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Dragon 94	-	-	-	Dragon

In most fantasy role-playing games, the
basic unit for adventuring is the small party,
which can move across open country
quickly, cheaply, and easily. Eventually,
however, many long-running campaigns
reach the point where both the players and
the gamemaster want to field small armies
or at least squads of troops. At this point
certain basic problems arise, particularly
with the movement of these armies.
Although most role-playing rules point
out that movement rate is reduced for large
units, many gamers don’t understand the
reasons behind the rules and thus are un-
able to role-play them. Army and troop
movement end up being a version of stan-
dard wargaming and lose the special excite-
ment of role-playing. What gamers need to
understand is that once the moving unit
grows beyond a few people and animals, the
realities behind the movement rate have
changed drastically. To role-play a
medieval-style war, both gamemaster and
players must know something about the
logistics of the medieval-style army.

 Logistics can be simply defined as the art
of supplying and moving troops, but the
simplicity is deceptive. Even in a technolog-
ically advanced society like our own, move-
ment is always dependent upon supply, not
the other way around, for the basic reason
that it’s futile to send troops into an area
where they’ll eventually starve. In a non-
technological society, feeding itself becomes
an enormous problem for any army, be-
cause of the inefficient agricultural system
and inherent problems of food transport.
To role-play wars and troop movements
properly, gamers have to take food supply
into account. Players need to know how
much their army will eat, how they will get
what the army needs, and finally, how their
supplies will be transported. This article will
discuss these and related questions and
show gamemasters how problems of supply,
not arbitrary movement rules, can be used
to determine how far a given army can
march on any given day.

First, it should be pointed out that an
army consists of more than the actual fight-
ing men. Although the ratio of combatants
to noncombatants in a medieval or ancient
army was far larger than it is today, an
army would still have about one noncom-
batant for every five combatants. These
noncombatants include armorers, fletchers,
blacksmiths, a surgeon or two, a scribe,
some heralds, servants for the noble-born,
and (in fantasy-world armies) magicians
and priests. All these personnel also need
food for themselves and their mounts. Also,
an army packs along a large amount of non-
edible supplies —weapons, blankets, and
so on. On the average, there will be one
horse or mule, or three slaves, per each six
personnel to carry such gear.

The minimum daily requirement
Until recently, historically speaking, grain
was the mainstay of an army for men and
animals alike. Almost all ancient or medie-
val armies carried querns (handmills) to
grind grain fresh daily because flour spoils
more quickly than whole grain.

The modern role-player has to under-
stand what transporting food means in a
world without refrigeration and preserva-
tives. For example, in summer fresh red
meat will begin to spoil in three days.
Yeasted bread either moulds (in damp air)
or turns rock-hard (in dry air) in about
three days, too. Thus the main rations of
medieval armies were porridges of various
grains, dry flat bread like sea-biscuit, and
soda breads cooked fresh nightly, supple-
mented with small amounts of cheese, salt
pork, and whatever pickled meats or vegeta-
bles were available in their part of the
world. Even these rations often spoiled; let
us remember that the army of Henry V
won the battle of Agincourt while suffering
from diarrhea brought on by bad food.

No matter what the kind of food, to
determine how much of it an army requires,
the gamer must start with the needs of each
member of it. The following food require-
ments are those of a 150-pound human
male, a decent average. Although in ordi-
nary conditions women require less food
than men, we can assume that an army of
Amazons will have the same energy output
and probably the same body-bulk as a
group of men and thus will have the same
food needs.

Each warrior needs 3,500 calories a day,
including 70 grams of protein, to stay in
fighting trim and good condition. In pro-
longed battle conditions, he requires 4,000
calories and 80 grams of protein. In medie-
val ration terms, this translates to three or
four pounds of whole grain, measured raw,
and a pound of mixed cheese, meat, fruit
and so on a day. Without some fruit and
vegetables, warriors will develop scurvy and
yaws.

