Month: August 2026

The Combat Styles page has grown quite a bit.

You can already search the Combat Style Encyclopedia by weapons, traits, culture, troop type, area, region, milieu and other criteria; clone existing styles; build your own temporary styles; export them; and even ask the Random Special Effects tool for inspiration when somebody suddenly needs to decide what to do with that glaive.

The latest releases concentrate on making creating your own Combat Styles much easier.

The Combat Style Designer now helps you while you build – it might not always be right but it could give you some guidance.

These temporary combat styles stay in your browser local storage for awhile.

The Designer Now Gives Advice

Go to Combat Styles page open Create Temporary Style, start choosing weapons and traits, and watch the new Combat Style Tips panel.

The suggestions change according to what you have already selected.

Pick a shield, for example, and the Designer may point you toward traits that make good use of it.

The same works in the other direction. Weapons can suggest appropriate traits, while traits can suggest weapons needed to make them useful.

The Designer also recognizes less obvious weapon characteristics such as ranged weapons, long weapons, mounted weapons, clubs and other properties when looking for useful combinations.

These aren’t rules telling you what your Combat Style must contain. They are prompts intended to answer the much more useful question:

“I’ve chosen these weapons. What might work well with them?”

Or its equally common cousin:

“I really want this Trait. What equipment would make sense with it?”

Click a suggestion and it is added immediately to your style. No hunting through another list required.

Keep It in the Right Milieu

A perfectly sensible weapon can still be several centuries early.

The Designer therefore pays attention to Milieu.

Choose an appropriate setting or era and weapon suggestions are drawn from equipment suitable for that milieu. Change the milieu and the suggestions immediately change with it.

This is particularly useful when using I Feel Lucky.

Select something such as Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance etc and let the Designer assemble a style from suitable weapons and compatible traits. The generator uses the same underlying synergy rules, so specialist traits are paired with equipment that can actually support them.

It remains random enough to produce combinations you might not have considered yourself. That is rather the point.

Unarmed Fighters Are Invited to the Party

Unarmed combat is now a proper weapon category in the Designer.

You can explicitly filter for Unarmed, and the I Feel Lucky generator can incorporate unarmed fighting naturally into generated styles.

At the same time, the Designer has become slightly more discerning about what counts as suitable equipment for a human warrior.

Claws, Teeth, Tusks and similar natural weapons belonging to creatures are automatically kept out of normal human Combat Style suggestions and random generation.

Your pit fighter may therefore punch somebody in the face.

Help Without Leaving the Designer

There is now a dedicated Help panel inside the Combat Style Designer.

It explains how temporary styles, weapons, traits, suggestions and generation work without requiring you to leave your half-built style and consult another page.

The Designer’s selection lists also use the same rich tooltips as the main Combat Styles page. Hover over a weapon to inspect its statistics, or over a Combat Style Trait to see its rules.

This makes the Designer useful for experimentation as well as construction. You don’t need to remember exactly what every one of the 170+ Combat Style Traits does before trying combinations.

Clone, Change, or Start from Nothing

You don’t have to design everything from a blank sheet.

Find an existing Combat Style that is close to what you need and click Clone. It becomes a new temporary style which you can modify without changing the original database entry.

Perhaps an existing city guard is almost right, except your campaign’s guards carry spears instead of swords.

Clone it. Swap the weapons. Look at the new suggestions. Change a trait. Give the result a suitably impressive name.

Or start from scratch and use the random sword-and-sorcery name generator when inspiration deserts you.

Temporary styles live in your browser’s local storage, so they remain private to your device and never alter the main Combat Style Encyclopedia.

And Then Use It

Temporary styles aren’t second-class entries even though they do not linger in the database.

They participate in the normal Combat Styles workflow alongside database styles. You can select permanent and temporary styles together and export them as Markdown, Obsidian-flavoured Markdown, PDF or JSON.

You can also send your homemade styles straight into Roll Effects.

So you can design something like the Bronze Jackals of the Seventh Gate, equip them, give them suitable traits, and immediately generate Special Effect ideas for their weapons when they encounter the characters.

The distance between “I need an interesting group of opponents” and “roll initiative” has become considerably shorter.

