Odds, Ends & the Situations Combat Doesn't Cover
An ambush differs from mutual surprise (see Both Sides Surprised, below) in that it's deliberately arranged. Ambushers sneaking into position need a successful Move Quietly, or a successful Hide if they're already lying in wait when the plan is made. Targets crossing sparse cover get a Search or Luck roll to spot the ambushers first, much as with Partial Concealment.
Sometimes neither side plans the encounter — two parties round a corner, or a fight's chaos suddenly reveals a new combatant. Who reacts first depends on the situation: the lower DEX or Listen roll might grant initiative, or in the dark, comparing Idea rolls feels fairer. Absent any better justification, fall back on DEX ranks — this is really a question of mental quickness rather than physical speed.
A target who is substantially, but not completely, hidden — and who isn't moving or otherwise drawing attention — is only half as likely to be noticed as normal.
Semi-darkness halves any weapon-related skill. In true darkness, every vision-dependent skill, weapon skills included, falls to a third of normal, or to half the character's Search skill, whichever is lower — this represents how sharp the character's other senses are.
In pitch darkness, or against something invisible, an attack becomes guesswork: roll INT x3, POW x3, or a quarter of the relevant weapon skill, whichever is smallest. If the hidden target has a strong smell or makes noise, the attacker may instead use half Scent/Taste or half Listen, respectively.
Candles, torches, and lanterns are the everyday sources of portable light, sufficient for reading or searching by.
Against a creature or Chaos thing of SIZ 30 or larger, add five percentiles to a missile attacker's chance to hit for every ten points of SIZ above thirty, range modifiers still applying. Conversely, subtract five percentiles for every point of SIZ a small target falls below SIZ 5, again with range modifiers applying on top.
Spending extra time lining up a missile shot improves the odds: for every five DEX-ranks the shot is delayed, add ten percent of the current skill to the chance to hit that round (round fractions up), though the shot must still be fired that same round. Careful aim has no effect once the range passes double the weapon's base range.
Aiming at a fixed point — a doorway, say — and waiting for someone to step into it requires the target to be at half base range or closer for the archer to keep the full chance to hit; otherwise there isn't time for the shot before the target can move clear.
Aiming for a specific, small part of a target — a hand, an eye — is considerably harder: halve the chance to hit, though the bonus for careful aim still applies in full if DEX-ranks were spent delaying the shot.
A missile attacker can try for a hit out to double the weapon's base range at half the normal chance, out to triple range at a quarter chance, and out to quadruple range at an eighth chance. Beyond double range, halve the damage the missile does. Thrown knives and axes have no chance to hit at all past double their base range.
A missile weapon's chance to hit doubles once the range to target is no more than the attacker's DEX in feet. Once the range closes to touching distance, the exchange stops being missile combat and is resolved as hand-to-hand instead. A target unable to resist is hit automatically; a fumble at point-blank still does only the weapon's minimum damage.
Firing a missile weapon up at more than a 45° angle costs the shooter 20 percentiles; firing down at more than 45° costs 30.
When combatants stand at heights roughly like tabletop versus floor, and their weapons are of similar length, the lower fighter's chance to hit drops 10 percentiles while the higher fighter's rises 10. If the lower combatant instead wields the longer weapon (long against medium or short), the height difference stops mattering.
Halve the attacker's chance to hit defenders who fight from a standing or kneeling position behind stone, wood, or similar solid cover. Those who crouch or kneel behind such cover can't be struck by small missile fire at all, though catapults and magical attacks can still reach them.
A gate, corridor, or similar choke point limits how many attackers can bring weapons to bear and shields the defender's flanks — a single swordsman holding a narrow passage can hold off a much larger force for a while. This works best when the defender's weapon is at least as long as the attackers'.
Cramped quarters — a crowded plaza works as well as a tiny room — restrict which weapons can be used effectively. A long weapon needs at least two yards of open space to deploy; a medium weapon, especially a chopping one, needs a yard; a short weapon only needs to be free of a successful Wrestle — a foot or so of clearance is enough. If a weapon can't be deployed in the available space, its user's effective skill drops to a quarter of normal.
Judge how many attackers can actively engage a single target by the weapons in play. Ordinarily no more than five swordsmen can surround one adventurer with room to swing; in a smaller space, perhaps only two great-sword wielders have room at once, while in an open area, as many as eight spearmen might be able to thrust at a single surrounded defender.
With a successful DEX x3 roll, an adventurer can squeeze in one extra attack on the last DEX-rank of the round, at 50 percentiles or their normal skill, whichever is lower. The following round, all attacks are forfeited as payment. Dodges and parries aren't affected either way.
