Cataphracts Design Diary #1
Cataphracts commanders: there is no actionable intelligence in this post. Read on.
About two months ago, I reread several series on military historian Bret Devereaux’s blog, ACOUP: analyses of Helm’s Deep and Minas Tirith, breakdowns of pre-modern command and pre-modern logistics, and, of course, a post simply titled “How Fast Do Armies Move?”. I’m a fan of Devereaux’s—he writes in that delicious space of really knowing his history yet also with the understanding he’s writing for a bunch of D&D dorks who care about the fiddly minutiae of, say, the efficacy of maille vs. plate armor against English longbows. The fun, gritty little details.
In military history, as Devereaux explains, there are basically three levels of decision-making: strategy (why you fight, the goals of the war), operations (how you get your soldiers to battle, how armies move), and tactics (how you win battles). It struck me, as Devereaux often alludes to, that there are a lot of games about strategy (Civilization, Diplomacy, the world map of Total War) and innumerable games about tactics (any given medieval strategy title or tabletop wargame), but very few about operations. Almost no games, as far as I’m aware, are interested in, say, the logistics of feeding an army, or communication structures between commanders in the field. Games usually simplify or skim over all those fine details of running a war, or just skip them entirely.
So, I said to myself, why not try to make an operations wargame? Embrace the logistics, the gritty details, the fuzziness of the fog of war?
Thus was born Cataphract, the written ruleset, and Cataphracts, the game I’m currently running. They have the same name because I made both of them, but—as I’ll discuss—if you run your own campaign, it’ll probably be different. (Really, this one should be called something like “the Voreia Campaign” or “the End of Emperor Michael’s Peace.”)
Almost immediately, things started happening that I have never seen before in any game, anywhere.
The pitch is pretty simple: it’s an asynchronous play-by-post real-time wargame, set in a pseudo-Black Sea region circa 1300. That means no sessions—instead, my players write what they want to do in a discord channel, and I keep track of their orders on my map. We track things in real time, so that means if an army takes two weeks to march from one place to the next, well, I’ll see you in two weeks. Messengers are just “a guy on a series of horses,” so they, too, are tracked in real time—a letter sent from one stronghold to another 150 miles away takes, at minimum, about three days to arrive. While I allow a little bit of “rubber-banding” to keep things moving (especially with players in multiple timezones), we generally stick to this real time element quite strictly. No teleporting armies, no instantaneous messages.
The actual written rules are straightforward: 6-mile hexes, a basic 2d6+mods roll for battles, pretty simple rules for special units, and a few other odds and ends. You can read these rules quickly, and they’ll feel familiar if you’ve played a more simulation-y tabletop RPG before (or, you know, Mount & Blade).
The other twist I added is command structures: each of the five factions (more on them in a minute) starts with a single commander leading one huge army. Whenever a commander wants, they can bring in a new commander (and thus a new player), hand them a chunk of their army, and send them off. Once that happens, those commanders are broken into their own text channels, and cannot communicate except through messengers. (The one exception is when two commanders are in the same place—then, they get a channel together where they can talk freely.) Those commanders can then appoint their own subordinate commanders, and so on. I started Cataphracts with five commanders—at time of writing, I have twenty-three.
I’ll talk more about the IRL logistics of running a play-by-post with twenty-three players in a future post, but the short version is this: I set up a channel on a reasonably-popular RPG discord server I’m on, then each commander gets their own thread, using discord’s thread feature. Each commander then gets a little doc with their character writeup and a sheet with their army numbers. They write messages to me, I reply and notify them as events occur, and I keep track of everything on a big spreadsheet and a running Photoshop map file. Critically, commanders do not get to see the detailed world map: they have a public diegetic map that’s low-detail and not totally accurate (see below), but only get the detailed hex map with all the place names of regions they explore. Even then, they don’t get positions of armies; no commander has perfect information.
The inaccurate, in-universe map of Voreia (the setting of my Cataphracts game), which all commanders see.
That brings us to factions. The five factions in Cataphracts each get a short little writeup, a couple of special unit types (each of which is no more than a sentence or two), and a table of names and titles—only a page or two per faction. The five factions are:
- The Novan Empire. Think late-game Byzantines, somewhere between the Palaiologans and Angeloi. Their lead commander is not the (young, snot-nosed, sniveling) emperor, but rather a legate, a military veteran.
- The Divine Eparchy of Sakarziya. Basically, “What if the Orthodox Church had Papal States, and what if those Papal States were in the Caucasus Mountains?” As with many archbishops and emperors, the exact power split between the two is a little unclear, but the Novans and Sakarziyans are not at war.
- The Zlanic Principalities. Pre-Golden Horde Kyivan Rus’, more or less. Formerly a client of the Novan Empire, the Zlans declared independence (and thus war), but still follow the Orthodox faith.
- The Third Valgar Kingdom. Take the Second Bulgarian Empire, make them Bogomilist, and scooch them forward a bit in time. Heretical subjects of Nova, now turned to rebellion against them and the Sakarziyans alike.
- The Kalkhanate. Almost exactly just the Ilkhanate (lol)—pseudo-Turcopersian horse lords bent on conquest, with a leader recently converted to the local faith to win extra support.
Each of those five started with a single commander and a big block of soldiers, somewhere between ten and twenty thousand apiece. There’s a possible version of this game that starts earlier, with each of those five lead commanders raising their armies and bringing them together and so on, but I opted to skip that—lead commanders started with all available troops raised, ready to march, what would amount to something like 2–3 months after the war’s official declaration.
