Gloranthan Battles & Warfare

[David Scott]

I've moved this over from

https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/6893-can-warding-be-abused-this-way/?page=4

to a new thread as the direction has gone in a new and interesting direction:

@Pentallionsaid

I love set battles in Glorantha.  Using WarHamster, I've run the Battle of Iceland I think 3 times.  It's always gone differently for the PCs even though the battle generally follows closely to the script.  That battle should win roleplaying awards for being so well designed.  It works perfectly with WarHamster rules.

 

@Joerg

That's the crux of it - your battle resolution system that allows to deal with units while keeping some personal experience for the character included in some formation or other.

@Furry Fella

I have used the above committee game and krieg spiel larger scale combat for / in RPG's before.

@g33k

I remain unimpressed by the handwave of "oh, there's other magic thsat counters the magic, so the mundane militaries look and act about the same..."

 

[Stew Stansfield]

*hesitates*

Oh, go on, let's be provocative...

Warfare has always been—by far—the weakest area of Glorantha.

Why? Because we know too little of what we speak? Quite the contrary. Because we know too much. (Or presume to...)

No other area of Glorantha suffers from so many preconceptions. Most of us know sod-all about ritual, economics, semiotics, anthropology or any number of other subjects. Oh, sure, we pretend to when we're getting into arguments on t'internet. But we don't really, do we? We just look it up on Wikipedia beforehand. But warfare? We've got that down. It infuses us. It may be a fairly shallow level of knowledge, but it's real and broadly pervasive. (And, OK, there's probably a lot of Wikipedia'ing going on aswell.)

Look at those of us who contribute to Glorantha, whether as creators or fans on message-lists. We're (mostly) all the same. Middle-aged white blokes of European heritage, who grew up playing with the same (or similar) toy soldiers, watching the same war films and reading the same popular military history books. We play the same role-playing games that—even now—struggle to shake off their clumsily deterministic wargaming roots. The fetish that is military history (or military 'current affairs') is the oldest, most persistent example of geek culture – that existed millennia before we thought to coin the term; its pathology rooted in the same categorisation, reductionism and determinism. Everything goes in its little box. Logos.

And that's the problem with Gloranthan warfare, really: too much logos, not enough mythos.

The tension between mythos and logos in Glorantha is, I think, often a good thing. Provocative but inspiring. But when it comes to Gloranthan warfare, mythos is losing. And that's bad.

It's far too rooted in our own experience. We bring far too much baggage and fail to see it on Gloranthan terms. It's bad enough for me as a fairly proximal early-modernist having to bat off late-modern assumptions and prejudices; I feel for Gloranthans or even real-world ancient cultures.

How often do we see magic treated as some addendum? A layer added on top of a unit's panoply and tactical function, as opposed to its core? Why not an approach that turned all this on its head; that reduced Earthly military history to second- or third-order haberdashery and instead centred on myth and meaning?

I might whinge about Hero Wars and HeroQuest's incessant focus on the Orlanthi, but it had a glowing up-side. The Sartarite Orlanthi don't do military in the sense that comforted nasty old logos. You just had a bunch of yokels pratting around in a shieldwall while heroes and weaponthanes went around doing ABSOLUTELY COOL SHIT (TM). Mythos was front and centre. Needless to say, I liked that.

Anyway, enough of me moaning. I should probably stick to duck wizards.

But I've been wanting to write that for about five years, and here seemed as good a place as any. Sorry!

*scarpers*

[Yelm's Light]

Combat is one sphere, and RP'ing is another, and generally never the twain shall meet.

 It all depends on the focus your game has.  Logos only wins out over mythos when that focus is combat.  If the majority of your game time is spent moving miniatures around and rolling dice, your focus is probably the former.

 Sure, I'll fight to the death over realism in combat.  But that's only for the portion of the game in which there is combat, which, in mine, is a minority of the time.  I hardly ever do major battles except as plot devices or background, Warhamster notwithstanding.

