This is part 2 of the guest article on Wars in TTRPGs by Alexander Atoz. 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. As usual, I’ll chime in every now and then with my own two cent’s worth. In particular, I want to focus my attention mostly on sci-fi and future wars, having noticed some trends and patterns over the years.

— Mike

How to Run a TTRPG War (reprised from Part 1)

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’re tackling the largest kind of conflict you can run in an RPG: war.

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

Modern War

Modern war, unlike its ancient counterpart, involves armies spread across vast distances. For example, during World War I, the Western Front’s trench system covered a length equivalent to one and a half times the width of Europe — due to its many curves and turns — and that was just one front of the war.

WWI also introduced air combat. While doing so ignores the consequences of victory in an Air War – something I’m sire Alexander will cover along the way – It can often be helpful to think of such things as an entirely separate ‘front’ within the larger conflict. Ditto surface fleets, submarines, satellite weapons, ICBMs, you name it. Ultimately, victory in any conflict is either political or a crushing defeat for one side that permits the victor to dictate terms – and even then, the politics post-war needs to be a strongly-considered factor, or you are simply sewing the seeds of another one down the line.

In terms of control, it comes from boots on the ground. Everything else is there to enable those land forces (including mechanized infantry) to travel as fast as they can, as successfully as they can, while protecting them as much as you can. By considering each of these variant types of conflict as separate fronts that in and of themselves are not decisive to the outcome, the consequences of success in one of them (and the cost of doing so) can be reduced to tactical advantages being given to the ground troops, greatly simplifying the whole war into a more manageable whole.

Even in Sci-fi campaigns like Star Wars, where the capital ships are capable of annihilating a population from orbit (or even the entire planet, in the case of a Death Star), military conflicts can be simplified into this simpler form. Threatening to destroy the population gains you nothing; threatening to use your superiority of position to land ground forces after wiping out all opposition is a whole different story. Ultimately, it may not even be necessary to land ground forces until after the surrender, but it’s the threat of doing so that dictates who’s the winner and who’s the loser.

Oh, and destroying the planet? It makes you look tough and scary, and that can be a benefit in itself as Moff Tarkin pointed out – but it costs you any resources that the planet may have contained. You can’t wipe out everywhere or you’ll rule an empire of ashes – cutting off your nose to spite your face. That’s why nuclear deterrence didn’t end war in the 20th century. Keep this things in mind as you read on.

— Mike

In fiction, stories about modern warfare often focus on isolated operations or small-scale missions. The sheer scale of the conflict makes it impossible to tell a personal story that encompasses the whole war. The same is true in RPGs: even if the campaign weren’t centered on player characters, it would be infeasible to portray the entire war. Instead, the GM will typically run individual missions set within the broader conflict.

Modern wars offer fertile ground for high-stakes, small-team operations, especially those carried out by special forces. These missions are often pivotal and intense, and they’re perfect for RPGs. Smaller unit sizes also make it easier to ensure the PCs play meaningful roles rather than being just another squad in a vast army.

It’s implied rather than stated, so let me make it clear: Do Not make the PCs the Generals. If the generals on both sides are NPCs, it gives you far greater control over the conflict, enabling you to shape it in a way that best delivers adventure to the campaign.

Mission Types for the Start of a War

As with ancient wars, I’ll begin by breaking modern warfare into its component parts — starting, though not limited to, mission types. At the end, I’ll explore how to structure a full campaign around these elements.

1. Surprise Attacks

These are especially effective in the early days of war, when the enemy is not yet on full alert. The attack on Pearl Harbor is one of the most famous examples, designed to cripple the U.S. Navy before it could fully engage. At the same time, Japan launched additional strikes to seize critical resources before embargoes could take effect.

This doesn’t have to be before war is declared. Earlier in history, the Confederacy used rapid assaults at the start of the American Civil War, exploiting the fact that Union forces hadn’t yet mobilized.

In RPG terms, these missions give the players the thrill of hitting hard before the war really starts, with high stakes and limited intelligence.

2. Preemptive Strikes

Sometimes a nation strikes first to avoid being overwhelmed later. The Six-Day War began with Israel launching a surprise airstrike to destroy enemy air power before it could be used against them. Had they waited, the combined armies of neighboring Arab states would have been unstoppable.

This type of mission suits a campaign kickoff: your players must act decisively to buy breathing room for their side — because if they don’t, the next battle may be unwinnable.

3. Defensive Positions

Elite units are sometimes tasked with holding the line to buy time for the main force to regroup. The U.S. Airborne Division did exactly this in the Battle of the Bulge, slowing Germany’s last major offensive.

While that wasn’t the start of the war, it’s still a great framework for an opening mission. For instance, at the start of the American Civil War, Washington D.C. was essentially undefended for weeks — Confederate forces could have marched right in.

A defensive stand can serve as a tense opening scenario: outnumbered and outgunned, the PCs must hold out until help arrives — or doesn’t.

