Some of you have been a bit out of the loop as to what exactly I mean when I mention Braunsteins in the past or present tense, some were not present for Fortress Orkmerica, some have been out of town or missed sessions. It's all good. The big thing is that there is likely another one of these events looming on the horizon and I would like to drop a quick post detailing exactly what is meant by this term in the context of our campaign.
Simply put, the Battle Braunstein is a special type of session that emerges when the activities of factions and major players in the gameworld converge sufficiently that they can no longer be resolved as background activity. Instead of "DM Fiat" simply hand-waiving the activities of these major players, the Battle Braunstein brings people to the table in a session format similar to our regular adventuring, but now instead of controlling a character in a moment-to-moment adventure, you control a powerful figure or even a whole faction and dictate the activities therein on a turn-by-turn basis (With a turn generally referring to a single 24 hour period).
The two things that make the Braunstein exciting and dynamic is the multiple controlling players working at cross-interests (as opposed to the general cooperation you see in a regular adventuring session) and the presence of a mediated Fog of War. The game plays much like Diplomacy, with characters writing out their orders and having these orders resolve simultaneously. Where it differs from diplomacy is the scope of activity. Orders can include everything from troop movements, ambush tactics, spell-casting, attempts at diplomacy, the construction of fortifications, espionage, assassination, the list goes on nigh-indefinitely. In order to make this work, the DM serves as a referee, taking all the orders, looking them over, resolving how they will all play out, and then revealing the new game-state to players.
This preserves a Fog of War where characters do not know if their allies are helping or hindering them, they may not even know where their enemies troops are! In the last Braunstein, the troop movements resulted in more than one instance of the humans not reliably knowing where the orcs were as their intel was rendered useless by some new maneuver of the orc player.
For a detailed exposition of how this can look in practice, go ahead and read the Fortress Orkmerica post linked above. The important thing about this post is that you need to understand what a Battle Braunstein is in order to conspire to bring one about via adventuring session activity. The key thing is to think in terms of "How can the state of the world become messy to the point that the major players need to duke it out in order for stability to emerge?" To conclude this post I am going to list some example scenarios from our past campaigns that could have been resolved via a Battle Braunstein if we were using this system at the time:
- In the Blades in the Dark campaign, the conflict between the Bridge Street Bastards, the City Watch, The Crows and the Lampblacks could have been resolved with a gang-war Braunstein (#GANGSTEIN)
- In the Star Wars game the hot war between the Hutts and the Empire, with the Black Sun Syndicate trapped in the middle, could have been resolved with a Braunstein (And maybe a space/naval wargame for some BIG BATTLES)
- When the adventurers in our other AD&D game firebombed a village as a distraction in order to steal magical artifacts from that village, and then framed the Inquisition for the firebombing, and then with one of the magical artifacts accidentally summoned a giant demon lord that resulted in a pitched battle between the demon lord, our previous High-Level PCs, the remnants of the tribe that got burned AND the invading subterranean horde of Skaven looking to capitalize on the chaos? That ABSOLUTELY could have been a Battle Braunstein.
Really all it takes to make a Braunstein happen is to think AUDACIOUSLY and aspire to MANGLE the equilibrium of the campaign so badly that it simply must be addressed on the scale of a special Wargaming Event. I have full confidence that you guys will be able to make this happen, because you've done it so many times before without even being told to.
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