[kaydet]

Honestly, I like that Gloranthan warfare is roughly analogous to Terrestrial modes, with magic in a decisive but nevertheless supportive role. I have always pictured Glorantha as a world that functions "normally" except where magic penetrates into the world to change it. Perhaps that is because Glorantha, to me, is Earth With Gods: the Iliad and Odyssey as Truth.

Of course, as time passes on and the Hero Wars wax into fullness, magic becomes more and more the dominant arm of warfare, until eventually mortal soldiers become essentially irrelevant. So, as it has shown before, Glorantha has something for everyone.

[Pentallion]

What's cool about major battles - and WBRM captured it in their combat system - is the importance of what modern combat theory calls combined arms.  Combined arms nowadays refers to the integration of the air force, infantry, tanks and artillery in combat.  In Glorantha, it's the integration of shamanism, infantry, divine and sorcerous (and even chaotic magic) in combat.

Grasping the secret of combined arms is what set Argrath apart.  The Orlanthi always focused on Divine magic.  Just look at King of Dragon Pass and you see how their combat focused on divine magic.  But the Lunar's had conquered and subsumed so many cultures that they had learned to integrate spirits, sorcery, divine and chaos into their military tool box.  Argrath transformed the Orlanthi so that they could do the same.

And it works not only on a grand board game scale, but in the game Runequest as well.  Have a unit of 200 shamans release 200 spirits to possess 200 enemy infantry who then turn and attack their compatriots and you're going to not only disrupt their formation but cause a lot of damage.  Now charge into that unit while it's under spiritual attack and 200 sorcerers are casting multispelled venoms and even an outnumbered Orlanthi force can wipe out a much larger, heavily armed Lunar force. 

Except, of course, that the Lunars have their own shamans and their own sorcerers and Humakt knows what chaos magic they'll summon.

[Richard S.]

And this is why my homebrew Glorantha wargame isn't done yet.

[The God Learner]

Harrumph. I'd expect Gloranthan battles to be mainly driven by heroic single combat between key figures; multiple fights, if the situation demands it. The armies engage and provide a backdrop and setting for these as generals direct their forces to funnel the fights they prefer. That's the way it's always been done, after all, and the way it's done best. 

I was not a proponent of the mass production of magical gear, by the way. It appears to inevitably lead to off-putting stratagems of warfare like the 'trench warfares' or 'lightning kriegs' favored in an odd globular sub-hell covered with blue dragons that we studied for the purpose. But did anyone listen? Like Nysalor they did.

 

[Yelm's Light]

I didn't get a harrumph outta that guy...

[styopa]

3 hours ago, The God Learner said:

Harrumph. I'd expect Gloranthan battles to be mainly driven by heroic single combat between key figures; multiple fights, if the situation demands it. The armies engage and provide a backdrop and setting for these as generals direct their forces to funnel the fights they prefer. That's the way it's always been done, after all, and the way it's done best. 

I was not a proponent of the mass production of magical gear, by the way. It appears to inevitably lead to off-putting stratagems of warfare like the 'trench warfares' or 'lightning kriegs' favored in an odd globular sub-hell covered with blue dragons that we studied for the purpose. But did anyone listen? Like Nysalor they did.

 

Name checks out by the way. 

 

I think the question boils down to relatability.

Gloranthan army-scale combat is either:

- more or less like some historical IRL example, with the magic from each side roughly canceling each other out like mega-artillery until it doesn't, at which point the remaining side with it in good order wipes the other side off the field (this magical mega-artillery could be personified in heroes, or legions of mages, or spirits, or any combination), or

- something totally unlike anything IRL in which case the utter lack of specifics in terms of mechanics or rules make 'how it plays out' a complete guessing game and almost entirely pointless to talk about.

To me it's obvious that people tend to gravitate toward the former, if only because we're here to natter and the latter gives us nothing to natter about.

