Battle For Phaedra Grand Retrospective - Introduction
It's time to regale you all with my biggest rpg experiment: My 3-month-long cataphracts game that was the continuation of my 'home game' Phaedra.
This post is how the game was conceived, as many of the original game play docs as I can remember, and some notes about how some of it went.
A Warning
Starting in The Factions and Starting Commanders, I link to cloned versions of the starting documents for all players. Anyone reading those documents cannot play in the Phaedra B/X game, as some contain minor to massive spoilers. I'll keep those to a minimum in the text of the actual recap.
The Concept
I sent my first questions to Sam S1 on the day he posted his first Cataphracts Design Diary, so I was hooked on the concept immediately.
I pitched the game that day to my players. My initial pitch to my players over text message:
Hello loves! I had an idea of how to continue our Phaedra campaign. Would y'all be interested in playing the upcoming war over discord?
Each of your characters will become a commander and be split up to recruit troops and allies for the upcoming war. Your real-life commitment would be relatively minor. You would need to issue orders once per week and then they happen in real time (so if your army takes two weeks to get somewhere in-game, it would take two weeks of actual time).
It'd be a game about commanding armies with limited information. I think it will be tight as hell. I could run without all of you but I'd rather have all of you play
Over the next month, I messaged friends and family and got people assigned to factions. I constantly pitched the game as a light summer game with only little bit of time needed per week. This was very much not true, as will be revealed.
The Map
This is my too-heavily-stocked hexmap for the campaign (this is the versions the PCs had access to before the start of the game). There are a ton of sources used inside of this, I'd like to list them all at some point.
One might note that it's a little small for as many factions and players as I had. It definitely was and caused some minor issues I'll talk about later.
I don't think I ever exported it, but I have a version with population overlaid on top of it, but I can't get Hexkit to work right now so you can't see it.
I did a bunch of stocking of regions that hadn't seen gameplay before the start of the war game. They all got encounter tables and too many points of interest per hex. Some of these came in use later (mostly strongholds) but the encounter tables were mostly annoying.
The Rules
See the link for the ruleset. It changed a little over time, as one can see from the history, but it was mostly stable. I talked about the campaign in an old blog post and some of these changes made it in, but not all:
My Additions
Classed Characters and Monsters
I landed on using Fighting Capability from Chainmail, as originally suggested by @WeirdWriter, to calculate how classed characters stack up against regular troops. I extrapolated how HD and levels worked out as:
Fighters (Includes all monsters and anyone else will full attack progressions): Level/HD x 20
Clerics (and anyone else with partial attack progression): Level x 15
Magic-users (any anyone else with slow attack progression): Level x 10
The goal with this was so smush magic items, abilities, and general scariness into one number.
Damage for Classed Characters
I eventually figured out a system for damage for classed characters and monsters:
Heroes and monsters sustain damage differently than normal troops. Losses from battle are saved to the army sheet as a percentage and successive losses are together. After each battle, a d100 will be rolled for every hero and monster. If the roll is under the cumulative damage, the respective hero/monster is disabled for a week.
Once damage reaches 50% or higher, there is a chance that heroes or monsters will be killed instead.
Damage is decreased by 5% each week, or by 15% if the army has rested all week.
In the end, I think this worked out fine. More playtesting would be needed to say if it was balanced or not but I liked how it worked, even though I was annoyed by the system for most of the game. I wished more classed characters died.
Classed Characters as Commanders
I wanted the PCs to be able to lead armies. They got a special trait based on their original class and did not get extra traits like normal commanders do for age, since they didn't spend their life learning how to lead troops.
Spell-casting
The campaign is a B/X game, so there pcs and npcs with classic spells. I decided to make a distinction with arcane and divine spellcasting. Magic-users and the like could magnify their spells and cast them like Cataphract wizards. They could take 1-4 weeks depending on the spell and cast them at a Battlefield level. This only came up a few times but once was to devastating effect.
