In Heroes of Battle, the war is the dungeon. Your players simply haven't ever experienced an adventure like this. This book tells you how the armies interact, how the players move from encounter to encounter in the midst of a battle, how they influence the battle's outcome with scouting, planning, and hold-the-line heroics. Your characters have already been to the dungeon; they've never been to war.

10. Sample Encounters: A DM's life is ever busy. From world-building to adventure design, any trick we can find to reduce preparation time should be welcome. Heroes of Battle espouses a new way of building and thinking about large-scale battles, central to which is the focus on warfare as a dungeon-like environment for the characters to move through. This requires a new kind of encounter set up, and Heroes of Battle provides quality examples and pre-built encounters worthy of months of play.

9. Sample Armies: More examples, less work for you. With sample armies ready for you to adapt to your world, you can concentrate on story and world building rather than crunching numbers.

8. 1 Hour = 1 Army: Samples can't do it all, so Heroes of Battle turns army (read "dungeon) preparation into a 1-hour exercise that puts everything you need to get this new kind of dungeon ready for the mayhem that comes when the players arrive.

7. Commanders: What makes one group of foes different from another? How they fight. Put new tactics and new abilities in the hands of your player's foes with the commander rules. These new commander abilities and tactics can change an encounter, making it more challenging, more fun, and more memorable for your players.

6. Planning = Victory: In war, planning is victory, and your players need to know how their actions before the battle can give their allies the edge. Heroes of Battle puts the players in the center of the action before, during, and after the battle. Keep the focus on the players with these simple rules for how their preparations can affect the campaign.

5. Know the Terrain: Designing consistently good encounters requires a lot of different tools. When new monsters and aren't quite enough to give your players a new gaming experience, you just need to mix up the terrain. Every tactical challenge is a little more interesting if the terrain really affects the encounter. New terrain types and great advice on using them make Heroes of Battle a must-have for DMs trying to build great encounters.

4. Siege Engines: Let's face it: simple slug-fests are fun, but they can't be the only kind of encounter you run. Want a little variety? Hit the characters with a trebuchet-flung rock. Use the siege engines in Heroes of Battle to build great set-piece encounters that keep your adventures fresh and engaging.

3. Ancient Battlefields: One more hit on the theme of building new and interesting encounters. The lingering effects of ancient battles turn an otherwise normal encounter into a harrowing and exciting night of play. From undead soldiers to powerful magical effects that change the way spells work, these sites are a low-effort way to make an encounter memorable.

2. Build the Right Adventures: An important part of building a good campaign is building the right adventures for the players to experience. Heroes of Battle provides great advice on when and how to introduce your players to a war-time adventure. Remember those old dungeons ... the ones with stone walls? They'll still be part of the game too, and how you mix in new kinds of adventures is as important as the idea itself.

1. Coolest Dungeon Ever: A new way to play. That's it -- plain and simple; there's a new way to play in this book. You know how to build a dungeon where the walls are stone -- that's what the DM's guide is for. In this dungeon, the walls are squads of elite troops; entire armies even.