Today I bring you a guest article on Wars in TTRPGs by Alexander Atoz, in two parts. Wars are inevitable in most RPGs, sooner or later, but GMs often struggle to walk the fine line between making the conflict seem realistically big enough and keeping the experience personal to the players.

Vast armies lend themselves to Roll-playing, not role-playing. But there is a path through the thicket, and Alexander is here to show it to you. I’ll chime in every now and then with my own two cent’s worth.

— Mike

How to Run a TTRPG War

In most TTRPG adventures, the player characters are the story. The villain’s forces are usually small enough that the heroes can take them down personally, over the course of a campaign. Even when allies appear, they’re often just background dressing – advisors, informants, or reinforcements waiting offstage. The PCs are the ones who make the difference.

But what happens when the enemy is too vast to defeat with swords and spells alone? What do you do when the battlefield holds thousands of combatants – too many to count, let alone control? How do you keep your players in the spotlight when the scale of conflict threatens to swallow them?

In this article, we’ll tackle the largest kind of conflict you can run in an RPG: full-scale war.

The article is divided into two major sections. The first covers ancient warfare – where armies fought for supremacy in a single, decisive battle. The second explores modern warfare, where front lines stretch across continents, and no one skirmish can decide the outcome alone.

Each section is further divided in two parts:

1. A breakdown of major elements that define that type of war – and how they affect your game.
2. A set of structures and strategies for building an entire war-based campaign.

Along the way, we’ll also cover:

• How to run large-scale battles
• How to use allies without stealing the spotlight
• How to decide whether your war should follow an ancient or modern model, and,
• The ways that magic, monsters, or advanced tech might blur the line between them.

Let’s begin.

Ancient Wars: What Makes Them Different

Before diving into the ways a TTRPG campaign can use war as a central theme, it’s helpful to look at the different types of war – starting with the ancient world – and what sets them apart.

Smaller in Scale, Bigger in Impact

Ancient wars were typically much smaller in scale than their modern counterparts. Many such conflicts were decided by just one or two significant battles. In the case of famous campaigns that lasted years, many of them consisted of no more a few big battles every year.

Contrast that with WWI, where both sides maintained a line of trenches, all occupied, that covered 440 miles, and maintained that position for about four years straight.

The smaller scale of ancient wars wasn’t due to a lack of ambition, but rather a series of practical limitations that affected logistics, leadership, and long-term campaigning.

Let’s unpack those constraints – especially as they shape both soldier experience and command structure – because understanding them can give you all sorts of tools when building your game.

Communication: The Fog of Antiquity

In an era without telegraphs, radios, or reliable messengers, ancient armies couldn’t coordinate across distances. Splitting your forces meant each group was essentially on its own, unable to reinforce or support each other.

Armies did employ horsemen messengers, signal flags, and occasionally carrier pigeons, but the information they carried was unreliable, often blocked or intercepted, and in any case not timely.

Compare this with modern tactics, which routinely divide forces to flank, encircle, or control terrain – because coordination is possible. In antiquity, that just wasn’t an option.

In your game: Player characters in an ancient setting may have broader authority and looser objectives. But the information they receive will often be outdated, garbled, or wrong, even when the information is about their own sides’ capabilities. Planning around fog-of-war becomes a significant challenge, and sending messages to ask for help is downright unreliable, or its own quest if the players are the ones sent.

Command Structure: Independent but Vulnerable

In modern warfare, the generals are often hundreds or thousands of miles from the front. But in ancient wars, the high command was right there in the field.

The lack of modern communications meant that ancient generals couldn’t micromanage from a distance, they had to be there in the field. Also, it gave individual commanders much more autonomy.

This also helps explain why discipline varied wildly. Medieval knights, for example, often pursued their own glory rather than obeying orders – a nightmare for coordination, but gold for storytelling.

(Historical note: The Roman army is a well-known exception. It maintained tight discipline and deliberately included a surplus of officers to ensure leadership continuity in battle.)

In your game: This limitation means commanders in ancient campaigns had to stick together. Orders from high command were either delivered in person or not at all – which made frontline leadership far more autonomous.