The effects of spells were negotiated as they came up. As I eventually learned, I get pissy during negotiations like this.
Divine spellcasting was not able to be magnified and instead one needed many clerics and such to make use of spells to any large degree. Their fighting capacity already was supposed cover spellcasting in fights.
Exploration
I added mountains (travel at 1/4 speed) and deserts (rough terrain, armor cannot be worn and supplies cannot be foraged).
I also had hidden and secret locations on the map and some regions were 'wild', which has npc or monster encounters.
As I'll talk about later, my map was too dense and the amount of locations and encounters became too much and eventually I began ignoring them, I think to the benefit of the game.
Factions
Factions had assets, based on resources from elmcat's faction templates, as the faction documents are ported from my campaign versions that use these elements. These were generally negotiated effects. I landed on allowing most to be used 1/week.
These were cool but I advise new Cataphract GMs to either make these mechanical effects beforehand or just stick to the basics. The weirder a faction was to play, the higher chance I had of players to drop out.
The Factions and Starting Commanders
I have linked to versions of all the player documents, cloned from just before the game began.
The Northern Covenant
Colors: Black on silver. Insignia: Polearm, sickle, and staff, wrapped with ivy. An alliance between local dwarves, halflings, and witches, blessed by the goddess Hekate (and her church). Rules over northern Phaedra.
These were the original PCs of the campaign, so they started with a lot more information than everyone else. They also had a many diverse NPCs as assets, but didn't have a lot of troops in general compared to everyone else.
Commanders
Cassian, spymaster and member of the Triumvirate, arena and fighting tournament champion
One of the original PCs (playing a Dolmenwood Bard), and one of my siblings. Big Protagonist energy
Win-Chester, Wizard and former goblin king
Another one of the original PCs, and another sibling. A magic-user turned into a hobgoblin-ish creature by choice.
Freda, Curate of the Hekate and seer
Another PC/Sibling! Cleric. Freda was not a commander but did operate in the background, having some prophetic visions and negotiating some deals with foreign powers.
The Empire
Colors: Blue. The world-spanning empire, led by the Emperor and blessed the Church of the One True God.
These were the big bad guys of the campaign so far. For one or two literal years, they had been in the background of adventures, popping up as spies and supply-lines the players ran into in their last big expedition. They'd been hyped up for so long. The main information anyone knew is that they had 30k troops (a magnitude more than the Northern Covenant) hidden nearby and were preparing to invade and take back their former colony.
I planned out some of the initial commanders based on their proximity to me. The Empire was given to my roommate who had access to ask me lots of questions. Hypothetically everyone had the same option but he was right there so he got more of my time. This was intentional! The empire was all about their spies so he was allowed to ask a lot of questions. He also helped flesh out the empire, who we hadn't developed as an entity yet, given he is a huge history buff. He's still making long-term decisions for the empire to this day.
Commanders
Leontius Oäldoriaus “The Gilded Tongue”, General and long time veteran of the Empire
The big bad general. Played by my roommate. This army's big secret was their Illusionists each were casting Mirror Image every week, making the army seems 10x as big as it actually was. This was my solution for the absurd army size that I had said previously that I didn't want to actually roll with in game.
The Church of the One True God
The dominant church in the world, dedicated to the One True God, his most Lawful one.
The faction from Dolmenwood, now spread across the world. A major, albeit distant, antagonist for the campaign so far.
The church commander had access to The Empire's google sheets, but the empire didn't have access to the church's.
Commanders
Bishop Martina Attaliate
Due to an error on my part, my friend Vivanter's commander suffered a huge early penalty and spent most of the campaign without able to do much combat. She managed to do quite a lot though by the end though.
Cult of Apollo
Colors: Gold and white. Insignia: Laurel + a helping hand. A reactionary militant cult devoted to the god Apollo. Controls the southern farmland and coastal regions of Phaedra.
The earliest bit of lore from my game, these guys were made out of a few dice rolls when this was still a Caverns of Thracia game.
