System Review: Savage Worlds, Conclusion

And I Don’t Know What I’m in For

On inspection, it seems that Savage Worlds was first published in 2003, so it’s weird that I’m finally getting around to it now. Sadly, it came out too late for the “let’s convert these games to our own systems” phase my friends and I had in college, or it might have been really useful to us. Instead, it came out right in the middle of the “D20! All the time! For everything!” phase that I think a lot of groups went through a decade ago, and mine certainly did. So that’s my excuse for not really being aware of it earlier.

Overall, it’s a pretty slick little game engine that’s quickly crept up alongside Fate in my brain as an option for “I could just run [random game idea I just had] in…” As noted in the previous posts, I doubt I would actually run it without some significant alterations… but there are almost no games that I run without significant alterations. Savage Worlds has that special combination of modularity and simplicity, but with enough granularity to hook in a variety of ideas, that makes a good generic system. It’s tuned just enough toward high-action pulp that it makes itself obvious as a system for any game ideas within that spectrum without being so specific as to rule out particular concepts as too difficult to implement.

So, I’d heartily recommend the system to groups that aren’t afraid to seriously tinker with the rules. It does some things you might not be a fan of, but those things are pretty easy to replace with something more to your liking without breaking the whole thing. And if you suddenly find yourself struck by an idea for a campaign that you just need something lightweight, fast, and actiony to run, you’ll have another collection of tools to make that happen.

System Review: Savage Worlds, Part 3

Skills Out of Combat

Let’s be honest here, as a game that’s both a pulp action game and a potential replacement for D&D, Savage Worlds has a lot of pagecount devoted to combat. It’s about a quarter of the explorer’s edition, by my count. And that’s just the stuff that’s directly about actions in combat and combat gear. Many of the spells and edges are combat-related as well, pushing the count further.

But out of 24 skills listed in the book (not counting magic skills), only three are directly related to combat. You also have the standard range of mobility skills like climb, drive, ride, and swim. You have stealth, notice, investigation, and knowledge. You even have a few social skills like intimidation, persuasion, and taunt. And since the game is skill-based, you can pretty easily make a character with lots of non-combat skills and not much for combat.

Around 15 of the skills each have at least one fully detailed use. For the mobility skills, it’s generally a direct link to the chase system (always appropriate to a pulp game). The social skills each have their own rules: persuasion hooks into a D&D-esque friendliness chart and intimidation and taunt have a Test of Wills system that can be used in or out of combat to applied effects to a target. Stealth, survival, guts, and even gambling all have dedicated subsystems.

That’s why it’s glaring that there are a small number of skills that seem to be completely up to GM fiat (or expect their use to be prescribed by a module). In particular, information gathering skills like investigation, knowledge, and notice don’t offer up any guidelines as to setting appropriate difficulties (at least in the Explorer’s Edition). Knowledge is a specific issue because it’s the only skill I’m aware of that players have to buy multiple times for specialties. Not that it’s hard to design a use for those skills in play, but it does require a level of player faith in the GM remembering to support them that isn’t present in the large majority of other skills. If they were going to the trouble of inventing some kind of modular but consistent system for most of the skills, I would have liked to see all of the skills have something like that.

In practice, the standard difficulty of 4 does make it pretty easy to run skills on the fly. Even a bare minimum skill of d4 results in well over a 50% chance of success without modifiers (counting, of course, the wild die). Middle tiers of skill are more likely to get a raise, and high tiers of skill are likely to get two. Anything beyond two raises is generally a fluke of exploding dice (as even max skill will have to Ace to get a 16 or better). So the GM pretty much just has to get an idea of failure/minimal success/moderate success/exceptional success in mind to have a meaningful roll. And that’s a pretty small spectrum for a margin-of-success-based engine.

Combat

A lot of this has already been covered in Harbinger’s player-side review, so allow me to sum up. Combat in Savage Worlds is a pretty interesting limited-wounds system that initially seems like White Wolf but is actually more like Mutants and Masterminds. Too much of a sum up? Allow me to go into more detail.

