Free Starter Edition (5e)
Tomorrow you will bring the battle to the foe. Tonight you walk among the troops you'll lead. The mercenaries are veterans and sleep while they can¸ but the peasants levied from your lands seek courage in tales of your previous victories. You sit at their campfire¸ wearing your ring of invisibility so that you can listen instead of command. Remember when you were like them? Back when you first entered the dungeon¸ you wielded a sword to fight for gold¸ glory¸ and the favor of the gods. Winning these earned you a throne. Now you wield an army¸ and fight for the right to rule the domains at war.
Autarch's Domains at War brings all aspects of fantasy warfare into your tabletop gaming. It's simultaneously a mass combat supplement for fantasy role-playing games and a fast-playing tactical wargame in its own right.
The Free Starter Edition introduces the essentials of Domains at War and presents a simple¸ abstract system designed for quick resolution of the kinds of battles that most often arise in role-playing games. Who will survive when a mercenary unit of horse archers encounters a tribe of orcs¸ and what would the player characters have to do to change this outcome? How many troops does it take to besiege the Keep on the Borderlands¸ and how soon will they breach its walls if no one arrives to help the defenders?
Domains at War is easy to use with any RPG system that uses twenty-sided dice and shares concepts like hit points and armor class. The system is fully compatible with the Adventurer Conqueror King System's rules for mercenaries¸ strongholds¸ magic¸ and rulership¸ and the rules for mass combat are faithfully extrapolated from one-on-one combat in ACKS. Two years of playtesting and many spreadsheets have gone into ensuring that the outcome of battles resolved at the unit scale using Domains at War is consistent with the likely outcome if they had been fought at the individual RPG scale.
The Free Starter Edition contains rules for heroic forays¸ which allow the game to "zoom in" and play out the actions of player characters and other powerful creatures using ACKS or a similar OGL RPG. Because the mass combat rules are organically derived from the RPG system¸ it is easy to then "zoom out" and see how these individual efforts have affected the larger struggle.
If you enjoy this download¸ we hope you'll check out the complete Domains at War!