4. Covering the Retreat

Tactical withdrawals are sometimes the only option, especially in the early stages of a war. During the Korean War (1950-1953), American troops conducted a fighting retreat to delay enemy forces and buy time for reinforcements. In World War I, the Allies executed what became known as The Great Retreat, falling back toward Paris while reorganizing for a counterattack.

In World War II, when France fell with unexpected speed, the British army found itself trapped at the coastal town of Dunkirk. In one of the great miracles of the war, the Nazis were slow to press their advantage, and Britain seized the opportunity to evacuate over 300,000 soldiers — using everything from naval destroyers to privately owned fishing boats. To protect the evacuation, British and French forces launched fierce rearguard actions, holding the perimeter and delaying the German advance.

These scenarios are perfect for running battles, escort missions, or desperate last stands with shifting objectives and time pressure.

5. Capturing the Leadership

Wars sometimes begin with an attempt to decapitate the enemy leadership. The American Revolution unofficially began with the British trying to arrest rebel leaders — foiled by Paul Revere’s midnight ride. In World War II, there were several high-risk attempts (some successful) to kill or capture enemy leaders.

This type of mission combines stealth, speed, and political weight — whether the players are sent to capture enemy leaders or to thwart a strike against their own.

Active Countermeasures Missions

These next mission types are best suited for the middle of a war, when front lines have stabilized and the fighting has escalated into a prolonged conflict.

6. Raids for Information

Some of the most valuable operations during wartime aren’t about firepower — they’re about intelligence. During World War II, Allied special forces raided a German radar facility and captured a scientist to assess how far the Axis radar program had progressed. In another case, they sank a submarine and retrieved vital code-books from inside, keeping the retrieval operation secret so the Germans wouldn’t realize their codes had been compromised.

During World War I, a German diplomat was forced to disembark from a seized ship and reportedly complained about having to leave his luggage behind. A British officer heard this, had the luggage searched, and discovered valuable code-books. (That’s the official version. An alternative version is that British agents illegally raided a German embassy and the first story was invented as a cover).

Capturing enemy staff officers has occasionally yielded useful intel through interrogation, though deliberate raids to do so are mostly the stuff of movies — realistically, pulling it off is a matter of luck, and almost impossible to plan for.

Still, in a game, it can be a tense, low-combat mission with high payoff if the players succeed — or a framing device for enemy forces to try the same against them.

Don’t neglect the value of an Intelligence mission prior to the opening of hostilities. Usually, the PCs aren’t tasked with developing the Intelligence themselves, they are tasked with retrieval of an Asset and what he or she knows, from territory that is unfriendly if not yet openly hostile. The opposition comes from enemy counter-intelligence.

In the Adventurer’s Club campaign, we had militants in Japan preparing a surprise attack against China with demonic support in the mid-1930s, then placed the PCs in a position to become aware of this through contact with a Yakuza member who thought it just a skirmish between two criminal organizations at first. The PCs were blackmailed into performing a preemptive strike against the enemy Yakuza, leading them to discover the truth. Using this discovery, they were able to transform the Yakuza blackmailing them into an ally and with his resources, led a raid that banished the supernatural forces being assembled. They knew full well that this would not end the impending war, but it weakened the enemy of their ally and delayed it for several years while they regrouped, and preserving the shock value of Pearl Harbor.

From their point of view, it started as a Gang War plotline, became an Intelligence Mission, and then a Raid for Sabotage.

— Mike

7. Raids for Sabotage

A famous example of wartime sabotage is the Norwegian special forces attack on the Vemork heavy water plant, to slow German nuclear bomb research. There were many others: British commandos destroyed a dry dock to prevent repairs to the German battleship Tirpitz, and additional missions targeted dams, prisons, bridges, and industrial infrastructure.

More recently, Ukraine carried out a drone strike that reportedly destroyed around 40 Russian aircraft — an estimated $7 billion in damage.

Depends who you ask – I’ve heard $17 billion.

— Mike

Before the era of aircraft and rapid deployment, sabotage was usually the realm of partisans and spies. You can send your players on espionage missions too — after all, one of Britain’s top officers during the American Revolutionary War was captured while coordinating with American Major General Benedict Arnold, and executed as a spy.

8. Raids for Morale

Morale is a battlefield factor that often outweighs logistics or tactics. Napoleon famously stated “In war, moral forces are to physical as three to one.” In other words, a force with high morale can fight like an army three times its size.

Washington’s famous crossing of the Delaware was intended to boost morale after a string of defeats — motivating his demoralized troops to reenlist and striking a vulnerable enemy at just the right moment.

In World War II, President Roosevelt ordered an expensive raid on Japan’s home islands of absolutely no military value, purely to rally American morale in the wake of Pearl Harbor.

Morale raids can also work in reverse. During the War of 1812, British forces burned Washington D.C. — not for strategic gain, but to shatter American morale and humiliate the young nation on the world stage.

In your game, a morale mission may not turn the tide of war directly — but it can inspire allies, demoralize enemies, or shift political dynamics in powerful ways.

