Melee

Melee is fighting at arm’s length, armed or not. It is hand coordination and whole-body control, and it measures precision — where the blow goes and whether it arrives. How hard it lands when it does is Strength’s business, not the skill’s. Even the untrained express some of it when desperation requires, and Melee may be used untrained.

An experienced fighter can pick up nearly any object, or none, without falling apart. That is not to say weapons behave alike — they differ considerably in reach, in what they do to armour and in how they defend — but a fighter’s training does not fragment along weapon lines the way a specialist’s would.

Weapon groups. The system recognises eight: axes, clubs, flails, knives, polearms, shields, swords and unarmed. Most weapons within a group share innate qualities that affect everyone who wields them, trained or not, and those qualities are properties of the weapon rather than of the fighter.

Exotic weapons. A weapon that both demands specialised handling and is foreign to the character’s culture imposes −10 on tests with it. The GM may lift the penalty after a month of regular use, or at the character’s next improvement in Melee.

Melee is also the test made for Block and Counterstrike defences, for recovering a dropped weapon in a press, and for the unarmed manoeuvres that have no weapon behind them at all. Its Dodge subskill covers the one defence that is pure evasion.