Disarming takes an opponent's weapon out of their hand and, by force or threat, keeps them from drawing a second one. Two approaches exist:
To break off a fight when the other side wants to keep going, use a successful knock-back attack, a successful dodge, or simply turn and run — though running grants the opponent one free attack that can't be parried.
Entangling attacks use flexible weapons — nets, ropes, chains, whips — and require a stated intent at the start of the round; the attempt is made from a distance. A success prevents the target from moving or attacking for the rest of that round and all of the next, buying the attacker time to close. After that, a DEX x3 roll (or a knife attack against a net) frees the target. A successful STR-versus-STR roll on the Resistance Table can also use an entangling weapon to wrench a parrying weapon from a defender's grip.
A successful Dodge or Wrestle roll negates an entangling attempt; a critical parry negates a critical entangle, though an ordinary parry does nothing against one.
A knock-back attack shoves the defender back — usually with a shield — while the shield's rim slams into the target's chin, stunning and disorienting. The target is pushed back one yard for every point the attacker's STR exceeds the target's SIZ, with a minimum of one yard. Neither of the following can be parried:
Either way, the target needs a successful DEX roll or ends up sprawled on the ground.
To render a target unconscious rather than kill them, declare that intent at the start of the round, then attack normally. Damage equal to a major wound knocks the target out with no lasting harm; damage equal to a minor wound deals the weapon's minimum damage without knocking the target out. Armor defends as usual. A successful knockout leaves the target unconscious for at least 1D10+10 rounds. This only works against humans and humanoids.
This is a Myyrrhn maneuver, performed with a specialized long spear fitted with a stout crossbar — a pouncing stick. The Myyrrhn warrior dives feet-first onto a foe, striking with the stick's crossbar and adding the momentum of the fall to the blow, which does double damage on a success and triple on a critical. It's a one-use weapon in this style of attack, though it can be retrieved from a fallen foe and reused with a successful Luck roll.
The attacker needs a successful Fly roll afterward to land clear of the foe under control, ready to fight next round but without a weapon in hand, and unable to make further attacks that round. A critical Fly roll instead leaves the warrior airborne again immediately, to the admiration of any watching Myyrrhn (+10 percentiles to Charisma rolls in Myyrrhn society for a week). A failed Fly roll collapses the warrior in a heap near the foe, dealing 1D6 damage from the fall and costing pride (-10 percentiles to Charisma rolls for a week); a fumble doubles that damage.
An adventurer can deliberately do less harm with an attack than the blow could manage — even with a sword, by striking with the flat of the blade. Halve the damage die result, ignore any plus or minus modifiers, and drop the damage bonus entirely. A pulled blow doesn't need to be declared as part of the round's stated intent, only that some kind of restrained attack was meant.
An adventurer can fight with two hand-to-hand weapons instead of one weapon and a shield; the weapons don't need to match. Any adventurer can be declared ambidextrous to try this style. Skill with the off-hand weapon starts at half the current skill with that weapon, tracked as its own separate entry on the character sheet. Beyond the option to riposte, fighting two-handed provides a backup weapon in case of breakage or a fumble, and can be useful in the dark, with a torch in one hand and a blade in the other.
Weapon length matters: a longer weapon is more likely to land the first blow, or to hold off a shorter-armed opponent entirely, but it's also clumsier to use up close.
How much damage an acid does depends more on its dilution than on the type of acid itself. Only significant contact matters for game purposes — a hand or arm immersed, or contact with the eyes.
Illness is rare in the source material. A minor complaint — a cold or mild flu — can follow a failed CON x5 roll after exposure, and typically costs only a hit point or two over the following days. A major disease, such as plague, might attack any characteristic, though hit points or CON are the usual targets; a serious disease should be dangerous, doing something like 1D3 hit points per hour — enough to kill an average person within eight hours — with symptoms varying widely by illness.
Persistent use of the Heal spell can stop most natural disease in its tracks; anything stronger calls for more serious magic.
This applies to drowning in any liquid, to suffocation of any kind (including a demon's suffocation ability), and to strangulation by hand or cord. An adventurer unable to breathe rolls CON x5 or less on the first combat round of the crisis; that multiplier drops by one each subsequent round — CON x4, then x3, and so on down to CON x1, where it stays. An adventurer with no chance to grab a breath beforehand starts at the lower CON x3 multiplier instead.
A failed roll means the respiratory system takes injury: 1D6 hit points lost that round and every round after, until escape, rescue, or death.
Nothing in the source material describes true explosives, though a bursting boiler or an exploding cask of strong spirits falls well within what the Young Kingdoms could produce. Explosions do hit-point damage in expanding rings, calculated in D6s.