Advance Tactical Missions: Small Units, Big Impact

Small elite units are often used to lead an army’s advance, gaining ground or setting the stage for larger operations.

These mission types are designed to give allied forces a tactical advantage, either immediately or at some point in the near future. They enmesh those conducting them in the ‘mechanics’ of the war and are only suitable once fighting has actually broken out..

9. Seizing Bridges, Mountain Passes, or Similar Objectives

While made famous by World War II paratroopers, this tactic predates them by centuries. Paratroopers could simply go farther and faster than earlier forces. Sending elite units ahead to secure key choke-points — bridges, passes, crossroads — prevented the enemy from moving their full forces into position or created bottlenecks the main army could exploit.

This makes for a classic “hold until relieved” mission, or a stealth approach that turns into a pitched defense once the enemy realizes what’s happening.

10. Achieving Surprise

The original German Stormtroopers (not to be confused with their later Nazi namesakes) were developed during World War I. These troops moved just ahead of the main army, capturing trenches and sowing chaos in the enemy’s lines. Then the rest of the force would move in behind them to consolidate gains. Many nations across many wars have used similar tactics to establish momentum or collapse fragile defenses.

Your players can be the spearhead, tasked with punching a hole just wide enough for the rest of the army to pour through.

11. Diversionary Tactics

Small forces are often used to mislead the enemy. A few examples:

• ?Raids from one direction to distract from a flanking maneuver.
• Attacks on bridges to mask river crossings elsewhere.
• Sabotage of railway lines or infrastructure to force enemy redeployment.
• Dummy columns, fake encampments, or extra campfires to disguise the army’s true location.

These kinds of missions are ideal for clever groups who like deception, misdirection, and asymmetric warfare. Done right, the players might win without ever engaging the main force directly.

Other Factors of War

In addition to direct missions, modern warfare includes many peripheral elements that still make great RPG material. Most of these aren’t typically handled by frontline troops — special forces or otherwise — but with the right framing, they can still impact your players. After all, in good storytelling, everything revolves around the protagonists.

These mission types are rarely sufficient unto themselves for an adventure. But they can serve as a gateway into one.

— Mike

12. Scouting

Reconnaissance units are often sent ahead of the main force to scout terrain, identify enemy movements, or evaluate defensive positions. While pure stealth missions can sometimes lack gameplay variety, things get interesting when the plan goes sideways — maybe the players are spotted, or maybe they uncover something urgent that demands fast decision-making.

You can also give the players the job of evaluating the information, and making the decision of what to do next. Usually, scouts don’t choose the battle plan — they just report. But if your players are operating with limited backup, radio silence, or surrounded by indecisive (or dead) commanders, they might end up making the call themselves.

Let them shape what happens next, even if it’s not technically their job.

13. Propaganda

Wartime heroes are often used to inspire the public, encourage enlistment, and promote national unity. Sometimes this involves staged appearances or interviews. But what happens when a nosy reporter or an anti-war protester starts asking questions that your players aren’t prepared to answer — especially if they know something classified?

This is a great opportunity for a social challenge under pressure. Public image matters — and your players may not all agree on what to say.

14. Diplomatic Visits

Keeping other nations neutral — or better, bringing them to your side — is a major strategic concern. In World War I, Germany tried to lure Mexico into attacking the U.S in order to keep the U.S. tied up elsewhere and not available to join the Allies. This move backfired when Britain intercepted their Telegram to Mexico and passed it on to the U.S.

During World War II, the Allies worked hard to keep Spain neutral — a critical goal, since Spain joining the Axis could have allowed Germany to seize Gibraltar, a vital area that controls ship traffic into and out of the Mediterranean.

These events rarely involve field soldiers — but this is an RPG, and the rules of story apply. Maybe a neutral nation’s leader wants to meet the heroes they’ve heard so much about. Maybe your players rescue a missing VIP from that country. Either way, you can run a high-stakes diplomatic encounter disguised as a social quest, or a quest disguised as diplomacy.

Field soldiers can be used as security for diplomats, however. And if things subsequently go sideways, they may have to step up to the plate in ways they were never expected to have to function.

–Mike

Use politics as a pressure cooker. Even hardened soldiers can sweat under the weight of global consequences.

15. Escape

Sometimes the players are captured. Sometimes they’re just cut off behind enemy lines. Either way, getting home turns into its own adventure.

A capture scenario should come with a valid in-world reason — it should never feel like the GM is punishing the players for succeeding. Done properly, though, it can make for great story. Just make it clear that it’s happening through no fault of their own, so that they can accept it as plot device.

Escape stories naturally blend survival, navigation, stealth, and discovery. They also give you an excuse to plant intelligence they weren’t supposed to find.

It can be really effective to combine this with an intelligence mission – “get yourselves captured (deliberately) in such a way that you are certain to be housed at X. Identify the prisoner in X who has been sending us Intel under the code-name Y. Break him out before the enemy realize that the prisoner is actually Y.””

