Missile Attacks

A missile attack is one delivered across ground the attacker does not cross: an arrow, a bolt, a sling stone, a hurled axe. It resolves through the ordinary attack sequence, with three things particular to it — the weapon must be ready, the shot has a range, and the target usually cannot strike back.

Every missile attack is made with a missile strike mode. A weapon may carry melee and missile modes both: a spear thrust in the hand and thrown are the same object and two different attacks.

The Missile Sequence

1. Ready the weapon. A launcher must be spanned or drawn and its projectile nocked or seated; a thrown weapon must be in hand. A missile strike mode cannot be used until it is ready.
2. Declare the target and read the range. Distance to the target settles which range band the shot falls in, and the band settles how precisely it can be placed and how hard it lands.
3. Test. The attacker makes a Success Test against the Effective Mastery Level of the strike mode’s skill — Archery, Throwing or Sling.
4. The target responds. See Defending Against Missiles — the choices are narrower than in melee.
5. Resolve. A landing shot rolls its impact, and hit location follows from the aim and the band’s scatter.

Skills and Weapons

Three skills cover missile weapons, and which one applies is a property of the strike mode, not a choice:

A missile strike mode also names the projectile type it consumes — arrow, bolt, bullet, dart — or none, when the weapon itself is the missile. Where ammunition is consumed, the projectile’s own impact combines with the strike mode’s: the bow and the arrow each contribute to what arrives.

Two properties of the launcher belong to the weapon rather than the shooter. Draw is the pull the weapon demands, and a bow too heavy to manage is a bow that cannot be shot well; heavy crossbows are spanned with mechanical aid for exactly this reason. Volley multiplier is how far past its base range the weapon can throw a lobbed shot — see Range.

Crossbows are the exception to training. A crossbow is spanned once and then aimed like a tool, so an untrained shooter is far less handicapped by it than by a bow: a character shooting one tests the better of their Archery Mastery Level or an Effective Mastery Level equal to three times their Archery Skill Base. Anyone at all can pick one up and hit something; only an archer improves.

Range

Every missile strike mode has a base range. Distance measured from the shooter to the target places the shot in one of three bands:

Point blank is close enough to place the shot: the scatter tightens and the missile arrives with its flight barely begun, adding two to impact. Direct is the ordinary aimed shot — flat trajectory, the target in view along the shaft.

Volley is a different act altogether. Past its base range a missile must be lobbed, arcing up and falling on the target rather than flying at it, and no aim survives that. A volleyed shot is not aimed at a body part at all: it is thrown at a place, and where it comes down is a matter of scatter around that place. It is how massed archery is used and how a wall is shot over — a deliberately imprecise instrument, valuable for reaching what cannot otherwise be reached, and for the fact that a hundred of them landing together does not need to be precise.

A weapon’s volley multiplier is what sets that outer limit: a war bow that reaches 210 feet directly can put an arrow down four times as far, while a javelin manages twice its throw.

Aiming at Distance

A direct or point-blank shot may be aimed at a body part exactly as a melee blow is, and hit location resolves the same way — the part supplies the target zone number and the band supplies the zone die. Distance is what costs precision: d6 at point blank, d8 at direct range. Because the zone die always walks the hit downward from the aim, a shot at range drifts low, and a small target scatters off the edge of itself more readily than a large one.

Nothing is aimed on a volley. The shot is placed by scatter, and whatever it finds where it lands is what it hits — which is the risk in shooting over your own front rank.

Defending Against Missiles

A target who does not know the shot is coming defends not at all: the attack is resolved unopposed. A target who does may:

• Block, if they carry something to block with. A shield is the reason shields exist; interposing one against an arrow is its plainest use.
• Dodge, if they have room and warning enough to move.
• Ignore, and trust to armour.

Counterstrike is not available against a shooter out of the defender’s own reach. You cannot answer an archer at two hundred feet with a blow; you can only close, and closing is a different turn’s business.

Deliberate evasion is a separate matter from dodging one particular shot. A character who commits to evading — moving unpredictably, using cover and broken ground, presenting nothing to shoot at — imposes a penalty on every missile attacker equal to five times their Effective Dodge Index, taken from a Dodge Mastery Level already reduced by fatigue, impairment and encumbrance. A heavily laden, badly winded character is not evading anything, and the rule says so. A character’s Acrobatics improves both their Dodge tests and this penalty.

Impact at Range

Missile impact is the strike mode’s impact plus the projectile’s, plus +2 at point blank.

Strength does not add to it. A bow, a crossbow and a sling all put the force in the launcher rather than the arm, and a mighty archer’s arrows strike no harder than anyone else’s. The Strength Impact Modifier applies only to thrown weapons, where the arm genuinely is the engine — and even there it is reduced by one, because a thrown weapon is never driven as well as a held one.

From there the blow resolves like any other: aspect against the struck location’s protection, effective impact into an injury, and on into Trauma.

Mishaps

A missile attack’s Critical Failure reads by its units digit:

• Ending in 0 — Fumble. The weapon is dropped or nearly so; a Fumble Test decides which.
• Ending in 5 — Misfire. The shot is spoiled in the loosing. A launcher may be damaged in the process — a string parts, a prod cracks, a stave splits — while a thrown weapon instead risks the thrower’s own footing.

See Mishaps for the keep-control tests both lead to.

Spent Ammunition

A shaft is not destroyed by being loosed, but neither does it often come back as it left. Arrows that miss bury themselves in soft turf or snap against stone; they wedge in timber and are cut out ruined; they go into an animal that runs off with them. An arrow that strikes armour or a shield has usually done its work at some cost to itself — a shaft sprung or bent, a head turned or blunted, fletching stripped away by the impact — and is not simply picked up and shot again.

Recovery therefore has three outcomes rather than two. A projectile comes back serviceable, comes back damaged — recovered, but not fit to shoot until it has been worked on — or does not come back at all.

No test is made and no skill is called for in the searching itself: walking the ground and finding what fell on it is not a craft check. What decides the yield is where the shafts went, and whether the ground can be searched at all.

A field given up gives back nothing. An archer who withdraws leaves their arrows where they fell, and one who routs is fortunate to keep the quiver. Water, deep snow, thick undergrowth and a night’s delay each take their share of whatever would otherwise have been found.

The GM may settle a volley in bulk rather than shaft by shaft. At the butts nearly everything comes back fit to shoot again. Shot at armoured men across hard ground, with the field held afterwards, expect about half to come back needing work, a quarter serviceable, and a quarter gone for good — and expect nothing whatever if the field is lost.

This is why ammunition is a supply rather than a consumable, and why an archer’s evening belongs to their tackle. A full quiver is a real expense; holding the field recovers part of it, and the rest is recovered at the bench.

See also

• Attack Resolution — the exchange in full
• Strike Modes — projectile type, range, draw, volley multiplier
• Melee Attacks — attacking at contact
• Weapons — the missile weapons themselves
• Fletching — making projectiles, and working recovered shafts back into them