This creates rich opportunities. Want your players to earn a commander’s favor? Resent their interference? Carry out a politically motivated assassination? All of that’s on the table when the leaders are riding with the troops.

In addition, your players will have much more authority to disobey orders, which might be already infeasible when they arrive. Granted, this is something your players would do, regardless of your permission, in any setting, but any soldiers on their side will be much more ready to listen to them.

Supplies and the Cost of War

Ancient armies often carried a large share of their supplies with them – but almost never enough. Supply lines existed, especially for large empires like Rome or Persia, but they were difficult to maintain. Poor communication, hostile terrain, and raiders made it risky to count on deliveries from the rear – especially for smaller or less organized forces. Even Rome couldn’t guarantee consistent resupply deep in enemy territory.

And that’s just the logistics. One of the most overlooked realities of ancient and medieval warfare is the staggering cost of it all. We imagine royal treasuries overflowing with gold, but outfitting, feeding, and paying even 10,000 soldiers was a national-scale expense – something few kings could cover from personal wealth.

Historically, this was handled through emergency taxes, levies on the church, forced loans, and high-interest borrowing from merchants or early banks (Yes, really). Campaigns were often cut short not by strategy or weather – but by empty coffers.

For TTRPGs, this adds rich flavor and decision pressure. You don’t need to count every coin, but the consequences of limited supply are a great narrative lever.

• Time pressure builds as the army runs out of food or funding.
• Players can’t just ?send word to the rear? and expect a rare item to arrive – they’re part of a force that may be struggling to feed itself.
• NPC commanders may be forced into risky engagements, not because it’s wise – but because they can’t afford to wait.

Optional Guideline for Tracking Costs

If you want numbers:

• A basic soldier might cost 1-2 gold per day, including food, pay, and gear upkeep.
• An elite warrior or magically supported unit might run 5-10 gold daily.
  

  Not counting the cost of any magical equipment. Even giving every member of the unit a 5GP potion each is a big outlay – if you’ve hundreds or thousands of combatants.
  — Mike

• A modest force of 500 could cost 15,000 gp/month or more – and that’s before siege engines or mounted troops.

You don’t need to tally it all – but knowing the pressure is there gives both players and GMs an extra axis to build on. After all, war isn’t just about bravery. It’s about whether you can keep your army alive until the end.

Smaller Populations

Ancient armies were constrained by the simple fact that there weren’t that many people to recruit. Archaeologists and historians estimate that most field armies in antiquity topped out in the tens of thousands, with only a few exceptional cases – like the Roman army at Cannae or the mythical numbers claimed for Xerxes – reaching low six digits. And even those often included non-combatants or support personnel.

By contrast, World War I saw over 70 million soldiers mobilized, spread across multiple fronts and nations. Ancient states lacked the population, economic base, and administrative capacity to sustain fighting on multiple large-scale fronts at once. Most had to put everything they had into a single army – and that made every battle count.

Consequences

Because ancient wars were often fought with a single main army per side, a major battle could decide the outcome of an entire war. There were rarely reinforcements or second chances. If the army broke, so did the campaign – and often the state behind it.

This also means that underhanded tactics – the kind that feel far-fetched in modern military fiction – can seem surprisingly plausible in this context. A well-placed trap (a rigged dam, a poisoned grain store, a fire in the enemy camp) might not destroy an entire army, but it could weaken it enough to tip the scales in the next engagement.

To be clear: most of these tricks almost certainly wouldn’t work as written. But in a fictional setting where a bit of plausibility is all you need, they’re fair game – especially since real ancient armies have been wiped out by a single ambush, disastrous terrain choice, or freak weather event.

Weapon-Related Tactics

In the pre-gunpowder era, virtually all battlefield weapons were either melee (spears, swords, axes) or short-ranged (javelins, slings, bows). While some ranged weapons – like composite bows or ballistae – had decent range, they weren’t decisive on their own.

The dominant battlefield strategy in most open-field engagements was to mass troops into dense formations – phalanxes, shield walls, testudos – and attempt to break the enemy’s line by brute force or disruption.

