As I write mock modules for my own amusement (I should really just post my notes here, maybe someone will find them useful) and specially for higher level games with a focus for wilderness exploration, I notice more and more that I want to include mass battles. Perhaps not armies clashing, although the idea sounds amazing, but warbands and incursions size battles. I’ve always wanted to play out the random encounter of 50 orcs or 30 brigands but I never came around to figure out how that would play out. I have heard from peers in the community to just scale up the game: treat 10 orcs as 1 orc stat wise and just play out combat as usual, variations of Jeffro’s Mass Combat for AD&D which I admittedly find very smart.
Alternatively, I have also considered just using the Original Chainmail which is a fun game or Daniel Collin’s Book of War from Delta’s D&D Hotspot which is also very like Chainmail, but easier to follow and with less conditional rules. My issue with all of these however, even though they work great, is they way they implement the Player Characters. Jeffro’s doesnt talk about this, Book of War requires characters to be at least 10th level or more to survive and Chainmail is inconsistent with its approach and language when it comes to having heroes and fantasy units interact with the 1:20 scale.
And so, here I am, trying to find a way to make mass combat interesting while keeping in mind the player characters and have a mix of 1:10 scale and 1:1 scale. I admit, that the rules I have written up are incredibly inspired by Book of War if not pulled out directly, using as a key component the core rules of the game. However, I did give my own approach to integrate the PCs of any level, have the spot light shining on them while also managing mass combat. Additionally I also included advice for running this in Theater of the Mind. Down below I present my simple mass combat rules for B/X or any old school edition of D&D or OSR game. Keeping in mind, this is not a wargame but rather a set of rules to resolve larger scale conflict within ones own personal fantasy roleplaying game.
Lair of the Lich 