A guide to the Mythras Campaign Rules Setup Tool, including an introduction for complete newcomers

This article is a AI assisted summary of the several articles written by a human few years ago for a excel tool for NOMCORSS articles.

Mythras is a toolkit. That is one of its greatest strengths, but it can also leave a new Games Master staring at a collection of rulebooks and wondering where to begin.

Which magic systems should I use? How dangerous should combat be? Do I want optional rules from Monster Island, Mythic Britain, Classic Fantasy, or the Mythras Companion? And how do I tell my players which rules we are actually using?

This is why I created NOMCORSS, the NotesFromPavis Opinionated Mythras Campaign Optional Rules Setup Sheet. The name is admittedly not the most elegant ever invented, but it does describe the job.

NOMCORSS is an Excel-based campaign rule selection and documentation tool. It collects optional rules, alternatives, setting-specific mechanics, and some house-rule suggestions in one place. Rather than hunting through several books and trying to remember what you decided six months ago, you can make your choices explicitly and retain a reference to their sources. Use relatively recent Excel – older ones and other spreadsheets have not been tested.

Version 1.5, the latest published release identified in the original article series, contains more than 260 rule selections. You certainly do not need to use them all. The aim is to make choosing easier, not to turn campaign preparation into an archaeological excavation.

[!info] Get NOMCORSS
Start with the NOMCORSS V1.5 release article and its spreadsheet link. The published V1.5 workbookcan also be opened directly. Download a working copy before editing.

Explain it to me as if I have never seen Mythras rules before

What is Mythras?

Mythras is a tabletop roleplaying game published by The Design Mechanism. It belongs to the RuneQuest family and was previously known as RuneQuest 6.

Characters are primarily defined by skills, not character classes and levels. A sailor, priest, thief, mercenary, or sorcerer has a set of abilities expressed as percentages. If your Athletics skill is 65%, you generally roll percentile dice (d100) and try to get 65 or less, subject to difficulty and other modifiers.

Combat adds tactical decisions involving Action Points, attack and defence rolls, weapons, armour, hit locations, wounds, and Special Effects. Characters can have Passions reflecting loyalties, beliefs, and motivations. Mythras also offers several distinct approaches to magic, including Folk Magic, Animism, Mysticism, Sorcery, and Theism.

Why choose campaign rules?

Imagine three campaigns:

• Bronze Age sword and sorcery: dangerous combat, rare and unsettling magic, mercenaries and explorers in ancient cities.
• High fantasy: dungeon exploration, powerful magical traditions, strange creatures, and perhaps options from Classic Fantasy.
• Historical adventure: travel, warfare, politics, social obligations, and limited or no overt magic.

All three can use Mythras, but they need not use precisely the same options. Mythras provides the foundation; the GM decides which additional pieces fit the intended campaign.

What does NOMCORSS do?

It helps answer: What options exist? Which do I choose? Where is the source rule? How much work will it require? How complex will it be for new players? How do I communicate the decision?

NOMCORSS does not replace the rulebooks and is not a character generator. You still need the core rules and any supplements whose mechanics you adopt. The spreadsheet records decisions and points to source material. Nor do you need NOMCORSS to play: a campaign using the core rules alone is perfectly viable.

The word Opinionated is deliberate. Suggested defaults reflect preferences, not mandatory or universally optimal choices. Your Mythras May Vary.

What is included?

The catalogue expanded through 2022 to include material from the Mythras core rules, Mythras Companion, Monster Island, Adventures in Glorantha, M-Space, Ships and Shield Walls, Firearms, Lyonesse, Mythic Britain, Perceforest, Fioracitta, Mythic Rome, Mythic Constantinople, Mythic Babylon, Classic Fantasy, Thennla-related material, and other sources or suggestions.

This does not mean that every rule in every publication is reproduced. The emphasis is on optional rules, alternatives, and campaign-level decisions.

The two views: Selection View and Viewer View

NOMCORSS has two complementary ways to work with its rule catalogue. Their distinction is fundamental:

• Selection View is where the GM makes and edits campaign decisions.
• Viewer View is where the GM examines, filters, sorts, and reviews the resulting configuration.

The original articles also refer to Main and Display worksheets. In practical terms, the selection/editing function belongs in the Main or Selection view, while exploration and reporting belong in the Display or Viewer view. Check the tab labels in your particular workbook copy.

