Pickpocket Press

Hammer or Axe? Spear or Flail? Halberd or Great Sword? All characters must face the riddle of steel before they become an adventurer, by Crom!

In Low Fantasy Gaming we tried to make weapon selection a meaningful choice by giving them different traits that made picking an “obvious winner” difficult, and I think for the most part we achieved that.

In Tales of Argosa however, we’re kicking it up a notch. First of all, we’ve ported across the Trauma Table mechanic from Lowlife 2090. In summary, every weapon has a special effect on a Nat 19. Yes, every weapon. No more sad face from players when they Nat 19, only to recall that their club or bow doesn’t have a bonus effect! For the vast majority of weapons it’s a trauma roll: swords do Blade Trauma, hammers cause Blunt Trauma, and so on. The tables have entries from 1 to 12, of escalating severity, and different weapons roll different dice. A dagger for example causes 1d10 Blade Trauma, while a Battle Axe causes 1d8+4. For blades, rolling a 1 means the target is pinned, while a 12 means their neck is severed! Yessiroo trauma effects can be pretty nasty boo. Check out Blast Trauma 12. You’re welcome.

In keeping with LFG many weapons also have an additional thematic (?) option players can choose to invoke on a Nat 19 instead of a trauma roll if they wish – eg swords disarm, hammers knock prone or back, and whips trip, pull, or disarm.

Of course, Monsters also use the trauma tables. Many beasties have custom Nat 19 effects, but a good number make trauma rolls like PCs do. As you might expect, this makes every combat more dangerous for the party, which is consistent with our three primary design goals for ToA (greater danger, quicker combat, more emergent play). Theoretically, any bandit armed with a sword could get in a lucky swing and take off an adventurer’s arm! But to be fair, the odds of this happening are exceedingly low on an opponent to opponent basis. Over the scope of a campaign however, such injuries are entirely possible.

We’ve also taken the opportunity to tweak the balance of some weapons. The new Initiative stat (average of Dex and Int) makes daggers, rapiers, and shortswords more desirable for example (+2 Init), while varying trauma rolls better differentiates the d6 to d8 damage group. Comparatively speaking, polearms and flails received a small boost. Range bands have caused throwing distances to be simplified, and the new Second Rank trait allows for a “long reach” style quality without a grid.

Ammunition rolls are new. GMs can of course simply track ammo as normal, but the default rule is after each battle that bows, slings, etc are used in, there’s an escalating 1 in 6 chance that the PC only has enough ammo left for one more combat. PCs can resupply at the nearest village or town.

Finally, we’ve simplified special metals, refocusing them around weapons as opposed to armour (in six years of play, I dont think I ever had anymore use them for armour!), and cleaned up some of the table language.

Most importantly of all however – these weapon tweaks and trauma tables are compatible with LFG right now (or indeed, any similar fantasy game). If you’d like to make your sessions more dangerous, give these new weapons a try!! A six page PDF of the above rules is available via Googledrive here.

As always, we’re super keen to hear about play reports or other ideas and feedback you might have as we continue to test ToA 🙂 Don’t hesitate to reach out to us here or Discord or Reddit or any of our other socials – I promise I read them and I’ll be sure to respond!

And that’s the latest for now folks. Have a great weekend!