[Joerg]

Staging a battle with meaningful input from the player characters is easy if the player characters qualify to step forth as champions. It fails abysmally if the player characters take a place in the ranks, reducing them to little more than goons with a front line point of view on events.

From that perspective, the battle is a set of railroads and mary-sue champions doing their thing leaving the player characters to cheer or jeer, and then experience the terror of facing an inhuman wave of bodies on a collision course. No place for individual heroics like in the defence of the Cradle, just trying to maintain formation while hell breaks out. In a non-commanding role, there is hardly any way to make a battle a satisfying wargaming experience if your point of view is fixed to within the formation. Roleplaying the personal horror is easily done in narrative mode, but not in the gritty combat simulation that RQ excels at when player characters can act individually.

This is what made me avoid the trope of the Sun Dome militiaman.

[Pentallion]

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Staging a battle with meaningful input from the player characters is easy if the player characters qualify to step forth as champions. It fails abysmally if the player characters take a place in the ranks, reducing them to little more than goons with a front line point of view on events.

From that perspective, the battle is a set of railroads and mary-sue champions doing their thing leaving the player characters to cheer or jeer, and then experience the terror of facing an inhuman wave of bodies on a collision course. No place for individual heroics like in the defence of the Cradle, just trying to maintain formation while hell breaks out. In a non-commanding role, there is hardly any way to make a battle a satisfying wargaming experience if your point of view is fixed to within the formation. Roleplaying the personal horror is easily done in narrative mode, but not in the gritty combat simulation that RQ excels at when player characters can act individually.

This is what made me avoid the trope of the Sun Dome militiaman.

No, my personal experience says that is incorrect Jeorg, sorry to disagree with you.  Take the last time I ran the Battle of Iceland, for example.  The PCs weren't the leaders of the battle, but they had the potential to affect the battlefield.  In the end, they only affected their area of the battle.  Nothing changed in how the narrative of the battle was given.  Note that Orlanth is Dead was a HeroQuest scenario and we were playing Runequest using WarHamster rules for large combats.  So the narrative qualities of the battle were built in, but the RuneQuest simulationist qualities were what affected the PCs directly.   They got to experience the fear and exhiliration of being heroes caught up in a major battle nonetheless.

In the initial phase they held their ground just long enough for reinforcements to arrive, then fell back to regain fatigue points.  But then the people came out of the woods and the heroes realized the Lunar flanking maneuver through the forest.  So I take it back because this was their biggest affect upon the battle.   They lit the woods afire and destroyed those lunar units.  But while this was happening, the lunars were pushing through down the main road.  The PC's returned their attention to the front lines.  The Basmoli Berserker went full Basmol and leaped over the Hoplite line and began attacking them from the rear out of a move from Vikings on the History channel. 

This was my favorite part.  Right then the Lasadon Lions arrived and he had to go toe to toe with Carmanian lion folk.  The other PCs, desperate to save their friend, pulled out all the stops to get through the hoplites and fight by his side.  Meanwhile, all the chaos stuff began happening, all the flying creatures attacked.  the Sun Domers switched sides.  Ethilrists troops vs King Broyans men.  While the PCs find themselves in a little pocket of resistance that's pushed a bulge into the Lunar lines and is in danger of being surrounded.

And in the end, they were surrounded and all hope looked lost.  And right then, the trolls rose up out of the ground and saved the day.

So what did the heroes actually feel like they did?  First and foremost, they survived.  That's the very mythical core of the I Fought, We Won battle that Iceland represents.  Secondly, they bought time for their side to finally win the day.  Without them, those troops coming down that main road would have overrun Broyan and the rest of the Orlanthi.