Even if you think you know what a Phalanx is, Phalanx | Wikipedia is worth reading. There’s a link at the bottom to Shield Wall as well as Pike Square, Schiltron, and Tercio.

“Testudo” was new to me, and surprisingly isn’t listed amongst those comparable formations. So if you need to brush up on the Tortoise Formation, the page to consult is Testudo Formation | Wikipedia.

— Mike

Once an enemy force began to break and flee, they were highly vulnerable; at that point, cavalry and light infantry would pursue and rout them before they could regroup.

Consequences

In terms of running a TTRPG campaign, this section doesn’t introduce many new constraints – but it will matter when we talk about how battles are structured mechanically.

One key consequence is that training mattered more in ancient warfare than in many modern conflicts, adding to the reasons why losing an army was so decisive.

Another implication is in security and stealth: guards couldn’t simply shoot a fleeing thief from across the courtyard. Archery was useful, but slow to reload, hard to aim in chaos, and ineffective against armor.

I feel that this is the most contentious claim in the entire article. I was always taught in history that the English Longbow was the reason plate mail went out of fashion, and bows in most RPGs fire more quickly than swords can swing.

But those are numbers for Skilled Bowmen – most weren’t that good.

Using a bow involves the development of significant physical strength in specific muscle groups that weren’t used for anything else. This requires not only hundreds of hours of training but years of practice, frequently starting at a very young age with smaller and lighter bows.

Medieval longbows had a pull force ranging from 80 to 150 pounds. This wasn’t just about pulling the string back once; it was about being able to shoot effectively for extended periods under battle conditions. Skeletons of medieval longbowmen often show distinct physical adaptations like enlarged left arms and bone spurs.

If the pull strength of the bow wasn’t great enough, penetration of armor became impossible. While bows at the upper end could penetrate plate mail, the chances of doing so declined rapidly with reduce pull force – one source suggested that it was as much as half the square of the percentage below 150 for full plate, so 135 lb = -10% -> 100/2 = 50% chance of penetration. That sounds a little high to me – I’d maybe use 1/3 of the square or even 1/4 – but it gets the idea across.

Bows were even less effective against chain-mail, which was cheaper to supply, anyway, because plate was rigid, while the chain gave way, reducing the effective power of the arrow up to 20%, and distributing the force of impact over a wider area, further reducing it’s effectiveness.

And that’s just to use the bow at all. At the same time, you had to work on Accuracy and Rate Of Fire. While the basics of shooting could be learned relatively quickly, achieving the accuracy and speed needed for military effectiveness took years.

Archers had to master a rapid rate of fire (10-15 arrows per minute was expected for a skilled archer) and be able to hit targets at considerable distances (minimum of 200 yards for practice, with war ranges up to 400 yards).

The English longbow was particularly feared for two reasons: One, it developed a greater pull strength than any other non-compound bow, giving it greater range and penetrating power; and two, English children spent hours practicing bowmanship every Sunday. It was part of the culture.

In practice, archery’s primary power was to force the enemy to adopt a defensive position with raised shields, something incompatible with fast maneuvering; this pinned them down long enough for your infantry to close. Avoiding friendly fire then required the archers to stop what they were doing, so it was a tactical advantage but not a decisive one.

Of course, the other side knew this, and so their bowmen targeted yours. You can’t do much with a bow while cowering behind a shield. Only about 10% could actually fire on the enemy infantry / cavalry; the rest had to take out the enemy’s archers, first.

— Mike

If someone slipped away into the dark, the only way to stop them was to run them down.

You probably already knew this. But it’s worth noting how these constraints shaped both the tactics of war and the feel of personal combat in a pre-firearm world.

I now move on to outlining what a campaign built around an ancient era war might look like.

Part 1 – Assembly

Given the structure of ancient warfare, the opening act of your story will often be assembling the army. This isn’t just a matter of raising troops – it’s a chance to create a web of political, logistical, and interpersonal challenges for the players to solve.

Rallying the Troops

Different quests can focus on calling in favors from allies and reluctant vassals, persuading them to send soldiers or support. Depending on the era and setting, the monarch may have near-total power over his lords … or almost none at all.