Initial attacks are made with a standard roll of an appropriate combat skill. Melee attacks are made against a difficulty of a fixed “Parry” number set by the target’s own melee combat skill and gear bonuses. Ranged attacks are made against the standard difficulty 4 with penalties for range and cover. This is a divide my players found a little odd, but does at least create a difference in scope between blades and guns that’s not present in a lot of systems (i.e., if you’re out in the open at range, you’re going to take some serious gun damage no matter how skilled you are). A success allows you to roll damage, and each raise gives you an extra d6 on the damage roll.

Damage is those success d6s plus either Strength+Weapon die for melee or a fixed pair of dice for ranged. This total is all added together, but it’s not applied as a total in a traditional sense. Instead, the sum of all the dice is applied to the target’s Toughness+Armor number as a regular skill check: you’re checking for success and raises. This is the first real oddness of the combat system, and harkens back to one of my issues with CthuluTech: the typical language for skill results is abandoned for damage in that you’re totaling all the dice rather than taking the highest. The result of this is that, especially since the dice all explode, damage rolls can be incredibly swingy. The same set of dice can pretty easily range from missing the threshold entirely to getting several raises. And each raise on the attack roll is going to, on average, result in at least one more raise on the damage roll (because the d6 averages 4; or better with aces). In my playtest, this resulted in a breakpoint around Toughness 10 where the target would spend several rounds not being damaged at all only to suffer several wounds in one hit from a lucky roll.

The next unusual thing about the system is how these successes translate. Minimal success with no raises applies the Shaken condition (which can also be applied by intimidate and taunt via Test of Wills and a few other effects). When a target is Shaken, it’s basically a stun. On the target’s action, he has to pass a Spirit roll to clear it, and without a raise or spending a benny, that was the target’s whole round. If the target of an attack would be Shaken but is already suffering that condition, he instead takes a wound. So, functionally, Shaken serves as an ablative health level: it’s easier to damage you when you’re caught off guard, but you can recover and get back to the fight none the worse for wear if you weren’t tagged again while Shaken.

Unfortunately, Shaken can also lead to a running stunlock where there are just enough attack successes and Spirit successes to keep lots of the combat from doing much else besides applying and then clearing Shaken (and, unless I missed a rule exception, when you do take a wound, the penalty also applies to clearing Shaken, making you stunned longer). The condition doesn’t actually make you any easier to hit or damage (except in that if you get a successful attack past Toughness, you’re guaranteed a wound), so there are cases where a target that can be hit and damaged around half the time basically just spends rounds and rounds locked down with the opponent hoping against hope for some aces on damage rolls. My playtest session ended on a fight that took a ridiculously long time because it featured high-defense enemies with low Spirit; the players couldn’t reliably damage them but could basically keep them locked down through a combination of spells and tests of will. The next time I run the game, I’m giving serious thought to changing Shaken from a stun to a defense penalty that still allows you to act.

However, on the whole, combat in the game is fast and interesting, particularly at defense totals that are within the sweet spot for the group. The damage system doesn’t require a ton of bookkeeping but still provides a meaningful gradation of threats. There are lots of interesting combat options (some of which might have made the last fight go faster if we’d remembered to use them), and the consequence of getting pushed to incapacitated are an interesting mix of simulation and heroism.

Ultimately, I have some reservations, but, just like with character creation, they’re issues that I’m inspired to tinker with rather than allow them to turn me off the system entirely.

Conclusion

Alternate Savage Worlds Attributes

Based on my general uncertainty of the utility of attributes discussed in last week’s review, here is how I might replace attributes in a Savage Worlds game. This should have the side effect of making characters less likely to exceed expected balances at low rank.

