birthright, mausritter, rules light warfare
loyal creatures,
i’ve been reading birthright recently and its kick ass. it does such a good job of creating the feeling of it’s setting through its rules. it’s interesting, back in AD&D days, a setting supplement was by its nature a rules supplement, because the default assumption was that AD&D was a translation of a specific kind of world into rules text. Thats why you have things like “no. appearing” and “% chance in lair”. The very notion of “change the rules to suit you” is born from this nature. Obviously, if your world works differently, the rules adapt to follow! There’s a whole other article about this somewhere Im sure, but I feel like i should get more acquainted with the facts before I try to write it
Anyway, mausritter is awesome. I love Into the Odd, and i love redwall fantasy, so mausritter fits the bill. It also happens to have the best faction system known to man and maybe i’ll write about my experiences using this system in my Icewind Dale downtime adventure.
I was thinking it might be fun to run my players through birthright, but turn everyone into a mouse person, and run it in mausritter. They probably dont have to be mouse people, but I think it’d be neat.
Birthrights rather meaty domain turns can be stripped away and translated into faction rules as per mausritter, but there’s a piece missing. Warfare.
I’ve been looking for a rules light warfare system for a while, but I couldnt find one that I liked. I went and read REIGN, but if it passes for rules light then I must be an ultra-minimalist. (It was pretty cool though)
In the translation of The Southern Shore of birthrights “Ruins of Empire” book I stumbled upon some rules light warfare rules that I think might be worth sharing. They’re built on the back of mausritters faction rules, so go read those first. Here they are.
There is one important change: resting. In wartime, Warbands cannot get STR back unless they are not contributing to the war (essentially off the board)
Assault of Redwall Abbey
Rules Light Warfare
Regions control armies consisting of warbands. Warfare consists of battles, skirmishes and sieges.
A faction controls as many warbands as it does provinces. (Warbands, to those out of the know, are basically creature statblocks with resistance to any damages from non-warbands)
Each domain turn (or whenever you would roll the dice to pursue your goals) the leader decides the following for each warband:
- If they will move (can move into one neighboring province)
- Whether they are open for battle
If enemy warbands are in the same province, a conflict will occur, the type of which is determined by whether those warbands are open for battle. (The exception is when a warband is in a defensible place, in which case a siege occurs, more on that later).
If both are open for battle, a battle occurs. A battle is like a normal combat, but between warbands instead of individual creatures. Maybe make up some tables for battle terrain. If a warband decides to retreat, the closest warband gets to make a free attack on them before they get away. (Your referee may allow you to pursue and catch up)
If only one is open for battle, a skirmish occurs. In a skirmish, each warband makes one attack against another of their choice. A warband can only suffer two attacks
If neither are up for battle, they avoid one another, and there is no conflict. It’s worth noting you can only be open to skirmish too. In this case, treat it like wanting to battle, except that if both sides want to skirmish, there’s only a skirmish. Pretty simple.
Sieges are mechanically identical to battles, except that there is no penalty for the attacking side retreating, and the defending side cannot retreat. In practice, these will be very different, because one warband will be inside a fortified structure, and warbands outside that structure will be trying to get it. These details are left to the referee.
Those are the rules! Pretty simple right? Pretty sensible I think. Sieges might be ahistorical, and it lacks some details. I think forming a blockade is probably a big part of warfare, so maybe a warband can’t move past a warband with higher strength if the high strength warband is up for battle. I think it’s pretty simple to extend if you think about it logically.
I was coming up with some of these rules as I wrote them on this blog so none of them have been playtested, but i really want to try them out. Maybe i’ll post again with some playtest results if my friends will tolerate my nonsense long enough for me to play.