— Mike

Mission Complications

The following aren’t mission types — they’re complications you can layer onto almost any scenario to raise tension, create drama, or challenge assumptions.

Incomplete Information

This is one of the most common — and realistic — issues in military operations. Reinforcements don’t arrive. Promised firepower turns out to be a fraction of what was expected. Intel on enemy positions or capabilities turns out to be dead wrong.

Used sparingly, misinformation can be devastating. One small error in the mission brief is often worse than a completely false picture — because what’s correct gives players a false sense of confidence.

Use this to undermine certainty and force on-the-fly adaptation. Just don’t overdo it, or your players will stop trusting anything.

Something that’s happened more than once is that the perfect equipment turns up – for six months ago. The processing of the request has taken so long to be complete that by the time it arrives, the seasons have turned.

Again, it’s easy to overdo this.

I once saw, in a book, an analysis of humor (it comes from Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, if you must know). Some jokes are funny once – but any repeats or variations thereafter just fall flat. Other jokes are funny just about forever. This is an example of the first category – so save it for when you have a really good one to offer.

— Mike

Incompetent Leadership

Another staple of wartime storytelling: the officer in charge gives an order that’s tactically foolish — or outright suicidal. If the players disobey, they may not be able to prove they were right afterwards. And even if they are right, it still might not matter to the chain of command.

The best-case outcome is they find a way to “reinterpret” the order and still succeed. If not, they might face a court martial or earn a recurring enemy in the form of a petty, vindictive superior.

This isn’t just a story challenge — it’s a roleplaying dilemma. Following orders versus doing what’s right? Classic drama.

Again, this is easy to overdo – and the more often it’s repeated, the more it strains credibility. Why has the incompetent officer not been replaced already?

There’s a difference between Incompetent and Green, just as there is a difference between theory and reality. A Green officer may be full of theory and short of practicality; that has exactly the same effect as an incompetent officer giving orders, but it’s far more credible.

But even better is when an Officer has a legitimate tactical priority that can be honestly disagreed with but that isn’t actually wrong – just expensive in equipment and personnel. Almost-impossible objectives can be set and have to be attempted, even at great cost, if the resulting benefits are great enough. Sometimes, commands can’t afford to be conservative and pragmatic, they have to be bold.

Finally, before moving on, I want to mention the Charge Of The Light Brigade, in which orders were misinterpreted that led a bunch of light cavalry to charge down a valley against virtually the whole artillery of the Russian Army. Orders can be tossed off in haste, with no time to check them, incorporating vagueness and contradictions, that then have to be interpreted by the forces receiving those orders – the PCs. If time were not critical, clarification would be requested – but if that’s not an option, it’s up to the unit getting the orders to make the best of it.

Communications and Control are one of the biggest differences between modern warfare and that of ancient times, as was pointed out in Part 1. This is one area where it can make a palpable difference on the battlefield.

— Mike

New Technology

Necessity breeds invention, and nothing breeds necessity like war. The American Civil War introduced the telegraph, rifles, ironclads, and (rudimentary) land mines and machine guns. World War I brought tanks, bombers, gas masks, and modern helmets. WWII added radar, ballistic missiles, jet aircraft, synthetic rubber, computers (sort of), duct tape, the atomic bomb, and more.

Of course, not every new invention works as intended.

• You can give players prototype gear to field-test — complete with buggy mechanics.
• You can give those breakthroughs to the enemy, justifying a sudden difficulty spike.
• Or you can use material shortages to take away gear your players have grown reliant on.

Nothing keeps players on their toes like realizing they’re beta testing the future of warfare — in a live combat zone.

When it comes to Science Fiction campaigns, it’s important to remember the difference between “new to the players” and “untested equipment”. No matter how strange the gear is to the first, if it’s been around for a while and tested competently, the expectation should be that it will be used competently, and have a battlefield role that justifies its inclusion in the standard kit – or even in the non-standard kit of specialist units.

It is beholden on you to fill the gap in knowledge that is created when you retroactively introduce new military technologies. What’s the in-the-field experience with the equipment? How was it intended to be used, and what is it actually used for? Thing about these things in advance, and include any relevant information when first describing the equipment to the players.

And if it should be technology that isn’t in existence (and might never be in existence in reality), so that there isn’t any real-world reference to draw on, Make it up. There’s no-one can say you’re wrong under those circumstances, after all.

— Mike

The Role of Allies in a Battle

When it comes to military missions, my first choice is usually to have the PCs represent the entire squad. This keeps the mechanics clean and the narrative focused.

If that’s not feasible, I recommend giving the players one distinct area of the battlefield to handle, while other allied forces tackle separate zones.

In which case, spend some time thinking about the neighboring units, who’s in charge, their style and reputation, etc. In particular, whether or not they are weak and might need sudden reinforcing or reliable and strong, freeing up reserves that might be held back from that task for something else.