Selection View: configure the campaign

Work through the rule entries and choose the alternatives appropriate to your game. The spreadsheet supplies suggested defaults, but you can change them.

• Green cells are the rule-selection inputs. Use the available choices to select an alternative to the suggested default.
• Yellow cells are for comments or manually recording a decision where a predefined selection is not supplied.

For example, you might retain standard Mythras Action Points, allow Folk Magic, exclude Mysticism, and use an optional rule for a particular aspect of combat. Use a comment cell to explain a campaign-specific exception.

Do not sort the Selection/Main sheet. It is intended for editing, and rearranging rows can interfere with its structure.

Viewer View: examine what you selected

Viewer View is for navigating the decisions rather than making them. Filter and sort the results to find all combat rules, entries from a particular sourcebook, magic-system choices, or options requiring extra preparation.

A particularly useful filter is the field “Was there any optional rule chosen (rules that are default standard in RAW count as False)”. Set its filter to TRUE to see selected optional rules.

FALSE does not necessarily mean that the rule is disabled. It may simply mean that you are using the standard Mythras rule rather than an optional alternative.

Magic-system choices have additional highlighting to help locate related selections. Viewer View is also useful for preparing a short player-facing rules summary.

The basic workflow is select in Selection View, inspect in Viewer View, return to Selection View to revise.

Complete guide to the spreadsheet fields

The following describes the field headings identified in the published V1.5 workbook. Exact display and formatting may vary between workbook copies. The numerical preparation and complexity scales are described by their practical purpose here; their formal coding should be checked against the workbook itself.

Use Excel filters to limit the seen rules for example if you do not have Thennla or Sorandib filter them away using standard Excel filtering.

Campaign information

For example: Salt, Blood & Gold: sword-and-sorcery pirates in the Barachan Isles, dangerous combat, rare sorcery, and exploratory voyages.

Rule entries and decision fields

Preparation is not the same as player complexity

Requires prework by GM is about the GM’s setup burden. Preparing cultures, careers, magical traditions, or custom combat styles might involve substantial work before play.

Complexity for a new Mythras player is about how much explanation or learning a player may need. A rule can demand significant GM preparation but be straightforward for players, or require little preparation but be difficult to learn.

These fields are useful when deciding which optional rules to introduce immediately and which to postpone.

Understanding Source, Topic, and rule details

Source identifies the origin of the rule. RAW indicates the core rules as written; abbreviations such as AiG can refer to Adventures in Glorantha. The Topic identifies the question under consideration, while the detail column provides further context, references, or alternatives.

A topic such as Fixed or variable Action Points concerns how many Action Points characters receive in combat. Folk Magic available for player characters concerns access to that particular magical tradition. A topic may appear in more than one row when several related decisions exist.

Understanding Your campaign rules selection

This is the field that matters most: what your campaign actually uses.

For example, a selection might say “Standard RAW Variable. Calculated RAW pg 8” for Action Points, indicating the normal Mythras method. A different campaign might adopt an alternative to simplify play.

Use green selection cells to choose from predefined alternatives. Use yellow comment cells to explain choices that need interpretation, exceptions, or house rules. Comments are especially valuable when you revisit the spreadsheet months later.

Understanding the optional-rule TRUE/FALSE field

This field is not a general on/off switch for the topic.

• TRUE means the spreadsheet identifies a selected optional rule or departure from the standard default.
• FALSE means no such optional selection is identified for that entry. The standard rule may still be fully active.

For example, standard Mythras combat can be used even though many related entries show FALSE. Filter to TRUE in Viewer View when you want to concentrate on your customizations.

Understanding Category in use

This is particularly important for magic. Mythras distinguishes Folk Magic, Animism, Mysticism, Sorcery, and Theism, and a campaign does not need all of them.

An entry might show No for an unused subsystem or Optional Magic System Chosen for a selected tradition. These labels help identify related choices that are relevant to your campaign.

Remember that access for player characters and the existence of a magical tradition in the world are not necessarily the same thing. A tradition might be unavailable to PCs while still appearing among NPCs or monsters.

Utilities and charts available

This column points to supplementary material that can help apply a rule in play. It is worth checking when a chosen option would otherwise require additional tables or reference sheets.

