Combat
Combat resolves as a contest between two characters rather than as a roll against a fixed difficulty: attacker and defender each test, and the margin between their success levels decides how decisively the exchange went. Nothing about that is peculiar to fighting — it is an ordinary Opposed Test, applied to the one situation in the game where the stakes are usually mortal.
Combat is the most rules-dense part of play because it is where the most is at risk, but the shape of it is small. One exchange is one contest. Everything else — reach, aim, impact, armour, the wound, the shock, the nerve that fails afterwards — hangs off that single comparison.
Rounds and Turns
A fight proceeds in rounds. Within a round each combatant takes a turn, and on their turn they act: attack, move, or do something else the situation allows. A combatant may also be called on between their turns — to defend against an attack, and to make the tests that a wound or a fright provokes.
Turn order is Initiative Rank: combatants act in order of their Initiative Mastery Level, highest first. Nothing is rolled for it. The rank is what the character brought to the fight, and it does not change as the fight goes badly for them — a terrified, bleeding veteran still acts when their Initiative says they do.
An Exchange
An attack and the response to it are a single exchange, resolved at once rather than in two turns:
- The attacker chooses a strike mode — the particular way the blow is delivered — and a target to use it on.
- The attacker tests, and the defender blocks, counterstrikes, dodges or ignores, and tests that.
- The two results are compared. Whether anyone lands a blow, and what advantage the exchange leaves behind, both follow from that comparison.
- A landed blow rolls impact, finds its hit location, and becomes a wound.
- The wound is then a matter for Trauma — its severity, the shock it deals, and whether the victim’s nerve holds.
Attack Resolution sets that sequence out in full, and is the page to read first. What the other pages add is what differs between kinds of attack.
Kinds of Attack
How an attack is delivered depends on the strike mode being used — the specific way a weapon, a natural weapon, or an empty hand is brought to bear — and on whether the attacker closes to melee, looses at range, or fights unarmed:
- Melee — at contact, tested against Melee, with all four defences available and both combatants inside each other’s reach.
- Missile — across ground the attacker does not cross, tested against Archery, Throwing or Sling, where range costs precision and the target usually cannot strike back.
- Unarmed — trained techniques of the body, weak on damage but capable of things no weapon does: disarming, holding, tripping, pressing.
A combatant’s posture matters throughout: a prone fighter is at a disadvantage both in attacking and in answering an attack.