41. Wish You Were Elsewhere

1. On the Wish Table, if you wish a hired native is elsewhere, he goes back to the setup card. Is he considered to be unhired for regeneration purposes?

2. But not if it's a garrison native and gets sent to a dwelling on the board, right? So if a hired Order HQ gets Wished elsewhere, he stays hired, but if a hired Lancer HQ gets Wished elsewhere his term of hire ends.

Answer

1. When he hits the APPEARANCE CHART, he instantly becomes unhired.

2. Quite right. Exactly so.

The question has been raised about whether a character transmorphized into Mist can block or be block. In the General, Vol.16 #4 (Magic Realm, First Edition) there was a Q&A as below:

Q. Exactly how does MELT INTO MIST affect a character?
A. He cannot do any activities except MOVE (with Tremendous carrying capacity), he cannot Block or be Blocked, and he cannot attack nor be attacked with weapons or Spells. He can use hidden paths and secret passages freely as he moves (without discovering them). Otherwise, he plays normally.

Yet in the Second Edition rules, this point seems to be specifically addressed to the contrary:

"46.1 ...Unless the spell specifies otherwise, when an individual is transmorphized he moves, blocks and selects targets normally, as if he were not transmorphized." The description of Melt into Mist says nothing about blocking or being blocked--implying that the character transmorphized into Mist blocks (and is blocked) normally "as if he were not transmorphized."

Is this a difference between the First and Second Edition, a mistaken Q&A for the First Edition, or a correction that was supposed to get into the Second Edition, but didn't?

Answer

Apparently it's a correction that didn't get into the second edition. In any case, he/she who is melted into mist cannot block nor be blocked.

The Optional Commerce Rules are rarely played, but here's a question:

Each group of natives have their own special price for objects, for example the gold natives' special price is the objects gold value plus the Fame value (with negative Fame subtracting from the objects value as in the example). Is this special price used just for *selling* the item to the native group (like the Optional Commerce Table) or is it used in buying an object from the natives as well?

If it's used in buying, what do you do with an object which has a greater negative fame than its gold price? For example, the Black Book has a gold value of 10 and a Fame value of -15. If you are buying the Black Book, do they just give it to you and pay you 5 gold to take it?

Answer

It is definitely used in buying, as well.

In the example, you roll on the meeting table normally. If you roll a purchase, they give it to you and indeed pay you 5 gold to take it. In other words, when the item has a negative cost they pay you just so they can be rid of it, but they pay only the basic cost, without multiplication.

This is another little rule that got lost somewhere in the preparation of the 2nd edition rulebook, probably due to space constraints. You know, you phrase questions exactly the way Jim Stahler does. Jim spotted this and asked about it. As I recall, he didn't like my answer much.

The rules state that followers can use an Alert or a Rest phase that their leader records. What about Spell phases? If the Witch is Following the Sorcerer and the Sorcerer uses his extra spell phase and one other to enchant one of his purple chits, can the Witch enchant her black one using the same spell turns?

I know it doesn't say so, but I'm wondering if it was because Spell phases aren't introduced until the Fourth Encounter. (Then again, what happens if they both try to enchant the tile?)

Answer

No, followers cannot use SPELL phases. There are two reasons for this:

1) Such a rule would either require too many rules, or give certain magic users too much power, or both. How would it work? Would the followers have to specify which chits they are enchanting? How many? In what order? Do they get to see the leader's move? Are they forced to enchant chits, even if they don't want to? Presumably they are free to stop following and thus cancel the SPELL phases without warning. Following is a special activity with unique powers and penalties, and I think magic is too powerful to combine with it.

2) I want to encourage magic-users to operate independently, especially when they are hostile to each other. We tried allowing followers to enchant. It immediately led to long periods of intricate treasonous planning, followed by turns that someone bollixed up every time. Disgusted, the players stopped following entirely, and that hurt their ability to cooperate. To save following, I had to outlaw enchanting by followers.

There was a Q&A on the First Edition rules that got me thinking.
Q: If a character is Blocked before he takes his turn, can he still activate, inactivate, abandon and/or sell items he is carrying?
A: No.