— Mike

You can have background troops active elsewhere, but I suggest referencing them only occasionally. Mentioning them too often risks pulling attention away from the PCs and creating narrative clutter.

In my own blog, dragonencounters.com, I’ve experimented with a scenario where allied and enemy forces occasionally spill over into the players’ area — adding dynamic pressure without turning the spotlight away. That approach worked well for a single battle, but I wouldn’t recommend using it repeatedly across an entire campaign. It has the potential to get frustrating fast.

(It also needs adjusting for the mechanics of the ally in question, which is why I didn’t include it here.)

If you do include allied NPCs in combat, simplify their mechanics aggressively.

I typically:

• Let them roll to hit but deal average damage.
• Roll once to determine how many hit, then assign the hits as dramatically appropriate.
• Use the same simplified method for enemies attacking allies.

Only when player characters are involved — either attacking or being attacked — do I use full rules.

And, as pointed out in part 1, it’s often advantageous even then to use a cut-down set of mechanics.

— Mike

There are few things as stupid as forcing your players to sit there watching you roll dice against yourself.

I would give each of the players a facet of the NPC game mechanics to handle die rolls for before I went down the ‘roll-dice-against-yourself’ rabbit-hole for more than a single set of rolls.

— Mike

Playing Through a Modern War

The scale of modern war makes it challenging to structure a story around specific heroes. Unlike ancient warfare — where a single figure could believably shape the tide of battle — modern conflict spans continents, dozens of fronts, and millions of troops. But there are still ways to focus the lens on the player characters. Here are several narrative models that work well.

Option 1: Local Story, Global Stakes (Inglorious Bastards, Rogue One)

Focus the players’ efforts on a single operation or subplot within the larger war. Maybe they’re racing to recover a crucial prototype before the enemy gets it. Maybe they’re the only ones who uncover a major threat, and have to stop it — even if that means going rogue.

This approach works well whether the characters are elite agents with a defined mission, or ordinary soldiers or civilians who stumble into something massive.

If you want them to visit multiple fronts or factions, the classic RPG solution applies: their commanders won’t help them save the world until they complete “Quest X” first.

Option 2: The Tipping Point (The Dirty Dozen, Valkyrie)

The players take part in a series of elite missions. Over time, their actions accumulate into a pivotal blow that changes the course of the war. They may not win the war outright, but they tilt the balance.

(When taking this approach, you’ll need to give the players access to information that most frontline soldiers wouldn’t normally have. There are a few ways to justify this in-game:

• Their commander might trust them enough to share sensitive intelligence, encouraging them to watch for unexpected opportunities.
• They could stumble onto captured documents or prisoners that reveal the enemy’s broader strategy.
• Or you could simply grant them a wider, near-omniscient view of the battle –without explanation — leaning into cinematic convention rather than strict realism).

Historical examples:

• During the American Revolution, Washington’s surprise victories (including crossing the Delaware) convinced France to join the war, changing everything.
• In WWI, Allied interception of the Zimmermann Telegram helped bring the U.S. into the war.
• In WWII, the Soviet victory at Stalingrad reversed the German advance — though this would be hard for players to replicate directly, (it’s from the battles involving tens of thousands of troops), they might be assigned an all important part, such as sabotaging the supply lines or baiting the trap (not actual historical parts).

Option 3: A Slice of the War (Band of Brothers, Black Hawk Down)

This is the most grounded approach: the players are just one squad in a much larger conflict. They won’t win the war — but they’ll survive parts of it, shape their own legacy, and maybe walk away with a few turning points of their own.

To make this format engaging, two things help:

1. Player Choice in Missions ? This breaks realism, but enhances player agency. Even if they’re “assigned” missions, give them options whenever you can.
2. Recurring Threads ? Introduce persistent elements: a rival enemy unit, a half-finished mission, a mysterious commanding officer, or a long-running secret project. Revisit the ones that resonate with the players, and quietly retire the ones that don’t catch on.

(This technique works in any campaign, war-based or not).

Military Climaxes

One challenge in telling stories set during modern wars is how they end. Real wars often conclude with one side collapsing under the weight of attrition, logistics, or political instability — not exactly the high-stakes, cathartic finale that fiction demands.

Fortunately, history offers inspiration for more dramatic campaign climaxes. Here are a few you can adapt.

A Final Push

As World War I drew to a close, Germany launched a desperate offensive before American forces could fully arrive — an all-or-nothing gamble to win the war.

Similarly, in World War II, the Germans tried one last offensive in the Battle of the Bulge, hoping to turn the tide in the west. That attempt had almost no real chance of success, but it still created immense drama.

You can mirror this with an enemy surge that the players help stop just in time. Afterward, you can narrate reinforcements sweeping the field, the enemy surrendering, or collapsing in retreat.

Historical footnote: After D-Day, as the Allies advanced through France, German forces began fleeing in chaos. Had the Allies not run out of gasoline, they might have rolled straight into Germany. But logistics stalled them, giving the Germans time to regroup — delaying the end of the war by nearly a year.