In a fantasy world, non-human races
have different needs, based on average size
and food preferences, which can be figured
by referring to the standard ration above.
Here are some examples of races common
to many game worlds. Elves need three-
fourths of a standard ration, which trans-
lates to 2 pounds of grain and 1 pound of
fruit and vegetables. Salt pork and other
preserved meats would be indigestible to
elves. Dwarves, despite their small stature,
need a full ration to maintain their extraor-
dinary endurance. They will, however, eat
the same things humans will. Technically
speaking, halflings only need half a stan-
dard ration, but if they feel underfed, they
will grumble badly and lower the army’s
morale. Orcs and goblins require a standard
ration, but they will insist on having a large
part of it in meat and will spurn fruit and
vegetables.

When adding up individual figures to
arrive at the army’s total needs, the gamer
should use common sense and only include
those non-humans who will make a differ-
ence to the averages. Among 500 humans,
for instance, 10 elven archers will make
little difference— but 10 giants, with their
need for 50 standard-sized rations each a
day, would make a drastic one.

Besides the warriors, both riding mounts
and pack beasts require large amounts of
food. Although horses and mules can sur-
vive on grass in the wild or in the pasture,
they need grain every day to perform heavy
work like carrying riders. The average
horse or mule needs 10 pounds of grain and
10 pounds of fodder — grass, hay, or (in a
pinch) straw —every day, or it will be
unable to perform its job with the army.
Carnivorous mounts, like the wolves used
by orcs and goblins in many game worlds,
present a special problem, because they
need fresh meat every day or they will turn
nasty— a situation to be avoided at all
costs. The average war-wolf will eat about 5
pounds a day; beasts the size of lions will
need about 20 pounds. Carnivore-mounted
cavalry thus either has to spend several
hours a day foraging for fresh meat or else
bring cattle or other herds along as a
messhall-on-the-hoof. Prisoners of war
could provide another source of supply for
evil armies, of course.

Let’s see how these figures translate into
provisions for an example army. Our typical
medieval-style army might comprise 500
mounted warriors, 500 mixed pikemen and
archers, 200 noncombatant personnel, and
180 pack horses carrying the non-edible
gear. In one single day, this army eats
10,400 pounds of grain, 6,800 pounds of
mixed animal fodder, and 1,200 pounds of
mixed human rations. We’re talking, in
short, of over 9 tons of food every day —
and this is only a small army. Even a squad
of 50 mounted men, traveling without
noncombatants and pack animals, would
need 650 pounds of grain, 500 pounds of
fodder, and 25 pounds of mixed rations a
day.

Water is another basic necessity. The
average man drinks about 5 pounds of
water a day in mild weather conditions.
(This includes the water content of ale,
mead, milk, and so on.) Dry (desert) or
humid (jungle) conditions double this and
all amounts following. A horse or mule
needs 80 pounds a day; an ox, 160 pounds.
Non-human needs can again be judged
proportionally. An elf, for instance, needs
about 3½ pounds of water. If these figures
seem high, remember that we’re not talking
about people sitting around in offices or
schools all day, but people who are march-
ing and fighting in the warm summer.
Even in well-watered countryside, getting
enough water for a large group can present
problems. Armies need rivers or deep
streams, not just wells or springs. Consider
our example army, which collectively needs
26,400 pounds of water a day. Suppose that
they come to a village well with a bucket
holding 40 pounds and that it takes two
men one minute to raise the bucket and
pour the contents into a receptacle. It will
take more than 5 hours to raise half a day’s
rations — assuming that the well hasn’t
gone dry by then.