Basics

• Characters roll 1d6 (unless modified by an Edge) for most miscellaneous rolls formerly covered by attributes. This includes resisting tricks, recovering from Shaken, resisting disease and hunger, and any other attribute roll not mentioned below.
• Characters roll 1d4 (unless modified by an Edge) for performing tricks and adding to melee weapon damage
• Toughness for all characters is 4 unless modified by an Edge.
• At Rank 1, characters cannot purchase skills higher than 1d8 (though they might still benefit from passive bonuses from Edges). At Rank 2 this cap increases to 1d10, 1d12 at Rank 3, 1d12+1 at Rank 4, and 1d12+2 at Rank 5.
• When making a character, players gain 3 additional Edges (but, of course, no points to spend on attributes). They can be spent on existing Edges or the new Edges below.

New Edges

Each Edge below in the sequence requires the previous Edge as a prerequisite.

Strong: You add 1d6 to melee weapon damage (instead of 1d4) and add +1 to miscellaneous (1d6) tests involving physical might (which previously required a Strength roll).

Mighty: Your bonus from Strong increases to 1d8 and +2. Prereq: Rank 2.

Brutal: Your bonus from Mighty increases to 1d12 and +3. Prereq: Rank 3.

Unstoppable: Your bonus from Brutal increases to 1d12+2 and +4. Prereq: Rank 4.

Tricky: You roll 1d8 to perform and resist Tricks (instead of 1d4 and 1d6).

Clever: You roll 1d10 to perform and resist Tricks. Prereq: Rank 2.

Devious: You roll 1d12 to perform and resist Tricks. Prereq: Rank 3.

Adaptive: You roll 1d8 to recover from Shaken (instead of 1d6) and gain +1 to Guts checks.

Centered: You roll 1d10 to recover from Shaken and gain +2 to Guts checks. Prereq: Rank 2.

Unshakable: You roll 1d12 to recover from Shaken and gain +3 to Guts checks. Prereq: Rank 3.

Tough: Your toughness is 5 (instead of 4) and you add +1 to miscellaneous (1d6) tests involving physical health (which previously required a Vigor roll).

Indomitable: Your toughness is 6 and you add +2 to physical health tests. Prereq: Rank 2.

Invulnerable: Your toughness is 7 and you add +3 to physical health tests. Prereq: Rank 3.

Impervious: Your toughness is 8 and you add +4 to physical health tests. Prereq: Rank 4.

Immortal: Your toughness is 10 and you add +5 to physical health tests. Prereq: Rank 5.

System Review: Savage Worlds, Part 2

Character Creation

As mentioned last week, Savage Worlds is an interesting hybrid of skill-based and level-based. Characters spend experience on whatever traits they want as they get it (well, they technically turn every five experience into one “advance”), and every 20 experience they increase a level (“rank”). The primary benefit of increased rank is access to more powerful character options (particularly powers and edges). Effectively, rank is a prerequisite in the same way a high attribute or skill would be. This is theoretically a pretty straightforward way of having the more human-scale power levels of a skill-based system while mitigating the ability of a high starting combat skill from letting a new character trounce threats that are intended to be overpowering. Practically, I don’t have enough experience with the game to say whether it works for sure, but having a maxed skill is a huge advantage (and I’ll get into that more next week).

The creation method itself is not likely to have many surprises for players of other skill-based systems. The biggest (and most pleasant) surprise of the whole thing is the elimination of the current level conundrum: advances after character creation are spent in the same way as points during character creation (i.e., with no increasing cost to buy higher levels of a trait). This makes it less of a mathematical advantage to create an idiot-savant character during chargen with no traits that aren’t as high as possible.