This is right in the Second Edition as well since you can only activate, abandon, or sell at the beginning of a phase, and if you're blocked before your move, you don't have a phase. But what if someone comes into the clearing later (hidden, say)? Can the new character trade with the blocked character before a phase of his turn? I can't see any prohibition in the rules, but it would be easy to add one in the Third Edition.

Answer

No. The hidden character can trade with other hidden characters in the clearing, but not with the blocked character (opinion: he cannot trade because, until sunset, he is presumably being chased around the clearing by whatever blocked him).

Captain hires a Rogue at the Inn and then moves out of the clearing, leaving the Rogue behind (a common mistake!) The Company are unhired and in the clearing. There are also other characters in the clearing, so Combat will start and the Captain has to roll to see if his hired Rogue is battling the Company.

1) The Cloven Hoof is active at the Inn. (A player activated it but didn't buy it.) Does it affect the Captain's roll on the Meeting Table to see if his hired Rogue battles the Company? The text under the Cloven Hoof says it only affects characters, and Rule 32.1/1 state that hired natives don't use character's die modifiers. On the other hand, the description of finding if hired natives are battling unhired natives says the character rolls "just as if he were in the clearing" (Rule 32.7/5).

2) I assume the Captain can't buy drinks to affect his Rogue hireling's Block/Battle roll, since the Captain isn't in the clearing.

3) Does anything change if the Captain was carrying the Cloven Hoof (i.e., the Cloven Hoof was in the Captain's clearing but not at the Inn with the hired Rogue).

1) The Cloven Hoof does not affect the die roll. For the cloven hoof to take effect, it and the character must be in the same clearing, and it affects only that clearing. The rules about affecting only characters and about modifiers not affecting natives have precedence, since they explicitly address the issue. It takes some stretching to interpret "just as if he were in the clearing" to cover this case.

2) A very good assumption, indeed. No drinks.

3) Nope. The lonely native rolls on his own, so to speak, with no die roll modifiers.

The following question appeared on the MagicRealm.net forum:

"This one is not really a question (since I believe that there is no room for argument), but rather an observation: does anyone else find it strange how the rules treat mounted characters and natives differently when it comes to red side up tremendous monsters?

Rule 24.5/2: A mounted character who is in the grasp of a tremendous monster cannot play a horse
Rule 24.5: The character is killed, but the horse is unharmed.

Rule 34.7/7: If a native's horse survives, he continues to play it. Eventually, both native and horse are killed.

This seems very clear, and yet puzzling: why do tremendous monsters pick characters off their horse, but grab native horses along with the rider? Very puzzling...

It may simply be that the designer wanted to avoid the possibility of riderless
native horses wandering around, but still..."

The same question occurred to me--why a different treatment of horses for natives and characters? If the problem of riderless horses is the concern, someone suggested that a condition that native horses whose riders are killed run away and are removed from the game solves the problem. Is there something else that I am not seeing here that explains this discrepancy?

Your question is clearly about intent, so rather than insert comments, I'll just schmooze about it a little here.

There are actually two questions: why is the character plucked from the saddle, and why is the hired native not plucked. The discussion you sent seems to be asking the second question, but to be safe I'll answer both.

First, plucking characters. Allowing heavy characters to play a warhorse allows them to play a killing attack and a decent maneuver at the same time, which is too strong. At the same time, characters riding a workhorse are forced to play a much worse maneuver than they could dismounted, which would encourage bizarre tactics of dismounting. And in both cases, having the monster pick up and kill both horse and rider at the same time seemed poor verisimilitude.

So I made the monsters pluck the characters out of the saddle. It also had the added benefit of leaving the horse behind to be rounded up by other characters, which is desirable for several reasons.

So why not pluck the natives, too? Well, basically to give the Order a chance against the Tremendous monsters. Against Tremendous monsters, a dismounted Knight fights like a can of tuna fish. There's also a problem with the lighter mounted natives. They maneuver better dismounted, so plucking them just leads to a lot of pointless wriggling before the inevitable crunch. I deem it better to leave them mounted, allowing the Tremendous monsters to finish them quickly and move on to better targets.

