How do I run a Horde so it feels like a horde?

I used to run a Horde like a Solo with a bigger HP bar. It was one body and one swing, and the players waited for the real monster to turn up. The table never felt outnumbered. The fix was fiction first. The rules describe a Horde as a group of identical creatures acting together as a single unit, so I describe many bodies under one spotlight, and every Hit Point it marks is part of the swarm falling away.

Horde fiction at my table

The rules make this easy. A Horde’s stat block says how many creatures each Hit Point stands for, so a 2/HP Horde with 3 HP is six bodies. When the players make it mark one HP, two of them go down, and I say which two. Once the Horde has marked half or more of its HP, its standard attack switches to the smaller damage listed in its Horde feature, so the thinning is in the numbers as well as the fiction.

When I spotlight a Horde, I describe a press of bodies coming from several angles at once, not a champion. The mistake is talking about “it” as if the Horde were a single foe with a nameplate. The moment I do that, the swarm is gone.

Fear for a surge

I spend Fear on a Horde when the fiction wants a surge, like refilling a gap, overrunning a chokepoint or catching someone who tries to slip away. I do not spend it on every Fear result just because the Horde is on the table. The environment and the ordinary spotlight usually carry enough pressure. I save the spend for the moment the swarm should feel unfair for a breath, and then I let the characters carve it back.

Places that make a Horde work

A Horde needs a place that keeps asking where you stand when there are too many of them. At a chokepoint the Horde wants through. In the open it surrounds you. In a narrow street it becomes a wall. I pair it with an environment whose impulses are about space and numbers, and the fight does the rest. I wrote more about that in running environments at the table.

A Horde scene from our campaign

On the first night of the relief run to Scholea, the university town was under siege, and the only way in was a long causeway across the dammed lake. By then our table was down to three players. James plays Lenobius, Tom plays Ratchett, our Clank Warrior, and Izzy plays Tak, our sniper. I built the causeway as a Tier 2 Traversal environment and put a Tier 2 Horde of remnants on it, every one of them carrying the green scorch from the night the embers fell.

The opening spotlight was the mass filling the far end of the causeway. Ratchett’s first hit made the Horde mark HP, and I narrated a knot of remnants going over the rail into the lake while the rest shoved forward. I held my Fear until Tak broke away to climb a gatehouse for a better shot. That was the moment for a surge, so I spent a Fear to put the spotlight on the Horde and had the press cut off the climb. Holding it that long turned the dash for the gate into the climax of the scene. If I had spent it in the first minute, they would simply have been flattened.

The scene ended when the party reached Scholea’s gate, not when the last body fell. There were still remnants on the causeway, and they became the next session’s problem.

What I would do tonight

Name the swarm and spotlight it as many bodies. Narrate the thinning on every Hit Point it marks. Spend Fear only on a surge that changes where people can stand, and end the scene when its job is done, even if a few bodies are still screaming. If you are choosing between a swarm and a single big threat, I wrote about spotlighting Minions versus a Solo.

There are free sheets on the Resources hub if you want a pad for the fight.