"What system for wars with heroes?" Topic

Let's say you wanted to game the action of the Battle of Red Cliff, the Cattle Raid of Cooley, the Bhagavad Gita or the Iliad. Those battles involved hundreds, thousands of men but centered around the actions of a few heroes -- each of whom is worth a dozen common soldiers, or a hundred. What system would you use?

I prefer relatively simple systems. I play Hail Caesar and Saga, neither of which is quite right for the sort of action I envision.

Lord of the Rings would be perfect…

Sorry. Or War of the Ring for more "mass battles." But personally I think LoTR is just right. I would just assume I'm focusing in on the part of the battle where the heroes are…

Is it easy to unhitch LotR/WotR from the Middle Earth setting?

Warhammer is great for that sort of thing. If you can get your hands on some of the 5th edition fantasy cards or even an army book from them you can give the heroes in the WAB books some extra stuff that they might have had. Like magic armor for Achilles or a magic spear for Cu Chulainn or whatever you think is appropriate.

They won't be able to quite stand on their own against a whole unit but they could cause some havoc and will be very tough to beat by themselves.

If you want them to be able to stand on their own against entire units just use the Chaos lord stats from 5th edition fantasy battle and their magic stuff.

Rules According to Ral!

If you want to have have 100s of figures on the table in units, but a few heroes, then Warhammer/WAB would work.

If you plan to have not more than about 50 figs per side, mostly acting as individuals LOTR would do it.

In either case you are focussing in on a part of the battle (depending on how you want to scale) and both could easily be separated from their intended setting. There are variants for both that have done this – I've played LoTR in Vietnam and it worked fine.

Lord of the Rings is very easy to "unhook." The magic is all fairly subtle if you even want to use it. And it would ready very much like the Iliad with some changes of names, figures etc. the magic is more in the line of morale boosts, causing fear in your enemies. Not so much the whole lightning bolt and fireball action of D&D.

Most figures die with a single hit but characters like Aragorn or a Troll take 3 or 3 or even more. So Ajax might get 2 hits, likewise Hector. Achilles probably gets a magic special ability, as does any character who has a God watching over him. Really I think it would be a great choice.

I have run games with 100 figures per side with multiple players, many who had never played before. It ran fairly quickly even with that big a scope. The combat is siple enough that after a few goes you know "Okay, orcs hit on 5s and then need 4s to wound."

The rule books from the boxed sets are readily available cheap on Ebay:

auction

Any one of the three will work and will include probably enough army lists for you to work from.

Honestly it's a system that could easily be adapted to any pre-gunpowder period or genre (and has).

Or even post gunpowder period.

I always thought LotR worked a lot better for the cowboy genre than for Lord of the Rings actually.

The one thing I like about WAB over LotR are the morale rules. The other nice thing is the ability to mimic exact special abilities with already existing magic items in WFB.

Either system would work for heroic historical combat.

If you want "Homeric" chariot warfare, there is a set of rules by Adrian Goldsworthy (I'm not sure if it's *the* Adrian Goldsworthy) for Celtic chariot warfare in an old ("Black Dwarf") issue of Wargames Illustrated.

In this game your chariot-mounted heroes are the star of the battle. They ride ahead of the foot, perform feats to intimidate their opponent and psyche themselves up, then engage their opposite member in combat, then behead their opponent and/or strip their armour as trophies after slaying them.

The foot troops don't really take part in the battle, but are moved closer to the mid-line of the table as their heroes chalk up victories. If they get close enough they can pelt enemy heroes with javelins. If they reach the mid-line their side has won the battle (the other side presumably losing heart and abandoning the field).

Not your traditional type of warfare/wargame, but then if you already have the figures and can get a copy of the rules, why not give it a try?

Edit: It's issue 128

Fantasy Warriors may be worth a look and can be downloaded here for free-
link

For something simpler than WHFB, consider HOTT. Heroes tower above the rank'n'file, and the rules for Gods based on the Iliad.

What does HOTT stand for?

Hordes of the Things.

Doug