In desert or arid conditions, water must
be carried. The game referee should insist
that the players figure out their armies’
water needs and make provisions for the
necessary water. The average man or horse
deprived totally of water will die in 3 days;
on half-rations of water, an army will fight
and move at half normal efficiency.
In general, the lack of adequate food of
the right types should have a strong effect
on play. A half-starved army will fight at
below its normal capability and will
refuse to march at normal speed. Morale is
another important problem with hungry
armies. Although the player characters may
drive themselves on by willpower, the hum-
ble NPCs who make up their armies are
going to be preoccupied with their rations
just like real soldiers are. If a player is
undersupplying his army, the referee should
add penalties to morale checks in games
that have them, or decide when mutiny and
desertion will occur in games without for-
mal morale rules. As a general guide, I’d
say that after five days of poor and inade-
quate rations, 25% of a mercenary army
will desert, and 5% of a motivated one.
Armies led by great, awe-inspiring heroes
will stick things out longer, but after a
couple of weeks of real hunger, even the
most loyal soldiers will begin slipping away,
05% at a time.

Once the players figure out the amount of
food that their characters’ armies need, they
can turn to the far more interesting question
of where they are going to get it. One
method is to follow the example of some
ancient and medieval commanders and
resort to foraging as the army marches.

“Living off the country” produces visions of
swaggering warriors with hams tied to their
saddles and loaves of fresh bread in their
knapsacks. In a subsistence agricultural
economy, the real picture is grim. To under-
stand why, we must consider what subsis-
tence agriculture, the economic basis of
most game-worlds, really means.

Living off the land
Primitive agriculture is extremely labor-
intensive. For example, it took the medieval
farmer about 148 man-hours to raise 2½
acres of wheat, as opposed to the 6½ hours
it takes a modern farmer. Depending on the

fertility of a region, at least 85% or more
likely 90% of the population must actively
engage in agriculture, stock raising, and
gardening in order to supply the needs of
the total population. Thus we can see that
surplus food is going to be in short supply.
Furthermore, with poor tools, like the
medieval iron-tipped wooden plowshare,
and a limited knowledge of fertilizers, like
manure or nothing, the yield per acre is also
low. The total yield is lowered further by
the three-field system in use during the
Middle Ages, in which only one-third of the
arable land is growing crops at any given
time while the other two-thirds lies fallow to
restore its fertility. Obviously, the yield of
this system varied enormously depending
on the fertility of a given stretch of land, the
amount of available rainfall, and so on, but
as a very rough average, medieval farms on
good land produced per year about 500
pounds of grain per acre, or 160 tons per
square mile. (Compare this to the modern
United States yield of 1,760 pounds per
acre.) Our example army of 1,200 men
consumes about 21 acres of wheat per day,
or a square mile’s worth in one short
month. Thus we see why contemporary
writers often compared medieval armies to
hordes of locusts.

In a world with poor storage techniques,
the food supply is also dependent on the
seasons. The three-field system brings in
two crops a year in a European or North
American kind of climate — one in June,
the other in October. Starting with the June
harvest, grain is as plentiful as it ever is
until December, when the grain stored from
the October harvest begins to spoil. King
and peasant alike begin to go hungry; by
March, people are hunting sparrows and
scavenging old cabbages from the bottom of
barrels. Finally, in May, some of the harvest
is milk-ripe and harvested green to tide
everyone over until most of the grain ripens
in June.

An army, therefore, can demand grain as
loudly as it likes in March, but there will
simply be no grain to give it. In the late fall,
farmers and villagers will fight to keep their
harvest for themselves, because the alterna-
tive is starving to death in the winter. Be-
cause we moderns, with our vast food
surplus produced by mechanized farming
and protected by freezing and preservatives,
forget that getting enough food to eat is a
constant battle in primitive societies, I want
to drive this point home: Gold coins and
jewels cannot buy food that doesn’t exist.
How, then, can we translate this situation
into game terms? First of all, armies run by
player characters can only march during the
standard “war season” of the Middle Ages
and the ancient world — that is, the sum-
mer and fall. Although there are historical
cases of wars being fought in the winter,
those cases are rare and usually the result of
desperate circumstances, like the civil wars
during the reign of King Stephen of En-
gland. Most fighting begins in May or
June, and truces or retreats are declared by
November.