Finding Combat Styles Hasn’t Gone Away

The Combat Styles page remains a searchable encyclopedia.

Searches update as you type and combine criteria using AND, so you can narrow the collection by Combat Style name, weapon, trait, culture, troop type, kind, domain, area, region or milieu.

Partial searches work. Searching for hoplite, for example, can find styles whose longer names contain that word.

There are also several useful ways of wandering off the well-travelled road:

• I Feel Lucky finds random styles matching your current filters.
• Rare Trait digs out styles containing seldom-used Combat Style Traits.
• Rare Weapon does the same for unusual weapons.
• Favorites lets you keep styles you expect to return to.
• All / Permanent / Temporary lets you decide which kinds of styles you want to see.

Hover over weapon and trait badges for their statistics and rules, or click a Combat Style name to preview its condensed card.

A Quicker Page Underneath It All

There has also been a substantial amount of work below deck.

Combat Style search indexes are now precomputed and cached, dramatically reducing the work required when the application starts. Heavy data requests use ETags, so your browser doesn’t repeatedly download the same multi-megabyte data when nothing has changed.

Startup and cache handling have also been reworked, while crawlers receive a lightweight catalog rather than consuming the resources intended for actual players.

The practical result should simply be:

the Combat Styles page gets ready faster and stays responsive.

There have also been several reliability improvements to database updates, caching and temporary-style saving.

Small Things You May Notice

The site now has automatic Major.Minor.Build versioning, with the current version visible in the sidebar and also in the mobile navigation menu.

The desktop version indicator stays at the bottom of the sidebar even when the menu scrolls, while mobile users can finally see the same information.

There have also been readability improvements to the Combat Style Designer, more reliable UI refreshing, better cache invalidation after updates, automated UI tests, and a collection of deployment and maintenance improvements.

Try Building Something

The easiest way to explore the new features is not to read about them.

Open Combat Styles → Create Temporary Style.

Choose a milieu.

Add one weapon you know you want.

Then see what the Designer suggests.

Or press I Feel Lucky and allow fate to equip the regiment.

If the result gives you an idea for tomorrow’s opponents, clone it, twist it into something nastier, give it a memorable name and send it to Roll Effects.

You can find the tool here https://www.toolsfrompavis.com/search/combatstyle/ or select it from the Toolsfrompavis sidebar.

You know the moment.

Someone wins an opposed roll and earns a Special Effect. The table goes quiet.

“Which one should I take?”

The character has a sword, shield, three useful Combat Style Traits, and a glorious menu of tactical possibilities. Unfortunately, nobody can remember which possibilities they actually are.

The new Roll Effects feature in Tools From Pavis Combat Styles is designed for exactly this moment. It does not replace choosing Special Effects. Instead, it throws a handful of weapon-appropriate possibilities onto the table and says: How about one of these?

Start with your Combat Styles

Go to the Combat Styles screen and search normally. You can use any of the available search criteria.

Perhaps you want everything involving a Main Gauche. Search for Main Gauche, find the styles you need, and select one or several.

Your choices appear on the Selected Combat Styles page.

If these are styles you expect to use again, mark them as Favorites. Favorites are stored in your browser’s local storage, so you can quickly return to the same collection later.

You can also choose whether Choose Location (CL) should be treated as a Critical Only Special Effect.

Then press Roll Effects.

What happens when you roll?

After a moment, each selected Combat Style appears with all of its weapons.

For every weapon, the tool randomly selects at least four Special Effects from those actually available to that weapon and Combat Style.

This is not completely blind randomness.

If a Combat Style Trait enhances the usefulness of a particular Special Effect, that effect will appear more frequently. So the suggestions should tend to reflect what the Combat Style is actually good at doing.

There is another little wrinkle.

Some Special Effects require an opposed roll or depend upon STR. Those can be excellent choices when circumstances favour you, but perhaps less attractive when your winning roll was 21 on your combat style and you suspect your opponent might roll better.

For these effects, the tool provides an alternative in grey that does not have the same requirement.

So instead of simply saying:

“Use Bleed.”

the screen may effectively be saying:

“Bleed could be nasty here. But if you don’t fancy the opposed roll, consider this instead.”