This structure gives you a final battle that feels earned: the enemy’s last desperate charge, with the players right in the middle.

Capture the Leader

At the end of World War II, Allied forces raced to capture Hitler’s bunker before he could flee to the mountains and wage a long-term guerrilla campaign. He lacked the resources to do it — but history is full of leaders who escape, regroup, and reignite conflict.

Napoleon escaped from actual exile, returned to France, reclaimed power, and fought another war before finally being defeated for good.

In your campaign, a dramatic final mission could involve intercepting the fleeing enemy commander, either to prevent a resurgence — or to eliminate the last thread of resistance.

An old favorite is to find a way to raise the stakes at 59 minutes into the 11th hour. If New Development [X] is not stopped by a desperate, potentially suicidal mission, the all-but-defeated enemy can stage a comeback and the exhausted allies would lack the means to stop them – creating a pivot point at the climax. The forces charged with this desperate mission are, of course, the PCs.

In superhero and fantasy games, this is easy – the villain simply does a deal with some supernatural being for massively increased personal power. Who cares if the price is 10,000 souls – if they can be taken from the enemy!

In Science Fiction games, it’s a little harder – you generally need to have pre-established some race that’s keeping out of the conflict and sitting on the sidelines, a neutral party. The enemy leader does a deal with them to give them something they really want – desire, in fact, badly enough to risk allying with a losing side.

A variation is an 11-hour alliance forming to keep some technology out of the hands of the victorious allies, not because the third party explicitly wants it for themselves. Especially if you can drench this is a things-science-is-not-meant-to-know vibe, though that tends to be bringing in the supernatural again. Still, there are ways to make it work.

The great advantage of this sort of approach is the it makes the focal point of the entire war smaller and drops it squarely on the PCs shoulders. In real life, it would almost certainly never happen that way – but who cares?

— Mike

Defuse the Bomb

Some leaders, when they know they’ve lost, try to take everything down with them.

During the 2003 Iraq War, Saddam Hussein ordered his own oil fields set ablaze, causing billions in damage. That same spiteful logic could easily extend to nuclear or magical destruction in a fictional setting.

While not part of any formal nuclear doctrine, it’s not hard to imagine a fallen regime choosing to destroy its own territory out of vengeance — or to make a final stand. In a fictional setting, this kind of scorched-earth scenario makes for a powerful, terrifying climax.

Your players might:

• Infiltrate ahead of advancing troops to disable launch systems.
• Smuggle in covert operatives before the collapse.
• Race against the clock to stop a “scorched-earth” protocol.

This is the ultimate ticking time bomb. It’s not just about winning — it’s about stopping the world from ending when you do.

Two words of warning:

When this works, it works very well. When it doesn’t work, it can fail dismally. A lot of the difference comes down to the credibility of the ‘final solution’ and how you have foreshadowed it.

The other major factor is race-against-the-clock fatigue. If you’ve used time pressure a lot in the buildup to this finale, it is at least as likely to fall flat because players have become used to the ticking clock; it has become ho-hum to them.

So if you intend to go down this route, (1) do your groundwork carefully and in advance, and (2) go easy on the against-the-clock pressures leading up to the Big Finish.

— Mike

Turning Ancient into Modern — and Modern into Ancient

While this article draws a clear line between ancient and modern warfare, that line is far from absolute. With the right technologies — or magical equivalents — an ancient war can take on modern dynamics, while a futuristic battlefield can suddenly resemble something far older.

Technology Has Unexpected Impacts

Technology often reshapes society in ways that are hard to predict. As one example out of many: The invention of the record player transformed music from something ephemeral and live to something reproducible and commercial. Then the internet and musical piracy upended that model again — causing a return to live performances as revenue sources and shifting artists toward sponsored content.

And it’s not just a modern phenomenon. In the ancient world, innovations like aqueducts and chariots were equally transformative, reshaping military logistics, social structure, and empire-building in unforeseen ways.

In the same spirit, I firmly believe that any spell, magical item, or monster — no matter how minor — would drastically alter the world it exists in. Its influence on warfare would be inevitable, and often surprising.

Making Ancient War Feel Modern

Even in a low-tech fantasy world, magic and monsters can introduce elements we associate with modern warfare:

1. Instant Communication and Logistics

Spells like Message or Sending, or fast-flying mounts, function like radios or long-range comms. Create Food and Water or magical transportation removes the need to keep armies close to supply lines.

Result: Armies can split up, coordinate across vast distances, and move more freely — just like modern forces.

2. Area-of-Effect Spells Reshape Formations

Eisenhower once predicted that future armies would have to spread out due to the threat of nuclear weapons. In fantasy, Fireball, Earthquake, or Hurricane spells serve a similar purpose. Grouping troops too tightly invites catastrophic losses.

Result: Massed infantry formations become a liability. You start seeing fire-teams instead of phalanxes.

