Gear is the physical property a character owns and carries — weapons, armor, tools, supplies, coin, and everything in between. Each piece of gear is its own item, so it can be picked up, dropped, traded, stored in a container, or handed to another character. This page describes the properties common to all gear, the way gear burdens the character who carries it, and each of the gear types defined here.

Gear Properties

Every gear item, whatever its type, shares a common set of properties.

Carrying & Encumbrance

Only gear a character is actually carrying weighs them down. Gear that has been set aside, stored in a shelter, or left behind still belongs to the character and appears in their inventory, but it does not burden them.

The total weight of everything a character carries determines their encumbrance — the drag that heavy loads place on movement and action. The heavier the load, the greater the encumbrance.

Two rules refine how worn equipment interacts with this total; they are covered in detail on the Armor and Weapons pages, but in summary:

• Worn armor does not weigh you down the way loose cargo does. The weight of armor that is being worn is not counted against encumbrance — a well-fitted harness rides the body rather than hanging off it. Armor that is carried but not worn (bundled in a pack, slung over a shoulder) counts its full weight like any other cargo.
• Some armor and weapons carry an explicit encumbrance value. This optional value represents the awkwardness of the item beyond its raw weight. When such an item is worn or wielded, its encumbrance value is added to the character’s encumbrance.

Gear Types

Gear comes in several kinds, each with its own properties and behavior, described on the pages that follow:

• Miscellaneous Gear — ordinary goods with no special mechanics.
• Container Gear — gear that holds other gear.
• Weapons — instruments of attack, each with one or more strike modes.
• Projectiles — ammunition fired or thrown by missile weapons.
• Armor — protective equipment, worn or carried.
• Concoctions — potions, poisons, medicines, and alchemical preparations.

Miscellaneous Gear

Miscellaneous gear covers everything that has no specialized mechanics of its own: tools, rations, rope, torches, trade goods, jewelry, coin, personal effects, and the countless ordinary items a character accumulates. Miscellaneous gear uses only the common gear properties — quantity, weight, value, quality, and durability — and burdens its carrier by weight like anything else. When a piece of equipment does not fit one of the specialized types below, it is miscellaneous gear.

Cash

Cooking

Dye

Expedition

Food

Instruments

Jewelry

Lighting

Music

Natural Items

Religious

Scribe Materials

Spirits and Brews

Stone

Tack

Container Gear

Container gear is gear whose purpose is to hold other gear — a backpack, a sack, a chest, a saddlebag, a quiver. In addition to the common gear properties, a container has a maximum capacity: the greatest weight of contents it can hold.

Any gear item can be placed inside a container; while stored there, the item travels with the container. Containers may themselves be placed inside other containers (a pouch inside a pack), so a character’s belongings form a nested hierarchy. The weight of a container’s contents still counts toward the character’s carried weight while the container is carried — a full pack is no lighter than the sum of what is in it.

Weapons

A weapon is a piece of gear made for attacking — a sword, a spear, a bow, a mace, a dagger. Along with the common gear properties, a weapon has:

• Heft — a measure of the weapon’s weight and balance in the hand, affecting how demanding it is to wield.
• an optional encumbrance value — see below.
• one or more Strike Modes.

One Weapon, Many Strike Modes

A single weapon is rarely limited to a single kind of attack. A broadsword can cut, thrust, or strike with its pommel; a spear can be thrust in melee or thrown; a war-axe can chop in the hand or be hurled across the field. Each of these distinct ways of attacking is a strike mode, and a weapon carries one or more of them.

Every strike mode records its own attack and impact characteristics, and (for melee) its own defensive options. Because strike modes are a self-contained concept shared with unarmed and natural attacks, they are documented separately — see Strike Modes.

A weapon is held by body parts that can grip items (for a human, the hands). A strike mode can only be used while the weapon is held, and a mode that needs more than one body part requires the same weapon to be held by each — a bow drawn for a shot occupies both hands. See Strike Modes for the body-part requirement in full.

Weapon Encumbrance

A weapon optionally has an encumbrance value. If it does, that value is added to the character’s encumbrance while the weapon is worn or carried ready for use — a long weapon slung at the hip hampers movement more than its weight alone would suggest. A weapon with no encumbrance value contributes only its weight.