 

Edited February 16, 2018 by Pentallion

[The God Learner]

If we're talking game mechanics, I'm partial to an abstracted system like one of those for Pendragon, but altered for to get a Gloranthan feel. Pendragon, from what I recall, basically had two commanders slug it out in a contest of Battle skills with various modifiers. After a number of rounds, the battle ended with a draw or victory. Player knights in the battle basically fought one round of random monster encounter per battle round. Their commander's rolls affected how dire things got. It could get dangerous and bloody for the characters without any fault of theirs.

I would then add some mechanism for champions to clash and sway or decide the battle, like in the stories. I'll hand wave on exactly how that should be done for now. Personally, I'd prefer something with a light touch rather than, say, running a detailed encounter every battle round. 

Depending on grittiness, the roles of players can vary. I'd probably expect them to take part as (bands of) champions rather than regular soldiers. 

[soltakss]

With two evenly matched, discplined and equipped armies, the artrival of a True Dragon, True Giant or Chaos Demon such as the Crimson Bat will throw all the wargaming out of the window.

Mundane Gloranthan combat is about armies, true Gloranthan combat is about Heroes and Mega-Creatures.

There is a passage in King of Sartar that describes how someone brought an army and, more importantly, a Hero. Too right, armies are a dime a dozen, Heroes are worth their weight in gold.

[styopa]

6 hours ago, soltakss said:

There is a passage in King of Sartar that describes how someone brought an army and, more importantly, a Hero. Too right, armies are a dime a dozen, Heroes are worth their weight in gold.

Which to me leaves the resolution of Gloranthan battles more to the realm of a dramatic narrative than mechanics.  Some people might find that more fulfilling in a mythopoeic, Campbellian sense; I find it so subjective as to be actually rather dull. 

A game is a thing where people play according to codified structures in which the outcome isn't subjective but instead the result of choices made and risks taken, often calculating against impersonal chance.  Gloranthan battles of dueling deux-ex-machinas aren't really that.

[Joerg]

On 17.2.2018 at 12:03 AM, Pentallion said:

No, my personal experience says that is incorrect Jeorg, sorry to disagree with you.  Take the last time I ran the Battle of Iceland, for example.  The PCs weren't the leaders of the battle, but they had the potential to affect the battlefield.  In the end, they only affected their area of the battle.  Nothing changed in how the narrative of the battle was given.  Note that Orlanth is Dead was a HeroQuest scenario and we were playing Runequest using WarHamster rules for large combats.  So the narrative qualities of the battle were built in, but the RuneQuest simulationist qualities were what affected the PCs directly.   They got to experience the fear and exhiliration of being heroes caught up in a major battle nonetheless.

So, what exactly was the role of your players' charcters? Were they a small independent band thrown together with other such bands to make up an irregular force, or were they part of a coordinated unit trained to be more than just five bands of adventurers doing some mercenary stuff?

As much as I hate that movie, Mel Gibson's Patriot shows how a militia is made o hold up like professionals under enemy fire, and to just stand there and take damage while from enemy skirmishers other units do their  stuff. "Hold, don't break away" is a situation of individual and collective horror, especially if the enemy fire becomes Lunar (or Pentan) magic. The mere stable presence of that unit might be the hinge of the battle.

It is as honorable a role in a battle as followers of a mighty king might wish, but it doesn't necessarily mean much individual combat, if at all. It does mean sustaining casualties, often enough without being able to strike back. And never, ever, break off as your familiar small combat unit called "party".

Now make an enjoyable roleplaying activity out of this using RQ rules.

 

I won't doubt that your players had a lot of enjoyment of their characters' situation in the battle, but basically they did _not_ act as part of a battle unit, but as their usual small scale specialist fighter/mage irregulars. That's a scenario on the fringes of the battle, however decisive it may feel. But it is not participating in the core of a set battle.

Basically, you created a situation where the battle dissolved into normal RQ combat, and let them excel at what they were good at.

But what about being put into a unit that doesn't get these "let's step out of the set battle" moments? Sure, you could say that's poor railroading on the GMs part, but I would expect every participant in a war with such bigger coordinated units to survive one such day of battle, and it would be nice to give this as an in-play experience rather than an off-stage new background narrative.