TABLE OF FOOD PRODUCTION
Land type
Grain
Fodder
Meat
Vegetables
1
 Other
Rich arable
4,500 tons
600 tons
2 tons
2 tons
500 lbs. each of ale,
cheese, butter
Poor arable
2,225 tons
300 tons
1 ton
1 ton
Small amounts of
above
Forest
none
1 ton
2 tons
2
none
A few berries, nuts,
roots
Wild scrubland
none
100 tons
2 tons
2
none
Berries, nuts
Wild grassland
none
unlimited
3 tons
2
none
none
Pastoral
none
1,000 tons
3
120 tons
none
What few provisions
the herders have
(Remember that this is not the total year’s production, but what will be available during
the summer or directly after the fall crop comes in.)
1. Includes fruit.
2. Wild game, including deer, rabbits, fish, etc., but hunting takes much time.
3. The army will be competing with the herds for fodder and water.

Second, if armies are going to forage, the
gamemaster needs to know how much food
is available for the army to acquire, either
by force or by coin. Here we have a very
complex situation indeed, because the
amount of food will depend on the kind of
terrain, its fertility, its degree of settlement,
the year’s weather, and myriad other factors
that make a precise and realistic determina-
tion too time-consuming to be worth the
effort. For simplified gaming purposes, the
system summarized in the table above is
playable, but I offer it only as a suggestion.
Any referee who wishes can vary the table
to make it more precise, historically accu-
rate, or suitable for special conditions in a
particular game world.

The referee should first map out the war
zones and march routes in ten-mile hexes,
mark in the streams and rivers, and then
decide what type of terrain each hex con-
tains. Pastoral land is open meadows, often
hilly, given over exclusively to large flocks
or herds of cattle, sheep, and horses. Wild
grassland is basically pastoral land that no
sentient races are using; it supports many
wild animals. Wild scrubland is semi-grassy,
but dry and covered in part with bushes and
chapparal. Forest is of course obvious;
desert is not included because it offers so
little food that it might as well offer none.
When it comes to arable land, the referee
should keep in mind that in medieval condi-
tions, a much lower percentage of the land
will actually be in crops than is the case in
the big mechanized family farms of modern
times or in huge agribusinesses. Much of it
will be rough pasturage for dairy animals,
stands of woodlands for firewood, and space
for roads, villages, and dwellings. Thus the
yield per hex on the table is lower than the
per-acre figures given in the text above
would indicate.

Once the referee has established the total
food capacity of each ten-mile hex from the
table, he can figure the available surplus.
Although in reality the surplus would vary
at different times during the summer and
fall, to keep things playable we can set
constant percentages. (Remember that from
January to May there will be very little
grain or vegetables available at all, and no
surplus.) In rich arable land, the surplus
will be 15% of the total; in poor arable,
10%; and in pastoral, 20%. If the army
needs more food than the available surplus,
it will have to extort it out of the peasantry
or fight for it.

The referee also has to keep firmly in
mind that this food supply doesn’t magi-
cally restore itself. If one army strips a
territory of food in early summer, there will
be no more food for a second army until the
fall harvest. In fact, if the first army has
stripped every bit of available grain, there
won’t be a fall crop, because there won’t be
any seed grain left for planting. There are
no convenient feed-and-grain stores in a
medieval world.

Once armies strip an area down to the
seed-grain, the area becomes depopulated.
Those peasants who can will abandon their
farms and flee; those who can’t will starve
to death. When armies march back and
forth over small territories, depopulation or
is
at least a major reduction in population
inevitable. During the Viking raids, the
northern coast of France became a waste-
land not so much because of the deaths
caused by the raids but because of the dep-
redations of the armies sent to chase the
Vikings. When an area has been depopu-
lated, it will produce no food at all the next
year because there won’t be anyone there to
grow it.

