Leisure Reading and Domains at War

Finally got around to reading more of the Black Company series; previous attempts at the Books of Murgen left me cold due to perspective shifts, but making good progress this time.  Read Bleak Season last friday night and then She is the Darkness on sunday (aside: the kindle as a device is terrifying in its ability to enable bibliophilia).  Have postponed starting Water Sleeps until I have recovered from the late nights resulting from the last two bouts of bookserking.

Having run ACKS, however, puts a slightly different light on them.  The line "Combat is mostly fear and fear management" stuck out at me in particular following our Domains at War: Battles playtesting, where morale is how battles are won and lost.  Which has got me thinking...  how hard would it be to set up some of the battles from the books as DaW scenarios?  Two troubles, naturally, are the near-omnipresence of powerful spellcasters who operate outside the Vancian paradigm and copyright complications.  The caster problem is probably surmountable, but I haven't looked too deeply at it yet.  That the BCCS' casters are so damn durable further irritates the problem, though I suppose most of their durability is on the strategic scale (in that the Taken can be killed, but it's hard to keep them dead).  Finally, it might be easiest just to seek out battles where caster presence on either side was fairly minimal; the siege of Dejagore, which got me thinking along these lines in the first place, seems a prime candidate.

I suppose it also might be worthwhile to just model them as high-HD casters / monsters with casting abilities and give that a shot as a "good enough first stab".  The main thing is that when we were playing DaW:B, we lacked enthusiasm due to lack of context within a setting.  Stealing battles from an existing setting might remedy this (and also might provide some good 'sample' DaW:C scenarios too).  Granted, most fantasy literature does not provide good estimates of troop strength or even good maps, which makes this something of a matter of interpretation.

In unrelated news, setting creation progresses.  More to follow.