I don't have a cinematic battle on horseback, but you might want to check the War of the Burning Sky Player's Guide (available as PWYW on DTRPG). It has a section on large-scale combat that avoids making the jump to mass combat or wargaming. It introduces the concept of Victory Points (VP) which the PCs earn through various missions. Earning enough VP through successful missions means the overall battle is won, and you can set up various degrees of success or failure based on the final VP total. These missions can include defense of a target, assassination, raising morale, acts of sabotage, or anything else you want to come up with, and they can scale based on the size of the battle. A month long siege would have bigger missions. Having these little vignettes planned out lets you build the overall cinematic moment because the PCs are not necessarily set in one place fighting waves of enemies. Your narration moves them from set piece to set piece, and the PCs don't have to win every mission, but they need enough VP through successes to have a favorable outcome. A loss in one section could have them retreat and take a longer route or have to expend resources, or have some allies help them which means the allies are not handling their main objective. As the PCs go through the encounters, you narrate what is happening around them and between encounters. You could break down the battle for Helm's Deep from The Two Towers into vignettes for the VP system. The PCs hold off scouts as the refugees flee for Helm's Deep, prepare traps and fortifications, give a rousing speech, repel enemies scaling the walls, hold a breach in the wall long enough for allies to escape, etc. If the PCs succeed at enough of the various vignettes, they hold out long enough for the Gandalf to arrive with reinforcements. The overall narration can have the PCs still having to retreat even with a success (because of the overwhelming enemy numbers), but the retreat to the hold is slower narratively, which means the reinforcements arrive in time. A single battle like you are suggesting could have smaller goals like escaping a pincer maneuver, breaking through an enemy line, gaining the high ground, reaching a bridge first, or killing a warlord. This system is used in The Mad King's Banquet , the fourth adventure in the War of the Burning Sky campaign saga (and again in the final adventure). While the adventure is for 5e, the VP system is game system agnostic. <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/bundle/3843/wotbs-the-mad-kings-banquet" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/bundle/3843/wotbs-the-mad-kings-banquet</a> I would only suggest you buy this if you want to see the VP system in action, because while the adventure is a lot of fun, it doesn't have a cinematic combat on horseback. The adventure is for level 7-8 but contains a method for boosting the encounters for PCs of a different level or larger parties. There is a large battle in this adventure, and most of the PCs' involvement happens before the battle. The race against time to convince allies to join, sabotage the enemy as they march, and enlist mercenaries guerilla attacks. The night before the battle, they sneak into the enemy camps to assassinate an enemy commander and sabotage the catapults. All of this affects the strength of the enemies and allies during the battle, and the PCs see a bit of this as they hold a section of the line against an enemy onslaught. In the future, you might want to mine the other adventures in War of the Burning Sky for encounters or ideas for adventures built around what war looks like in a realm filled with magic. The campaign saga has adventures all the way to level 20 which include raiding a castle of undead for clues to a mighty artifact that can turn the tide of the war, find evidence of war crimes, hunt down the artifact and the person that stole it through their trap-filled land, repair the artifact, destroy a magical superweapon, liberate a city, rescue a dragon from a dream realm, destroy a mile-long living airship with a death ray, and stop an immortal empress from casting a spell which will forever bind the world to war. <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/publisher/230" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/publisher/230</a>