A practical step-by-step workflow

1. Download V1.5 from the release article and save a copy for your campaign. The tool was designed for Excel; other spreadsheet applications may not reproduce all features identically.
2. Name the campaign and add notes. State its setting, tone, and major assumptions before choosing mechanics.
3. Work in Selection View. Review the relevant topics, use the green cells to choose alternatives, and the yellow cells to explain special decisions.
4. Decide which magic systems exist. This affects many subsequent entries, so settle the broad direction early.
5. Choose only the rules that support the game. Pay attention to player complexity and GM preparation. You do not need to decide everything immediately.
6. Read the source material. NOMCORSS points you to rules; it does not reproduce or replace the books.
7. Open Viewer View. Filter the optional-rule indicator to TRUE; then filter by category or source to review the configuration.
8. Check for unintended combinations. An option from a heroic-fantasy supplement may have consequences in a gritty historical campaign.
9. Share a concise summary with the players. Explain important differences from standard Mythras, particularly those affecting character creation, magic, combat, and survival.
10. Revisit the selections when needed. Change the configuration in Selection View, document the reason, and review the result in Viewer View.

Worked example: a sword-and-sorcery pirate campaign

Suppose I want to run a campaign about pirates exploring tropical islands, ruined cities, and forgotten temples. The characters are capable adventurers, but the world is dangerous. Magic is rare and unsettling, not a convenience available to every sailor.

I would configure NOMCORSS in several passes:

Character creation: How capable are the starting characters? Which cultures, careers, and other character options exist?

Combat and survival: How lethal should fights be? Which wound, recovery, and combat alternatives support boarding actions and desperate duels?

Magic: Which magical traditions exist? Is sorcery reserved for occult scholars and sinister temple inhabitants? Use the magic-system highlighting to find related choices.

Campaign-specific mechanics: Which rules for ships, travel, exploration, or survival are likely to matter regularly?

Review: In Viewer View, filter the optional-rule indicator to TRUE. Examine the selections together. Do they support the intended style of play? Have I created contradictions or unnecessary complexity? Add comments where explanations will be useful later.

The result should be a relatively small set of deliberate decisions, even though the spreadsheet offers hundreds of possibilities.

Frequently asked questions

Should a new Mythras GM use all the optional rules? No. Start with the core rules and add only what supports the campaign.

Are NOMCORSS defaults official recommendations? Not necessarily. They reflect the spreadsheet author’s preferences, and some entries are suggestions or house-rule possibilities rather than official rules.

Can rules from different supplements be combined? Often, yes, but check their assumptions and interactions. A rule designed for high fantasy can substantially change the feel of a low-magic campaign.

Is NOMCORSS a character generator? No. It configures campaign rules rather than creating individual characters.

Can I change rules after the campaign starts? Certainly, but discuss consequential changes with players, especially if they affect established characters.

Is NOMCORSS useful for experienced GMs? Yes. It documents existing house rules, helps compare alternatives, and exposes options in supplements that may otherwise be overlooked.

Can I give Viewer View to my players? It can help prepare a player-facing reference. Consider removing GM-only decisions and explaining the most consequential choices in plain language rather than requiring players to study every entry.

History of NOMCORSS

The tool developed rapidly during autumn 2022. These are the dedicated articles identified so far:

Final thoughts

Mythras gives the GM considerable freedom to build a game that suits the setting, the players, and the desired style of adventure. That freedom is valuable, but the decisions can be difficult to keep track of.

NOMCORSS was created to make those choices visible and manageable. You do not need to master every supplement before starting, use every optional rule, or keep a 260-entry spreadsheet open during combat. You simply need to know which rules your campaign uses and why.

Your Mythras May Vary. NOMCORSS helps you decide how.

My first bigger patch. I have joined skoll to be maintainer of MeG code in addition to being the curator. I have a bit more time in my hands so there might be more features more often. I built first a development environment and then started to look at performance improvements.

MeG Enemy List: Major Speed Improvement

The Enemies page is now significantly faster, especially when browsing thousands of enemy templates.

