#generals

Do you have any suggestions for ttrpgs with large scale war system? My friend wanted to make a campaign were the players could become generals and lead an army, make strategies and stuff

Thank you!

THEME: Large Scale Battles

Hi there! I think you might be looking for skirmish games or war games, which I have a little less experience with compared to typical roleplaying games. I definitely recommend checking out the Wargame Vault to see if war games and miniatures have something of what you're looking for - I found out about it when I was looking for Urban Fantasy Games With Combat. I've got a few skirmish and tactics games listed here, and also some games that might be more easily classifiable as troupe play - these are games where players might embody more than one character.

Lancer Battlegroup, by Massif Press.

Lancer: Battlegroup is a game of tactical naval combat that takes place within the universe of Lancer, allowing players to step into the role of naval commanders leading groups of capital ships, subline vessels, and wings of strike craft into battle. As one of these commanders, the decisions you make will be the difference between victory and defeat, and each of those decisions will be measured by the cost of lives. Casualties are inevitable, but your actions may win the day for many more.

I don't know much about Battlegroup, but I know that original Lancer can feel very rewarding to folks who enjoy tactical games and strategic roleplay. It looks like the book is exclusively hosted on PlayRole, but if you want a community to help you learn how to use the game, I think you'll find a thriving community on the fan Discord server!

Over War: The Night Comes Down, by Richard Kelly

It is the year 1472 Dracos Domini and the land of Ballark is bathed in unrest.

The armies of the Over Night have descended from their floating islands to ravage the countryside, leaving disease, famine, and the byproducts of their cruel alchemical experiments in their wake.

You are a person of some minor authority. Whether you were born to this station or crawled into it, you now have control of a small band of combatants.

The nations of Ballark may have broken before the conquerors from the clouds, but you are determined that you will not fall. You will reclaim what they have taken.

In Over War, players control commanders and their units. Commanders are unique, custom characters with the authority to recruit for and restructure their unit. They also have out of combat skills they can call on to tackle the diplomatic and physical landscapes of Ballark. Units are formed around their commander, and are assembled from a long list of premade character types. You might build a unit with a front row of Sea Cucumbers to traverse the seas, or an Alchemist in the back for healing, or a Tallfolk to soak damage away from your commander. Commanders start with a small roster of character types to recruit from, but can broaden their list by visiting towns, expanding their war camp, and making alliances with local powers.

Out of everything on this list, I think Over War might be the most harmonious union of ttrpg and strategic war-game. Your players will have both commanders that are unique and powerful, as well as units that they'll control in pursuit of victory, against an enemy army that remains under control of the GM. However, the Monarch Edition, which is linked in this section, also has tables and rules that allow you to play without a GM if you so desire.

Egg Fleet, by Ioan Davies-John

Even off the coasts of Mobius, far from the land battles you know in the comics and on the tabletop, the Robotnik Wars rage on. NASH (Naval and Air Service for Humankind), more colloquially known as the GUN Fleet, are constantly on the defensive against an unstoppable, artificial evil…

The dreaded EGG FLEET.

As either the GUN or Egg Fleet, your job is to either liberate Mobius' seas or dominate them using massive guns, swift fighter planes, deadly boarding parties, and even nuclear warheads!

I found this game back when I was looking at Sonic the Hedgehog roleplaying options; it's a naval war game that gives each party a fleet of vessels. It looks like you'll be controlling boats more than individuals, but I think it will still carry the feeling of massive warfare. It also looks like it has an expansion that allows you to control legions, in what the author describes as "ramshackle guerilla combat."

No God's Country, by A Couple of Drakes

It was a Friday when the Walls appeared. 100 meters tall, perfectly interlocking and equipped with automated access gates and equipped with lethal weapons, they dropped from near-earth orbit, retro-rockets firing and scorching the suburbs around your city. The Angels appeared soon after. Not in person, of course. But on the screens of our leaders they told us of the great war in Heaven, and that we had been drafted.

We were divided, cut off from our families and neighbors, but it was only so that we could focus on our divine mission. Our rights were violated, but it was for the betterment of our Heavenly Dominion here on Earth. Dissenters disappeared, but only because their faith was lacking.

The Dominion controls every aspect of your life. They ration your food, control the media, dictate the nightly curfew, tell you when to work and where, and dispatch security teams when there’s a whisper of unrest. Their foot is on your throat and their faithful are always watching.

No God's Country is a Forged-in-the-Dark game in which you embody the leaders of various cells of a group called The Friction. This game is going to play a lot differently than a skirmish game or a war game: actions in Forted-in-the-Dark games are more flexible and can be interpreted in a number of different ways, from hunting down enemy agents to attempting to convince NPCs to fight for your cause.

