Scalemail: Rules for Mass Combat

Your dungeon-crawlers have become warlords. Now what?

Scalemail is a mass combat supplement for Moldvay Basic and its clones with '70s aesthetics and '80s mechanics. When your B/X campaign reaches the point where armies march and kingdoms hang in the balance, Scalemail gives you a fast, decisive system to resolve it — built entirely from the stats and dice you already own.

No new subsystems. No conversion headaches. Regiments use the same armour classes, hit dice, saving throws, and weapon dice as the monsters in your rulebook. Commanders are your player characters, leading from the front.

Scalemail is in early beta at this stage. Playtesting feedback — on balance, edge cases, and anything that breaks at the table — is very welcome.

The Command Die

The heart of Scalemail is a single elegant mechanic: the dice you roll for initiative become the command dice you spend to issue orders. Move, charge, fire, rally — everything costs a die. Managing that resource under pressure is the game.

What's Inside

• Regiment and commander stat blocks that plug directly into B/X
• A six-phase turn sequence covering movement, missiles, magic, and melee
• Charging, flanking, pursuit, overwatch, bracing, and withdrawal rules
• Full spell conversion tables for clerics, magic-users, and elves
• Flying units, siege engines, and structural damage
• Army building guidance using graph paper and coins — no miniatures required
• Tray dimensions for over thirty common monster types

What You Need

Scalemail requires a copy of Moldvay Basic (B/X) or a compatible clone. A set of polyhedral dice, graph paper, scissors, a tape measure and some coins complete the kit.

Scalemail is released under CC0. Take it, use it, build on it.