However, the game does still try to limit high-end skill creep in a different way. While you don’t roll Attribute + Skill, each skill still has a governing attribute. If a player wants to raise a skill over that attribute, it costs double. While sensible on paper, this method feels slightly punitive when actually making or upgrading a character. This is partly because the game’s suggested starting skill points are not enough to make a very well-rounded character in the first place, and having to pay double to get a reasonable skill rank that disagrees with your attribute choices makes this pool effectively smaller. Additionally, there is no concept of getting a refund if you eventually do raise the attribute, so two identical characters could have different experience totals based on what order they made purchases. Given that, with advances, raising an attribute costs the same as raising a skill over its governing attribute, you can get two attribute increases and two skill increases for the same price as three skill increases. In making pre-gen characters, it felt like making idiot savants was still a good tactic: not because of a penalty for buying high skills after chargen, but just because it pays to max out one attribute and the associated skills that you want before moving on to another.

Part of the problem is that attributes have no consistent system impact, instead being used in often idiosyncratic ways throughout the system. Strength adds to melee damage, Vigor sets Toughness, and Spirit is necessary to recover from the omnipresent Shaken condition (explained next week), and any attribute may be used more or less arbitrarily as a die or defense against certain maneuver types. The importance of none of these are apparent during character creation except Toughness and possibly melee damage (attached to attributes that govern no skills except Climbing). Thus players can get into a position of trying to arrange limited attribute points to make it possible to get the desired skills and then be blindsided when a low attribute turns out to be important in play.

Despite my reservations with the character creation, though, it is very easy to hack to do whatever I feel works better, were I to run the game long term. The game works very hard to establish only two tiers of costs:

• The value of an attribute level or edge (and the amount gained from a major drawback)
• Half that value, which can be used to purchase a skill level up to the governing attribute (and the amount gained from a minor drawback)

Edges are like D&D feats or Fate stunts, in that they give a predefined power and can be further balanced with prerequisites. The number of drawbacks that can be taken is limited and they’re on the level of the MURPG‘s drawbacks (i.e., this will actually create frequent, undesirable problems for your character), so players are unlikely to want to try to take too many anyway. So you wind up with a system with only two levels of granularity as far as advancement goes. This probably means that certain things are not as balanced as they could be, but it does mean that you can make major hacks to the traits without too much worry that it will create a drastic imbalance versus the standard game.

And, ultimately, chargen is pretty fast and fun. I was able to churn out stats for five player characters each with four advances in around an hour, without having made a character before, and each had a pretty solid array of traits that fit the character concept. Considering that I was trying to mimic D&D characters fairly closely, I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to make characters that fit D&D roles faster than in their original system and, if anything, they were more believably versatile in their capabilities. The system makes me want to tinker with it, rather than ignore it entirely, which is always a good thing.

Part 3

System Review: Savage Worlds, Part 1

It’s Like I’m Down on the Floor

I’ve almost played a lot of Deadlands. By which I mean most of my friends have been in love with that game since the late 90s, and talk about running it all the time, but I’ve only actually played in two sessions. I understood why people at least talked a lot about running it. In addition to a pretty cool Western setting, it was doing some pretty innovative, or at least unusual, things systemwise for the 90s. Integrating playing-card-based mechanics to capture the gambling-heavy feel of the setting was particularly noteworthy.

A few years ago I began seeing a lot of RPGnet posts talking about using Savage Worlds for various and sundry game concepts. I wasn’t at all sure what that was until I finally happened across a copy of the Explorer’s Edition version of the rules, which is a thin trade-sized paperback. In a lot of ways, it’s Deadlands broadened to handle a wider array of settings. Specifically, it reads a lot like, “If we broaden the Deadlands mechanics sufficiently to allow easy conversion of D&D characters, it turns out we can do superheroes, pulp, and a bunch of other stuff too!” Obviously, that’s just speculation on my part. It’s not like I was in the room.

So, in effect, Savage Worlds is a mirror image of GURPS: rather than a completely generic and highly granular system designed to be tuned to fit different genres, it’s a highly tuned system originally designed for a specific genre and ultimately expanded to handle others. The flavor of the Western still clings to the system, with your fear-resistance trait being Guts, dice exploding referred to as an Ace, retaining playing cards for initiative, and a lot of other little ways. Given that most of the published settings for the game seem to be in the spectrum of high-action pulp, it seems like the designers are okay with this preservation of flavor. Savage Worlds is functionally positioned, then, as a generic system for running pulp.

