watch out! I also visited the fine folks at Paizo and bought a copy of their new Pathfinder comic book, and a couple supplements from their Skull & Shackles AP for use in my own Greyhawk high seas campaign. It was great catching up with old chat friends Liz Courts and Adam Daigle who both went from lowly Paizo fans to full time henchmen. Lastly I bought the first novel in a new series by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman titled Bones of the Dragon. I'm hoping it's as good as their previous work, which coincidentally I had the Dragonlance trilogy on me so I had Weis sign that too.

D&DNext: I played in a quick playtest with two of my friends. I played a rogue thug with 5 h.p. and by all means was a screw up. We didn't play long enough to get a true feel of the system, but on the bright side it was not dependent on a grid to judge the action which is a good sign. Character creation felt like a hybrid of 3.5 and 4e. The jury is still out on this edition since there is 2 more years of playtesting to come. Sheesh!

Podcasting: Last but not least our gaming podcast, Gamerstable was out in force this year (well the guys were moreso than me). They were doing podcast recordings, mingling with industry folk, handing out cards and also Gamerstable shirts like this one...

Yeah, next year is going to be hard to top!

Flags, Banners and Standards

Over at the Canonfire forums a thread was started by Boslok the Elder concerning a lack of discussion and information about Greyhawk's flags and banners. At first this struck me as weird since everyone knows where to go to find pictures of the heraldic devices of each country. Yet the answers Boslok seeks is more nuanced than I originally thought, and the examples he created led me to research more into the history of flags on Wikipedia. I found some interesting stuff:

"During the High Middle Ages flags came to be used primarily as a heraldic device in battle, allowing more easily to identify a knight than only from the heraldic device painted on the shield. Already during the high medieval period, and increasingly during the Late Middle Ages, city states and communes such as those of the Old Swiss Confederacy also began to use flags as field signs."

So yes, we canonically know the heraldry of the Flanaess' nations and knighthoods, (and even a few individuals like Robilar or Tenser) but so far we've only been privy to the shield paintings and not hardly at all to how they fit or are arranged on flags either horizontal or vertical in shape.

I didn't know why but vertical standards and flags always seemed more common in certain cultures to me, and here is a simple reason why:

"Vertical flags are sometimes used in lieu of the standard horizontal flag in central and eastern Europe, particularly in the German-speaking countries. This practice came about because the relatively brisk wind needed to display horizontal flags is not common in these countries."

Then, of particular interest to my ongoing Hold of the Sea Princes campaign, there is maritime flag rules:

"Flags are particularly important at sea, where they can mean the difference between life and death, and consequently where the rules and regulations for the flying of flags are strictly enforced. A national flag flown at sea is known as an ensign. A courteous, peaceable merchant ship or yacht customarily flies its ensign (in the usual ensign position), together with the flag of whatever nation it is currently visiting at the mast (known as a courtesy flag). To fly one's ensign alone in foreign waters, a foreign port or in the face of a foreign warship traditionally indicates a willingness to fight, with cannon, for the right to do so."

"Traditionally, a vessel flying under the courtesy flag of a specific nation, regardless of the vessel's country of registry, is considered to be operating under the law of her 'host' nation."

This is quite cool to know and makes the need for distinguishing the flags of various maritime nations in the Flanaess important. (At least the cultured ones, the barbarian states probably wouldn't follow the same rules as the Sea Barons for instance) Creating unique pirate flags, like the Crimson Fleet or the Slavelords would be a keen project as well.

Of course with the pantheistic world that is Oerth, there is also a possibility for religious flags:

"Flags can play many different roles in religion. In Buddhism, prayer flags are used, usually in sets of five differently colored flags. Many national flags and other flags include religious symbols such as the cross, the crescent, or a reference to a patron saint. Flags are also adopted by religious groups and flags such as the Jain flag and the Christian flag are used to represent a whole religion."

Imagine a Heironean lightning bolt flag or a Hextorian discord standard. Lots of potential.

One last thing, I've always noticed that GW's Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40k always makes heavy use of banners, flags and so on. Their use is even an integral part of the minis game. Concerning D&D RPG settings though, examples beyond shield heraldic seem lacking by comparison (even for FR I'd imagine). If anyone knows more on the subject of Greyhawk flags I'd be happy to listen or perhaps see it discussed over on the forums for Boslok's sake. More next time.