Commanders
Stratigos Aratus Phebes “The Soft-Spoken General”
Played by a friend. This player ended up dropping out of the game early due to nightmares about the game, and I'll talk about his replacements later.
The Necromancers aka Bone Lord Ardonis
A necromancer, hiding out somewhere in the deserts west of Phaedra and the Mountains of Chaos. An enemy of the empire.
This was one of the weird factions, but one that had a player that stuck around. This was what I called a 'mini-faction'. They started with no land and just a single stronghold, but got other advantages, in this case the ability to play two different characters (one commander and one basically just the faction directly).
My friend who played this faction also fleshed out their background and straight up wrote some fiction for them, it was awesome. Their letters were one of the highlights of the game.
Commanders
Seregra the Cantorshade
Played by my friend, as mentioned. They ended up writing the background and traits for Seregra, due to a miscommunication but they were awesome so we kept them.
The Nomads
The desert peoples. Militant chaos-worm hunters during the warm season and drug-fueled-sex partiers during the cold.
Another mini-faction. The most intensive mechanically and this player dropped out quite fast. I made the mistake of making a faction without a real reason to join the war, and this made them feel stagnant. Also the faction document is a huge lore dump and I would do this very differently if running again.
Commanders
Unnamed Nomad Family Leader
Played by a friend.
The Lords of Khorne
(no public description)
This was my big secret. Given the original PCs were mostly my siblings, I thought it would be a blast to secretly include my dad in the game. I decided to make him a faction that he would enjoy and understand (he's a huge warhammer fan), and the Mountains of Chaos have been a foreboding but little explored region in the game for quite awhile.
I based the units on like 5 mins of reading on Age of Sigmar wikis.
I also promised I would make his side of running the game easy, so I helped with keeping track of supplies and I gave his commanders some powers I wouldn't for other people.
I gave this faction some special war goals: They got power ups at certain kill thresholds (any military casualty in the war counted, for any side) that were negotiated when they happened. Eventually I gave them an impossible goal (5000 kills) and said I'd do something cataclysmic if they reached it.
And well -- (I'll talk about that later)
Commanders
Skynax The Insatiable
Played by my dad!
Player Resources
I talked with each player before the game over dms/texting/in-person and answered questions. Everyone was given my perfect map (see it's perfection below), a glossary, the link to my defunct campaign wiki, and some advice on how to play:
Commander Advice
Take forts
The goals of pre-modern war was primarily about sieging and taking over forts. If you want to control territory, you need forts.
Ask me questions!
Ask me questions!!!!!! I do not have time to write down everything your faction would possibly know, so I will do my best to fill you in if you ask.
Orders
When it is time to give orders, you want to state what your army is doing (if it is marching, say where you want to go) plus you will want to communicate any other intrigue you want to do (including sending folks off for operations, like sending a party to a dungeon).
Send messages to your fellow players (or npcs)
Negotiate with, lie to, or just taunt your fellow players. You might be surprised who is willing to work with you.
You are also free to send messages to any npc in the world. If you want to communicate with someone outside of Phaedra, let me know and we'll figure it out.
Also, this world is filled with hidden places and secrets. Feel free to negotiate with these folks as you see fit, you never know who is willing to work with you
Be creative
Out-flank, out-maneuver. The most successful commanders in this game aren't the ones with the most troops, they are the ones who put their operational boons to the best effect.
Use your assets
Most factions have a list of assets in their faction sheets. These are resources that can be used, but you have to figure out how to best make use of them.
The Game Began!
Orders starting rolling in June 1st, 2025. I'll continue telling the story of the game next time, and hopefully I get some players to share their side of the tale.
Let me know if anyone has questions or wants to see anything in particular. I'll be getting into more how I ran the game from day-to-day next time hopefully.
Take care and thanks for reading! <3
I have no idea how busy Sam S. is these days but I appreciate his help so much, he answered a lot of questions over the course of the game. I will share some specific answers that I don't know ever made it into design diaries.↩