In both cases I wanted a simple rule, so I made each rule cover all cases of that type. I didn't want the players to choose whether to play the horse--that seems bogus to me, from a verisimilitude point of view. The point about my not wanting characters riding native horses is of course correct, but it did not affect the decision because, as the fellow points out below, the horses run away. So I was left with an inconsistent rule: characters are plucked, but natives aren't. Now, I value consistency and strive for it (for lots of reasons), but when I have to choose between consistency and play value, I consistently try for play value.

Here is Richard Hamblen's comments on whether you can use a Boots card in both the Encounter Step to charge and the Melee Step to maneuver.

You can use a Boots card only once per round, either in the encounter step or the Melee step, but not both in the same round. See rule 22.4/2c, second sentence:
"He cannot play a chit or card he already used in the encounter step..."
Also, on page 70 the writeup under 8. BOOTS cards says each Boots card
"can be used as a Move chit", implying the one-use limitation.

49. Flying vs. Walking the Woods

This is from Teresa Michelsen:

"One of our GMs is wondering why characters transmorphized into flying monsters can fly, but characters transmorphized into non-flying monsters can't walk the woods, only beasts can walk the woods (at least, that's how the rules appear) - even though non-flying monsters walk the woods when they prowl, so they must be able to do it. Or so the theory goes :)

The theory is this: Only the Transform Spell transmorphizes the character so completely that he gains the instincts of the beast enough to walk through the forest. Other Spells (e.g. Absorb Essence) allow him to occupy the body of the monster but not its mind, so when he tries to walk through the forest he keeps bumping into trees and gets lost.

A question has come up about buying drinks. Somehow most of us had mentally inserted an "unhired" into Rule 10.5: "Buying drinks costs one gold point for each member of the group in the clearing."

But looking closely there isn't any such qualifier there--perhaps because there are no hired natives in the First Encounter. But it's not qualified in 31.2/2 where hired natives are introduced, either.

The reason for the question is that when hiring or trading with the Rogues or the Order, it seems strange that you would have to buy drinks for those natives that are already hired by another character.

Or that you would have to buy drinks for the Rogues you've already hired to trade or hire with the remaining unhired Rouges.

This is one of those rare cases where the rule means exactly what it says. When you buy drinks for a group, you must buy for every member of the group in the clearing, including those that are already hired (by anyone!).

This is not as strange as it seems. Why do you have to buy drinks for the whole group in the first place? Because the group is sort of like a family, and you want the whole family to feel kindly towards your efforts, rather than stir resentments that could interfere with you hiring. Hired members of the group are still loyal members of the group, and need to be humored. So to speak.

From a game design point of view, I did not want the hiring of the Rogues to get cheaper as you got closer to the leader, so he was the cheapest hire of all. That would be strange!

It would certainly be helpful to explicitly state that you
have to buy drinks for all the members of the group in the clearing, including any who are currently under hire.

The spell description says:
HURRICANE WINDS (IV/PURPLE), one character, monster or native, Move: This spell can be cast only in a mountain clearing. It creates a FLY chit with Tremendous strength and a time number of "1". The target must use this chit to run away at the start of the next encounter step; the FLY chit overrules the target's normal behavior. When the target flies out of the clearing, all of his belongings, including his horses, fly and land with him. The spellcaster chooses which adjacent tile the target flies to. See rule 47.

The questions are:

1. The spell description states that the target runs away at the beginning of the next Encounter Step, not during the Action phase when characters would ordinarily run away. Does this apply to characters as well as denizens?

2. If so, I assume that this means that a character with Hurricane Winds cast on them cannot be prevented from running away by another player charging with, for example, a Broomstick Fly 1 chit, because the character with the spell cast on him would be removed from the clearing before another character has a chance to charge him with Broomstick.

3. If the target has a red-side-up monster on his sheet, does 47.4/2a "a. When he flies away, he ignores non-flying move times. The only denizens and ATTENTION chits on his MELEE SECTION that can stop him from flying away are those that fly (and red-side-up Tremendous monsters)." imply here that Hurricane Winds has no effect on an individual in the clutches of a red-side-up Tremendous monster?