Does it live up to this position?

Core Mechanics

Savage Worlds is a skill-based system with a light level-based component: certain powerful advantages and spells require you to hit higher tiers of experience before they can be purchased, but otherwise you can spend your points on anything you want. Skills themselves are a stepped dice progression similar to Cortex or Earthdawn: raising skills means buying a bigger die.

Unlike these other stepped die mechanic games, even though you have attributes, you don’t roll Attribute+Skill. Instead, player characters always roll one die from traits and a d6 “wild die” to mark them as heroes, keeping the die that rolls higher. NPCs often don’t get a wild die, and roll only a single die for their relevant trait. This, of course, means that PCs have a much greater protection against the flat probability of a single die: even if you have a d12 it could still roll low, and hopefully in that case your d6 will roll high to compensate.

This would also mean that the game was on a fairly fixed range of results (the highest die size being a d12 and not adding results together), except for two factors. The first is that the game does use static modifiers to the result for many effects. These are usually small, but could push a result up or down. The second, and more relevant, is that all dice in the game explode (“Ace”): rolling the maximum result allows you to keep it and then add another roll with no upper cap to the number of explosions. It’s, thus, not uncommon for the upper bounds on a decently skilled character’s rolls to be in the mid-teens. And the occasional lucky roll series can allow a character with a very low skill to get an extremely successful result.

All of this is coupled with a semi-standard difficulty and a standardized margin of success system.

Unless otherwise noted, all rolls in the system are made against a target number of 4: if you roll a 4 or better, you’re successful. This means, even with the lowest trained skill of d4, you have over a 60% chance of success (counting the wild die) before modifiers. Of course, modifiers are fairly heavily used for most rolls that hit the standard difficulty; ranged attacks, for example, can quickly accumulate penalties for range, lighting, etc. that make that difficulty 4 remain fairly imposing. A lot of rolls, particularly contested ones, forego the standard difficulty in exchange for the defender rolling an appropriate opposing trait to set a difficulty (which can result is some swingy behavior) or generating a fixed difficulty based on traits (which is mainly only done in combat).

Margin of success in the system is formalized into the concept of a “Raise:” for every 4 points the roll beats the difficulty, it’s expected to have an upgraded result. Due to the size of this margin vs. the size of the dice, for situations where the difficulty or penalties are closely matched to the character’s skill, a single Raise is common for the best possible roll without an Ace, and two or more Raises is increasingly uncommon without exceptional dice luck with Aces. A trait that’s way higher than the difficulty is more likely to get a second Raise without insane dice luck, but not much more. For a lot of situations, the GM really only has to consider the ramifications of failure, basic success, and exceptional success.

All of this, of course, gets even more complicated with combat.

Part 2

Savage Worlds – Ravenloft Adventure

I put together a short module set in Ravenloft but using the Savage Worlds rules (for the review that starts this week). It’s fairly straightforward, suitable for a demo scenario, and includes pregen characters and a rules summary. You can get it here.

The village of Steinberg has experienced a troublesome last few decades. A quiet farming community, it has become more and more insular. There is no inn, there is no government to speak of, there is just a small hamlet of people that work their fields by day and are careful to lock themselves in their houses by night. They never discuss the strange anemia that seems to afflict those with inferior locks or the events of fifty-three years ago that make them believe that their lot is only what they are owed…

Savage Worlds Fantasy: Magic Items, part 2

Continued from last week..

Armor

Magic armor has a few problems. The first is that it’s simply not as exciting as weapons, as offensive special effects are generally more interesting than defensive bonuses. The second is that it’s probably not in your size: Savage Worlds recommends doubling the effective weight of captured armor. The latest editions of D&D got past this latter problem by instituting the “don’t think about it too hard” global power of magic armor to automatically shapeshift to fit its new owner. Even if minor shifts in fit don’t bother you, try visualizing what has to happen when a male PC captures plate from a typical villainess that has a… lovingly rendered… illustration in the module. Finally, Savage Worlds breaks armor up into head, torso, arms, and legs: it’s odd to convert D&D whole-body magic armor to something that can be worn piecemeal.

