Feast of Crows: Army of the Dwarves

Contains stats for both standard OGL play and Feast of Crows unit conversions. Army of the Dwarves also contains expanded siege rules.

Master craftsmen and builders, delvers into the earth, smiths of unsurpassed quality and fighters of a steadfast and strong-willed temperament the dwarves are accomplished at war but rarely muster above the surface save in times of great peril for all the lands.

Most of the dwarves? battles, most of the dwarves? lives, are spent deep beneath the surface of the world, delving their homes, building their fortresses living and dying without sight of the sun. They are one with the rock, stoic, unswerving and patient.

The greater number of the dwarves? wars are conducted in the caverns and keeps below the surface and fought against one terrible enemy only, the endless march of the goblinoids. The bitter feuds between the dwarves and the goblinoids are legendary and their battles and skirmishes in the dark heart of the world all but unceasing.

Dwarves are not the speediest of combatants but they do have a mastery of crafting and technology that others lack and they have specialist tactics and methods suited to their underground battles. Neither is magic their greatest strength, though they have their faith. Dwarven battles are about taking and holding ground while making a slow, implacable advance. Steady and even progress towards a goal or the bitter holding of ground, denying even an inch to the enemy no matter how fierce the battle.

Feast of Crows is an abstract mass combat system designed to be scalable to most army size conflicts from skirmishes to nations and designed to be compatible both in spirit and in mechanics with the Open Gaming Licence material available, most especially that depicting the pitched battles of heroic fantasy.

You don?t need to spend out hundreds of pounds on figures or spend hundreds of hours painting them to a fiddly, detailed degree. You can make do with scratch paper, your dice and a calculator or any other method of representing the battle you wish to use from miniatures to just keeping the whole idea in your head.

Feast of Crows, by necessity, abstracts the nature of role-playing combat further than it already is. While some heroes, magicians and warriors alike, or some monsters, tamed or bargained into helping an army can make an impact, it is usually as leaders of the rank and file and not as individuals that they will make their mark.

Feast of Crows requires little more preparation than a normal game or a normal set of character sheets and battles involving thousands of troops can be resolved just as quickly, if not more quickly, than normal party-level combat encounters while retaining the heroic, magical feel placed in gamer?s imaginations by The Lord of the Rings or other fantasy works.

Feast of Crows is a feast, not only for the scavengers of the battlefield but also for the gamer seeking a good solution to resolving large scale battles as part of their epic campaigns.