• 78% faster loading: Backend processing reduced from 2 seconds to just 0.43 seconds with approximately 4,500 enemies.
• 99.98% fewer database queries: Reduced from over 9,000 to just 2.
• Faster favorites (stars): Starred enemies are now identified much more efficiently, eliminating thousands of individual database lookups. Star icons display correctly without slowing down the list.
• Scales better: Performance remains efficient even with very large enemy collections.
• Everything still works: Favorites, tags, filtering, and public/private visibility behave as before.

Result: Faster enemy browsing and more efficient handling of starred favorites, without sacrificing functionality.

You will find more on MeG here

Here is a simple way to find encounters for your game session from MeG

For example one could use the Meg this way: Get the list of templates json from the meg help page (https://mythras.skoll.xyz/instructions/) and then in ChatGPT say for example:

Give me five new interesting encounters from attached file for fantasy city. give some idea of their dangerousness. if they are gloranthan give guidance how to make them non gloranthan – if there is nothing to do with Glorantha, skip the comment. for each provide a link to mythras.skoll.xyz to click and get the stats of the creature

The format for link is as follows where 468 is the id
https://mythras.skoll.xyz/enemy_template/468/

And the result would be:

Here are five new encounters from the attached MeG database. I’ve avoided the five from the previous set.

1. Greed Is Contagious: Greed Passion Spirit

A prosperous merchant suddenly becomes obsessed with acquiring a particular object. Within days he has sold ships, betrayed partners and murdered a servant to obtain it. His family hires the characters to discover who is blackmailing him.

Nobody is.

A Greed Passion Spirit, Intensity 3 has attached itself to him. Perhaps it inhabits an ancient coin, idol or jewel recently brought into the city. The fun begins when the characters recover the object and the spirit finds somebody with an even more interesting Passion to corrupt.

The database identifies this as a Rank 4 spirit based on the Passion Spirit rules. index_json

Danger: ★★★★☆, Veteran (Rank 4). Physically, it need not be dangerous at all. Socially it can be catastrophic. A Passion Spirit possessing or influencing a powerful merchant, magistrate or crime lord can turn half the city against the characters without ever drawing a sword.

Greed Passion Spirit, Intensity 3, MeG stats

2. The Ambassador from the Sea: Messenger of Gorath

At dawn, something walks out of the harbour.

The figure wears shimmering black mother-of-pearl scale armour and a great nautilus-shell helmet. A black gull circles overhead. The stranger marches directly toward the palace carrying a sealed message.

Then somebody tries to assassinate him.

The database’s Messengers of Gorath are agents of the cult of Yarthraak. Their equipment functions underwater, their nautilus helmets allow them to breathe both water and air, their gloves carry shark-tooth spikes, and at sea they ride killer whales controlled by whistles. Each also has a black seagull familiar. index_json

The characters could protect him, hunt him, steal the message, or simply become involved when his assassins attack in a crowded market.

Danger: ★★★★☆, Veteran (Rank 4). One Messenger should make a substantial opponent. Near water I would make him considerably more dangerous because he can retreat somewhere most characters cannot easily follow. Add his familiar and aquatic allies and this becomes an encounter where terrain matters enormously.

Messenger of Gorath, MeG stats

3. The Locked Room Has Six Swords: Six-Armed Snake Demon

A wealthy antiquarian hasn’t been seen for three days. His servants hear movement upstairs but refuse to enter his study.

The door remains locked from the inside.

When the characters finally enter, they discover the antiquarian dead beside a shattered clay seal. Something with six arms has spent three days quietly examining his collection.

Better still, don’t make the demon immediately hostile. It wants one particular object and regards everyone else as an irritating inconvenience. Now the characters can negotiate with it, race it to the object, or discover why releasing it was exactly what somebody intended.

The database’s Snake Demon, veteran is Rank 4, immune to electricity and poison, and receives two additional Action Points because of its extra pairs of arms. index_json

Danger: ★★★★★, Veteran (Rank 4), but exceptionally nasty. The rank understates the tactical danger. Extra Action Points are frightening in Mythras because the demon can attack, defend and exploit Special Effects while ordinary opponents exhaust their actions. I would use one as the encounter rather than treating it as another monster type appearing in groups.

Six-Armed Snake Demon, MeG stats

4. The Vampire Has Been Invited to Dinner: Ctenmiir

A wealthy noble has acquired an exotic foreign adviser. Since his arrival, servants have disappeared and the noble has become strangely compliant.