Bows

Crossbows

Slings

Thrown

Flails

Swords

Axes

Clubs

Knives

Polearms

Nets

Whips

Shields

Siege Weapons

Projectiles

Projectile gear is the ammunition that missile weapons consume — arrows for bows, bolts for crossbows, bullets for slings, darts for the hand. Each projectile declares a type (arrow, bolt, bullet, dart, or other) so that a missile weapon draws only the ammunition it can actually use.

A projectile carries its own impact — the damage it delivers on a hit, expressed as a number of dice, a die size, a flat modifier, and an aspect (blunt, edged, piercing, or fire). When a missile weapon looses a projectile, the projectile’s impact combines with the weapon’s missile strike mode to determine the blow. Projectiles may also carry traits that change how they behave — for example, a broadhead arrow.

Projectiles are ordinarily tracked in quantity (a bundle of arrows) and are expended as they are used.

Armor

Armor is protective equipment — mail, plate, leather, padding, shields, a helmet. Beyond the common gear properties, armor has three defining aspects: how it is protective, where it covers the body, and how it burdens the wearer.

Worn or Carried

Armor may be either worn or merely carried. This distinction matters both to protection and to encumbrance:

• Only worn armor protects. Armor that is carried but not worn (in a pack, on a packhorse) offers no protection until it is donned.
• Worn armor weight does not count against encumbrance. A suit of armor that is being worn rides the body and is not tallied as carried load. The same armor carried but not worn counts its full weight against encumbrance like any other cargo.

Armor Encumbrance

Armor optionally has an encumbrance value, separate from its weight. If it does, that value is added to the character’s encumbrance while the armor is worn — representing the stiffness and restriction the armor imposes beyond its mass. Armor with no encumbrance value burdens the wearer only through the general weight rules (and, since worn, that weight is excluded from encumbrance).

Because worn armor’s weight is excluded, an encumbrance value is the whole of what a worn piece costs. A piece with none is free to wear.

Arm Harness

The small rigid arm pieces — spaulders, rerebraces, coudes, vambraces, gauntlets and mittens — are the exception. No such piece encumbers on its own, however finely made; a single vambrace is not what slows an arm down. But wearing three or more of them together costs 5 encumbrance between them, and 5 no matter how many beyond three are worn. It is the harness getting in the way of the arms, not the pieces adding up.

Such a piece therefore carries no encumbrance value of its own. It belongs to the arm harness instead, and the cost is charged once to the set. The pieces need not match: a plate spaulder, a mail mitten and a scale gauntlet make three as surely as a matched set does.

Protection

Armor is graded by its resistance to each aspect of an attack:

• Blunt
• Edged
• Piercing
• Fire

For each aspect, the armor has a number representing the amount of impact it can absorb. When a blow lands, the armor absorbs up to that amount of the incoming impact for the blow’s aspect; any remaining impact passes through the armor to harm the wearer. A piece that is proof against edged blows may be far weaker against a blunt one, so the same armor protects unevenly depending on how it is struck.

Layering

Armor can be layered — a gambeson beneath a mail hauberk beneath a surcoat. Where two or more worn pieces cover the same location, each layer contributes its absorption to the total for that location, so stacked armor protects better than any single piece alone.

Coverage

A piece of armor covers one or more body locations — a helm protects the head, greaves the legs, a hauberk the torso and arms, and so on. Only the locations a piece covers receive its protection.

At each covered location the armor is either flexible or rigid, and the two behave differently in play. Rigid armor (plate, a steel cap) turns and deflects blows in ways supple armor cannot — for example, causing a glancing blow where flexible armor (mail, leather, padding) would simply absorb what it can. The same piece may be flexible at some locations and rigid at others.

Sensory Penalties

Certain armor — particularly helmets — imposes a perception penalty on the wearer. A closed helm narrows vision and muffles hearing, so while it protects the head it also hampers the wearer’s ability to perceive their surroundings. Such penalties are a deliberate trade-off against the protection the piece provides.

The penalty applies to any test built on Perception — the attribute itself, and every skill whose Skill Base is derived from it. A skill that merely takes Perception into account some other way is unaffected.

The worst penalty applies, never the sum. A wearer in a mail cowl beneath a great helm suffers the great helm’s penalty alone: the helm already subsumes what the cowl does to sight and hearing, and a wearer cannot be blinded twice over.

Cloth