 

[scott-martin]

On 2/14/2018 at 7:32 AM, Quackatoa said:

Look at those of us who contribute to Glorantha, whether as creators or fans on message-lists. We're (mostly) all the same. Middle-aged white blokes of European heritage, who grew up playing with the same (or similar) toy soldiers, watching the same war films and reading the same popular military history books. We play the same role-playing games that—even now—struggle to shake off their clumsily deterministic wargaming roots. The fetish that is military history (or military 'current affairs') is the oldest, most persistent example of geek culture – that existed millennia before we thought to coin the term; its pathology rooted in the same categorisation, reductionism and determinism. Everything goes in its little box. Logos.

Not arguing with any of this but 'tweren't always thus . . . and maybe the community can draw on a wider range of life experiences in future. While Steve Perrin ultimately had to sit out the war classified 1-Y, it was due to the cumulative bones broken in 2-3 years of hard SCA combat. These weren't quite the massive camping-and-mayhem engagements of today, but there was still plenty of mythos if not gnosis there -- he'd effectively already seen so much action that the draft board moved on to fresher prospects. I also understand that Clint Bigglestone and other figures around the early Runequest scene spent enough time in the mundane military that they wouldn't exactly count as armchair-only fetishists.

It might be good to open talk of Gloranthan warfare to modern SCA generals (with their decades of experience in both the realities and the dramaturgy of archaic combat) and find ways to get the new Runequest into the hands of active duty personnel as well as recent veterans. 

[Yelm's Light]

In my experience, SCA events were seldom about the war leaders' strategy.  (And I'm also a Navy man, not that that has much of anything to do with land combat.)

[davecake]

On 14/02/2018 at 8:32 PM, Quackatoa said:

ow often do we see magic treated as some addendum? A layer added on top of a unit's panoply and tactical function, as opposed to its core? Why not an approach that turned all this on its head; that reduced Earthly military history to second- or third-order haberdashery and instead centred on myth and meaning?

For major battles we know about, this seems exactly what has already been done. At the Battle of Night and Day we know the battle order etc, but then literal gods turn up on the battle field. The Fall of Boldhome has dragon vs Bat, and a legendary magical duel. Four Arrows of Light we know far more about the actions of gods and heroes than troops. Dwernapple is about giants, and Jar-eel leaving the field for love. Nights of Horror has dragons and heroes and chaos monster hordes on the field, as well as huge hordes of cavalry. 

We may spend a lot of time worrying about the battalia and troops, because that’s the human scale detail that matters to many PCs. But when it comes to descriptions of battle in the sources, a magic and myth dominated outcome seems pretty common. 

[davecake]

There is no one way to make a battle part of a story, and so no one way right way to run it in a game. 

I’ve run mass battle sessions in RuneQuest, HeroQuest, D&D, 13th Age, pendragon, and probably more, for a range of settings - Glorantha, historical, Arthurian, homebrew D&D, etc. There are multiple way to do it, that all can work, as long as you know what sort of story you want to tell. You can have the PCs as part of the general melee, like the Pendragon battle system. You can play it out with players as commanders, either generals at a strategic level or small unit commanders. You can have the PCs be that small but crucial strike team that can change the course of battle. You can have your PCs be focussed on the magical side, battling in the spirit world while the melee ranges ‘beneath’ them. Or the PCs controlling specific powerful assets - Dragon riding, or aiming siege weapons. And you can mix and match them - the  PCs are commanders, but also the only people tough enough to take on that demon. Or after a few rounds of battle you can attack the enemy leaders. Or perhaps the battle starts with single combat between champions, and that will determine morale. I’ve done most of these as well. I had a D&D campaign that had a major war, and had scenarios with the PCs taking out strategic emplacements, another with PCs teleporting into the centre of battle to take out demons, another with a fight on the back of a huge dragon against enemy commanders, another with them raising cash for logistics, etc. 