Unfortunately, the characters cannot simply kick down the door. The adviser attends dinners, visits temples, meets merchants and enjoys the protection of one of the city’s most important families.

Ctenmiir is a vampire with sunlight vulnerability and a Gaze Attack capable of Domination. index_json

The interesting encounter therefore isn’t “fight the vampire”. It is proving that the charming foreign guest is a vampire while dealing with people who genuinely believe the characters are dangerous lunatics.

Danger: ★★★★☆, Skilled (Rank 3). The raw rank is moderate, but Domination dramatically changes the situation. His greatest weapons should be servants, guards and influential victims who don’t realize they have become weapons.

Removing Glorantha: The database tags Ctenmiir with Glorantha, Genertela and Pamaltela, but the actual mechanical concept shown here is easily detached. Make him an ancient vampire from another kingdom and retain sunlight vulnerability and Domination.

Ctenmiir, MeG stats

5. Something Is Eating the Bronze Statues: Parenlings

The city wakes to discover that a famous bronze statue has lost both feet.

The next night part of a temple door disappears.

Then bronze nails, hinges and fittings begin vanishing from buildings in the same neighbourhood.

The culprits aren’t thieves. They are Parenlings, strange living organisms made from inorganic metal. They resemble elongated blobs of metal with pseudopod-like limbs, sense vibrations and minerals, feed upon minerals and can slowly merge with and travel through solid rock. They normally prefer fleeing to fighting and occur in groups of roughly two to six. index_json

That creates a wonderfully peculiar urban hunt. Follow the trail of missing bronze into foundations, forgotten cisterns and ancient tunnels until the characters discover that the creatures have laid eggs inside the foundations of an important building.

And now somebody wants them alive because a living creature made of silver would be worth a fortune.

Danger: ★★★☆☆ individually, ★★★★☆ as a colony. Their real danger comes from environment and numbers rather than aggression. Cornering several in a cramped underground chamber turns apparently harmless mineral grazers into creatures battering people with mace-like metallic limbs. The database explicitly notes that they generally flee unless cornered. index_json

Removing Glorantha: Replace the Mostali origin with an ancient alchemist, forgotten artificer civilization, dwarven experiment, magical accident or spontaneous elemental life. The essential idea is simply metal that somehow became alive.

Faster pages, simpler hosting, and a sturdier home for Fog of War and MeG.

There has been quite a lot happening behind the scenes at Tools From Pavis during the last couple of weeks.

The biggest change is one that hopefully you will mostly notice by not noticing it: Tools From Pavis has moved to the Render hosting platform.

The old PythonAnywhere setup served the site well for a long time, but Tools From Pavis has gradually become a rather different beast from the collection of small utilities it started as. MeG has grown, Fog of War now has live player displays and synchronization, and considerably more is happening during an actual gaming session.

The move to Render gives the site a better foundation for all of this. Pages should respond faster, deployment and maintenance are simpler, and I have considerably better tools for seeing what is happening when something goes wrong.

In other words, not the most glamorous feature ever added to Tools From Pavis, but quite possibly one of the more useful ones.

A more reliable Fog of War

A fair amount of the work leading up to the move came from Fog of War.

The Live Player Display introduced a new challenge: the GM can now change something on one device and expect it to appear almost immediately on another. That sounds simple until browsers, networks, hosting services, phones, televisions and embedded Obsidian windows all join the party.

Quite a bit of plumbing has therefore been rebuilt.

Large pieces of tactical data, such as fog masks, are no longer pushed around unnecessarily with every synchronization message. The live display has become better at retaining its session identity, and several problems involving HTTPS proxies and generated links have been fixed.

There are also some useful new GM controls.

You can now switch between revealing and hiding areas of the map, and the active mode is much clearer. There is an emergency Black Out Players command for those occasions when the players really should not be looking at the map at all.

And if things aren’t behaving, pressing S opens the Sync Monitor, which provides a quick view of whether the GM, server and player display are still talking to each other.

Players also have their own local measuring ruler. They can check distances without filling the GM’s display with measurement lines.

MeG remembers its history

The other substantial piece of work has been less visible during play, but important for the long-term creature library.

MeG now keeps a permanent monthly history of the creature catalog.

I have restored and checked the available history back to May 2026, and comparisons can now look back over the previous twelve months rather than just a few recent releases.

