Heroes of Battle

by David Noonan, Will McDermott, Stephen Schubert

The essential handbook integrating war and battlefield action into D&D play.

Heroes of Battle provides everything one needs to know to play a battle-oriented D&D campaign. Players can build military characters with new
feats, spells, uses for traditional spells, and prestige classes. Information is
given on tools specific to the battlefield, including siege engines, weapons,
magic items, steeds, and other exotic mounts. Battlefield terrain aspects are
discussed with plenty of illustrative maps and new rules. Specific types of
battlefield encounters are discussed in detail, and the book provides specific
detail on designing battlefields.

DAVID NOONAN is an RPG designer/developer at Wizards of the Coast, Inc. Recent credits include authoring Complete Divine and co-authoring
Races of Stone and Unearthed Arcana .

WILL McDERMOTT, former editor-inchief of Duelist and TopDeck magazines,
has written a number of articles for Dragon® Magazine, but is known
primarily for his fiction in the Magic: The Gathering universe, including
the novels Judgment and The Moons of Mirrodin.

STEPHEN SCHUBERT is a freelance writer whose previous credits include
articles in Dragon Magazine.

Genres: Gaming, Role Playing Games, Dungeons and Dragons, Fantasy

160 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2005

About the author

David Noonan is an Australian artist known for his distinctive collage-based practice that merges found imagery with screen-printing, painting, and textile work to explore themes of performance, ritual, and the theatrical. Born in Ballarat, Victoria in 1969, Noonan studied fine art at Ballarat University College and later earned his MFA from the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. He relocated to London, where he currently lives and works.
Noonan's work has been widely exhibited internationally, with solo shows at leading institutions including the Tate Modern in London, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Chisenhale Gallery, and the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis. His haunting, monochromatic pieces often draw from archival sources such as stage productions, avant-garde film, and folk traditions, lending his art an enigmatic and timeless quality.
In 2020, he was featured in the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, and his exhibition Stagecraft at the Art Gallery of Ballarat reflected his long-standing interest in performance and transformation. His work is held in major public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate, the Guggenheim, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Reviews

[Brian Wilkerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a supplement to the main Dungeon Master's guide which is specific to war-theme campaigns. It offers campaign advice, sample missions, new prestige classes, new feats, new items and new spells. The idea is provide aids for a campaign other than dungeon crawling.

The differences are quickly made apparent. Four adventurer PCs in a large army of NPCs against another army of NPCs in open area instead of an enclosed one with far more going on than a single encounter at a time; how does one manage that? The answer can apply not only to board games but to video games and adventure novels too, "Think big, play small". After reading this section, I started seeing it in a lot of plots, such as Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon.


There is this chapter in the game which revolves around a huge siege of Dragon City. There are a lot of humanoid moles defending the walls and the gates (competently, I might add) and four big and powerful dragons. In all of this, how do the programmers make Spyro and Cynder relevant here? Before you say "exploit protagonist powers and take on the entire army in the field", let me pre-empt that by saying this is not a game where the main character can kill any number of mooks; take on too many and you will die. Maybe you could it using cheat codes to get fury breath early and unlimited mana but even then an enemy could get the drop on you from above.

Instead, the game guides the player's through scenario. The dragon pair put out fires, defend a wall-mounted cannon, help the guy reload, destroy siege towers, and defend the front gate. All of these are singular, specific, important areas where PCs can make a significant difference in at least one section of combat, and through it, the overall battle.


Also, this book is not all about pitched battles or sieges. There is variety. A DM can plan covert stuff like intel gathering and rescues missions. There are escape-the-siege-and-bring-reinforcements missions. There is infiltration and La Resistance type missions. There is lots of potential fun suggested apart from dungeon crawling, and that can be included too (Ex. "The general has received word of special combat-power-enhancing herbs that only grow in this haunted forest".....).

In addition to campaign and encounters, there are also new prestige classes ranging from Combat Medics, mixing fighter and cleric, to War Weavers who are basically wizards geared around team-playing, to Legendary Leaders, who milk all the advantages that come from having many cohorts and can make the morale checks easier to manage.


Speaking of which, the morale rules are interesting. Losing too much health or seeing a bunch of their comrades die can lead an NPC to fear and panic, but seeing a hero doing something awesome or giving a rousing speech can embolden them. This is another way that PCs can influence battles. It also adds another layer of realism and strategy, which adds immersion and rewards those that can effectively utilize the system.

I tell you, I'm going to refer to this book when designing my own war-themed campaigns as much or more than a textbook like The Medieval Siege. What's good for the Dungeon Master is good for the Author

Trickster Eric Novels gives "Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes of Battle" an A+

[Diego · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a nice book but the last 20% looks a bit rushed.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not that I've run a war-themed campaign before, but I've certainly read enough to realise that this sourcebook is pretty handy if one is going to do it.

It starts off with providing and identifying the differences between traditional campaigns with a war/military campaign, and the roles the PCs could play. It includes rules and guidelines for establishing army composition, setting up interesting battlefields, tracking the flow of events in a battle, and keeping score on well the PCs for assisting the war effort. Meaty stuff. Then it throws in some sample encounters, the typical stuff you'd see in movies - rescue, escort, hit-and-run, etc.

On the mechanics side of things, it includes stats on siege engines, how to handle large groups of NPCs, rules on rallying, morale, and commander auras, and touching a bits on promotions and rewards for the players.

For the players, some useful spells for battle situations, new skill applications and a few 5-level prestige classes that are more generic roles than classes (the exception being the War Weaver, which I found intriguing), but they're easy to adapt to add flavour into. There's also a new "teamwork benefit" mechanic to reflect the military training aspect of a war-based campaign.

The appendix rounds up the sourcebook by fleshing out the typical compositions and stat blocks for entire armies of the different core races plus drow, orcs, goblinoids, lizardfolk, and giants.

All in all, it feels like a sourcebook that's quite essential to getting a war campaign just right.

[Brian Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my favorite supplement for D&D 3E, mostly because of its central stroke of genius. The core activity in D&D is a dungeon crawl. A dungeon is essentially a flowchart of options. Noonan and his conspirators take the action on a battlefield and tell you how to make it into a flowchart, and that lets you expand the games core activity into a whole new space without deforming or unbalancing any part of it. Add in the concept that each action the PCs succeed in gives them Victory Points, and the more they accumulate the closer their side comes to the best possible outcome, and you now have large scale battles brought down to the individual heroic PC actions using the games core activity. It's putting D&D on the battlefield without making it a wargame.

To me, that's exactly what I was looking for, as wargames require an entirely different set of system masteries that I don't want to force onto my players.

High recommended, if you can find it. The ideas are easily enough transferred to any other F20 game.

['Nathan Burgoine · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting sourcebook that focuses on the huge-scale battles, and how to weave your PCs into them with meaningful (but easy to handle) results. The idea of drawing a larger tactical focus to D&D is daunting - big matches are slow and cumbersome done by the rules - but the inclusion of things like medals and ranks was interesting, and well done.

Love the prestige classes.