Ravenloft Campaign

[seanadams]

Hi all,

I am looking into running a Ravenloft 3.5 campaign. I am going to use the some pre-existing material but I would like to, at the end to have a massive battle between the PC's/friends made during campaign and the bad guys/small army. Has anyone run a massive battle that I would love to have running over several weeks and have you any tips on this and running a Ravenloft campaign?

Thanks

[HuManBing]

Hello and welcome!

Large scale battles can be great fun. DnD 3.5 has a supplement book, Heroes of Battle, that give some rules on running sieges and mass combat.

Notes on structure:

Most RPGs generally tend towards a small squad-based focus on action. You'll have a party of PCs each fulfilling some party role and they'll do exploits together. If you keep this structure, you can have them perform as a modern commando unit. They're the ones sent in to accomplish various elite missions, while the regular army of grunts keeps the enemy occupied elsewhere.

The problem with the squad-based adventure is one of scale. You must scale down their operations to something small enough that an adventuring group of people could realistically do. (Otherwise, if they're taking on superhuman odds and winning all by themselves, your players may start wondering why they even need the friendly army at all.)

Possibilities:

• Sabotage a weak point in enemy defenses, like starting a fire at a thin part of the city wall
• Assassinate an enemy general
• Intercept an enemy spy carrying volatile information about your army
• Carry out a false flag operation (do evil nasty things while pretending to be your enemy, so local peasants hate them) like poison wells, salt fields, rape and kill and steal and pillage
• Carry out a humanitarian operation (do good lovely things to give your army greater support with the local peasants) like cure diseases, provide food and shelter, and relocate refugees to safety
• Steal enemy plans or sabotage key enemy supplies, like putting rotten oats in their warhorse feed bags
• Carry out raids and feints to disorient the enemy and draw their main strength away from your army's intended real attack point

Another adventure structure you can use is to have PCs leading a column of the army, tasked with a more large-scale mission. These will probably do well with the mass combat rules of whatever system you're using - but bear in mind these will be somewhat different from individual combat, and so either you or your players will have a little acclimatization to do. (In DnD it's almost all on the DM - the PCs are still told to make rolls against familiar stats and skills but the DM is the one handling how they operate slightly differently.) These can afford to be much more grand, because you're talking about leading an entire section of the army.

• Destroy an entire enemy fort
• Annihilate, rout, or disperse an entire enemy division
• Take and hold a key location on the battlefield, like a specific high ground vantage point so your friendly siege can deploy there and enemy siege is captured or destroyed
• Clear and secure an entire highway providing supplies for your army or denying supplies to the enemy army
• Block a mountain path or city gate or river bend so the enemy can't use it anymore

Division-level warfare also comes with several problems that you can tweak to give a real sense of battlefield logistics. Generals also have to worry about supplies, which PCs can generally carry with them. A large number of soldiers needs sleeping tents, food provisions, medicines, ammunition, and odds and ends for breakages. (One of the main morale boosters for coalition troops in Iraq was wet wipes sent from home. It's hard to stay clean and hygienic when you've only got dry paper to clean with.)

Troop morale is also very important, and a number of psychological factors play into this. Some generals will even pick easily-won engagements that have little or no tactical value at first, just to show their troops "Look, you can do this!" and so when the crunch comes later, they'll feel more positive about it. When two large bodies of soldiers meet on the battlefield, you rarely get a fight-to-the-last man scenario. More likely, whichever side has the stronger will to stay on the field will prevail, and the losing side is usually the one that people run away first. You can regroup after a bad battle and reform your ranks, but it's a situation most would rather avoid...