A fall costs 1D6 hit points for every three yards dropped (or fraction of the first three yards). A successful Jump roll made before landing reduces the damage by 1D6. Armor gives no protection against a fall — plate actually adds an extra 1D6 points of damage from its own weight and rigidity. Damage from a falling object striking someone else is worked out with the Throw skill instead.
Only the gamemaster declares fatigue — most fights are too short for it to matter. Even so: an adventurer starts to tire after CON x3 uninterrupted rounds of combat, doubling the chance of a fumble from then on. After CON x4 continuous rounds, the fumble chance quadruples. Complete exhaustion — unable even to lift a sword — sets in after CON x10 uninterrupted rounds. A lull in the fighting, when both sides pull back to catch their breath, resets the clock.
Fire temperatures range from a torch or small campfire up through the white heat of a forge bellows. Armor insulates against fire for 1D6 combat rounds; after that, the wearer takes fire damage as though unarmored.
Rate every poison by its potency (POT), then pit that potency against the victim's CON on the Resistance Table — the poison is the active side of the roll. If the poison overcomes the target's CON, illness or death follows: the victim usually loses hit points equal to the poison's POT. If the target overcomes the poison instead, they still lose hit points equal to half the POT. A mild poison that's overcome might cause only momentary upset, or nothing at all.
The gamemaster should pick whatever outcome best fits the story; lingering illness and discomfort can last up to as many days as hit points were lost.
Fast-acting poisons take hold within a round or two — cyanide can kill inside a minute — but most poisons work slowly, worsening over hours. A poison like arsenic can be built up as a tolerance: a subtle poisoner who ingests small, increasing doses over months can eventually shrug off quantities that would kill an unprepared victim in hours.
| Poison | POT | Onset & Symptoms (paraphrased) |
|---|---|---|
| Adder venom* | 10 | 15–60 min; swelling, sweating, violent spasms |
| Arsenic | 16 | 1–24 hrs; severe pain, vomiting, violent diarrhea |
| Belladonna | 16 | 2–48 hrs; racing heart, blurred vision, hallucination, convulsions |
| Cyanide | 20 | 1–15 min; dizziness, convulsions, fainting |
| Dragon venom* | 20** | 1–5 min; intense, maddening pain and vivid hallucinations |
| Mushrooms | 15 | 6–24 hrs; violent cramps, vomiting, hallucination, jaundice |
| Noidel berries | 15 | 1–2 hrs; fatigue, sweating, pain building to death |
| Scorpion sting* | 9 | 1–2 days; intense pain, weakness, hemorrhaging |
| Spider bite* | 8 | 1–6 hrs; chills, sweating, nausea |
| Strychnine | 20 | 10–20 min; violent muscle contractions, asphyxiation |
| Viper venom* | 16 | 15–60 min; convulsions, respiratory failure |
| Wine of Bakshaan | no POT | 1–2 hrs; hallucinations, and madness on a failed POW x5 roll |
*POT for living-creature venoms averages across the species and can vary by the individual's health, age, or sex.
**Once cooled and hardened, dragon venom can instead serve as a restorative in the hands of someone who knows how to use it.
A sufficiently terrifying experience can bring on stupefaction, disorientation, hallucination, or outright unconsciousness. The gamemaster decides when this kind of mental shock applies — witnessing a massacre, failing to save someone dear, coming face to face with an awful Chaos apparition, and the like. A Luck roll ends the effect immediately; failure lets it linger for days.
Sudden movement on a slick surface risks a fall. A successful Dexterity roll avoids it entirely; for the sake of keeping play moving, only a roll of 00 costs the victim 1D6 hit points from the tumble. See also Fighting While Down.
Knockout attacks, electrical shocks, knock-backs, falls, and similar jolts can incidentally stun an adventurer for several rounds. A roll above CON x5 means the character is stunned; each round afterward, a roll of CON x5 or less ends the effect. While stunned, an adventurer can still parry, dodge, or crawl and stagger to safety, but can't attack or cast magic.
Acid, fire, or a chaotic effect can ruin armor outright, and a critical hit could conceivably destroy one segment of it — though exactly which segment is lost usually matters little to the adventurer wearing the rest. When it does matter to show partially destroyed armor, roughly halve its defense roll, rounding in the wearer's favor (1D6-1 becomes 1D3, for instance). That same fraction also represents what repairs will cost — mending half-damaged leather and rings, for example, runs about 300 bronze pieces.
Fumbles and parries alike can break weapons. A weapon breaks outright if it parries a blow whose rolled damage exceeds the weapon's remaining hit points by at least one point. An improvised weapon instead loses hit points every time it lands a blow. See also Shields, below.
A sword still in its scabbard, or a shield slung across the back, isn't ready for instant use. Drawing or sheathing a weapon is an action that costs five DEX-ranks in the combat round. A fighter with 101 percent or more skill in a weapon is proficient enough to draw or sheathe it without spending a separate action at all, folding it into another five-rank action, and can even exchange such weapons within a single five-rank window.