In history, vassals usually did respond when called – especially under feudal obligation – but they might do so half-heartedly, late, or with excuses. Modern RPG players are so familiar with the “do X for me first” quest structure that you can easily justify delays or conditions without raising eyebrows.

If that feels too artificial, you can frame the delays as rallying aid from neighboring kingdoms rather than formal vassals – or just play up internal politics: rival generals, cowardly nobles, or ambitious clergy getting in the way.

As mentioned above, raising money was also a major factor of getting a war together. That said, this one might be best omitted. While it actually is highly realistic, it won’t feel that way.

It is to have your fund-raising cake and eat it too – make the actual raising of the funds easy and behind-the-scenes, but detail the PCs (and other similar groups) to escort the wealth back to the King, and from there, to wherever else it had to go. Enmesh the players in the logistics of currency transportation; it gives you a chance to show off the impact that the war preparations are having on the society and provides first-hand experience of the overcoming of the difficulties involved.

— Mike

Then there’s the matter of securing passage. In many historical campaigns, armies had to negotiate with local rulers, city-states, or even neutral powers to pass through their territory. Sometimes this meant diplomatic agreements or bribes; other times it meant fighting for every mile.

And of course, this being a fantasy game, players might need to gather intelligence or prepare magical countermeasures to deal with supernatural threats the army could face.

Delays, Sabotage, and Disease

Once assembly begins, complications are likely. In real history, armies were often delayed by disease outbreaks, poor roads, or political foot-dragging. You may prefer something more dramatic: enemy spies, assassinations, or magical sabotage. Fantasy makes such actions more plausible – and more fun.

In fact, it’s entirely believable that a fantasy army might employ necromancy, curses, or magically-induced plagues. Even in real-world warfare, sabotage has always played a role, from the guerrilla tactics of ancient rebels to the industrial espionage of the 20th century.

As for biological warfare: real-world nations haven’t used artificial plagues on a major scale – most likely only because a sufficiently large war hasn’t demanded it since it became practical. WWI saw treaties against poison gas ignored, and WWII gave us strategic terror bombings of civilian populations (carried out by both sides). It’s not hard to imagine fantasy nations crossing similar lines under pressure.

GM Advice: Use Sabotage Sparingly

If you include enemy action delaying army assembly, do it once – maybe twice, tops. Players want to feel like they’re progressing, not treading water. One good way to handle this is a minor act of sabotage that turns out to be a distraction from a larger threat – giving you tension and misdirection without repetition.

Consider having acts of sabotage come from a third party, either a known ally of your enemy or someone looking to curry favor with them. A relatively small outlay can gift an ally significant advantages, even turning the outcome of a war. This raises the prospect of reciprocal countermeasures – i.e. sending the PCs into the enemy’s allied nation to persuade them not to do that any more, or else.

— Mike

Part 2 – On the March

Once the army is ready, the next stage of your campaign will be traveling with it. This is a rich opportunity for adventure – not every battle happens on the battlefield.

Depending on your GM style, you have two broad approaches here:

• Side Quests Along The Route
• Strategic Decisions with Tactical Fallout

Option 1: Side Quests Along the Route

The players can be sent on small missions in support of the army’s advance. These might include:

• Scouting out a fortified position ahead
• Negotiating with a neutral faction (although this may have been a major theme earlier in the campaign)
• Securing a bridge, ford, or mountain pass
• Investigating a nearby abandoned temple or dungeon the army must pass close to.

These quests help maintain the party’s traditional adventuring rhythm, while still contributing meaningfully to the larger war effort.

Look for ways to highlight how the military venture impacts on the ‘standard adventure’, for example adding time-pressure. The PCs might not have as far to go for logistical support eg healing – but what support is available may be more restrictive. And it’s possible that clearing a dungeon under orders means that you don’t get to keep the loot, or part of it.

One other thing to mention, in terms of scouting out a forward position: Surprises. Every war should have surprises, on both sides. Such scouting expeditions are a great way to spring these surprises on the army the PCs are part of. Having the PCs discover that the enemy has an elite unit consisting of pilots and archers mounted on Wyverns, or are summoning a Demon to molest the army, for example.