The decision remains yours.

Don’t like the roll? Roll again

The suggestions are not commandments carved onto a bronze tablet.

You can Reroll All and generate a completely new set of suggestions, or reroll just one individual Special Effectwhile leaving everything else alone.

There are also tooltips to remind you what the various entries mean.

This makes Roll Effects useful not only when somebody has forgotten the available Special Effects, but also when everyone knows the rules perfectly well and simply wants inspiration.

Reach gets a reminder too

Each weapon also shows its Reach and gives useful reference points for fighting at a substantially different distance:

• the shorter Reach, two Reach ranks below
• the longer Reach, two Reach ranks above

That is there to provoke another kind of tactical thought.

Perhaps the best answer is not another clever attack. Perhaps you want to close the distance and make that long weapon awkward. Or perhaps you want to open the distance and make the opponent regret bringing a dagger to a spear problem.

Special Effects are only part of Mythras combat. Distance matters too.

Take the results elsewhere

The generated results can be copied to the clipboard, so you can move them into whatever you are using at the table.

But the more interesting question is: how should you actually use Roll Effects during play?

Three ways to use Roll Effects

1. The GM rolls for players who want help

Before or during the session, gather the player characters’ Combat Styles onto the Selected Combat Styles page.

When somebody wins a Special Effect but does not know what to choose, roll.

Instead of opening the rulebook and examining the entire Special Effects list, give the player one of the generated suggestions:

“You rolled a crit in your attack roll. Here is a good possibility for your crit or you can choose also this non critical option for your weapon. Pick one.”

Or, for a very new player, simply give them one:

“Your opening is there. Trip him.”

This can be particularly useful when introducing Mythras to players who are still learning how Special Effects work. They get to experience the tactical variety without first having to memorise the menu.

2. Players roll their own suggestions

A player can keep their own Combat Style selected and use Roll Effects themselves.

Win an effect. Look at the suggestions. Choose one.

As familiarity grows, they will probably need the tool less often. But along the way they may discover Special Effects they had overlooked.

That is rather the point.

3. Give your NPCs a larger tactical vocabulary

This may be my favourite GM use.

It is very easy for NPC tactics to become habitual.

The swordsman always Trips. The spearman always Impales. The thug always Bashes. After a while the supposedly dangerous mercenary company begins to fight suspiciously like one GM wearing twenty different helmets.

Instead, gather the Combat Styles of the NPCs involved in the encounter onto the Selected Combat Styles page and roll.

Now their weapons and Combat Style Traits generate a spread of appropriate Special Effects. Reroll individual results you do not like, or reroll the whole collection when you want a fresh tactical palette.

Suddenly one guard Pins Weapon, another Compels Surrender, the veteran uses the effect his Combat Style Trait was built around, and somebody remembers that changing Reach is a perfectly respectable way of ruining an opponent’s afternoon.

The NPCs start fighting according to their weapons and training rather than according to the GM’s four favourite Special Effects.

A suggestion engine, not an autopilot

Roll Effects is deliberately not trying to determine the mathematically perfect move.

Mythras combat is too dependent on circumstances for that. Armour, Action Points, Reach, positioning, weapon size, injuries, opponents, objectives and what you are actually trying to accomplish all matter.

The tool does something simpler:

It puts several plausible ideas in front of you quickly.

Use one. Ignore them all. Reroll one. Reroll everything. Spot an effect you had forgotten existed and choose that instead.

The purpose is not to remove tactical choice.

It is to get you past the moment when everyone is staring at the Special Effects list and thinking.

“There must be something good I can do here…”

You will find the tool here: https://www.toolsfrompavis.com/search/combatstyle/

There are other useful tools in https://notesfrompavis.blog/2014/02/04/rq6-charts-and-tables/

Starter resources for GM are here https://notesfrompavis.blog/2020/12/28/starter-resources-for-mythras-gm/ and for player here https://notesfrompavis.blog/2024/07/22/starter-resources-summary-for-mythras-player/

You will find the tool here with name “Combat Styles”

The Combat Styles Encyclopedia has now an interactive form with the same data. There is additional content

• Book of Schemes
• Desert Wastelands
• Desert Fantasy
• Islands (from Pacific)

There are new fields

Domain: Fantasy, Mythic History, Glorantha

Troop kinds: Regular/irregular

Milieu : Ancient, Medieval,Renaissance,Industrial

Styles have been grouped to Cultural and Professional

Areas have been cleaned up.