4. What if the target is a red-side-up Tremendous monster? Does the monster get flown away and its victim stay in the clearing? Or do both stay in the clearing? Or both fly away? (That would be difficult to handle since there would have to be rules in effect for what happens when a character/denizen is in the clutches of the red-side-up Tremendous monster during the day when they land.)

5. If the target is a character or hired leaders, I assume they execute a Fly phase as their first phase the following day and land as usual when flying away. The spell description suggests that the spellcaster determines which tile they land in, instead of having a choice to land in the hex they flew from or the adjacent hex. Is this the case?

1. Yes

2. Yes, exactly so. This is the exact intent of the rule. After all, how to you stop something being carried off by a Hurricane Wind?

3. No, the reference applies only to regular flying, not Hurricane Winds. An individual cannot just fly away while he is being held by a Tremendous Monster. Except for Hurricane Winds, of course. When Hurricane Winds hit an individual being held by a Tremendous Monster, the individual is ripped from the monster's grasp and flies away (and the Monster turns red-side down). This exception is sort of implied by the clause "the FLY chit overrides the target's normal behavior", which is located in the Hurricane Winds spell description. Of course, the rule should have been stated explicitly. The rule: "When the Hurricane Winds FLY chit is played on a red-side Tremendous monster, or his target, the monster immediately drops his target and turns red-side down, and the target of the Hurricane Winds is blown away." A sentence much like this one was one of the first sentences edited out of the 2nd Edition rules in order to shorten them.

4. The monster flies, the victim stays. See my answer to question 3, above. You make a nice point about the lack of rules. If the monster and victim were blown away, surely I would have made some reference to how to handle the situation. Unfortunately, the "surely" doesn't work because you can't be sure what was edited out!

5. Yes

52. Optional Missile Table

I am just about to finish my first PBEM game that I have run using the Optional Combat Rules. This is the first time that I have used the Option Combat Rules and one thing that has struck me is how much more powerful attack spells and bows appear to be than in the base rules. This is a combination of two effects:

1. the Optional Missile Table increases the harm by one level (die roll=3 gives no change in the base Missile Table, but increases the harm by one level in the Optional Missile Table)

2. the speed differential for bows and, particularly, prepared attack spells is enormous. Since bows will almost always be alerted with speed=1, they will have a -3 roll modifier against a move speed 4 opponent if directions match and a +1 roll modifier (equivalent to the original Missile Table) for an undercut. Prepared attack spells with speed=0 are powerful beyond anything imaginable. Nothing stands up to them if they match directions: a prepared Fiery Blast that matches directions automatically takes out any Tremendous monster or, if it matches direction with either the horse or the rider, an armored Knight of the Order on their armored mount. Even if it only undercuts, a prepared attack spell exceeds the base combat results against a speed=4 target. Any target faster than speed=4 is typically going to be more vulnerable. A prepared Fiery Blast is powerful beyond anything in the basic game, and it makes characters who can cast Fiery Blast way more powerful.

I am contemplating trying out a variant where the speed differentials are applied to the Fumble Table, but not to the Optional Missile Table. Any comment?

I surely do have some comments. The rule is correct, except as noted below. (This is one of those "Horror Tales from the Second Edition", but I won't bore you with the yarn unless you're interested.)

1. The typesetters set the wrong Optional Missile Table. It should look like this:

Net die roll: Effect on damage caused:
-2 or less = plus 3 levels
-1 = plus 2 levels
0, 1 = plus 1 level
2, 3, 4 = no change
5, 6 = minus 1 level
7 = minus 2 levels
8 or more = minus 3 levels

Explanation: The old Missile table provides 6 levels of results (from gaining 2 levels to losing 3 levels). This covers the range of results for all possible missile attacks, but I think it is too much variability for any particular attack. I wanted to differentiate better attacks from worse attacks, reserve the best results for the best attacks and reserve the worst results for the worst attacks. This necessarily implied fewer levels of variability, forcing me to repeat some results on the table. The result is a table where any given shot's results can vary by only 3 or 4 levels, with the best results reserved for hits that match direction and the worst results reserved for the hits that merely undercut.

