On the last Dev Journal we looked at getting your characters some friends and making new acquaintances in the grand city. For this Dev Journal, however, we’re bringing some well deserved violence to the streets of Middelburg.
Weapon Classes
In the Runed Age 1.0, weapons don’t exist, at least not mechanically. There’s no real rules for using different types of weapons (outside a quick mention in the Ruined People adventure book). The Sigil System changed that by introducing Weapon Classes, and by Classes I mean “weight classes”
The Weight of a Weapon
All weapons, ranged and melee, come in one of three different weight classes: Light, Medium, and Heavy. These weight classes give the weapons a Damage Modifier which is applied after you hit an opponent (at the same time that Armour Modifiers have always been applied), with Light weapons giving a +10 Modifier, Medium a +20, and unsurprisingly Heavy weapons give a +30 Modifier. Since the damage threshold for a Significant Wound is 20, using a Medium weapon means you will always at least give an opponent a Significant Wound each time you hit them. With a Heavy weapon, you only need to beat your opponent’s roll by 20 to give them a Grievous Wound.
So the short of it is that the heavier a weapon, the more damage it deals once it hits.
Working out those Melee Muscles
While melee and ranged weapons both use the same Weight system, melee weapons also give you a negative modifier to your Fight Skill Check to see if you will even hit the opponent, and just like the Weight Classes, the heavier a weapon, the bigger the modifier and the less likely you are to hit someone with it. The negative modifier these weapons give you is half their damage modifier, so -5 for Light, -10 for Medium, -15 for Heavy.
So heavier weapons are harder to hit someone with, but if you do hit them, they most likely won’t be coming back for seconds.
Range Bands
Where melee weapons get there negative modifiers, ranged weapons get Ranged Bands. Unlike the melee negative modifiers, the Ranged Bands are not tied to the weapon’s Weight Class, and are independently applied to the weapon. Ranged Bands don’t give any modifiers to a Shoot Skill Check, but instead they limit how far away you can actually hit someone with the weapon.
In short: you can only roll a Shoot Skill Check to hit someone if they are within your weapon’s Ranged Band or closer. Easy enough, right?
There are four Ranged Bands, but their distances aren’t fixed or defined in detail. Instead they are narrative ranges that can be different for different scenes and encounters.
Close: melee range. If you can hit something with a stick then they are within Close range.
Near: from a few meters away up to a couple of dozen meters. This is the range at which pistols and thrown objects will accurately hit their target. Anywhere in a room, decently sized house or equivalent is in Near range.
Medium: most of the way across a football field, Medium range requires a people to shout to be heard and good sized weapons to hit something.
Far: from the far end of a football field to easily twice that distance. You need a telescope to properly see further than this.
And that’s the new weapon stats for the new Runed Age. Weapons will now hit harder, but will have some limitations to getting that good hit in. In the final book you will get some examples of all sorts of weapons that fit into each weight and ranged category as well, so you’ll easily be able to pick out the right weapon for your characters.
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