War is one of the oldest sources for stories, and there are a lot of stories to tell, and ways to tell them. They all work. So there is no one right way to run a battle scenario or a war campaign, and no single set of rules that will always suit. Sometimes you want abstraction, sometimes you want detail, sometimes you want simulationist, sometimes narrativist (even, sometimes, when that goes against the campaign default mode), sometimes players have agency, sometimes the point is they don’t. Sometimes you want detailed war game rules, sometimes you might want DrameSystem and not much more. Most of them can work in Glorantha. 

I particularly recommend, as a source for a range of war stories all in one, Joe Abercrombie’s book The Heroes. 

[davecake]

I do tend to reject the ‘listen to the SCA’ school of thought for Glorantha, precisely because of the prevalence of magic and the combined arms aspect - magic is a vital part of Glorantha, at all levels, and that does change a lot. To an extent, a lot of battlefield magic is like artillery or air cover in how it changes battle, so Gloranthan warfare is very different to historical Bronze Age warfare, especially in the Hero Wars era. But it’s also wildly different to modern warfare, because magic is not like technology - especially Gloranthan magic. 

[Stew Stansfield]

3 hours ago, davecake said:

For major battles we know about, this seems exactly what has already been done. At the Battle of Night and Day we know the battle order etc, but then literal gods turn up on the battle field. The Fall of Boldhome has dragon vs Bat, and a legendary magical duel. Four Arrows of Light we know far more about the actions of gods and heroes than troops. Dwernapple is about giants, and Jar-eel leaving the field for love. Nights of Horror has dragons and heroes and chaos monster hordes on the field, as well as huge hordes of cavalry. 

We may spend a lot of time worrying about the battalia and troops, because that’s the human scale detail that matters to many PCs. But when it comes to descriptions of battle in the sources, a magic and myth dominated outcome seems pretty common. 

That's very true, David. Glorantha likes magic and myth writ large, with heroes, gods and monsters. I'm perhaps getting at something a little different. I'll try and explain by way of an example.

• A bronze-clad phalanx marches upon the enemy's heartland. It is summer. The air is cloudless, hot and dry. The lighter-armed enemy denies the attackers battle. They retreat, harassing the invaders at every opportunity. The invaders cannot engage or give chase, so march onward. Finally, after the phalanx is worn down by its marches, stressed by heat fatigue and skirmishes, the enemy gives battle. The phalanx is rigid and strong, but tired, unwieldy and inflexible. The enemy is quicker, lighter and more adaptable – in armament and tactics. Its swordsmen get under the spears of the phalanx; they harass its sides and rear. The invader is slowly and inexorably bled and defeated.

This simple example has many antecedents in history. It draws on the relative strengths and weaknesses of irregular versus regular soldiers, or of light, medium and heavy infantry; of rigid and flexible tactics. Let's transpose this to Glorantha.

• A Stonewall Phalanx marches upon the enemy's heartland. It is Fire Season. The air is burned cloudless by Yelm's magnificence; the phalanx marches under his glory. The lighter-armed enemy denies the attackers battle. They retreat, harassing the invaders at every opportunity. The invaders care not. Their armour is burnished bright, reflecting their god's brilliance. Every step they take—in unison—under the blazing sun is an act of worship that makes them stronger. The enemy skirmishers are dazzled by the invaders' panoply; their very arrows and sling-stones blinded. Finally, the enemy gives battle. The phalanx is unyielding. Their armour shines and burns with Yelm's power. The enemy wilts and falters before its assault, unable to break the perfect unity of the Stonewall as it is trodden underfoot.

The second example aims to show how two fundaments of Earthly military experience—so crucial to the first example—might have radically different effects in Glorantha.

In the first example, the phalanx—heavily armed and armoured—suffers from heat fatigue, both on the march and in battle. In the second example, the sun has an opposite effect. It makes the phalanx stronger; its every deed taken under the aegis of their god an act of dedication and sacrifice.