One solution to these issues may be to embrace the video game concept of the set bonus: Savage Worlds armor can theoretically be broken into six pieces (head, torso, two arms, two legs), so may not be able to support its best magic effects unless all worn by the same individual. Famous suits of armor tend to become split up over the years as adventurers discover that, for example, the owner was a little long in the torso and had a big head, necessitating the breastplate and helmet to go to allies while the arms and legs are serviceable. Pursuit of a matched set isn’t just out of greed for the powers invested in it, but out of the dawning realization that the original owner was more or less the same size and shape as the hero.

Armor Materials

• Steel/Leather: Most armor is made of common ingredients, though mystical ones might be made of very high quality versions of these materials. Unless otherwise noted, armor is assumed to be made of steel, leather, or something else appropriate.
• Adamant: Adamantine is the preferred armoring metal of dwarven smiths, for it is tougher than steel in all ways, and resists puncture. Armor made of this metal naturally has +1 armor rating and ignores half (round down) the AP value of an attacking weapon. However, these armors tend to be 40% heavier than their steel counterparts.
• Mithral: Another favorite of smiths with the resources and skill to craft it, mithral can be made enormously light while maintaining the same qualities as steel. It weighs 40% of the normal amount.
• Dragonhide: Counterparts to leather, chain, and plate can be made from the hide and scales of dragons, depending on which pieces are used. This gear weighs 20% less than the normal amount. The armor itself is resistant to the energy inherent in that dragon type’s breath, but imparts none of this naturally to the wearer beyond what would logically come from having a non-conductive barrier between skin and threat. At the GM’s option, the armor might be cheaper and easier to enchant with the requisite elemental resistance magic.
• Cold Iron/Silvered: While less useful than with weapons, metal armor can be made from metals that serve as banes to certain creatures. Double the armor value against creatures vulnerable to the metal that are attacking with claws, fangs, or other natural weapons. Cold Iron armor is 40% heavier than steel, and silver armor has 1 less point of Armor.

Armor Traits

The following are common enchantments found on magical armor.

• Magic: All enchanted armors have the “magic” trait, and, for some, this is the only trait possessed. Magic armor is more able to resist breaking and magical effects that would destroy or ignore mundane armor (treat Toughness as +5).
• Elemental Resistant: Armor can be enchanted to resist fire, frost, or electricity. The armor doubles its rating against targeted attacks that use its protected energy source. Additionally, if the bearer has a full suit aligned to the same element, this protection extends to environmental hazards and area of effect attacks (e.g., a full suit of plate with fire resistance provides 6 points of armor against the damage caused by being trapped in a fire or from the Blast power).
• Fortified: Suits of armor are frequently enchanted to be suffused with protective mystical force, particularly over joints and other weak points. This has the net effect of reducing Raises on attack against the character by +1 per Raise (i.e., without a Keen weapon, the attacker Raises every 5 levels of success, rather than every 4).
• Magic Resistant: Some magical armor can make spell and other magical effects simply roll off the wearer. Whenever targeted by a power or caught in some other kind of magical effect, roll a die; on a 6 or better, the character ignores the effect for this turn. The size of the die depends on the thoroughness of the armor set: 1d4 for one piece (the die has to Ace), 1d6 for two-three, 1d8 for four-five, and 1d10 for all six.
• Ghost: Like with weapons, undead hunters frequently enjoy armor that is proof against spectres, wraiths, and other intangible creatures. Armor so enchanted applies its full benefit against creatures that would otherwise ignore inanimate objects when attacking. With a full set of such armor, the wearer is completely immune to possession by spirits, and adds +2 to resist Fear-based attacks.
• Sealed: When wearing a full suit of such armor, mystical bonds extend between all the pieces and hedge out threats. The character is immune to toxic gas and airborne illness while wearing the armor.