This means the release notes can show more reliably how the catalog has changed over time: what has appeared, what has changed, and how the collection has grown.

There are also automatic checks intended to make sure that months don’t mysteriously disappear from that history in the future.

It is perhaps a slightly archaeological feature, but then catalog archaeology is surprisingly entertaining when you have accumulated enough creatures.

Lots of smaller things

As usual, a number of smaller improvements arrived while all this was happening.

Browsers should now pick up updated styles and scripts without requiring ritual cache-clearing ceremonies. Live tactical links have a cleaner lifecycle and expire after 24 hours. Various production errors and broken links have been fixed, and the diagnostic tools behind the site have improved considerably.

Most of these aren’t features you should have to think about.

That is rather the point.

A new home

So this update is less about adding another shiny button and more about giving Tools From Pavis a stronger foundation.

PythonAnywhere → Render

The aim is simple: faster response, easier maintenance, better diagnostics, and a more reliable platform for the increasingly live and interconnected parts of Tools From Pavis.

There will undoubtedly still be bugs lurking in dark corners. This is software, after all. But at least I now have a better lantern for finding them.

You can see the smaller changes on the What’s New page, and MeG’s expanded history in the MeG Release Notes.

And now that the plumbing has had some attention, perhaps I can get back to the important business of creating creatures and hiding them behind the fog.

You can find toolsfrompavis here like always https://toolsfrompavis.com

The Fog of War tool has received quite a workout during the summer.

What started as a fairly straightforward way to cover and reveal parts of a map has gradually become something rather more useful at the gaming table: a lightweight tactical map companion with tokens, initiative, measurements, statuses and, now, a live synchronized player display.

The latest round of changes concentrates on two things: sharing the action with the players and making the GM interface faster during actual play.

Here is the GM map

The Big One: Live Player Display

You can now give the players their own view of the map.

Start a Live Session and Fog of War creates a unique player URL and QR code. Put the player view on a television or second monitor, or let players open it on their phones or tablets.

The player display is deliberately not another GM screen.

Players see fully opaque fog, the parts of the map you have revealed, and only the tokens they are supposed to know about. Hidden tokens and GM-only information are filtered out before the player view receives them.

You can either just share the players screen separately or give them the link of the live players screen.

So the ogre lurking behind the ruined wall remains the GM’s little secret until it is time for the ogre to become everybody’s problem.

The Map Now Moves Live

Originally synchronization was something you explicitly asked Fog of War to do. That is still possible, but Auto Synccan now take care of most of it.

Reveal the map with the brush or lasso and the player display follows while you work, updating roughly every couple of seconds during active revealing.

Move a token and the players see it move. Zoom into the interesting corner of the dungeon and, with Auto Sync enabled, their view follows yours.

Even ruler measurements can be synchronized. If you are explaining that the serpent is 23 metres away rather than “somewhere over there near the pillar”, everybody can see exactly what you mean.

This makes the player display particularly useful on a large television at a physical gaming table. The GM keeps the complete tactical picture on the laptop while the shared screen shows the world as the characters currently understand it.

Players Get Their Own Ruler

The player display is no longer entirely passive.

Once the GM has established the map scale, players can use their own local measurement tool. Click the ruler or press M, then measure distances directly on the player map.

Player measurements appear in yellow and remain local to that player. They do not appear on the GM map or clutter anybody else’s display.

This is a small feature, but a useful one when somebody inevitably asks:

“Can I reach that thing this round?”

Measure it and find out.

Players also now get a more focused version of the Tools From Pavis sidebar, concentrating on things useful during play, such as Combat Flow and the Dice Roll Evaluator. An active Fog of War session can be reopened through the Player View link.

Initiative Has Become Much More Tactical

The initiative list has also received considerable attention.

Initiative values can now be edited directly in the sidebar. Change a number, finish editing, and the list automatically sorts itself into the new order.

You can also right-click a character directly in the initiative list to open its tactical menu. There is no need to find the corresponding token underneath a heap of combatants just because somebody has been knocked prone.

From there you can apply statuses, toggle torches, rename tokens and perform the usual token operations.

The currently active character is much harder to lose track of. It receives a prominent gold border and ▶ marker in the initiative list together with a gold ring around its map token.