As a system of food supply, foraging has
In the Middle Ages, the decent rulers
tried their best to spare the peasantry out of
enlightened self-interest — empty farms
don’t pay taxes and support castles — but
in desperate conditions, the armies took
what they needed first and worried about
farmers later. Many commanders also de-
stroyed crops to keep them out of enemy
hands. In any game where alignment or
some form of “honor points” are involved,
the referee should judge player characters’
actions carefully in this regard. Medieval
knights considered that starving peasants
was dishonorable and a bad thing; in one of
the old French chansons de geste, for exam-
ple, the knight Rainouart gains great honor
by killing men who are stripping a peasant’s
bean fields.

other inherent problems, the biggest of
which is that it dramatically slows the move-
ment rate of the army. Foraged food must
be located, then either bought or extorted
from the peasants and townsfolk who own
it. If a hostile army is taking food by force,
the peasants will flee, leaving the army to
do its own harvesting and its own chasing
after cows. Once the food is obtained, it
must be distributed and packed. Even an
army of 1,200, like our example, needs
several hours to strip a farm, and what they
get may only last them a single day. Food is
likely to lie off the direct line of march, thus
slowing the army’s forward movement even
further.

Consider our example army with its grain
need of just over 5 tons per day. At the
beginning of a summer’s campaign, the
soldiers march through rich arable land
having a surplus of several hundred tons.
Farmers gladly sell them what they need,
and several days’ provisions at a time are
theirs for the time spent loading it. But the
war rages all summer with that area becom-
ing an important tactical location. By the
time two different armies have each
marched back and forth across it, the fright-
ened farmers have taken to the hills. Our
army is lucky to find a few vegetables rot-
ting in gardens, much less tons of grain.
Most of each game-day will be spent fan-
ning out on each side of the road and
searching desperately for food. The army
will move only about 5 miles per day for-
ward and will also be demoralized and
vulnerable to sneak attacks.

Taking it with you

To avoid such desperate situations, most
historical commanders preferred to take
supply trains with them, and the wise player
character will do the same. Since a riding
horse or an infantryman can’t carry more
than a rider and a few pounds of gear (in
the case of the horse), or his weapons and a
few pounds of gear (in the case of the infan-
tryman), the commander must resort to
either large carts or pack animals to carry
supplies. Since in our motorized society
carts are usually the first thing gamers think
of, let us consider them in some detail.
A medieval-style cart or wagon is made of
heavy wood and has wooden iron-rimmed
wheels, which are extremely vulnerable to
ruts and rocks. In any group of five carts,
one will break down each day to the tune of
two hours of travel time lost while the cart is
repaired. Heavy mud renders carts immo-
bile; light mud or hills reduces their move-
ment rate to 1 mile per hour. On steep
uphill roads, men have to shove a laden cart
from behind in order for it to move at the 1
mile per hour rate.

Each cart requires a team of either oxen
or heavy draft horses, plus a carter. In good
conditions, oxen pull at 2 miles per hour,
but oxen can only pull for 5 hours a day
because of their sensitive (and unshoeable)
hooves. A horse team pulls at 3 miles per
hour for 8 hours a day, but because of
breakdowns, it’s unlikely that any line of

carts will be moving for a full 8-hour day.
Oxen require 25 pounds of fodder and grain
per day apiece, while the draft horses re-
quire only 13 pounds of each foodstuff.
What oxen can do, of course, is pull
much more weight than horses can. As a
very rough average estimate, with a
medieval-style cart on medieval-style roads,
a pair of oxen can pull 6½ tons plus the
weight of the cart and carter, while horses
can only pull 3 tons. In any case, even in
optimum conditions, an army with horse-
carts can make no more than 20 miles a
day, while one with oxcarts can do a maxi-
mum of 10 miles a day.

By now it should be obvious why so
many ancient and medieval commanders
preferred a baggage train of pack animals to
any kind of cart. The difficulty with a pack
train is simply that it takes a great many
head of stock to carry a large amount of
supplies. The average horse can pack 180
pounds beyond the weight of the pack sad-
dle; the average mule, 220 pounds. Even a
two-mule team can pull much more weight
than the 440 pounds they can pack. A pack
train also runs into an interesting law of
diminishing returns because pack animals
need food of their own. A mule carrying
220 pounds of grain, for instance, on an 8-
day march is packing food for itself, a cav-
alry horse, and several men. On a 22-day
march, however, the mule will eat the entire
load by itself. Thus, no matter how many
pack animals it has, an army can never

carry food for more than 19-21 days on
pack animals alone.