In the first example, the phalanx—being a formation of regular, heavy infantry—suffers when exposed to a more flexible force against which it cannot dictate its strengths; against an enemy whose weapons are more useful in an engagement of that nature. In the second example, such technological and tactical determinism loses its place. Military history likes its parables of innovation; where outdated and outmoded ideas are continuously defeated at the hands of tactical progress. But a Stonewall Phalanx is strong because it is stagnant and inflexible; every year it shuns change and adaptation is a year added to the thousands over which it has existed in the perfect model of its creation.

Faced with the first example, you'd say (i) don't fight and march in the midday sun, and (ii) adapt to a more flexible paradigm. The second example says, "Bollocks."

And, to end, a final example:

• A Stonewall Phalanx marches upon the enemy's heartland. It is Fire Season but the sun is hidden under a broiling slate sky, as the Storm-singers call upon the winds to marshal the clouds above. The lighter-armed enemy denies the attackers battle. They retreat, harassing the invaders at every opportunity, their thunderstones thinning the ranks. Finally, the enemy gives battle. The phalanx is strong, but shorn from the gaze of its great god; its armour dulled and cool. The enemy moves with edge and quickness of the wind. The phalanx tries to adapt to the challenge, but its paeans are lost in the keening storm; its officers' warnings and commands stifled as the breath is stolen from their throats. The mortar of the Stonewall crumbles, leaving hundreds of individual stones to be engulfed.

Humility aside, I know a fair amount about military history. And honestly? At least in my Glorantha, I don't think it really matters that much...

[styopa]

2 hours ago, Quackatoa said:

Humility aside, I know a fair amount about military history. And honestly? At least in my Glorantha, I don't think it really matters that much...

I don't entirely disagree with you; my conclusion to your recitative is that is probably why we DON'T have many mechanics connecting large scale warfare to the RPG scale.*  As I mentioned before, it belongs more in the realm of narrative than mechanics and thus is hardly a "game".

*with the obvious contrary example of Dragon Pass and WB&RM (board wargames).  Those clearly ARE military wargames but my point is there is really NO connection to individuals and roleplaying possible (except for masochists, who want to see treasured long-played characters impotent and wiped from the game because someone happened to roll a '6')

[g33k]

4 hours ago, styopa said:

I don't entirely disagree with you; my conclusion to your recitative is that is probably why we DON'T have many mechanics connecting large scale warfare to the RPG scale.*  As I mentioned before, it belongs more in the realm of narrative than mechanics and thus is hardly a "game".

 

Well... it isn't a straight-up military-sim game.  But this could ENTIRELY be gamed in Glorantha.

The PC's are approached by the Orlanthi rulers; all their best mages and heroes are engaged with the Yelmies & co.  They need the PC's to scour the hinterlands before fire-season, and recruit & lead a cadre of shamanic/sorcery/divine/whatever casters, to provide the magical half of the magic & military resistance needed to stop the fearsome Stonewall Phalanx.

So the military PC's can either be with the military skirmishers, or bodyguarding the casters.  And the casters are both casting AND doing little Heroquests to keep the unseasonal overcast in-place, dulling every Sun-worshipper magic...

===

This plays into something I've been thinking over.

I think a mil-sim Glorantha game needs to be run on 2 levels -- the "traditional wargame" mil-sim, with units and formations and all that stuff.  Spellcasters and magical artillery, sure.

But simultaneously, a mythic-scale narrative-centric heroquesting game is happening.  The ebb and flow of the battle makes things harder (or easier) on the Quest, and successes (or failures) in the quest impact the battle profoundly.  Sometimes a great hero needs to step out of the battle and engage matters in the spirit-world... and sometimes they must return to the battle to impact the tenor and the context of the Quest.