The PCs don’t necessarily have to be the ones to solve these problems (but someone is going to have to) – it’s enough for them to discover the problem.

— Mike

Option 2: Strategic Decisions with Tactical Fallout

Alternatively – or in addition – you can give the players strategic choices that shape the army’s march:

• Which route to take (faster but riskier? longer but safer?)
• Whether to prioritize speed or reconnaissance
• How to handle a diplomatic incident or skirmish with locals
• What to do about brewing dissent, plummeting morale, or captured spies

Because you don’t want to burden the players with micromanaging the entire army, it helps to frame these decisions as reactions to new information or consequences of earlier choices, not as a general “what should the army do?”

When presenting decisions, avoid vague “What do you do?” prompts. Instead, offer two or three concrete, contrasting choices. And if your players come up with something unexpected but plausible, go with it – as long as it moves the game forward, it’s gold.

Best Practice: Mix Both Styles

Personally, I recommend combining the two approaches. Let the players make meaningful decisions about the army’s course – and then have those choices lead to small, one-session quests.

For example:

• Choosing to march through the desert might require an expedition to secure or purify water sources.
• Choosing the mountains could require clearing or defending bridges and passes.
• If the army skirts a haunted temple, the players might have to delve into it and exorcise its spirits – before half the camp is too sleep-deprived to function and morale collapses.

This way, the army’s journey becomes both strategic and personal – and the players never feel like passengers.

Part 3 – Climactic Army Battle

After all the buildup – gathering forces, marching with the army, facing minor threats – your players will expect (and deserve) a major battle as a payoff. Even if the campaign is character-focused, the war needs its battlefield moment.

But how do you run a massive army-on-army clash in a player-character RPG without bogging everything down in new mechanics?

Use Familiar Combat Mechanics, Lightly Adjusted

My recommendation is to stick with the core combat rules of your RPG system, adjusted slightly to accommodate army-scale action.

That means each unit of the army should have:

• HP (representing cohesion / morale – more on this in a moment),
• Movement rules,
• Damage output,
• Any other necessary stats – all in the same language your players already know.

This saves everyone the trouble of learning a one-off mass combat system that will be used once or twice and never again.

Let Players Help Design Their Units

In most RPGs, characters have unique powers or features that don’t map cleanly onto groups of soldiers. Instead of trying to force a direct conversion, invite your players to design army units inspired by their characters:

• Let each player pick 2Â?3 of their own abilities or tactics.
• Apply those to one or a few units under their character’s leadership.
• These units can fight “in the style of” the player – archery-focused, berserker-style, healing support, whatever fits.

This gives players a sense of personal investment in the battle, ensures they understand the rules of the units they’re controlling, and saves you a lot of prep time. It also makes sense, if their characters had a hand in training or simply served as inspiration.

I’ll also mention that in my experience, players are often much more fair-minded when building rules collaboratively than they are when trying to argue for a specific combat edge to a specific situation.

(And if they do push boundaries a bit? Just adjust the enemies to match. It works, and I wouldn’t even call it cheating. The rules have just been finalized, and now you have to implement them via the other side as well.)

One Key Change: What HP Means

Here’s the one place you do need to change something: what HP represents.

In character combat, HP usually means how much damage a character can take before collapsing. But with units, players naturally assume that losing 10% HP = losing 10% of the soldiers – which creates two problems:

1. By the time one side “wins,” they’re reduced to a handful of exhausted survivors.
2. An army unit that’s lost 50% of its soldiers shouldn’t logically be fighting at full power.

You could try scaling damage output based on remaining HP, but that’s a terrible idea. It bogs down play in math, and worse, it kills the pacing. Instead of a climactic finish, you get a slow, grinding war of attrition – death by a thousand dribbles of damage.

Instead: HP = Morale and Cohesion

Make it clear – both before and during the battle – that a unit’s HP reflects how much punishment it can take before morale crumbles and the soldiers scatter. That’s how many real-world battles were decided anyway: not total annihilation, but a rout.

