Feast of Crows: Army of Civilisation

Humankind has not the industriousness of dwarves, the savagery of orcs nor the arcane knowledge and eternity of the elvenkind. Men have no one thing that makes them shine above the other demihuman races, they are not beautiful, they are not giants, their senses are dulled compared to their companion humanoids, their minds weaker, they lifespan fleeting.

But what humans do have are towns, villages, cities, kingdoms and empires. Man builds communities; he transmits knowledge from one generation to the next. He creates gods, he creates traditions, he creates history and, so short lived, he strives to leave his mark upon the world before he passes beyond it through deeds and accomplishments.

Man creates civilisation in all its trappings, the inheritors of the land. Man?s armies are organised, powerful, working together. Man is the jack-of-all-trades of the races, master of none, but able to work together to create accomplishments that no other race can. Where they are one dimensional, focussed, exaggerations of some aspect of the spirit of man only he is whole, one, able to bring every part of himself to bear in peace of conflict.

Man?s armies are innovative, adaptable, disciplined. Working together in faith they can stand against a much greater force and destroy it, simply by holding steadfast. Their adaptable, flexible nature gives them a depth to their force that no other race, no matter how ancient or savage, can hope to destroy.

Man has spirit.

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.