2. When rolling for a prepared (i.e. time zero) Fiery Blast or Lightning Bolt Spell, subtract one sharpness star (in addition to any sharpness lost due to armor). Explanation: This is strictly a play balance adjustment, to keep Fiery Blast and Lightning (especially Fiery Blast!) from being too strong. This adjustment need not be made for Stones Fly--I don't mind beefing that Spell up a bit.
Explanation: This part of the rule was cut to save space, but I didn't fight for it because a) it was such a kludge I was ashamed of it, and b) I wasn't sure it was needed, given the other effects of the Optional Missile Table. Now I think it is needed, even if it is a kludge.
Incidentally, a "kludge" (aka "klooge") is a clumsy patch to fix a flaw in a system (as opposed to designing a flawless system). I first encountered the term in engineering, but we game designers also use it to describe an arbitrary, artificial rule to patch a malfunctioning game interaction.

53. Pilgrim's Heavenly Protection and Hired Natives

The Pilgrim can not lure the Demons or the Imp and does not roll when they are randomly assigned. What about the Pilgrim's hired natives?

1. Can the Pilgrim lure a Demon with a hired native or deploy a hired native against a Demon? I would assume yes since it doesn't say they can't.

2. Can a Demon be Randomly Assigned to one of the Pilgrim's hirelings?

Groan. The 2nd Edition rulebook spits up another hairball.
My intention was (and is) that the "Special Advantages" apply only to the characters themselves, not to their hirelings.
The problem is with rule 32.1/1, I think. This rule intended to imply that hirelings were attacked like their owners, using the owners' friendship values when dealing with natives. It was *not* intended that the hirelings should benefit from their owners' Special Advantages.
Jim Stahler pointed the problem, so I put an additional sentence in the exception to rule 32.1/1, to the effect that the hirelings cannot use their owners' special advantages. Unfortunately, the powers that be (or the powers that were) edited the extra sentence out, in order to save space (remember, the rules were too long). In justification, they pointed out that the issue had never actually arisen, and that the players seemed to automatically assume that hirelings cannot use the special advantages; in other words, the "powers that were" felt that the exception was not needed.
So here we are, with me not knowing what to say except that the hirelings should not be allowed to use the Special Advantages, period. To allow hirelings to use any of the special advantages raises the question, can all of the hirelings use them? This opens a real can of worms. Can the Rogue choose different times for his hired leaders to take their turns? When the Berserker plays his Berserk chit, do all of his hirelings gain Tremendous vulnerability? Do the Amazon's hired leaders get to move an extra space when she is not with them? Do the Wizard's hired leaders know all the secret passages and hidden paths in the game? And so on.
So I say again, the hired natives should not get the benefit of special advantages, ever.

1. Yes.

2. Yes, whether the Pilgrim is in the same clearing or not.

54. Vial of Healing

Consider the Vial of Healing. I generally thought of it as just being a fairly worthless Potent, worth 2 gold or so. Then while gamemastering the BIMR6 game, I actually read the description:

"VIAL OF HEALING: This card converts its owner's wounds into fatigue instantaneously, at no cost. While a character has this card active, all of his wounded action chits are instantly converted into fatigued chits,and any new wounds he receives are also converted to fatigued chits. This card does not affect fatigued chits. This Potion is reusable and can be transferred while active, but it expires at Midnight and is returned to the Chapel."

The question is what happens if your wounded chit doesn't have any asterisks? It can't be fatigued - there's no provision in the rules for a fatigued chit without an asterisk. It seems like there are only two choices: either a) if you wound a non-asterisk chit while the Vial of Healing is active, it immediately comes back as an active chit, or b) the Vial of Healing doesn't apply to a wounded chit without an asterisk.
The language "all of his wounded action chits are instantly converted" seems to invalidate b). On the other hand, if a) is correct, this is a very valuable item. It seems that you can't be wounded to death if you have the Vial of Healing active. With the Vial of Healing active, the White Knight is invulnerable to Wolves or Axe Goblins. In fact, he can just keep wounding his non-asterisk chits and getting them back instantly. No wonder it goes back to the Order when it expires - it's another little advantagefor the White Knight.

You're right, the Vial of Healing converts wounded non-asterisk chits into healthy chits.