Loyalty is another factor that PCs in a squad rarely have to worry about, but which is important in large scale battles. Leaders need to know why their men are fighting, and to keep them motivated, and to keep them fighting for their side. If the enemy army has made use of conscripts by holding their women and children captive, you could disintegrate their entire fighting force overnight by liberating their women and children instead of fighting their armed men on the field. Likewise, if you have a column of River Province folk under you and River Province has already been liberated, you're going to need greater incentive to keep those folk fighting instead of returning home to their households and families. PCs may find themselves in the moral grey area of punishing deserters and dealing with politicians, while still trying to stay the good guys and heroes of the piece.

[HuManBing]

So much for the general themes of a military campaign. (Much more can be said, but I'll let other more knowledgeable people comment.)

Specific to Ravenloft, there are several situations where you could run a very interesting grand battle campaign.

Falkovnia: Easily the most convenient setting for this. Drakov runs a military dictatorship and has terrorized his own people and those of neighboring lands for decades. A war against Darkon could recur, in which case you'd have highly-trained Falkovnian horsemen and soldiers marching against undead and magic. It would almost be hard to know which side to actually root for - it's not as though Azalin is a particularly more likeable ruler than Drakov.

Falkovnia vs. the treaty nations could be fun too, because they have much smaller standing armies, but they do have gunpowder weapons, which would geometrically affect their fighting power. Here it would be much easier for you to set a "good guy" side and a "bad guy" side for the PCs if that's what they like. If you prefer shades-of-grey morality, like I do, then you also have plenty of opportunities to introduce questionable issues, like the "brave knight felled by enemy sniper" trope, or the "valiant soldiers dying for the corrupt aristocrat" motif. Gunpowder does introduce many more possibilities for sabotage than spears and swords do, however.

Falkovnia could also implode politically. Drakov already has two organized rebel groups in his country - the kobolds and the rebels under Gondegal each could mount guerrilla style warfare similar to Vietcong vs. the Americans or Mujahideen vs. the Soviets. Besides that, Drakov has several sons and other nobles who could be goaded into outright rebellion, which would lead to fullblown civil war with well-equipped armies facing each other in the fields. Or Azalin could decide to put an end to Drakov and invade with undead. (Whether this would succeed or not is up for debate - it might be enough to spook the Falkovnians so much that Drakov is dethroned regardless of whether the undead could actually reach Lekar.)

Invidia: In the 3rd edition Gazetteers, Drakov and Mallocchio of Invidia had formed a military treaty. Mallocchio seems to be a much more militaristic leader than his mother was, and his pogrom against Vistani and those who support them could boil over into a pretexted war against other nations. Left alone as a pogrom against the Vistani, you'd have a military power beating the stuffing out of a largely non-militarized victim ethnicity.

Sithicus: Less so in 3rd edition, but in 2nd edition Lord Soth was another obvious candidate for a military leader. He was also engaged in a war against the elves, which could be a low-intensity asymmetrical warfare setting.

Gundarak: After Duke Gundar disappeared, Barovia absorbed Gundarak. However, the two peoples are not the same ethnic stock, and a rebel group could easily appear to oppose Strahd's rule.

[HuManBing]

For more thoughts on asymmetric warfare, take a look at this thread.

It can be helpful if you fully intend for your PCs to take on superior numbers of forces, and win.

[alhoon]

Just a quick note, this thread touches several Ravenloft aspects and I think it should be in the general board.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Just a quick note, this thread touches several Ravenloft aspects and I think it should be in the general board.

Agreed, and done. Welcome, seanadams!

[seanadams]

Hi many thanks for the reply I will have a read through. My idea was that the Mists bring the PC's into Ravenloft. I will use my own ideas to get to this point and then I was going to use other pre-written material to carry on from there.

At the end I was going to have PC's successfully leave Ravenloft and they think that that is the end but all the tasks they completed where to open a portal to the other planes (Forgotten Realms, Eberron etc) by a darkpower and their army so they could destroy/take over the other planes. The PC's find out about this and calling on friends they encountered during the campaign meet the dark army to stop them entering the portal.

There is a battle and the PC's successfully stop the dark power's army entering the portal and the portal is closed.