3. Magical “Territory” Creates Strategic Spread

A magic-rich zone, ley-line nexus, or divine relic site may be too important to ignore — forcing armies to spread thin across terrain to control them. Similarly, if the enemy can summon monsters or Undead behind your lines, you need rear defenses.

Result:Armies stop behaving like medieval blocks and start acting like dispersed, multi-front networks.

Making Modern War Feel Ancient

On the flip side, futuristic warfare can be pulled back toward ancient-style structure under the right conditions:

1. Teleportation Creates Local Vulnerability

In settings with teleportation or sci-fi equivalents (“Beam me up, Scotty”), a spread-out army is a sitting duck. The enemy can isolate and destroy units before reinforcements arrive.

Result: Massing troops in tight formations becomes a survival tactic again.

2. Area Shields and Psychic Threats

Some sci-fi settings feature massive mental manipulation or battlefield-scale energy attacks. Protecting troops might require grouping them under overlapping shield generators or psionic defense fields.

Result: The safest place becomes within the protective bubble — just like in ancient shield walls or tortoise formations.

3. World-Shaking McGuffins

Some stories center on a single object that defines the war: the One Ring, the Death Star, the Tesseract. In worlds like that, controlling or destroying the McGuffin is the only objective that matters.

Result: All strategy collapses into one point: protect the artifact or destroy it — just like a pitched battle over the sacred banner or the king himself.

Final Thoughts

Modern warfare is vast, messy, and logistically overwhelming — but with the right tools, it can become the backdrop for powerful, focused stories.

Whether you’re highlighting elite special ops, moral dilemmas, collapsing regimes, or magical terrain-shifting chaos, the key is always the same: keep the spotlight on the players. Use what war offers — scale, danger, invention, and desperation — but twist it until the drama hits home.

If that means bending realism to make the campaign work, do it. After all, war may be hell — but your campaign should be unforgettable.

Honorable Mentions

There are several other aspects of war that deserve attention — but each one could fill an article on its own. Here’s a quick roundup of major factors that can shape a war, a battlefield, or your campaign:

Navies

Naval forces play a critical role in warfare, even if they’re often overlooked in RPGs. Fleets are essential for maintaining supply lines, transporting troops, and blockading enemy ports. Cutting off a nation’s access to food, weapons, or raw materials can win a war without firing a shot inland. That’s how the Union crippled the Confederacy in the American Civil War, and how the Allies tightened the noose in both World Wars.

Ship-to-ship combat does exist — but it’s often just the visible tip of a logistical iceberg. Whoever controls the seas usually controls the flow of the war.

You can draw a line connecting the Blockade Of Berlin and more recent conflicts such as Desert Storm, and say, ‘somewhere along that line, air transport equaled or overhauled naval transport’. You wouldn’t be entirely wrong to do so.

In general, what happens is that freighters carry the material and troops to somewhere where they might be needed in the near future (there’s always somewhere). These are conveyed, a few at a time, to Aircraft Carriers and loaded upon aircraft, which deliver them to the target zone.

This means a much faster delivery of material to the focal point than going all the way home, restocking, and taking off again. The “Op-tempo” is much higher. So the point Alexander has made is not invalidated by the mass transport of men and material by air.

— Mike

Disease

Until very recently, disease — not combat — was the number one killer in most wars. Marching and camping in unsanitary conditions makes armies ideal breeding grounds for outbreaks. Throughout history, disease has cut forces to half-strength or worse, often deciding the outcome before the next battle was even fought.

Up until the late 19th / early 20th century, a scratch that drew blood had a 40% chance of leaving a soldier permanently unfit for service and 40% of those, dead, or so I’ve read (I suspect some exaggeration in specifics but not in principle). Now throw in the penchant for armies to provide boots that are too small or too large…

Modern medicine has made people complacent, insufficiently cognizant of how deadly and dangerous things used to be.

In the US Civil War, surgeons became so adept that they could amputate an arm in under 60 seconds and a leg in less than 2 minutes – and keep it up for hour after hour. Think about that for a minute. It was the standard treatment for wounds – even wounds that might have healed were given the treatment because they might not heal, and it took far more resources to care for an infected invalid than an amputee. Brutal, but that was the reality.

Alexander has used the heading “Disease”. I think it could equally have been “Medicine”.

— Mike

Don’t overlook [Disease] as a campaign complication. Quarantine, supply shortages, or moral dilemmas about infected allies can create serious tension.

Weather

If weather can hinder a single traveler, imagine what it does to an army. Mud can bog down wagons, cold can freeze weapons, and rain can ruin supply chains. Weather worsens morale and often worsens disease, too.

Ancient armies usually turned back for winter. Modern forces dig in — unless they’re desperate. Germany’s final offensives in both World Wars (1918’s spring offensive and 1944’s Battle of the Bulge) were launched in winter, precisely because time was running out.

