Special effects are one of the best features in Mythras. They can make the fights cinematic and their right use tactically can make you win.
Ulgar the Quick (PC character): I hit the thug and he did not parry – I want to get rid of the opponent’s weapon – what options do I have.
GM: Ushgar the Rabid (PC character) failed to hit and the Ilyan the Constable parried. I want to force Ushgar to do something – what options do I have.
Mongo the Mighty (PC character) : Mongo smashed and the puny opponent failed to parry. I want to hurt the opponent – what options do I have.
Here is a result based approach in mind map form for both defensive and offensive special effects. This should help in getting players (and the GM) to find quickly what special effects to use based on what the winner wants to achieve on his special effect.
Combat styles, combat style traits, weapon traits and special effects are key parts of what makes Mythras so interesting in combat. I decided to make a player aid for my campaign that contains the key information for players about combat style they have chosen.
Combat style card contains the name and combat style traits of the style with an explanation what the trait provides.
Each of the combat styles contains usually several weapons. Most of the special effects that player can choose are the same for each of the weapons. So I gathered the common special effects within the combat style’s weapons to the top of the page.
For each of the weapons the key details of the weapon are shown plus the possible weapon traits.
Underneath the basic information there are only those special effects specific to that weapon.
So how would player use this:
Let’s say she knows the combat style Gladiator.
She has succeeded in the attack so she now has options
choose any of the items in the common block underneath the combat style – any from Close Range to Trip Opponent.
decide to use her Shortsword’s Impale or
use her Buckler’s Bash special effect.
When it is her turn to defend she can
use her Daredevil trait to evade blows without ending up prone or
she can passively block with her Buckler 2 locations or
she could actively parry with either her buckler or
she could actively parry with her shortsword.
Here is a bigger combat style example
The files here contain close to 100 combat styles described as above. The material is scourged from AIG, Monster Island, Mythras, Monster Island and my own campaign.
Monster Island
Brotherhood of the Carrion Scavenger.pdf
Brotherhood of the Fang.pdf
Brotherhood of the Noiseless Whisper.pdf
Brotherhood of the Obsidian Claw.pdf
Brotherhood of the Relentless Pursuit.pdf
Brotherhood of the Serpentine Grace.pdf
Brotherhood of the Silken Death.pdf
Brotherhood of the Unsleeping Eye.pdf
Civilian Cohort.pdf
Eight Jab Doom.pdf
Eiki Elite.pdf
Eiki.pdf
Mua Infantry.pdf
Stinger.pdf
Tua Skirmisher.pdf
White Death.pdf
Here is a traditional sorcery grimoire template for Mythras – this is a first tryout for my campaign’s first sorcerer. This is traditional in a sense that the only options it uses is the duration length option. I will be making similar ones for various sorcery schools which have different components.
How one could use it. Player should fill it with the sorcery information relevant to your players’ sorcery grimoire. During game it should help how the various shapings the player wants to use affect the spell.
When he selects as a spell Shapechange to Shark with his 4 shaping points he could put 2 points into duration getting 15 minutes of shape change. After this he could put one point into targets getting 2 targets (perhaps himself and a companion). After this he could put remaining 1 point he can put 1 point into magnitude getting a magnitude of 2 and have some protection for resisting dispelling the shapechange.
This would take 1 MP for the spell itself and 1 for each shaping (Duration, Targets and Magnitude) = 4 Magic Points for the overall spell cost. It would take 4 turns to cast the spell (1 for the spell itself and 1 for each shaping).
Gianni Vacca made a request at Google+ forums for d100 version of Altinae daimon that was missing. So I promised to create one in the Encounter Generator. Daimons are quite rarely encountered in Genertela.
On the whim I added few other rarely encountered ones. Sedrali are dog people in Ralios. They are seen for example in the original Narrator’s book but of course found on the Anaxial’s Roster.
Games Master will sometimes need quickly a set of player characters. Perhaps it is for a one off at convention or otherwise. Perhaps there was a TPK or you had one new player on baord without a character. Though character generation is fun it may take awhile – so in this series of posts a way to generate quickly some pregenerated characters.
You will also find a pregenerated nomad party, most likely in Paps or near Pavis city walls as so many different tribes together is likely to cause strife.
What are you waiting for – go make ambush already in Plains of Prax or hire out to protect a merchant caravan or go looting he Big Rubble in front of you
which contains the Cwim itself, gorps he throw and the spit monsters.
It would be good to know about his arriva a bit beforehand as the party might need some preparing. So I created random party table for Foreshadowing the Encounter. It can be attached to any party and it can provide some clues that an encounter might be occurring. Some examples would be
locals fleeing the encounter
carrion animals associated with encounter gathering
Spoor of the encounter found
Footprints made by the encounter
Wildlife alarmed by the closeness of the encounter
Favorite food animal of the encounter growing alarmed
and so on.This is attached now to Cwim’ming party but will in time be attached to other parties as well.
Here are few other Chaos encounters from earlier posts
Mythras Encounter Generator reached a boundary of 2500 Encounter Templates today. It is quite a ride since August 2013 when I first learned of the RQ Encounter Generator and started to contribute to it.
Here are few of the new ones I created during this weekend.
Sorcery tool described here has been updated based on user feedback.
The new version of the tool (1.1) contains both the standard durations for spells and the optional long durations. You select as per your GM’s choice using the campaing duration rules field.
The unenchanted iron version is a house rule that is now explained.
Here are some charts that I made that have been useful for my Mythras (former editions known as RQ6) campaign. All the relevant ones have been updated for Mythras 3rd printing (2018 Nov). The screen shots are still of the old versions.
List of charts
Combat Flow
Offensive Special Effects (landscape and portrait)
Defensive Special Effects (landscape and portrait)
Added a small chart for combat flow and pointers to relevant rules sections based on great discussion in the design mechanism forums in here
Combat Flow in RQ6
Special Effects
Offensive and Defensive Special Effects
The Combat Special Effects for Offensive combines all the special effects for the offensive one quick reference to see what you can do when hitting something. Here is the latest one updated with Mythras in portrait mode
Here is an update to Gloranthan andEastern Weapons for RQ6 that has current understanding how lunar, dwarves, elves, dragonewts and easterners weapons work in RQ6.
Here we have a quick reference chart for Criticals and Difficulty Grade effect on skill. If you like maths – you do not need the chart, the calculations are simple but I find doing them in the heat of the game distracting.
In Mythras the success of your attempt can be modified by the situation. This can be adjudicated by GM fiat but if you some guidance here are all of the recorded modifiers in tables both for close combat and ranged combat. Some people do not use fatigue or encumbrance rules or even the weapon differences – that is ok but in my view these provide additional flavor to the game. In my quest towards perfect GM Screen for Mythras I gathered all the close combat situational modifiers into one table.
Close Combat Situational Modifiers
It now contains the usual ones (fighting in pitch black darkness, partial darkness, blinded, while prone and so on). In addition it has the shorter reach for those of you playing with Reach rules. I added also the fatigue effect on close combat skills and limitations brought by swimming, climbing or riding while fighting. In case your players are doing a fighting retreat with the loot it contains the encumbrance modifiers as well. If for some reason the players (or even the NPC’s) need to grab a different, perhaps unfamiliar weapon to use – the table contains the modifier rules for those as well.
For the future chase sequences in my campaign decided to combine all the movement effects into tables that fit into a single page. I find it easier to look info from table instead of calculating it with the rules.
It contains now a table for movement rates between 1 and 14, effect of athletics on the speed when walking, running or sprinting. It also has a table for the common modifiers for movement like encumbrance, armor and fatigue. It has also the effects on ranged combat.
