I have been toying with running [Red Hand of Doom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hand_of_Doom) again (I last ran it about eight years ago).

One thing I found unsatisfying then was that the hobgoblin foot soldiers are described as professional soldiers, part of a regular army. Their stats don’t match this though; they’re built as regular mooky warriors. So, because I can’t leave well enough alone, I’m trying to rebuild them more like a shield wall with spears. A lot of the set pieces have them starting separate, and I think it will add nice tactical depth if they get more dangerous if they can group up.

I also don’t want the mooks to turn into an existential threat every time.

I am looking at changing them all to fighters (level 2 ideally, level 3 is also good), and giving them tower shields and longspears. That makes them individually more survivable and gives them some tricks with reach, but not actually much more dangerous. If they group up, they’ll have a little block of threatened squares which will make direct assaults more difficult.

The problem is, I can’t find any way to make it work. You need two hands to get reach. There was a *Dragon* magazine feat which allows use of a longspear with a small shield, but that’s not quite the same. I could step down to a shortspear, but that loses reach. Spinning swords are almost right, but that’s a weird thing for an army of hobgoblins to all use, and it’s difficult to just re-skin as a spear (you can wear this spear as a belt? What?). I’m also aware of the Inhuman Reach feat, but I don’t want to introduce aberration blood as a backstory part of a whole army of hobgoblins.

I think the answer is probably feats, but I haven’t found any that solve this. Fighter 3 plus one flaw (weak-willed) is five feats to play with, and all of them can go to this spear-and shield concept.

Anything first-party is fine. Outside that, I don’t see a difference from just using DM-fiat to say it works.