"What's available." Topic

Today my son was poking around in some of the gaming stuff (rules mostly) that had been stored and not used in the past decade or so, and he found my D&D Battlesystem set.

That set me on a search, and as I've found that TMPers are pretty helpful with reviews and suggestions, so I thought I'd once again request help to augment my search.

We've talked about it, and what interests him, and me, are:

Units equal to regiments or so.
Armies up to corps size.
Equipment up to, and maybe including, early black powder stuff.
Magic.

I'm thinking that 15mm would be about the right size for the figures.

I'll be searching on my own, but I would appreciate reviews and suggestions of rules.

Thanks!

What do you mean by regiments and corps? Surely these have no set meaning in fantasy in general.

Hordes of the Things.

Hordes of the Things is a generic yet amazingly adaptable rule set. I have happily played everything from the Trojan war to Dark Age myths and Lords of the Rings games with this rule set. If you look at it as a tool kit, it will let you do an amazing amount of things, and has provided me with well over a decade of gaming varying from 'enjoyable' to 'riotious'.

2nd Ed. BattleSystem is the best of the two mass battle games, as it is streamlined from the 1st Ed. boxed game. The books cover up to early black powder weapons. It works better if you have 2nd Ed. AD&D books, such as the Player's Handbook, and the Tome of Magic, as both have BS-specific spells, and magic items as chrome for the rules.

The game is actually complex covering flying combat, siege, fighting within buildings, etc. It also is a bucket-O-dice game, so players get to roll a die for each attacking figure, which can be fun.

If interested, 2nd Ed. BattleSystem books can be found on e-Bay, as well as the others, in hard-copy form. The PHB and ToM can be downloaded as PDF's from dndclassics.com/. Cheers!

The references to regiments and corps makes me think you are envisioning a good number of figures on the tabletop, organized in units with maybe a dozen or more figures each. I suggest you consider Warmaster. It is perfectly compatible with 15mm figures, and does cover early black powder weapons.

Mighty armies is fun too.

I'll look into Hordes of the Things and Warmaster.

I did find Mighty Armies, and it looks interesting.

I also found that I have a copy of 2nd Edition Battlesystem, in the bottom of the 1E box.

Thanks for the pointers, guys!

Once again, the answer is Fantasy Warriors!

Don't see why you can't port them to 15mm. Use cm instead of inches, put figures on cm-multiple bases. Someone's probably done it already somewhere.

Mighty Armies gets my vote. That said, there are also Big Battle rules available for the Ganesha Games Song of series including some for Middle Earth. You can get them free on their Yahoo Groups site.

Kings of War from Mantic. The core rules (all you really need to play) and all the army lists are available as free PDF downloads.

link

No figure removal---handy since it could get fiddly in 15mm.
Designed for large armies to be moved around rapidly during a game so you can field large forces.
Magic exists as either shooting attacks (e.g., ZAP! that some sorcerors have) or buffs for your units that remove wounds.

Additional magic items are available in the full rules but they're largely minor buffs such as move 1" faster, shoot with an extra die or two, increase range, etc.

Here's an authorized reference card list for the magic items. Each is unique for an army so only one brew of this or medallion of that can be given to a unit/hero. Warmachines like catapults, cannon, etc. can't receive magic item upgrades.

link