Review: A Practical Guide to Medieval Warfare: Exploring History through Wargaming

tl:dr; a great source of detail for medieval warfare that can enrich your TTRPG games.

"A Practical Guide to Medieval Warfare: Exploring History through Wargaming" by Richard Brooks and John Curry was something I stumbled onto trotting about on the web at Weaver.skepti.ch and was seized by an excerpt that tried to reality check behaviour on medieval battlefields using modern analogues as well as original sources. This is both an interesting read and a great source for anyone describing melee combat in TTRPGs. I am reviewing with my table-top GM hat firmly in place, war-gamers will probably get a lot more out of this. I thought it was great even when I was not the target audience.

The kindle version I got has some proofing issues, nothing that made it unreadable but there is an editing pass missing. With that out of the way, this is exactly what it says on the tin - a practical guide. Deeper books of scholarship are certainly out there but to get you up the curve from 'I know nothing' to 'I won't make ridiculous errors' this is great bang for buck.

So what is in the book?
First section: medieval operational art of war
Second section: the medieval battle
Third section: sieges and street fighting
Fourth section has a number of rulesets for wargaming.
Game #1: Middle Aged Spread - Battle level rules 1066-1485
Game #2: Sword and Spear: Wargaming Low-Level Battle Tactics
Game #3: Once More unto the Breach: Skirmish Rules
Game #4: Gaming Retreats: Cymerau
Game #5: Gaming Cattle Raids

Going by section first we have medieval operational art of war for approx the first tenth of the book. This is interesting for a DM in how forces are assembled, the sizes of units fielded, how medieval armies conducted themselves and other aspects of marshalling forces to the field. Great stuff for getting the feel of medieval forces right - giant uniform blocks of professional soldiers wielding the same weapons is not what you want - if we are working with the time of full-plate armour then units are personal retinues with a mix of arms and armour within them. The basic unit of force is a small combined arms group capable of doing most things - somewhat like an adventuring party!

The next tenth of the book covers the medieval battle on how battles were conducted when forces met in the field. Where this section excels is parts like the previously mentioned anecdote where reenactors (with no concern for surviving the battle) and LARP-ers (who had persistent characters) both participated in a raid that went wrong. The reenactors fought to the death in place while the LARPers fought their way out of the trap and fled. Insights like this on how battles most probably played out are gold for getting the atmosphere of the fights at your table right.

The third section, sieges and street fighting, takes us to the 1/3 mark. More gold on building-to-building fighting, sieges, castle raids and other close quarters fights in constructed environments - something like dungeons! Again lots of nice detail, interesting anecdotes and behavioural insights to weave into your gaming - things like night raids are hard normally because the defenders know the castle and will douse any lights at the first sign of trouble leaving the attackers to blunder around in the dark or signal their presence with torches (or light spells) and draw fire from archers.

Fourth section has a number of rulesets for wargaming. These take up the back two-thirds of the book and get down into the details of setting up wargames. Interesting for what it is and potentially useful for running a larger scale conflict at the table - I could see some of these potentially integrating nicely with hex-crawls or domain scale play if you want something light and fast. The focus in the book is on tweaking forces and rules to more or less repliably replicate what actually happened at the historical battles studies which is perhaps a different arm of the hobby than the fantasy battles side of things I would find myself in.

While the rulesets may not be ones I would immediately reach for, each one frames up a typical scale of conflict for the era together with historical examples. You get a sense of the major scenarios and there is plenty of fodder for inspiration in all of this.

All told I greatly enjoyed this, ranging from interested to cackling with delight at the best details. Well worth a read.

Some more on this can be found on the authors blog.