Well, in a project like this there will always be some products that fall by the wayside, and that is the case with the Battlesystem set that we are covering here. I should have noticed when I covered Dragons of Ice (#388) that it was already using Battlesystem stuff in one of the sections, but I didn’t… so this should have been reviewed before Dragons of Ice (it came out a couple of months earlier). However, now that there is a bunch of Battlesystem stuff coming up the pipeline, I remembered that I forgot! So here it is!

What is Battlesystem I hear you asking? Basically it’s what the name says, a system to integrate large scale battles into (Advanced) Dungeons & Dragons, going back to the game’s origins in tabletop wargames, this parallel system shows up to make players able to control large armies on the field in the context of a TTRPG, bringing a bit of that Warhammer goodness to D&D. 

It’s no coincidence that this system is showing up at the same time as Dragonlance’s story is advancing. Dragonlance is set in a world at war and where epic battles are very much a part of its story, the first instances for the use of Battlesystem are precisely Dragonlance modules, such as DL6: Dragons of Ice and the upcoming DL8: Dragons of War, some Battlesystem dedicated modules set in other worlds are also upcoming. Bundled with this set are some other Dragonlance battles that can be inserted retroactively in earlier modules (such as DL2) as well as an art book teaching you how to paint miniatures written by Steve Winter.