The Art of War

This week we continue our miniseries exploring the alternate rules in the Tome of Whispers. Our current topic is big enough to be another miniseries in its own right. It's going to take us three installments to discuss it!

Army Combat

War stories can be difficult to tell in most tabletop RPGs, and Realm of Runes is no different. The focus of RPG rules tends to be on individual characters and their exploits, and the turn-based nature of combat begins to break down as the number of participants in a combat grows. Even just having the party outnumbered 2:1 can start to put strain on the suspension of disbelief. Filling the battlefield with enough characters to comprise an army? The thought of all that bookkeeping for the GM is a bit horrifying!

Yet wars present myriad interesting stories, and it's disappointing when the mechanics of a system fight against the type of story you want to tell. That's where these army combat rules come in. Army combat allows for combat on a grand scale, without sacrificing the potential for individual heroics from characters. Indeed, the intention of these rules is to allow for seamless transitions from more individualized portions of a narrative, into broad skirmishes, and back. Any character you make for the normal gameplay experience can work in army combat.

In many ways, army combat is like a whole extra miniature system designed to interface with standard Realm of Runes. The Tome of Whispers is the perfect place to introduce these rules. They're not something that most players or GMs need to worry about in every campaign, but it's good to have them on hand for when it matters. Our exploration of these systems will be divided into three parts. Today we'll look at a more general overview of the rules. Future installments will discuss how to make and use troops, and then how your individual character fits within the structure of army combat.

Overview

Army combat is used when each side in the encounter has enough combatants to make up at least one troop. We'll take a look at troops in more detail later, but for now think of the troop as the fundamental unit of army combat, indivisible. Many army combats consist of several troops on each side, collectively comprising overall armies. Although an army may have a general dictating broad strategy, each individual troop's commander must read the ebb and flow of the battle around them to best utilize their force in real time.

The scale of army combat is much grander than individual combat. Whole troops act together as one entity, performing maneuvers on the field of battle. A large army combat might last for hours, from a character's perspective, but the structure of these rules allows them to be resolved quickly and smoothly. In general, the goal of army conflict is to inflict casualties on your foes while minimizing the number of casualties on your side. If you can make it so your enemies can no longer field any organized troops, you've probably won the day.

Army combat uses a hex map like standard combat, but the sheer size of troops necessitates a much larger scale. Whereas standard combat uses hexes that represent an area of about two meters across, army combat hexes represent an area about 250m across. At this scale, troops in army combat occupy the same number of spaces as individual characters in standard combat. Most troops therefore take up just one hex, but those composed mostly of huge and bigger creatures will occupy multiple spaces and thus might be forced to engage with multiple other troops at once.

The time scale of army combat is also larger than standard combat. Whereas a turn in standard combat represents about six seconds, each round of army combat instead represents about ten minutes. Unlike standard combat, troops do not roll initiative. Instead, all troops decide upon and execute their strategies at the same time. Because there is no initiative, plans made during army combat may not turn out how they were envisioned! Each round of army combat proceeds over several phases, each of which is full resolved before moving onto the next phase.

Combat Phases

Army combat is divided into three distinct phases: Orders, Execute, and Aftermath. Each round, every phase is enacted in this order. If there are still combatants at the end of the round, these phases are repeated for the next round, and every subsequent round, until the combat is complete. Let's explore each of these phases, and how they contribute to army combat as a whole.

Orders

Each troop decides its actions for the round during this phase. A troop's commander chooses the strategy their troop will use. All troops decide their strategies at once, without knowing what any other troop commander has picked. This secret nature is critical to the feel of army combat and prevents any one troop from perfectly countering another. A commander can, of course, use the circumstances of the battle and their intuition to try to predict what an enemy troop's commander will do. Not all strategies require a troop to move, but if they do the direction of the first hex of movement must be decided now. Any subsequent hexes of movement can be decided differently as the round unfolds.

Execute

Each troop executes the strategies determined in the orders phase during this phase. Troops that engage as a strategy, either because they are engaging at range or because their troop already occupies the same hex as another troop, act first. These are followed by troops which use strategies that do not require movement, like emplacing siege weapons or digging in. Finally, those troops that move resolve their movement one hex at a time. The direction of the first movement is decided during the orders phase, but all subsequent hexes can be chosen on the fly during this phase.

Troops that move into the same space as an enemy troop must engage that troop and lose all the rest of their movement for the turn. Otherwise, all troops with movement remaining simultaneously decide the direction of their next hex, resolving any encounters that happen as a result of that movement, until all troops have either engaged an enemy troop or exhausted their movement for the round. Because troops choose their movement simultaneously and in secret, troops might maneuver around each other without engaging in combat, or a retreat might be cut off.

When troops engage during this phase, the effects of those engagements are held in limbo until the next phase. This means that a troop's effectiveness is not diminished as a result of those engagements until all possible engagements have happened. This is an important aspect of army combat, since the capacity for some troops to keep moving might have the same troop be engaged multiple times in the round if surrounded. There is diminished effectiveness already built-in to having to participate in multiple engagements at once, and it would be bad for the consequences to "double dip."

Aftermath

Troops are likely to be dealt damage from other troops during engagements that were resolved in the execute phase. Effects of that damage is applied during this phase, all at once. Troops that take damage may suffer casualties, diminishing its capability to continue participating in subsequent rounds of army combat. Casualties may even include characters that are a part of that troop, but we'll talk more about that when we more fully explore how characters operate in troops. For now, we'll just mention that casualties do not necessarily mean being killed, so your character becoming a casualty does not necessarily mean you have to make a new character.

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We've only begun to scratch the surface of military combat in the Tome of Whispers, and there's a lot more to discuss in upcoming installments. The utility of being able to swap back and forth in terms of scale makes Realm of Runes a great system for telling war stories without losing the capacity for individual heroics. Next time we'll return to the card game to introduce another new villain, so stay tuned!