Donald Engels (see the bibliography at
the end of this article) gives a useful formula
for finding the total number of pack animals
needed for a given march. Divide the total
weight of food by the carrying ability of
each animal minus that animal’s share of
the food it carries. For example, our army
wants to march for 5 days through country
with ample fodder and water, meaning that
they only have to carry grain. They thus
require 58,000 pounds of grain and mixed
human rations. Each mule can carry 220
pounds, minus the 50 pounds it will eat
during the march. Thus: 58,000 divided by
(220-50) = 341.2, meaning that 342 mules
are needed— an enormously long baggage
train, to say nothing of an expensive one.
Historically, armies did travel with as many
or even more animals than this.

We can also reverse Engels’s formula to
see how long an army can march if we know
the length of its pack train. Let’s say our
example army with a daily grain and mixed
ration need of 11,600 pounds has acquired
200 mules, to bring their need up to 13,600
pounds of food a day. The total carrying
capacity of these mules is 44,000 pounds.
Thus, dividing the daily food need into the
total carrying capacity (44,000 divided by
13,600 = roughly 3.2), we realize that the
army can only carry food for a little over 3
days at a time.

Given the limitations of pack trains, we

can see that the average army has to resort
to a combination of carrying food and for-
aging if it’s going to travel long distances,
or else resign itself to using carts and travel-
ing slowly. Making this choice should
present players (and their characters) with
an interesting decision that could well influ-
ence the outcome of the war.
Horse care: a matter of life and death
Whether the army commanders decide to
use cart horses or pack animals, finding the
necessary animals for the supply train — to
say nothing of cavalry horses — should
present a further problem in a medieval-
style game world. Since supporting a horse
or a mule takes about 20 acres, and an ox
40 acres (both for fodder and for grain), few
farmers will keep anything but a plow team.

Specialized horsebreeders, like any other
kind of specialist, will also be rare.
In the Middle Ages, lords set aside part
of their holdings to raise the horses and
mules so necessary to war. The ancient
empires, both Roman and Chinese, bought
their horses from the nomads of the Central
Asian steppes —as did the much later
British Empire in India. Gamemasters will
have to decide if such nomads exist in their
world, of course, and players may well have
to have their warlike PCs breed stock of
their own to supply their armies.
What happens, however, if the PCs lose a
large portion of their baggage train when
far from home base? Determining just how

many horses and mules will be available in
any given part of the game world is a near-
impossible task to do accurately and histori-
cally, just as was determining the food
supply. As rough and playable estimates
only, I offer the following. In arable land,
there will be only 15 horses suitable for war
and 40 pack mules per 10-mile hex. If an-
other army has already marched through
thathex, it’s a
any left at all.
good bet thattherewon’tbe <>

On a military campaign, then, horses and
mules are worth their weight in gold. Too
many gamers persist in treating horses and
mules like trucks —inexhaustible as long as
they’re refueled. By doing so, they are not
only going contrary to reality but also ig-
noring one of the primary logistical influ-
ences on movement rates — that is, the
need for time to take care of the stock. This
kind of ignorance gives rise to rules that
state that cavalry may always move faster
than infantry over long distances (on the
basis that horses can run faster than men,
probably) —when the reverse is often
actually the case. Well-trained infantry can
often out-march cavalry over the long term
simply because they don’t have to tend and
feed their horses. Let’s see why this is so in
some detail.

For all their appearance of strength and
nobility, horses are physically delicate and
emotionally moody as well as quite stupid.
While his willpower spurs a warrior to feats
of endurance, a horse or mule has no such
resource. Commanders who force animals
beyond their natural limits are going to lose
a lot of valuable stock to laming, saddle
sores, foundering, and broken wind. While
saddle sores can be treated by rest, the other
conditions do not automatically go away
even with the best care in the world. The
only thing an army can do with a wind-
broken or foundered horse is to eat it.