The player initiative display follows the same secrecy rules as the map. Hidden opponents remain hidden and their statuses are not quietly leaked through the initiative tracker.

A Faster Interface for Actual Play

The September update reorganizes the interface around a fairly simple idea:

setup and play are different activities.

The sidebar is now divided into four tabs:

Tools | Tokens | Initiative | Session

Things you normally need while running an encounter stay close at hand. Setup operations such as entering a map, aligning its scale and exporting it have moved into Session, where they stop consuming space once swords are out.

Reveal controls are contextual as well. Brush size and softness settings appear when you are actually using the Brush rather than permanently occupying valuable sidebar territory.

The result is considerably less scrolling and more room for the map itself.

Statuses Without the Scrollathon

Mythras combatants have an unfortunate tendency to accumulate conditions.

Prone. Stunned. Bleeding. Unconscious. Dead.

Previously, assigning these meant navigating a fairly long status list. Status selection is now a compact four-column quick grid with recognizable icons, making common combat conditions much faster to apply.

This is especially useful once an encounter has acquired six combatants, three wounds, two people on the floor and somebody who has caught fire.

In other words, somewhere around round three.

Better on Tablets

A considerable amount of less glamorous work has gone into making Fog of War behave like a tactical application rather than a desktop web page squeezed onto another device.

Buttons and inputs now use a minimum 44-pixel touch target, making the interface much easier to operate from an iPad or other tablet.

Labels also maintain a minimum readable font size, so token names do not shrink into archaeological inscriptions when working at unusual zoom levels.

Help and keyboard shortcuts have meanwhile been consolidated into a single accessible help dialog in the header.

Small Things That Remove Clicks

There are several smaller changes intended simply to make running an encounter require less fiddling.

New enemy tokens now face right (90°) by default, while player tokens face left (270°). Drop opposing groups onto the map and they are already looking suspiciously at one another.

The interface remembers more of the tactical state, and the player sidebar provides a direct route back into an active Player View.

There is also now a secure contact form in the Help Hub for bug reports, suggestions and other feedback.

Keeping GM Secrets Secret

The synchronization work also prompted some substantial changes behind the curtain.

Fog of War now follows a more fail-closed approach to player information. If something cannot safely be determined to be visible, the player display should not receive it.

One particularly sneaky bug involved torches attached to hidden tokens. Under the wrong circumstances, their light could reveal fog and thereby announce that something unseen was standing in the darkness carrying a light source.

That has been fixed.

Hidden monsters may once again lurk professionally.

Getting Started

Using the new player display takes only a few steps:

1. Open Fog of War at /fogofwar/.
2. Load your map and prepare it normally.
3. Open Session and enable Live Session.
4. Enable Auto Sync if you want the player display to follow changes automatically.
5. Show the generated QR code to the players or send them the player link.
6. Start revealing the map, moving tokens and tracking initiative.

From there the GM continues working normally. The player display takes care of presenting the appropriate version of events to everybody else.

From Map Veil to Tactical Companion

Fog of War is still deliberately not trying to become a complete virtual tabletop.

There are already excellent applications for that.

The aim is narrower: give a GM the tactical pieces that are useful alongside a physical or online Mythras game without requiring the campaign to move into a VTT ecosystem.

Load a map. Hide what should be hidden. Reveal it as the characters explore. Put combatants on it. Track initiative and conditions. Measure distances. Give the players a clean second-screen view.

And then get back to the game.

That has been the direction of the summer updates: fewer interface gymnastics for the GM, more useful information for the players, and considerably fewer opportunities for the monster behind the door to accidentally announce its presence.

You can find Fog of War at https://www.toolsfrompavis.com

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

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

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.

This update brings one of the most requested Fog of War improvements together with a major round of reliability work behind the scenes. Tokens are now much more flexible on the battlefield, the encounter catalog has become considerably more resilient under load, and it’s easier than ever to bring your Initiative Wheel roster directly onto the map. There are also quite a few security, performance and bot battling things added in the background so for example the stats should be more reliable and bots will not bother so much the other app functionality

What changed

Resizable Tokens. Tokens can now be resized to match your map. Adjust individual tokens from their context menu or resize every token at once using the new Global Size controls in the sidebar.

Smart Proportional Scaling. Token names, numbers, status markers, borders, and shadows now scale automatically with token size, keeping everything readable and visually balanced.

