2/10/2025 - Combat and Monsters

2 days ago by Ward Against Evil (@ReeseSurles)

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Changes to the Combat System

After some recent playtesting, I noticed three things:

When the combat works, it works well, and you get some truly epic fights
When the combat doesn’t work, it is boring because it doesn’t have bounded accuracy like other games
In either case, stunts are under-utilized

So! Let’s fix it! The solution was obvious in hindsight.

Missing is no longer a null result, if you miss an attack you at least Mark the target. This means that the next attack made against them, assuming it hits, stunts, and if it would stunt anyway, it performs any stunt of your choosing.

Suddenly, missing is not so boring and stunts are being used in much more interesting ways!

Another thing I realized was rolling for initiative every round slows down the game, however it was a great fix for the mounted combat system. So, now you only roll for initiative at the start of a fight, but if you’re on horseback that’s one of the perks you get, that you can reroll your initiative at the start of any round.

Also, if you get a critical success on your initiative check you get to take two actions in the opening round. I’ve had a few situations where players “waste” a crit on initiative and I’d like to reward them.

New Art and Compatibility Badges

There are two new pieces of art in the book. You’ll see them on the first few pages. We also have official compatibility badges! Add them to your covers and thumbnails to show off the system! You can download them along with the updated Quickstart Rules on the main page.

A Full List of Animals

The animals section of the Bestiary is fully laid-out and is available for free in the Quickstart Rules. I think the Quickstart rules will also get a full list of the Folk (humans), which will add up to around 32 monsters out of the 80. I think that’s pretty reasonable, and there’s a lot of encounters you can build with those two sections and some elbow grease.

What's Coming Up the Pipe?

Art-wise, we’re working through the book from beginning to end, so up next is a stylized character sheet (the simplified character sheet will still be available as well for those who don’t want all the art), then we get into Death and Bloodshed.

Rules-wise, I’m going to change the spells that are available to the Quickstart Rules which means laying out some new ones. Instead of four disconnected spells, it’ll be two pairs of inverts.

After that, we’re going to start powering through the monsters. Some preliminary layout has told me that the page numbers for the Bestiary section in the Table of Contents is accurate. We did 20, 60 more to go!