What kind of care does stock require on
the march? The most important thing is
always having grain to eat. An army that
tries to feed its stock on grass alone loses
05% of its horses and 03% of its mules on
the fourth day of such treatment (this means
05% or 03% of the beginning total, not the
steadily decreasing current number) and on
every day thereafter. An animal marched
with inadequate water will founder in 5
days.

Rest is almost as crucial. No fully loaded
animal should be marched more than 8
hours per day at a walking pace if the ani-
mal is laboring under a pack-saddle and full
load. (Well-fed cavalry horses can travel for
8 hours at a walk-trot-walk pace; they can
never gallop for more than about twenty
minutes straight without injury.) One day
out of every 6, all animals must rest un-
loaded for a full day. What’s more, since
animals won’t graze in the dark in unfamil-
iar territory, the army must wait each morn-
ing and camp early enough each night to
allow the stock at least an hour of grazing,
depending on how lush the available fodder
is.

If a commander insists on a forced
march, or if one is absolutely necessary, his
stock will pay for it. A forced march is
defined as moving more than 8 hours in a
day at normal speed or moving 8 hours a
day at faster than normal speed, that is, at
faster than a walk-trot-walk for laden ani-
mals or gallop-trot-walk-gallop for cavalry.
Well-fed stock can make a forced march of 2
days without harm, provided that they can
rest for a full day afterward. If not, and
especially if the forced march continues, the
army will lose 10% of its horses and 05% of
its mules on that third day, as it will also do
on the fourth day. If a forced march con-
tinues without a day of rest past that point,
the army will lose 20% (of the beginning
total) of all stock every day the march con-
tinues. These penalties are cumulative.
Stock fed only on grass or watered inade-
quately as well as being force-marched will
founder at a doubled rate.

Moving it along

Now we can turn to the daily movement
rate of an army and see that the crucial
point is not how many miles an hour an
army can march, but how many hours a
day it can stay on the march. The hourly
movement rate for an army will be much
the same as for an individual foot soldier,
that is, 3 miles per hour. (This rate has to
be modified for terrain, of course, using the
referee’s own system.) What the referee has
to determine is how many hours a day will
be available for moving at this rate.
 

The first thing that the gamemaster has
to consider is any limitations imposed by
traveling with carts. As we’ve seen, oxcarts
can only travel 5 hours a day, period. Al-
though horses can keep pulling for 8 hours,
cart breakdowns will cause delays, so that
horsecarts will be on the road only 6 hours a
day.

If the army is traveling with a pack train,
food will be the main limiting factor. In
summer, with sufficient food, the army can
indeed move a full 8 hours per day. In the
short days of spring and fall, taking time to
let the horses graze reduces movement to 6
hours per day. If the army needs supplies,
the referee has to determine how many
hours it will take to provision the army.
Specific figures for all situations are impos-
sible to give here, but I suggest that buying
food takes at least 2 hours and extorting it 4
hours, for 1 day’s worth of food. This time
should be doubled for 2-3 days’ worth and
tripled for 4-5 days’ worth. It’s thus possible
for a large army to spend several days ac-
quiring provisions.

There are a number of optional factors
that the gamemaster might wish to take into
account when determining available march-
ing time. Since a grumbling, disorganized
army takes a long time to get moving, the
referee could penalize demoralized troops
for an hour of march time. If water is
scarce, there could be penalties for the time
spent searching for it. Finally, if an army is
marching into unknown territory, the game-

master could decide that it must spend
several hours a day waiting for advance
scouts to rejoin the group.
By taking account of logistics and using
this system of determining available march
time, daily movement will range from 10
miles per day for an army using oxcarts to
24 miles per day for a well-provisioned
army with a pack train. Since these rates
are much lower than those in most game
systems, let’s look at a couple of historical
examples to see if the system is accurate.
Alexander the Great’s army, the speed of
which absolutely dazzled the ancient world,
averaged 20 miles a day. During the Nor-
man Conquest, King Harold, desperate
though he was to engage William, took a
full week to march the 135 miles from York
to London. Charlemagne’s army, which
used oxcarts, averaged 8 to 10 miles a day.
Any player, therefore, who wants to
march 60 miles in two days — just because
the rules in his system allow it — is delud-
ing himself, as the gamemaster is now in a
position to point out.

