The kobold sentries did, indeed, see Varis as a threat. He was greeted with barking shouts from the tops of the walls, and the sharp “crack, snap!” of discharging crossbows.
There were decidedly more than the six or so Gilliam had guessed at with his quick glance into the courtyard. Six bolts alone seemed to spring up in the dust raised by Varis’ boots. One thudded into his upraised shield, while another two broke against the large huddle of stone towards which the warrior charged for cover.
That looked to’ve been part of the keep’s upper floor, tumbled into the courtyard, not yet completely swallowed by the ground or worn away by the countless seasons of rain and snow. Hugging the keep’s wall along the inside would only shelter us from two or three attackers, at most. The jumble of half-sunken blocks was our best bet for any sort of cover.
“Go!” Gilliam urged us, and sent one of the kobolds tumbling from the wall, a grey-feathered arrow in its throat. That gave the rest enough pause that Ana and I could dash for the stones.
Another storm of bolts peppered the courtyard around us, but fortunately, the early morning’s sunlight was enough to hamper the kobolds’ efforts.
“Distract them,” Varis said, adjusting the grip on his shield. “I’m going for the stairs.” And he was off again, shield held overhead. How he could run under the weight of that jangling metal was beyond me.
I called forth a gout of Druidic flame, and hurled it towards the top of the wall Varis charged. It fell short, splashing against the stones halfway up. Beside me, I heard Ana mutter a prayer, and then a curse. Whatever it was she’d tried had likewise failed.
Gilliam sucked in a slow breath as he drew grey fletching to his cheek. As he let it out, his fingers relaxed, and another kobold toppled. If the arrow in the leg hadn’t hit the artery, then the fall from the wall surely did the creature in.
Bolts cracked and struck sparks off the stairs to either side of Varis. One even lodged in his mail shirt, but he shook it loose, redoubling his efforts, taking the steps two at a time.
I lobbed another sphere of Druidic flame, and Ana repeated her prayer. Her brow furrowed, but a slight smile quirked her lips, and she repeated the Alphatian chant, her eyes intent on the kobolds to our left, atop the wall above the gates. They looked as if the were trying to scamper through mud, their teeth bared as they hauled at their crossbows as if the things were made of stone rather than wood.
Gilliam loosed another arrow, but sucked in a sharp breath, ducking down too late to avoid taking a bolt in the arm.
“Leave it!” he hissed, as I reached to yank the quarrel free. “It’ll only bleed more.”
Varis had reached the top of the stairs, and charged the closest kobold as it hauled at its crossbow’s draw mechanism. The warrior skewered the thing just as it was bringing up its weapon to fire.
Gilliam cursed as he drew and loosed an arrow. The motion was rushed, and he barely touched fletching to his cheek before he loosed the arrow, taking out the second kobold in Varis’ path before the creature could finish aiming.
The kobolds’ barking climbed in pitch, and instead of more bolts whizzing from the opposite wall, we saw three of them clambering hastily down another ruined stairway, scuttling out of sight around the corner of the keep.
The two kobolds atop the gates weren’t giving up though, struggling against Ana’s magical hold on them. They loosed their crossbows in our direction, but the shafts flew wide.
Ana’s chant broke off as Varis finished off the two, and she gulped at her waterskin. I hadn’t failed to notice that her voice had been starting to fray about the edges.
She reached past me, and slapped Gilliam’s hand as he was about to pul the bolt from his upper arm.
“I was going to—“
“You were going to make it worse,” she said. She rummaged in her pack, and pulled out a slender wooden box. Inside was a variety of cubbies and niches, containing bottles or parchment- or linen-wrapped bundles. She picked through them, sprinkling a few ingredients into a small mortar and pestle, added a splash of water from a small vial, and ground the concoction into a paste. She moistened a cloth from yet another vial, and pressed it around the edges of the bolt’s shaft. Gilliam’s sharp hiss turned into a cry that he bit down on as she yanked the quarrel free. Red darkened the cloth as she pressed it hard against the wound.
“Thorn, can you conjure that fire again?”
A small effort of will, and I filled my palm with a flickering spout of fire. More than a candle, but less than, say, a torch.
Ana held a long, silvery needle in the flame, turning it this way and that, until the tip took on a low orange glow.
“What… what are you going to do with that?” Gilliam asked. His voice cracked and he licked his lips nervously.
“Don’t worry, this will only hurt for a little bit,” Ana said.
“No, I’m fine, I think—“
“Ah, just in time,” Ana said, as Varis’ shadow fell across us. “I’ll need you to hold Gilliam’s arm still. And once I am finished here, I’ll check you to make sure that quarrel you took didn’t do something similar.”
Varis rotated his sword arm. “It didn’t go through. Feels a bit bruised. No need to trouble yourself.”
Was it my imagination, or was his reassurance a bit too hasty….?
Granted, one combat scene is really not enough to weigh an entire liking or disliking of a game. However, it did bring some aspects of the game to light that I hadn’t given much thought on a pure read-through of the rulebook.
I’ll be the first to admit that I was heavily disappointed when I saw that Sasquatch had seen fit to invert the core mechanic. It still doesn’t sit right with me, and seems to invite d20’s problems of ludicrous numbers. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the dice will only add up to so much, and there are only ten levels. But still. I miss “lower-is-better” and the internal logic of stat-plus-rank/half/quarter. And “Average/Excellent/Stellar” just feels like they fished through the thesaurus.
Sasquatch’s take on the durability track is novel. I like it… but it doesn’t feel like Alternity to me. It doesn’t feel quite as robust as the original. Debility is all well and good, but it feels “tacked on,” rather than inline like stun/wound/mortal/fatigue was in the original.
I know people lamented that armor in original Alternity wasn’t good enough (“Waah, it only stopped one point of damage!”). Armor in the new version, though, seems too good, especially with them doing away with secondary damage.
So, enough about what irked me about the new system. What did I like?
Much as I missed the Marginal, Ordinary, Good, and Amazing phases, I like how the Impulse Track “flowed.” When you acted next depended on your previous action. If you want to do bunches of “minor” actions within the round, you could do that. Similarly, if you sank all your effort into one concentrated attack, that was going to suck up a lot of your options within the eight impulse round. One minor nitpick, though, was that you sort of had to dig through the rules to see how to work out how to do two things simultaneously — if you could at all, because some of those seemed to be relegated to Talents, some of which need quite a bit of investment to finally get to.
Psionics. The closest thing they put into the rules for magic was surprisingly robust. Despite having so few options to choose from, what could be done with those options and rules covered a fair bit of territory. It was a tight bit of writing and gamewrighting. Doing away with fiddly energy points was nice, in that it made actually using those powers more palatable of an option, and the implementation of psionic effort balanced by the fatigue check put a check on the notion of going Nova every round. I liked that many of the psionic skills had “normal” and “effort” options. Those that didn’t, I tinkered a bit.
Ana, for instance, used Psychokinesis to attempt restraining pair of kobolds, in lieu of D&D’s Hold Person spell. That spell can either be targeted at an individual or group. Burning effort, I decided, would allow her to target multiple kobolds, and I tacked on the burst mechanic (-1 step per extra target). Fortunately, she rolled high enough on the control die, and got lucky with low rolls on the situational penalties. Also, she rolled high on her follow-up fatigue checks. The rules weren’t clear on sustaining effects, so I simply went with “lather, rinse, repeat” on her next turn.
I wish more skills made use of the effort/fatigue mechanic.
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