I'm not entirely sure how much control over the rank-and-file each player has, but it seems like you switch between different characters depending on the scene you're working in: are you a member of Leadership, planning missions and objectives, or are you a specialist on the mission, trying to execute the objective? If you want to explore a number of viewpoints that can be juggled by everyone at the table, and you want a little more drama to accompany your strategy, you might like No God's Country.

Splatter Knight, by Death Cap Stories

The Hollow is void between worlds, an ever shifting dream of fog and tangled trees. Drenched with the memory of slaughter and it hungers for more. Here, fanatic warbands clash over cursed relics, sacred sites, and the will to survive one more day. The Hollow King watches all, so make every kill brutal and bloody.

Build your warband from broken knights, splatter priests, bone thieves, or worse. Arm them with weapons pried from the hands of the dead. Each battle is a story, a brutal, fast-paced clash where every kill has weight, and every choice bleeds into the next.

Victory earns you little more than a mark in the Hollow’s memory. But for those who survive, a fleeting redemption may be found.

Meant to be gritty and gruesome, Skirmish Knights allows you to build your ideal warband using gold pieces as a representative of what it will cost to fill out your squad. Your players will engage in 60-90 minute battles against each-other, after which the injuries, mutations, and victories of each battle will change your fighters for the next one. It looks like this game is going to come with Scenarios, which are likely going to be helpful for structuring a battle. I'm not entirely sure if this a game with a GM: it looks like the minimal size of players is 2, and it feels like this is a game in which you could have two people controlling opposing warbands without a mediator in between.

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Witches & War Rigs, by Brian Binh.

My Tactical Combat Games Recommendation Post.

My Combat Recommendation Post.

Donald Trump walked into Quantico Tuesday expecting a rally. He got a funeral.

The generals sat in perfect silence, faces locked in the kind of grim stillness that comes from years of watching idiots talk and choosing not to react. Trump, of course, couldn’t handle it. “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he confessed, his voice trembling somewhere between wounded pride and panic. Then came the kicker: “If you want to applaud, you applaud.”

This wasn’t leadership. This was a washed-up Vegas act begging the crowd to clap. The Commander-in-Chief turned into the Clapper-in-Chief, reduced to prodding the nation’s top brass like a sad carnival barker who forgot his punchline.

A campaign rally in uniform.

Instead of strategy, Trump delivered his usual medley of grievances: Barack Obama ruined everything, Joe Biden ruined it twice as hard, and only Donald J. Trump, self-proclaimed “two-term, maybe three-term president” could save America. It was less a military briefing than an episode of The Apprentice: Pentagon Edition. The generals, trained to withstand battlefield chaos, sat stone-faced through the barrage of nonsense. They have endured artillery fire with more enthusiasm.

Enter Pete Hegseth, America’s Pastor-in-Arms. Trump’s “Secretary of War” took the podium with the intensity of a man who thinks Tom Clancy novels are actual military doctrine. He promised “fire and brimstone,” called for purges of “fat generals,” and announced he wants the next war to look exactly like the Gulf War, because apparently it’s still 1991 and CNN is running that same grainy footage of tanks in the desert. But Hegseth wasn’t done. He led them in prayer. Yes, prayer. The nation’s top generals, summoned by presidential ego, now folded into a forced altar call like extras at a megachurch revival. The separation of church and state?

Obliterated. Constitution? Shredded. Jesus, apparently, is now Commander-in-Chief. Trump can play Vice.

Weakness on parade.

Trump likes to brag about firing generals who “aren’t warriors.” But on Tuesday, the real firing squad was silence. Not one clap. Not one cheer. Just the steady hum of contempt vibrating off the brass like feedback from a dead microphone. These men and women have seen actual combat. They’ve buried soldiers. They’ve lived with the weight of real command. And now they’re expected to cheer for a man who brags about moving “a submarine or two” like it’s a toy in a bathtub, or who lectures about “two N-words” as though nuclear strategy were a stand-up routine. No wonder they didn’t clap.

The pin-drop presidency.

What happened at Quantico wasn’t just awkward. It was diagnostic. Trump’s presidency is a hollow shell propped up by applause, and when the applause disappears, so does he.

And Hegseth? He’s the zealot-in-chief, delivering sermons about war and Christ in equal measure, a man confusing the Book of Revelation with the Pentagon’s operations manual. Together, they make quite the duo: one desperate for claps, the other desperate for amens. The generals gave them neither. Instead, they gave silence, the most cutting judgment of all."

A Chinese Battlemaster tank, commander surveying the field before leading the armour company against a GLA base. The crew have raised the recently-delivered Nationalist banner to bolster the beleaguered troops for the final push.