If you want to make the numbers feel more epic without changing the outcome, you can multiply HP and damage by 10 or even 1,000. The math stays simple, but the visuals become more satisfying: “The line held with 2,400 HP … barely.”

Optional: A Preliminary Battle with the Vanguard

If you (or your players) want more than one large battle, a good solution is to start with a smaller clash involving the vanguard.

The vanguard is a forward detachment of the army – often tasked with scouting, defending against ambushes, and keeping the main force from being caught unaware. It makes sense for the PCs to be traveling with them, given their capabilities and autonomy.

If the players made strategic decisions in Part 2, an enemy attack on the vanguard can be presented as a consequence of those choices – good or bad. It creates a natural escalation.

Just be careful not to stack too many large-scale battles back-to-back. Before the final clash, it’s best to include a small, one-session quest – securing a pass, sabotaging the enemy, protecting an injured scout – to preserve the rhythm of the campaign as a character-driven RPG, not a wargame.

The closer you get to the Big Battle, the greater the danger that you, as the GM, have to overcome – the danger of part of the lead-up overshadowing that climactic battle. Because it’s far more likely to be run using the normal combat mechanics and the ‘major armies’ variant proposed earlier, the clash of Vanguards presents this danger at it’s most acute.

“Very well,” some will think. “I’ll take it just a little easier on the players in the penultimate battle and so avoid that problem completely.” And that is a great way of avoiding turning the climax into an anticlimax – but it introduces a new risk or two.

Specifically, it gives a false impression as to the strength of the enemy. “I didn’t think they would be such wimps” is the feedback that results, and right away your big finish has one foot in a bucket and one hand tied behind its back.

And then, when the climactic battle does eventuate, you can be accused of beefing up the enemy. Or of trying to lull the players into a false sense of security. Of being unfair in general – just to make matters worse.

All this hassle can be avoided by being more intelligent about a pre-Climax one-session quest. It should not be divorced from the war but should play into it, enhancing the excitement of the climax and not distracting from it; but at the same time, the primary antagonists should be chosen so as to give minimal impression as to the enemy strength and abilities.

One approach that works, but can often be over-used as a result, is a “Common Enemy” to appear between the two armies, causing the Vanguards – or a scouting group even in advance of the Vanguards – to have to work together to defeat it. Because of the in-game circumstances, this can acquire all sorts of overtones –

• is this really an 11th-hour last chance at Peace (no, it isn’t)?
• Is it exploring what might have been had the war not arisen (well maybe)?
• Is it informing the players as to the motivations of the enemy (it’s a very good opportunity to do so, at the very least)?
• Or, is it foreshadowing the end of the war and the subsequent peace? (Again, maybe, maybe not).

But above all, what it is is NOT undercutting the climactic battle.

It would also be easy for the enemy to come across as too ready to make peace or implement a detente, or as too bloody-minded to do so when it’s in their own best interests.

For those reasons, it can actually be much better to have the war provide nothing more than the backdrop and some time pressure, and have the opponent be completely unrelated to the major enemy. These issues may seem melodramatic to the reader, but I would advise the GM to take them very seriously.

Oh, and one more piece of advice that I may as well drop in here – when dealing with / describing ancient armies, put heavy emphasis on color as a narrative trait. Back then, it was common for standards to be used to distinguish and identify one group from another on the battlefield, perhaps with tunics in matching color schemes. Large collections of fighting men (and presumably, in a Fantasy campaign), women, can frequently become a riot of color as a result. In more modern warfare, the dominant color is going to be “bland” – chamo or khaki or whatever. So contrast strongly with that to emphasize that this is a war in a Fantasy milieu.

— Mike

Part 4 – Climactic Character-Based RPG Battle

Readers of fantasy may be surprised that I’ve placed the players on the offensive side of the war. After all, in most fantasy novels, the protagonists are almost always on the defensive. It’s the villain who commands the massive army, and the heroes must rally a last stand or sabotage the threat from afar.

This makes sense for fiction – but not always for RPGs.