I wrote the first five commanders—a legate, an archbishop, a grand princess, a king, and a khan—but each subsequent commander is randomly generated. New subordinate commanders get a relationship to their superior commander (often, but not always, family), their age, and a few traits—older commanders get more traits but are worse in hand-to-hand combat (a relatively uncommon occurrence). These basic tables have resulted in some remarkable dynamics and relationships: one faction is entirely composed of family members of a dead former king; another involves a secret parent-child relationship; another still is composed of no family at all, just work colleagues trying to get along. My players love these relationships. While Cataphracts could basically be played entirely in clipped sentences and spreadsheet math, so far, every single one of my twenty-three has, to a greater or lesser extent, gotten into character and spent a lot of extra time and effort in their letters and messages to each other.
(Worth mentioning there are also a handful of other commanders, ones that don’t strictly exist in any one faction: monastic orders of knights, mercenary companies, peasant revolutionaries, one or two others. I’ll talk about them more in a future post.)
For me as a game designer, though, what’s been more compelling is the complications that arise from the logistics. Commanders know only what their scouts can see (within a fifteen-ish mile range) and what they receive in letters. The real-time tracking continually creates a powerful, sometimes overwhelming level of “information lag,” where operations succeed or fail not based on the strength of the armies in question but rather on commanders simply knowing (or, more likely, not knowing) what’s actually happening in the field.
Here’s a (mostly) hypothetical example: Red Commander marches into Blue territory, and reaches Blue Stronghold A. The Blue NPCs in Stronghold A write a frantic letter to Blue Lead Commander, saying “Oh God they’re here! Send help!” Before that letter reaches Blue Lead Commander, Red Commander captures Blue Stronghold A in an assault, and begins marching to Blue Stronghold B. Upon receiving the letter from Stronghold A, Blue Lead Commander brings in a subordinate (Blue Subcommander) and says “The Reds are at Stronghold A! Go stop them!” Blue Subcommander marches, and unexpectedly runs into Red Commander at Stronghold B. Blue Subcommander sends a letter to their lead saying “Oh God! Now they’re here at B! Send help!” at which point Red Commander again assaults Stronghold B and defeats Blue Subcommander. Blue Subcommander retreats to Blue Stronghold C, only a short ways ahead of Red Commander.
At this point, what does Blue Lead Commander know? They know that Red Commander is at Blue Stronghold A, and they know that Blue Subcommander is somewhere between them and Stronghold A. That’s it. If Blue Lead Commander is at Stronghold C (they might not be, but bear with me), the first time they hear of both Stronghold A and B’s fall to Red is when Blue Subcommander arrives in person fleeing Red Commander. (It is, quite literally, the Two Generals Problem.)
This kind of thing happens constantly. Almost every week, one faction or another has made blunders or errors based on a lack of clear information. Fancy strategy and complex maneuvers have consistently failed simply because coordination is extremely slow and difficult. The most successful factions thus far are not the ones that have fancy strategy or even especially powerful units, but instead the ones that keep their plans dead simple.
Sometimes, it goes even further: from time to time, a commander will get unlucky and, for one reason or another, they’ll send two or three letters to another commander and get no response. When this happens, the usual response is panic: they freeze and hold position for days or weeks, they pick a random direction and march away hoping to escape and/or find their targets, they turn around and march straight back to talk in-person, or otherwise freak out and start behaving irrationally. Because information is so limited, commanders are constantly under pressure, a high level of background uncertainty. To really move with confidence is a very rare occurrence: most of the time, commanders only really trust what they can see with their own two eyes (or rather, their own scouts’ many eyes)—everything else is suspect.
One of my friends, a lead commander, said it best: “Sam, I feel like the extreme difficulty of this game —and thus its possible brilliance—is that I never have any idea what the fuck is going on.”
These constant logistics requirements also add further wrinkles of complexity to the diplomacy. While a lot of Cataphracts plays along similar lines as Diplomacy, Crusader Kings, or Model U.N., the intense fog of war and need for resupply (combined with unpredictable elements like weather) muddies the waters. While I expected this to result in backstabbing (a very common occurrence in Model U.N. and large-scale megagames), it’s actually done the opposite—subordinate commanders are loyal, almost fanatically so, to their lead commanders. Players are desperate for direction. While hostile factions do engage in a measure of deceit and trickery in their letters to foreign powers, inside each faction the various commanders have thus far been extremely loyal and honest.
In megagames and larps I’ve played in (not to mention smaller-scale board games and videogames), players betray each other for fun, to make things interesting. In Cataphracts, players don’t dare betray one another because they need each other.
Factional alliances, likewise, have thus far reached an intriguing conclusion: no faction has yet broken a deliberate alliance with another (no betrayals), but multiple factions have already failed in their alliances. That is, they agree upon a time and place to meet and thus crush their enemies, but along the way, one or both factions just… don’t show. And not even intentionally! In the alliances I’ve seen so far, more or less all commanders intended to honor the alliance and stick to the plan, but failed to do so. The weather slows them down, they need to stop and resupply, their superiors redirect them, they miss a critical message and show up in the wrong place—this kind of thing happens all the time.
Again and again, operational issues are the linchpin of the game. Commanders succeed and fail based on their battles, sure, but more than that, they succeed and fail based on their ability to coordinate, stay organized, and stay aware of their surroundings. The simplest elements—knowing where the enemy is, knowing where your allies are, knowing how long it will take to get from A to B—become essential to victory. In other games, this information is usually obvious; in Cataphracts, operational intelligence is a rare and valuable resource, more precious than treasure or soldiers.
I have so much more to talk about (the barriers between the written rules and my own referee style! time, scale, and domain play! the logistics of running for twenty-three players! simulation as a tool for education and research!) but I’ll save them for a future post. Thanks for reading—I hope you enjoyed this little snippet of an ongoing project. Hopefully, there will be more design diary entries in the future.