 

[Joerg]

34 minutes ago, g33k said:

Well... it isn't a straight-up military-sim game.  But this could ENTIRELY be gamed in Glorantha.

The PC's are approached by the Orlanthi rulers; all their best mages and heroes are engaged with the Yelmies & co.  They need the PC's to scour the hinterlands before fire-season, and recruit & lead a cadre of shamanic/sorcery/divine/whatever casters, to provide the magical half of the magic & military resistance needed to stop the fearsome Stonewall Phalanx.

So the military PC's can either be with the military skirmishers, or bodyguarding the casters.  And the casters are both casting AND doing little Heroquests to keep the unseasonal overcast in-place, dulling every Sun-worshipper magic...

All of this makes the players take exceptional roles, and doesn't play a battle, only uses a battle as backdrop for your scenario. Which is entirely fine for having an individual fighting romp, but doesn't answer my question how to give the players an experience of a battle as part of a cohesive unit. And this is something every Yelmalian worth his salt should have experience with. And it should be one of the first steps of a future Orlanthi warrior in the Hero Wars, too.

 

34 minutes ago, g33k said:

This plays into something I've been thinking over.

I think a mil-sim Glorantha game needs to be run on 2 levels -- the "traditional wargame" mil-sim, with units and formations and all that stuff.  Spellcasters and magical artillery, sure.

But simultaneously, a mythic-scale narrative-centric heroquesting game is happening.  The ebb and flow of the battle makes things harder (or easier) on the Quest, and successes (or failures) in the quest impact the battle profoundly.  Sometimes a great hero needs to step out of the battle and engage matters in the spirit-world... and sometimes they must return to the battle to impact the tenor and the context of the Quest.

That's basically what went on at the siege of Whitewall.

In a way, you ask for the game that never was - Masters of Luck and Death, the third part in the hex wargame series featuring WBRM/Dragon Pass and Nomad Gods.

 

If sufficiently large and coherent units walk over a battlefield, they can be abstracted as their wyters/regimental deities/standards manifesting as a spiritual entity, and it is these which are targeted by the Dragon Pass spirit magicians. So, how do you give the player a meaningful feedback that his (and everyone else's) determination etc. feeding the wyter is of critical importance to the fate of the unit in the battle, and possibly for the outcome of the battle, despite units to your left and right being taken apart, with the individuals making up the units a mix of people fleeing in disarray, unable to rally, casualties on the field, or prisoners led away into ransom incarceration or slavery. And possibly your own unit becomes a casualty as well.

 

This is similar to supporting someone else's heroquest, without participating on the other side yourself. What you do can be crucial, but you are socially alienated from the entire process (to borrow the Marxian vocabulary).

So how do you turn such participation in a personally rewarding activity for the player and player character, and how do you transport the drama into a role-playing session? Escpecially one that rolls more than one pair of opposed dice, as in HQ.

 

 

[Psullie]

Funny that no-one has mentioned Pendragon yet which set out, among many things, to bridge gulf between RPG and war-game. I've run many a very successful Pendragon game where the PC's participated in mass battles. It can be easily done if the GM establishes goals that represent the level of impact the PC can achieve. For the common soldier staying alive is often the case (in Pendragon surviving the initial clash of heavy cavalry was considered glorious), for the other PCs just outline what they could hope to do and then how that would ultimately effect the whole battle. As a GM build the expectations into the narrative, so the player understand what's at stake. Watch any war movie and you can see how this works, even if you know the outcome of the battle, you root for the characters personal battles. 

I only mention Pendragon as Battle is listed as Knowledge Skill on RQG and curious if it'll get much treatment.

I see Gloranthan battles as an arms race taken to extremes; I send in my giant bat, I see your bat and raise you a god, is see your god and raise you two dragons etc. Makes for epic tales but less than epic games. Also the level of commitment is commensurate with the benefits of victor or the cost of failure. There are many minor conflicts were the actions are well within human influence and just a little divine support (like the shining Yelm examples above).