A Play Report for Hellmarch: Simple System, Smartass DM
It was the first time back to the table in a couple of weeks. In our campaign world the most notorious location on the Greyhawk map is a garbage little gnoll den that exists north of the Spikey Forest. It’s annoying because after clearing most of it out the first time, the gnolls there beefed up their defence, but then were almost uniformly destroyed by goblins led by the orc Lord Serpico, who decided to turn it into a production site for haphazardly constructed flying apparatus.
While the players were off adventuring and warring in the east, the gnolls fought back with great vengeance and furious anger, reclaiming the den for themselves along with a mountain of gunpowder, jars, mechanical wings, and other goblin paraphernalia. They decided to experiment with this stuff (to the tune of many incidental casualties) and make it their own, and were building an army of flying, bomb tossing gnomes while the brunt of the goblins were engaged in other conflicts to the east, returning only after a wandering dragon on the map scared them from their pillaging party.
And so, a great battle was about to commence - a three way fight between goblins, gnolls, and men to see who would be the final victor in the battle for this key strategic choke-point.
For this encounter, I wanted to experiment with a game my friend on X AlchemicRaker has been designing. Hellmarch is a mass battle system for Shadowdark and it interested me because at one point I was working on my own system for the game called Massgrave…then Shadowmass…then it was something else…and eventually, it just turned into my sci-fi roleplaying wargame Cosmic Debris, and - well, you may see a pattern developing if you have been following me for awhile on how some of my projects proceed.
We play AD&D and not Shadowdark for this campaign, so I did something I am normally fairly good at doing which was I expanded and removed where necessary.
What I discovered in Hellmarch was two things:
A fast and simple system for running combat with larger units of soldiers.
That I can still make mistakes and have a less than stellar session.
The basis of Hellmarch is good. Troops are divided into units. They have a quality level, a troop type ranging between light and heavy based on the armor they are wearing, and the system does not collide with Shadowdark in that PC’s can be involved in combats and still operate the same way, with their role in battles being primarily to serve as generals in a unit to give them buffs, while they can still operate independently and fight against other named PC’s.
The rules here are very Warhammer-esque in that everything is resolved with a D6 (or rather, many of them) with a result of a 6 on the die indicating a successful kill, with that threshold for success being modified situationally along with the existence of advantage and disadvantage mechanics. Since every troop in a unit will roll a die to attack, you will often be chucking many of them at a time resulting in that fun meta game of sorting the successful dice from the unsuccessful ones, and then calculating remaining troops, etc.
Morale is also key here, with morale checks taking place on a fairly frequent basis, including after each melee. Ranged attacks are dangerous because depending on the quality of the troop firing missiles, some will automatically hit in addition to those that are rolled. There are rules for both indoor and outdoor combat here, flanking maneuvers, charges - everything you would expect from a mass combat game. And with a morale system that can result in units scattering, where they need to spend an entire round rallying to continue fighting, or surrendering completely, combat is intended to be run quickly, the expediency of which while adding some complexity to Shadowdark, still retains its spirit of overall simplicity.
I took concessions of my own with the system to try and make it fit in with our AD&D session while still transposing most of the basic stuff over and while I could see the merit in the system and the speed at which it ran, my own decision making here sullied the purity of that experience and created several points of imbalance that I could identify as being completely my own fault. Primarily, overestimating the strength of ranged units, and not having enough of them in the enemy army, which resulted in the ones that were there being picked off rather quickly.
The battle was sort of mediocre with the initiative going to the enemy forces. To explain it in game terms, the players had one objective; reach the cursed gnoll nest, kill the leader and shutdown operations.
For this purpose Hellmarch gave me everything I needed and nothing I didn’t; but here’s the rub.
Tonight’s session made a good case why “rule zero” is a bad replacement for familiarity with a structured game when you have not had real experience with it at the table. I added terrain features and used a hex grid, a reasonably small one where a movement consisted of 2 hexes plus some variable in that depending on terrain and other factors. The PC’s here were really acting as commanders of their own units and were not a real factor in playing out the conflict.
But maybe about 70 percent of the way through I decided to call it. Victory was a foregone conclusion and so for the last hurrah we switched a real quick post-mortem where we went over the events and what then transpired.
The group, deciding that they never wanted to deal with this den again decided to take whatever useable equipment they could from the den and spend a few days clearing it out, and detonating the gunpowder. For them it was an extremely cathartic end to watch the entire thing blow up into a pile of rubble. And we are following up with a week long play-by-post to resolve any other minor events that may have occurred in this time.
This is not a review of Hellmarch, it’s instead a good example of why, as someone who advocates for actually following rules and not making up a bunch of house ones on the fly, that adherence to rules is actually important. Because Hellmarch is more mechanical in nature, fiddling around with it too much was a real quick way to ensure a lopsided experience.
But the base of what Raker has produced is solid and sound. I could see running this easily theater of the mind or simply with loose formations of markers depicting units on the field rather than mucking about with a grid or hexes. I felt more and more as we played that this really was the optimal way to run it, and since Shadowdark’s own movement rules are very much “zone based” in nature, it makes a lot of sense.
Even though the session was one I walked away from disappointed from a DM perspective, the players got their vindication. So it was a nice conclusion to a half a year of those rascally gnolls messing up everyones plans. The goblins remain a problem.
Anyways, although my own modifications were objectively bad, I would definitely recommend checking out Hellmarch when it comes out. I had a few people ask me when I was testing Shadowdark how they thought mass combat should be run and, well, you now have an answer.
Thank you to AlchemicRaker for allowing me to take a crack at this one!