I strongly recommend the highly simplified and abstracted systems discussed in Trade In Fantasy Ch. 5: Land Travel, Pt 2 – I would go with a three- or five-result set of results:

1. Strongly advantageous to you
2. Advantageous to you
3. Neutral
4. Disadvantage to you
5. Strongly disadvantageous to you

Note that these are Net positions – if conditions are advantageous for you and disadvantage the enemy, the net result is “strongly advantageous to you”.

— Mike

Guerrilla Warfare (As a Companion to Conventional War)

Used in tandem with regular military forces, guerrilla tactics are extremely effective. Strikes on convoys, supply depots, or rail lines can bleed the enemy dry — especially when they can’t catch the attackers. The risk is high (guerrilla fighters are rarely taken prisoner), but the impact is undeniable.

Guerrilla warfare is also highly romanticized in fiction. Think Lawrence of Arabia, the French Resistance, or The Great Locomotive Chase. (All of them real, by the way). The image of a small, determined band harassing a massive invader is powerful — and very gameable.

Guerrilla Warfare (On Its Own)

Guerrilla tactics alone usually can’t eject a determined occupier. Without a regular army to back them up, insurgents aim not to win by force, but to wear down the invader through exhaustion and attrition. They rely on the support of the local population and often require outside supply lines to stay viable.

Still, when guerrilla warfare is paired with political resistance, public backlash, and external allies — as in Vietnam — it becomes a nearly impossible challenge to defeat outright.

A great article, Alexander – thanks for offering it! I want to close up with a couple of points about wars in Sci-Fi and in the near future.

Near-Future Conflict

The existing trend is, and has been for some time, destruction from an ever-greater distance. Missiles, Rockets, Drones. The early race was to miniaturize radar enough to fit them to aircraft – fire and forget. Alternatives used heat-sensors (jet engines put out a lot of heat). The response was to develop decoys and the like, to which there were two counter-responses: Either increasing the kill-zone caused by detonation (so that even a near-miss was good enough) or making the missiles themselves smarter / more discriminate. Countermoves to that led to Stealth technology, reaching the point where on-board Radar was all but useless; this led to aircraft with more powerful indirect radar systems, which led to a new crop of missiles designed purely to hunt and kill such aircraft. Which led designers to put the radar-guiding aircraft at ever-greater altitudes and even to play games with the radars themselves, using sneak peeks and smart systems to reduce vulnerabilities. And on and on it goes. These days, the fire-and-forget range is something like eight-to-eighty miles, I think. But ultimately, it’s detection – identification – target – attack. And trying to prevent one or more steps in the chain from being successful, on the other side of the hostilities.

The same concepts are now beginning to show up in terms of ground forces. Projecting power is the name of the game, and rapid-deployment mobility to exploit the damage done.

I can foresee this leading to a return to the trenches of World War I – defensive structures shielding highly mobile forces on both sides from attack for long periods of time until one side achieves a lucky strike that is more successful than normal. Long periods in which nothing changes and no-one advances, punctuated by sudden breakthroughs and breakouts where the whole landscape of the battle changes abruptly – before settling back into another period of ‘stagnation’ and attrition.

Far-Future / Sci-Fi conflict

This is all about command and control over interplanetary distances. If you have the communications and sensory capability to achieve this, the warfare will look modern; if there is any sort of significant delay, the shape of the war will migrate backwards in time to match. If it takes minutes or hours, you’re back in early WWII or late WWI. If it takes several hours, you’re in the 19th century. If days, you’re even earlier, and more than likely looking at Ancient Warfare as your basic model.

War in Star Wars is basically modeled on the age of Sail. You can have fleet actions, you can have bombardment from space – if you can get through the screening force of defensive ships – and so on.

War in Traveler is more akin to Imperial Rome, with a bit of the Phoenicians and early age of sail thrown in – and a fair smattering of the East India Company and some Viking Raiders to boot. Command and communications are even less sophisticated than in Star Wars – messages have to be carried by ships or drones, and even a neighboring star system can be a week away. Which means a lot of emphasis on local initiative and less on grand unified strategies.

If C&C is so powerful a need, the obvious thing to do is to move the commanders closer to the action so that they can exert greater control – but there’s always a compromise: the closer to the front they are, the more vulnerable they are. This road leads to insanely big ships like Imperial Dreadnoughts and Star Destroyers – ships designed to protect the commanders while carrying them close enough to the front lines to be effective. Think of them as combined Battleship, Aircraft Carrier, Troopship, and Mobile Command Bunker.

If you analyze the technology that’s available to the armed forces within your campaign in terms of how close to the action the commanders have to get, how long it takes for situations to be analyzed and orders issued for strategic responses, etc, you can narrow any given conflict down to be analogous to some time frame in either the near future or the past – either modern or ancient – and that gives you the analogy you need to analyze the military situation, the options, and the consequences.

Star Wars may look ultra-modern with its fleet engagements etc – but when you dig beneath the surface, it’s all about one decisive conflict dictating the course of a war (until the next one). In other words, it’s more akin to ancient wars than modern ones, those spectacular space battles between fleets notwithstanding.

— Mike

About The Author: Alexander Atoz

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.