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Archives of Nethys

Archives of Nethys

Pathfinder RPG (1st Edition) Pathfinder RPG (2nd Edition) Starfinder RPG

Rules Index | GM Screen | Player's Guide
Battlecry! / How to Have a War

Where Are the Heroes?

Source Battlecry! pg. 200
Having decided what kind of war you want, the next important step is figuring out what exactly the protagonists are doing and where they fit into the military hierarchy. Military theorists sometimes divide war into three layers: strategy, operations, and tactics.

All three levels of military practice are important, and it’s fairly common for success at one level to be undone by failure somewhere else. A brilliant victory in battle is meaningless if the underlying strategy is flawed or misguided, and a genius operation can still be undone if the troops lose the actual fight. Even if the heroes do their part flawlessly, things can still unravel due to others’ actions. Whether this will happen, and how often, is important for setting the tone and something to make clear to the players early on.

Strategy: This is the upper level, where kings and generals decide whether to have a war in the first place, what they hope to gain, how, and what resources they can allocate to the job. For instance, suppose Her Infernal Majestrix, Queen Abrogail Thrune II, determines to reconquer Ravounel. In consultation with her advisors, she decides on a campaign of coastal raids followed by two armies entering the country from different angles before converging on Kintargo, and she decides that she can spare three legions and a detachment of the Chelaxian navy for the task.

Although it’s unlikely for a low-level party to have strategic input into a large war, inherited positions or special means of influence make it possible. For smaller countries, a group of player characters could easily form its rulers and most powerful weapon. Even without formal rank, the strategic input of more powerful characters may become necessary as their group’s power approaches that of a general’s army.

Operations: This is the middle level and is about getting your army to the target specified by your strategy, preferably without running out of food or ammunition, getting lost, or getting ambushed along the way. Operations is the unglamorous but necessary work that takes up most of military leadership’s time, and it requires making a hundred decisions that shape the actual battlefield—forge ahead and risk arriving at the battle exhausted, or take a slower pace and give the enemy time to prepare? Take a shortcut through the fey-haunted swamps, or try to secure boats from the potentially hostile locals? Camp on the site of the ancient massacre, or risk attack by marching through the night? Operations are intimately concerned with questions of time and distance, balancing the conditions of their troops against the map and the timetable.

If the player characters are given command, then this is where they will generally find themselves. They have some forces at their disposal and play as officers, either as colleagues or allowing players interested in the details of managing operations to do so while others play to their own strengths. Their job is then to navigate a series of decisions and encounters to try and secure their objectives as efficiently as possible. Successful protagonists will take full advantage of their abilities, both mundane and supernatural, to assist their forces.

Tactics: The final level is about actually winning the battle. In Pathfinder, this is going to usually be the province of regular combat or the variants in this book. If the player characters exist mostly at the tactical level, then by virtue of having access to player character abilities (such as magic, animal companions, and so forth), they are probably the equivalent of commandos or special forces. They could be a designated military unit (likely called scouts or similar) or might simply be their commanding officer’s favorite troubleshooters. In either case, the campaign takes the form of a series of interconnected vignettes, where each session the heroes are given a new mission to accomplish—an advance must be scouted, a bridge sabotaged, a spy captured, a war crime investigated.

Often, as the heroes accomplish task after task, they’re rewarded with commendations, medals, and promotions, and might find themselves sliding into ever more complex missions until they’re given command of their own forces. This model has the advantage of letting the earlier, vignette-style campaign act as an extended tutorial for independent command, introducing the players gradually to the setting, the story, and the challenges of military operations.

Generally speaking, player characters won’t be regular grunts, or at least not for very long. Past the first couple of levels, most protagonists have too many abilities for it to make sense to use them as cannon fodder—though an initial adventure or two as foot soldiers until they’re noticed by high command can do a lot to set the tone of a campaign.