There's no inherent combat bonus for fighting unarmored. That said, gamemasters should watch for moments — leaps, jumps, tests of balance — where an armored fighter's chances should suffer relative to an unarmored one. When only one side is armored, reduce that side's chances in such situations; when both sides are equally armored, or equally bare, ignore the difference.
A shield carried normally, as in melee, can also block incoming missiles. A half or small shield has a 15 percent chance to block a missile; a full shield, 30 percent; a large shield, 60 percent. Kneeling and bracing behind the shield improves this further: a full shield blocks 60 percent of the time, and a large shield 90 percent. Only ordinary successful hits are stopped this way — impales and critical hits get through regardless.
Light leather and barbarian armors stay buoyant enough, until soaked through, that a swimmer needs no Swim roll to stay afloat; sea leather in particular never saturates, which is much of its appeal. Heavier armor — leather and rings, half plate, half plate and mail — requires a successful Swim roll every round or the wearer begins to drown. Plate armor can't be swum in at all; its wearer sinks like a stone.
Armor can be removed underwater in the same number of rounds it takes to put on, with a successful Dexterity roll each round; failing that roll instead requires a successful Swim roll or the wearer starts to drown. Cutting the straps to shed armor entirely underwater works too, but the armor falls away and is lost for good.
To throw something that isn't a proper weapon, use the Throw skill. The gamemaster sets the base range, and damage rarely exceeds 1D6. Normal half damage bonus applies as with any thrown object, though some items are simply too heavy or unwieldy to be thrown with any force — those are effectively dropped rather than hurled, and get no damage bonus at all. Using a large object in hand-to-hand combat, such as slamming a boulder down on a downed opponent, treats it as an improvised large club rather than a thrown weapon. See also the Throw skill.
Giants, gods, and other enormous beings can strike several targets at once with a single step or a single blow. How this resolves may be clear from the creature's statistics or from the situation itself — the coverage of the blow, and whether it's aimed or incidental. Failing other guidance, choose whichever of STR or SIZ fits better, and let every ten points of it equal 1D6 points of damage dealt to every target caught in the area.
"Down" means tripped or fallen, usually sprawled on the back, facing a still-standing attacker. The downed defender's chance to hit drops 20 percentiles, while the standing attacker's chance rises 20. The person on the ground gets no damage bonus while down, and can't fight with a two-handed weapon, though they can still parry. A successful Dodge roll gets the downed adventurer back on their feet. See also Superior/Inferior Position, above.
Missile fire is possible from horseback, but only at a percentage no higher than the rider's own Ride skill. On foot, running while throwing or firing straight ahead is possible at normal percentage; running while throwing or firing to the side isn't possible at all. An adventurer can instead move for half the round, then throw or shoot in the other half, at the appropriate DEX-rank.
Outside of jousting with lances or an outright charge, mounted combat happens at fairly modest speed. A mounted rider's fighting skill — attacking and parrying alike — can never exceed their Ride skill, and Dodge drops to 50 percent unless it's already lower, since only the head, arms, and upper torso have much freedom of movement in the saddle.
A successful knock-back attack dismounts a mounted opponent, as does a major wound, and the gamemaster may rule other effects can do the same. A rider must dismount to retrieve a fumbled weapon. When fighting an unmounted opponent, use the Superior/Inferior Position rule instead.
A charging, weapon-wielding rider uses the horse's damage bonus rather than their own; charging into a braced spear adds the horse's damage bonus to the spear's damage as well. A charge is made at the end of a full movement. Much of a charge's power comes from demoralizing the opposition into breaking ranks and fleeing — a horse will typically shy away rather than crash bodily into a target, and horses are valuable enough as spoils of war that they aren't casually sacrificed.
Wrestling and thrusting weapons — spears, tridents, knives — can attack effectively underwater. Subtract one point from the rolled damage of each such attack to account for the water's resistance; impales are unaffected by this reduction. Double the normal fumble rate underwater.
Armor still works reliably, though the leather belts and ties that hold it in place stretch and weaken with time in the water. Shields are useless underwater.
The attacks-per-round listed for most missile weapons assumes the attacker takes the time to aim and reload each round. An attacker can instead fire volleys toward a massed group of troops, or to pin down defenders: spearmen and axemen can hurl their weapons twice in a round this way, and slingers, archers, and rock-throwers can fire three times — but the chance to hit drops by two-thirds. Besides burning through ammunition quickly, keeping up volley fire is tiring: after CON x2 rounds of volleying, the rate of fire is halved for the next CON/2 rounds before full volleys can resume.