Logistics and the game

Including logistics in a campaign does
more than add a certain sour note of real-
ism to play. Gamers forced to operate
within the limits of their armies will have to
make fascinating strategic decisions, while
gamemasters can add those extra touches
that keep campaigns dangerous to the over-
bold and rewarding to the clever.

<missing paragraph>

as much as the besieged do. By keeping
track of the food taken from the surround-
ing countryside, the gamemaster may well
find that the besiegers have eaten the terri-
tory bare. In that case, they will either have
to negotiate with the besieged or else bring
in supplies from a distant area. Such long
supply lines will be in danger from attacks
by allies of the besieged, as well as draining
men from the siege itself.

Logistics are so important to a medieval
campaign that the historian H.J. Hewitt
wrote:“Medieval warfare is not solely, nor
even largely, battles and sieges. For weeks
and even months on end, it is military
pressure exerted by the destruction of life,
property, and the means by which life is
maintained” —that is, fields, farms, and
livestock. A player character who neglects
this important truth should learn his mis-
takes the hard way, just as Napoleon did
during the invasion of Russia. It was then
that the great general forgot his own good
advice:“An army marches on its stomach.”

Bibliography

1. Beeler, John, Warfare in Feudal Europe, Cornell University Press.

2. Grigg, D. B., The Agricultural Systems of the World, Cambridge University Press.

3. Engels, Donald, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, University of California Press.

4. Tellen, Maurice, The Draft Horse Primer, Rodale Press.
 
 

LETTERS

Rational question
-
Dear Dragon,
I read Katharine Kerr's article on feeding an
army in motion ("An army travels on its stomach,
" issue #94) and I was glad that someone
finally outlined a system for feeding an army.
After reading it I was left with one major question.
In the Players Handbook, on the equipment
list, iron rations are listed as costing 5 g.p. for
one week's worth. My question is simple: Could
a soldier function normally if given only iron
rations and water? Iron rations are not very
expensive and last a long time without spoiling.

Jonathan Zaleski
Selden, N. Y.
(Dragon #96)


I think a soldier could "function normally" if
all he consumed was iron rations and water, but
the problem of having enough food for a large
army is not solved just by having each man pack
a supply of iron rations, for these reasons:

On a small scale, it may be true that "iron
rations are not very expensive." But let's imagine
a 1,000-man army that's about to go on a march
that could take as long as two weeks. It would
cost 10,000 gold pieces to buy two weeks' worth
of iron rations for every soldier -- assuming that
the leader of the army can find a merchant who
has 2,000 one-week portions of iron rations to
sell.

According to Appendix O of the DMG, a
portion of iron rations has an encumbrance value
of 75 gp, so that two weeks' worth would take up
150 gp worth of weight and space in a soldier?s
gear. Each soldier would also have to carry a
substantial amount of non-edible equipment, and
the result might be that many soldiers wouldn't
be able to carry all their necessary gear and also
have room for a supply of food. You can't count
on being able to pick up non-edible equipment
while on the march, but it would be a lot easier to
find food along the way. So, many of the soldiers
would not be able to pack all the food they would
need, and they would have to find it while they're
on the move.

And even if every soldier could carry enough
iron rations to last him throughout the journey,
that doesn't address the problem of how to feed
the animals that are traveling with the army. For
the reasons described in the article, it would
probably still be necessary for the army to find
some food along the way to keep all of the horses,
mules, etc., alive and able to do their jobs.

So, although it's a good idea that might work
in some situations, iron rations would not solve
all the problems of how to feed an army on the
march. 

-- KM
(Dragon #96)