Harpy Tactics - The Monsters Know What They're Doing

Once again, I find myself turning to The Monsters Know blog, to think through the tactics of a specific monster my players are going to encounter more than once. The initial encounter during this last session was a nice appetizer and was pretty easy for them, as I expected. This is especially true with the mid-level (8^th) of the PCs currently and their supporting numbers. However, what they have to expect (or perhaps not) is that this won't be the last time.

Reading through Harpy Tactics - The Monsters Know What They're Doing, I can see some nice suggestions on harpies using their luring song ability in some small scale sneak attack situations. I'm toying with the idea that the harpy reinforcements will follow the company and begin to set up traps and pick off some of the wayward squads in small raids. However, I think something the article writer missed and was pointed out in the comments, is that the song ability is an Emanation ability with a huge 300' range. This means it covers EVERYONE in that range. This is a huge globe. And when multiple harpies sing it overlaps, so anyone caught in multiple affects has to save for each one. Harpies aren't very intelligent, but perhaps there is a really BIG ambush that they might stumble into creating for the company. We'll see if that makes sense.

One bonus that I only just stumbled upon is specific lore surrounding harpies in Eberron. It turns out the Byeshk mountains, and not the Graywall mountains, are a natural place to find LOTS of harpies in organized groups. They sound like warring tribes. My plan was to have the group the PCs face be more monstrous, but keeping with the "monsters are people too" theme I keep toying with, I might have the PCs meet up with these Byeshk harpies at a future point. Again, we'll see.

Humanoid Swarms for Mass Combat :: 5e D&D

I was doing research on mass combat rules for D&D 5e for …reasons… and I know there's nothing completely official. There is a 2017 Unearthed Arcana for Mass Combat [PDF] published by Wizards of the Coast. In fact, there are two PDFs for this, the other likely from 2015.

In previous editions, there were the Battlesystem rules, especially the Battlesystem 2nd Edition that I was most familiar with. These were D&D's answer to other miniatures combat rules from Ral Partha et al.

In 3rd edition, there were two books, Heroes of Battle and the Miniatures Handbook that could be used for the same purpose.

But as far as an official mass combat system for 5e, there is only the playtest UA stuff above. In my research, I stumbled upon my same question on a Reddit post from a few months back.

Posts from the dndnext
community on Reddit

And one of the commenters suggested setting up stats for large groups as swarms and then run normal combat. And they linked to a page on The Homebrewery for Humanoid Swarms. This is an interesting idea because it simply enhances the monster stat block for one humanoid and expands it to an unnumbered swarm of variable size. The sizes match monster sizes above medium; large, huge and gargantuan.

• Commoner → Mob of Commoners
• Pikeman → Pike Square
• Archer → Mass of Archers
• Bodyguard → Company of Guards
• Hedge Witch → Coven of Witches

Another reason that this catches my eye is that one of the …reasons… or themes matching why I started searching this in the first place was that I wanted something remniscent of an old video game that I was a huge fan of growing up called Ancient Art of War on the Macintosh Plus (1985). There were three troop types in that game; knights, archers, and barbarians. Along with other rules, the combat advantage for the three types was similar to rock-paper-scissors.

• Knights, with their heavy armor, were strong against barbarians, but too slow to deal with archers.
• Barbarians were quick and nimble, easily crossing the battlefield to defeat archers, but fell easily to knights.
• Archers could fire volleys of arrows and easily defeat knights, but could not hit barbarians with any accuracy.

The "swarm of humanoids" has some ideas in common with this.

• Pikemen are clearly knights...
• Archers, archers
• Bodyguards are potentially barbarians (although...)

So it would be possible to use this a bit. The problem I anticipate is that you can't have a mixed squad of barbs and archers and knights in varying numbers. This was almost always a strategic way to win in Ancient Art of War. Here's some nostalgic gameplay footage I'm saving just for myself.

Bonus: Check out more along these lines with a post named mass combat belongs in the monster manual on Blog of Holding.

Pathfinder Stripped of Traces of D&D in New Rulebooks

It would be ironic that the same year that I was first instroduced to playing Pathfinder in earnest was the same year that Wizards of the Coast, in their ultimate wisdom would decide to stab themselves in confusion and cause a big controversial upheaval in the games industry by pre-releasing an update to their gaming license rules. Which in summary was going to severely hurt independent creators. There are a million blog posts about this and I don't necessarily want to rehash it here in total.

Pathfinder was very highly inspired by D&D (2nd or 3rd edition?) and borrows quite a bit of intellectual property. The possible move by Wizards seems to be tailored specifically to hit back. So the makers of Pathfinder made the proactive strategic decision to completely strip every last trace of the shared content from their rules. Read more about it at Polygon - Pathfinder stripped every last trace of D&D from its new rulebooks — even owlbears.

[Book Recommendation] Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

This book was recommended to me and I'm going to grab it through the Libby app. It was mentioned like this:

...like Samone and his coffee plants...

Ooh, that's a memory I'd not retrieved in a while. First here's the book.

My stepbrother played in a Dark Sun campaign that I ran back in the day, and he played a Halfling Druid/Thief that had a home base just east of Gulg at a small hidden hot-spring oasis. At some point, he tried coffee and decided to grow his own along with other food for himself. This book mentioned above is about an adventurer who retired and opened a coffee shop.

I've queued this up from my library, but I may purchase a copy if I like it enough. Check it out for yourself!