Import Tokens from the Initiative Wheel. Bring your Initiative Wheel roster directly into Fog of War with a single action. Existing combat rosters can now move seamlessly from initiative tracking to the tactical map. If you update the Initiative Wheel roster you can reimport and only the new ones will come in.

More Reliable Encounter Catalog. The catalog cache has been redesigned to safely support multiple users at the same time using atomic updates, preventing partial or corrupted catalog data during simultaneous browsing and encounter generation.

Catalog Health Checks. Additional validation now verifies downloaded catalog data before it is saved, protecting your library from incomplete or interrupted network responses.

Better Recovery from Edge Cases. Improved handling of malformed JSON, network timeouts, and disk-related issues helps the application recover gracefully instead of failing unexpectedly.

Production Monitoring. Added automated error notifications through Brevo, allowing production issues to be detected much sooner.

Updated Help Pages. The Initiative Wheel and Fog of War documentation now explains the different ways to import rosters, including directly from the Initiative Wheel, MEG, local session files, and active sessions.

Why it matters

This release makes tactical maps more adaptable during play while quietly strengthening the foundation underneath the entire toolset. Whether you’re adjusting token sizes for a crowded dungeon, importing combatants straight from the Initiative Wheel, or browsing the encounter catalog during a busy session, everything should now feel smoother, safer, and more dependable.

You can find the tool in https://www.toolsfrompavis.com Take a peek also at Initiative Wheel and MeG Library

This Fog of War app tries to be as simple as possible to setup and use erring on having less features than having more. I was persuaded to add couple of more: Token support and Point based area selection.

Running encounters often comes down to one question: what can the players actually see? This update expands the ToolsFromPavis Fog of War tool with features that make running tactical encounters smoother, while also improving reliability behind the scenes.

Fog of War: Tokens Arrive

The biggest addition is token support.

You can now place both Player and Enemy tokens directly onto the map, move them with drag and drop, rename them, and track their condition during play.

More than fifteen RPG-oriented status markers are included, covering common situations such as:

• Prone
• Dead
• Impaled
• Blinded
• Stunned

…and many more.

Status indicators use clear visual borders so they remain easy to read without obscuring the map itself.

For groups playing tactical Mythras combats or any other RPG with simple positioning, this removes the need to juggle a separate virtual tabletop or token tracker.

Reveal Exactly What You Want

The Fog of War brush remains the fastest way to uncover large areas, but sometimes a corridor bends at awkward angles or a room has an unusual shape.

The new Point Selection mode solves this.

Simply click between three and eight points to define any polygonal area, then reveal it instantly. Double click at the final point. It’s ideal for:

• oddly shaped caverns
• twisting corridors
• irregular buildings
• revealing only what characters can actually see

Press P to enter Point Selection mode.

If you change your mind halfway through, press Esc.

A Cursor That Doesn’t Disappear

One surprisingly annoying problem with many Fog of War tools is losing sight of the cursor when moving between dark fog and bright map areas.

The cursor now automatically changes contrast depending on the terrain underneath it, making it visible whether you’re working over black fog, pale stone floors, forests, or snow.

It is a small change, but one that quickly becomes difficult to live without.

Better Safari Support

Safari users should notice a smoother first experience.

An issue that occasionally prevented session files from appearing immediately after opening the application has been resolved by ensuring session cookies are established as soon as the application loads.

Faster MeG Library

The MeG Library also received attention in this release.

A new centralized caching layer together with proactive cache priming reduces waiting time and improves responsiveness, particularly on slower network connections or after server restarts.

Most users won’t notice the engineering involved, only that the catalogue responds more quickly and consistently.

Stability Improvements

Several infrastructure updates also made their way into this release:

• improved session persistence
• updated visualization libraries
• general reliability improvements across the application

These aren’t flashy features, but they help keep the tools focused on the game instead of the technology.

Available Now

This release continues the goal of making ToolsFromPavis a practical companion for running tabletop RPGs, whether you’re revealing ancient temples one chamber at a time or tracking the chaos of a full-scale combat with multiple opponents.

As always, feedback and feature suggestions are welcome. Many of the improvements in recent releases have come directly from game sessions where a small inconvenience turned into the next feature.

You can find the Fog of War here

Other articles on Fog of War