Notes on adapting CATAPHRACT to my B/X game
I read Sam's first CATAPHRACT blog-post and was immediately obsessed. I've been working on restarting my on-hiatus Phaedra campaign with CATAPHRACT as the engine. The goal is to start on June 1st and run it for a couple months.
I've amassed a lot of thoughts on how to do this, and luckily Sam wrote a second blog post which I am following now to finalize all of my prep.
I need to get some of these thoughts out in the open, both for balancing feedback and just general sharing of the hobby.
This post requires that you've read CATAPHRACT and Sam's two blog posts, I am not going to summarize any of that. Go read them, they are great.
Let's begin!
My war-game
I have amassed 7 players, 3 from the original campaign and 4 playing other factions. I'm in middle of writing up their faction sheets and commander info from Sam's second post (so god damn helpful, btw). Next up is army stats, make some spreadsheets for forts and settlements, and cleaning up my personal secret map and making a diagetic map for everyone else. It's a lot to do in 1.5 weeks but I think I'll be alright.
Probably the hardest part so far is explaining wtf this game is to some of the players. The ones who are around me a lot have heard me talk about the 'operations-level async fantasy discord-based war-game' for a couple weeks, but the ones who are less close to me are a little confused (but seem willing to learn!). I have a general idea how the running of the actual game will go but I think there will be some learning as we play.
Our staring factions:
- The Northern Covenant: An alliance between local Dwarves, Halflings, and Witches, guided by the god Hekate. Represented by three of the original PCs of the Phaedra campaign
- The Vitalia Empire: The Empire! Coming back after 50 years to re-take their lost child.
- The Church of the One True God: Here to bring the Lawful Faith back this poor country, alongside the rightful rulers, the Empire
- The Nomads: Militant worm hunters during the warm season and drug-fueled sex partiers during the cold season, these nomads just want to be left alone.
- The Bone Lord: Somewhere in the deserts west of Phaedra, this necromancer hides away with his skeleton army. Why the Empire wants 20k gold for his head, no one knows.
- The Cult of Apollo: Militant reactionary disciples of the god Apollo, who control the coastal and southern regions of Phaedra. Tenous allies of the Northern Covenant who want the Empire gone from their lands.
CATAPHRACT and dnd characters
The more I am reading ACOUP, the less I think that dnd characters would be impactful in a big, pre-modern army battle. Maybe as inspirational leadership? I can't imagine that the dumb brawls they get into with monsters in dungeons transfers at all to fighting in formation.
A few of the dnd characters from the campaign are going to be commanders though, and I have been trying to figure out how to adapt them for single-combat, if that were to arise. I like that commanders get worse at single combat as they get older, but they become more experienced with actually leading troops.
Idk how to adapt this to Classed characters, those fools who has amassed magic weapons and armor and get better at fighting. Maybe instead of rolling under age, they roll over HD*10, and we make the math work somehow. Idk
Spell-casting
Part of what I am trying to do is make as little changes as possible to CATAPHRACT. So, magic-users (and any other arcane spell-casters, I have necromancers and illusionists too in my game) use all the Wizard rules. If they want to cast something that is army-level, they will require 1-4 weeks to memorize and we'll negotiate the effects on a spell-by-spell basis. I may require a saving throw in some cases when spells are cast on enemy detachments or armies.
If they really want to, they can skip this and keep their normal spell list. I'm sure there are plenty of uses of regular B/X spell-casting if someone wants to get creative.
For clerics, which are a big focus in the campaign, I think they will not be able to magnify their spells. I want magic-users to feel special and right now they really don't. Clerics can make a difference on an operational scale, but you need a lot of them.
I also have Rituals in my game (inspired by WutC), which are divine in origin, and clerics can research those and cause large, operational-level effects. My original players already have one of these. The Cleric PC in the campaign is staying behind (the player doesn't want the work of leading an army) to do research like this. We've already negotiated an effect that is super fucking cool and I wish I could talk about it. Alas!
Army hex-crawling
I spent some time and finished stocking most of the hex map I have been using (it's about 30x30 hexes). It is smaller in scale than the one Sam mentioned in his second post. I'm using ktrey/d4caltrop's hex-stocking (reducing the amount of locations per hex since one can cover several 6-mile hexes in one day vs ktrey's time-based single day hexes.)
One difference to CATAPHRACT as written is that this is a dangerous dnd frontier area with lots of monsters. I don't think I will be rolling encounter checks (everything in the area will know the army is here) but I will use the stocked hexes for flavor, potential operations, and hazards. Plus, some lairs and forts/keeps are large enough to cause problems (or be potential allies) for commanders and I want to see what happens when players meet some of the locals.
Using old prep
I originally starting using Tome of World-building to expand the hex map we've been using to a full-sized continent. I spent a week on this but I realized this was silly. I didn't want to do all of this work, I just want to run the game.
What I really needed to do just stop doing new work and pull up all my old notes and just use that. I already did a bunch of work writing up factions that haven't been used much and I have some old history notes that never came up in game. It is extremely pleasing to have a use for this work.
End of thoughts
That's all I have right now, I will probably have more. I haven't edited this much, please let me know your thoughts!