The crowd was silent as Mayor Boone stood toe to toe with the Bandit King. The silence seemed to last forever... Boone putting on his toughest face. The man has never been in a physical fight in his life, The Bandit probably knew that... but this "conflict" was more formality than anything. The Bandit King breaks the silence with crazed laughter, patting Mayor Boone on the cheek, his posse follows with the laughter.The Bandit turns to the crowd "I'm gonna enjoy killing everyone here!" he shouts. Then turns back to the Mayor "But you... I'm going to enjoy making you watch.""If anyone wants to live... you better leave. You'll see us in seven days." The Bandit remarks.As the gang rides out of town, Mayor Boone turns to his assistant "Put in a call to Lionsguard, Send for anyone that will come... anyone that will help."-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How many movies have we seen where a band of ragtag outlaws want to take over a town, but between the heroes of the film, the helpless townsfolk, and roughly 4-7 days, they manage to put together a rube-goldberg line of defense and militia that would stop even the toughest of gangs that Faerun has to offer. With this framework I hope that even your village of misfits can band together to save the town!

With this guide I'll provide the framework and try to inspire you to build off of that to create a memorable fight!

• Establish the setting***:*** When I ran it I had a physical map - I made a target around the town with 3 rings, the bullseye being the town. I then split that target into 5 pieces of pie, These 5 sections would be the "lanes" that the bandits would spawn in. This let my players know that bandits would attack from any of 5 directions and units would advance (at least) 1 ring per round. Bandits would stay in their lane and would be forced to interact with whatever was in their way. With that knowledge I had them assign ALL the stuff that they earned with their villagers around this target. After they assigned all their stuff I let them have the 50 villagers in 5 groups of 10. They were able to assign those groups to be archers or swordsmen and then place them about the map as well.
  • Player Rules: I limited the players to 1 action per turn and that they could only attack the lane they were in. MEANING on their turn they could Position (relocate to a new lane) OR Attack (execute all their attacks in their lane.) The idea is at this point we're at a birds eye view of this fight and the players realistically can't relocate on the other side of town in one turn, thus why I limited to either move or attack. It also builds the dread that If I move away from here it could cost us this unit... but if I don't the back wall will be unguarded. Other than that players had full access to their weapons, items, and spells.
  • DM's: You'll have to decide on your own what all the stuff they earn is "worth" What does a High wall mean? How tough are the towers? What bonus do people stationed in the towers get? How many enemies will a pitchfield burn up til others can get through? How many rings can your archers shoot? how much health do they have? These are all questions you'll need to sort out when your establishing your menu.
• Time Currency: First we need to establish the timeline the bandits gave our town and with that we need to decide on a daily currency for defensive spending. In the story I ran I gave my guys 5 days to prepare and for each day they had 50 townsfolk to assign to duties. At the beginning of every day We would pause and go through the "Menu" (so-to-speak) and assign our 50 villagers to their daily duties. Which brings us to the next step.
• The Menu: (For lack of a better term) The menu is what the players can assign their villagers to on a daily basis. You want to give your crew more choices than they have people for... make them make sacrifices. Doing so won't allow them to make a fortress, but allow them to create their own weaknesses that they will have to deal with during the siege. The options for things to do are limitless but In my game I gave them these options:
  • Build the wall*:* villagers would be assigned to build a wall around the town. Depending on the amount of villagers assigned to wall duty would influence the quality of the wall (more on that next).
  • Build towers: Towers that could be built around the borders of the village that would provide advantage to archers.
  • Build Traps: Spike traps - pitch fields - so on and so forth.
  • Learn magic: Give the villagers the ability to learn basic spells that could help - alarm - fog - darkness.... whatever.
  • Militia: I split my militia into two groups either train Archers or Train Swordsmen.
• The Cost: Now that we have a Menu we need to assign costs to all of our line items. When doing so, take into consideration is this going to be a fixed cost? or variable? Above, I mentioned in the wall building - "the more villagers assigned will improve the quality of the wall." For example in my game this was the rule: Every day you can assign 10 villagers for a low wall - 15 for a medium or 20 for a high wall. IF you assign villagers all 5 days they will complete the wall at the level you assign. IF you miss a day, it will be incomplete in some fashion. Giving this a daily assignment meant that if they wanted a finished wall, they had to commit X-villagers to the job, every day. Towers can be the same - 15 workers can complete 1 tower in 1 day. In the case of the Militia I gave a solid number - 10 per day. You can decide to train archers or swordsmen each day (you can assign 10 to each group per day) For every day that you do - They get a 1 to hit. For example: You assign villagers to an archer platoon for 3 days. That means come the fight Archers will be 3 to hit. I made sure to keep costs in increments 5 AND to include price points at different levels. Doing so made it easy to keep track of villagers spent AND to have a dump job they can pour excess villagers into when they don't know what else to do with them.
• Prepare: The dawn of the fight is here now we need to prepare. Taking into account all the stuff that the players completed we now have to put that on the map. Give them the list of items they have and let them place it about the map.
  • As the DM I also made a couple tables for spawning and the different types of baddies/ events that could come down the lanes.
    • Table 1: Spawning. Easy enough. Assign the lanes numbers, roll a die, spawn bad guy.
    • Table 2: Enemy/Event: This table can be as light or as dense as you want it to be. Come up with some creative stuff that you can throw at the party. Aggro a lane with a Ogre barreling down wiping out militia with a single swipe. Have a flaming boulder shoot down a lane crashing into the town wall. Spawn more than one enemy at once. Have a volley of arrows hit everything in that lane. Have an enemy move 2 rings at a time, or spawn in the first ring. Have a unit that changes lanes at the first sight of danger... Whatever you imagine can be put into this chart.
• Attack! let the players get set, Cue the rain, have the mayor of the town say "so it begins" and execute this plan!

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This scenario was a blast with my crew. I had an over arching story that went along with this, the town they were defending was a hotbed for scientific discovery and invention BUT this town was also cool with human sacrifice and experimentation in the name of Science! Throwing in a narrative crinkle like that might make a party think twice about saving such a place. In my case they never discovered its dark secret and ended up saving the town... but should a party learn of such nefarious behavior it would be fun to see what they would do.

There is a popular board game called Castle Panic which is where I took the main mechanic for the enemies from. You can find plenty of how to play videos on Youtube to get a gist of how the game plays and how you could adapt it to this system.

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Please treat this as a framework and not law... got an idea? cool implement it in! We had a blast with this scenario and it was a really fun creative exercise as a DM.

Enjoy and feel free to ask any questions!