Why Traditional Fantasy Structures Don’t Work in RPGs

In many fantasy stories, the protagonists spend the war on a side quest: slaying the Lich?s phylactery, destroying the artifact, or assassinating the dark general – all while the main battle rages elsewhere.

That kind of structure is hard to replicate in TTRPGs, because it keeps the players removed from the central conflict. If they’ve helped gather armies, made strategic decisions, and marched with the troops, they’re going to want to see it through – not watch the ending from a side room.

And unlike fiction, where the villain almost always survives until the last page, TTRPG villains can absolutely be destroyed mid-campaign – sometimes earlier than expected. That makes it harder to rely on a looming, external threat to carry dramatic tension all the way through.

Solution: A Fortified Villain and a Final Assault

To preserve the feel of a classic RPG climax, I suggest placing the villain in a fortified city or stronghold – either retreating there after the army’s defeat, or never leaving it in the first place.

The natural medieval response would be a siege. But sieges are long, static, and not suited to a final session or emotional high point. Instead, make the siege unfeasible – either because:

• The villain has reinforcements en route, meaning time is running out (classic epic fantasy), or
• The villain has begun an apocalyptic ritual that must be stopped before it completes (classic D&D adventure).

Either way, the party must infiltrate the city, overcome obstacles and defenders, and confront the villain in his lair – giving them the kind of personal, high-stakes battle that best suits the medium of roleplaying games.

UPDATE:

Alexander has provided some additional commentary about the inserts that I dropped into his article that are worth making a permanent part of this post:

I especially enjoyed your point about the extra vanguard encounter and the dangers that it represents. I did not think of that.

(I don’t think I’d have them ally with the main villain, though. That is a legitimate plot move, and I have enjoyed it, but it doesn’t feel like the right fit for a war campaign. I would instead have them face a small group of allies of the villain, or a different villain that might be associated with the main villain (think Saruman), without having the main villain make an appearance. That said, I already stated that it is now your article … Treat this email as a comment made by a reader who enjoyed the post.)

That about wraps up Part 1. In part 2, Modern warfare.
— Mike

About The Author: Alexander Atoz

I used a screen capture of Alexander’s site to create these banners. Unfortunately, I’m not all that happy with either of them – the subtext is just too hard to read either way. It says, “Combat scenarios for every monster, allowing them to utilize their combat potential to the fullest for the first time ever.”

Alexander Atoz is the writer behind DragonEncounters.com, a blog dedicated to helping GMs make the most of the monsters in the D&D Monster Manual. So far, he’s covered over 120 monsters in depth – including all fourteen demons, all eleven devils, and all forty dragons.

Each dragon type has been given four separate articles, one for each of the four age categories, offering at least one unique combat scenario that reflects that dragon’s changing tactics and personality. None of the encounters repeat, meaning a GM who runs multiple dragon fights will always be giving players something new.

While combat encounters are the blog’s foundation, Alexander goes well beyond the battlefield. He frequently explores how to use monsters in story-driving or support roles – especially underutilized good-aligned creatures. Rather than simply turning them into villains or quest-givers, he offers ways to integrate them into the campaign in subtle and satisfying ways.

For example, his article on aarakocra shows how they can serve as long-range messengers, helping expand the scope of your campaign world. In his couatl write-up, he suggests ways to use its disguise abilities to guide players unobtrusively, streamlining plot progression without railroading.

His young and adult bronze dragon articles explore how to position powerful allies so they contribute meaningfully to the story – in ways that have them fighting both alongside the players and elsewhere in the game world, and either way without overshadowing the players.

In addition, every article involving good-aligned creatures includes guidance on how to prevent the inevitable player attempts to “recruit them for the party”.

The blog also digs into social trickery, deception, and narrative roleplay. His glabrezu article explores how such a fiend might earn the party’s trust, while his guide to doppelgangers offers a trove of infiltration and manipulation ideas beyond the standard “evil shapeshifter”.

Beyond individual monsters, Alexander has written system-neutral advice as part of a number of his articles that are applicable to a wide range of games. Topics include how to run horror, designing chase encounters, handling powerful neutral third-parties, and more – all aimed at making sessions more dynamic, more surprising, and more memorable.