Weapons have additional explanation for rarer weapons.

There are tooltips for many fields.

You can export the selected styles in markdown (in full, condensed or ultra condensed form), in PDF as combat style cards and in json.

You can click on the name of the style and see a formatted version of the style. You can search with multiple fields (AND searches).

I Feel Lucky, I Want Rare Stuff

You can also ask “I feel Lucky”, or give me styles with rare traits or rare weapons.

How could you use this:

Every warrior tells a story long before the first sword is drawn.

A scarred city watchman gripping spear and shield does not fight like a tribal hunter armed with a bow and hatchet. A noble duellist circles patiently, looking for a single decisive opening, while a caravan guard expects ambushes from every dune. Their weapons matter, but so do their training, culture, and expectations.

This encyclopedia brings together 843 Combat Styles and 136 Combat Style Traits collected from published Mythras settings and original creations into a single reference.

It is not meant to be read cover to cover or scrolled thru for all the styles.

Think of it as an armoury. Open it, grab what you need, and get back to the adventure.

How to Use This Tool

This encyclopedia is compiled from many published and home-grown sources. Use it as a toolbox rather than a rulebook.

Find a style by:

• Area or setting

• Culture or organisation

• Weapon combination

• Combat Style Trait

• Colourful Combat Style name

For most campaigns you only need a handful. Pick a couple of styles for your recurring enemies, perhaps one distinctive style for each player character, and let everyone else borrow from those foundations. Players will soon begin recognising opponents not by statistics, but by how they fight.

A Combat Style represents the combination of weapons, training, and battlefield techniques that a culture or organisation teaches to be used effectively together. Most styles include one Combat Style

Trait, while a few exceptional traditions possess more than one.

Each Combat Style Card is intended as a quick-reference at the table. It shows the weapons used together, Combat Style Traits, weapon statistics, and how those weapons interact with Combat Special

Effects. Use the indices at the beginning of the PDF version of the encyclopedia to find suitable styles by area, organisation, culture, weapon, or trait, then keep the chosen card beside your notes during play.

Do not feel compelled to read every entry. These cards are intended to inspire, not overwhelm.

Make It Your Own

Nothing in this encyclopedia is tied to a single world.

A Combat Style is simply a combination of weapons, training, and battlefield habits. Rename it, move it somewhere else, or borrow only the parts you like.

For example:

• A Book of Schemes Shadowy Alchemist could become a secret poison-master serving a noble house in Glorantha, a hidden cabal in Lankhmar, or a sinister cult in your own campaign.

• A Book of Schemes Guelden City Guard can become the watch of any fantasy city simply by changing the name, heraldry, and local equipment.

• A Lunar Hoplite from Glorantha might become an elite legionary of a forgotten empire in Thennla,complete with the same disciplined tactics and equipment but an entirely different history and culture.

• A Hyborian mercenary company can become disciplined border troops in Dragonbane’s Misty Vale,veterans of a crumbling kingdom in HârnWorld, or soldiers serving a ruler from your own setting.

• A Monster Island jungle hunter works just as well as an explorer from Forbidden Lands, a wilderness scout from another campaign, or a tracker from any untamed frontier.

The mechanics stay the same. Only the names, colours, and stories change.

Reskin for your own personal use in your campaign.

After all, warriors across worlds may carry different banners, but a spear wall is still a spear wall, and an assassin with a knife remains terrifying whatever the map happens to be. Retain this: Example of how to use this can be seen here

Combat Style Cards for Mythras

More information about Combat Style Cards is available on my blog https://notesfrompavis.blog

Source for each combat style or trait is mentioned with the combat style or combat style trait. Some styles are inspired by weapon combinations described in the original source. All mentioned are used with permission. Feedback is welcome

New version of full PDF encyclopedia will come soon.