Thursday, February 03, 2005

Battlefield Adventures

Andy Collins has posted some information about Battlefield Adventures on his forums. This is mainly interesting from the fact it isn't a mass-combat book. Oh, and that Stephen Schubert worked on it.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail--that's what the D&D website is for--but I'll try to explain what the general purpose of this book (and the genre series) is.

Battlefield Adventures is not about running army vs. army conflicts, but rather about running a D&D game that features warfare as a significant theme of the game. That's the goal of the genre series (of which this is the first): to provide a DM with the information he needs to incorporate a particular genre or campaign "flavor" into his game.

Think of it this way: This book won't give you the rules to mimic the activities of every single orc and archer in the Battle for Helm's Deep, but it will let you run all the interesting encounters featuring Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli (aka the player characters), and it'll let you build warfare-minded characters like Eomer.

Battlefield Adventures isn't really like any other book that we've done in the past. My best comparison would be to Frostburn, not in terms of subject matter but in terms of exploring and expanding a concept of the D&D universe so that DMs can focus on it in their games.

I led development on this book, and I think it's got some really interesting ideas for DMs who've wanted to include warfare in their campaigns but have been leery of going "whole hog" and running mass battle encounters. (If you're looking for a system for mass combat, I advise that you check out the Miniatures Handbook.)