Savage Worlds Fantasy: Magic Items, part 1

I have a vague and unformed intention of using Savage Worlds as an engine for a Paizo adventure path at some point. My primary interest is the utility of squishing down the power levels: Savage Worlds seems to map pretty easily to the standard language of leveling up, without drifting power levels by orders of magnitude the way D&D does at higher levels. I’m running Curse of the Crimson Throne now, which is a module series that takes place in a single city for the most part, and it’s even more of a hurdle than normal D&D in avoiding conceptual dissonance as to how the threats to the city always seem to be keyed directly to the strength of the PCs at any given moment (I’ve actually taken to just giving the luminaries of the city some degree of metagame awareness; they assign the PCs to tasks that seem to be roughly within their power level to free up higher level NPCs to deal with higher level threats).

So, all that said, a big task is to add in support for D&D tropes that the Savage Worlds fantasy rules don’t already cover. The biggest one is magic items. As noted above, my goal is to use this as a lower powered replacement for D&D, so part of that is to avoid having too much escalation of itemization: you might swap out an item for one with a wider set of capabilities or for one more tuned to your character style, but you won’t feel the urge to replace a +1 item for a +2.

Weapons

Many weapon types grant “bonus damage” in certain circumstances. In this case, the weapon effectively adds a Wild Die for damage: add a d6 to the damage roll and drop the worst die result. If multiple traits of a weapon add bonus damage at the same time, roll a bonus die for each element that counts, and then drop low dice equal to that number (effectively, never keep more dice than your normal damage total). Some powerful items might add a bonus die larger than a d6, and these will be explicitly noted.

Weapon Materials

• Steel/Wood: Most weapons are made of common ingredients, though mystical ones might be made of very high quality versions of these materials. Unless otherwise noted, a weapon is assumed to be made of steel, wood, or something else appropriate.
• Silvered: Weapons designed to fight lycanthropes and certain other monsters often have silver alchemically bonded to the surface of the weapon, giving it an almost Damascus-like patina of silver and steel. These weapons deal wounds that ignore any monster protections (armor, immunity, invulnerability, regeneration, etc.) that are weak to silver. Silvered weapons are of functionally identical strength to normal weapons, but this process is complicated and expensive. A weapon made of pure silver is equally effective at bypassing monster resistances, but will likely do reduced damage due to softness of the metal (GM’s option) and is easier to break than steel weapons (having half the Toughness).
• Cold Iron: Many faeries and demons are weak to weapons made of “cold iron;” this term generally refers to iron worked in a way that preserves its elemental purity… by the time it’s become steel, some vital mystical element is lost. Thus, wrought iron generally qualifies, and weapons made of the stuff are often heavy, brittle, dull, and ugly compared to their steel counterparts (but may be cheaper to create). Cold Iron weapons bypass certain monstrous defenses in the same way as silver vs. lycanthropes. They weigh twice as much as standard versions of the weapon, generally do one die step less damage for cutting/piercing weapons, and are easier to break than steel weapons (having half the Toughness).
• Adamant: Iron mined from fallen stars and deep in highly magical areas is often classed as “adamantine.” Steel forged from this metal is generally harder and stronger than even the best normal steel, can be sharpened to a razor edge, and tends to cause lesser materials to shatter more easily. Effectively, these weapons gain bonus AP equal to the size of the bonus damage die/2 (e.g., a Str+d4 weapon has 2 greater AP than normal, a Str+d10 weapon has +5 AP, etc.). Additionally, these weapons may bypass monstrous protections possessed by golems and other constructs. These weapons have twice the toughness of steel weapons and apply their AP to attempts to break other items. At the GM’s option, these weapons may also be easier to enchant.
• Ironwood: Elves, druids, and other forest dwellers have a secret process of oils and resins that can turn a weapon made of wood as hard as steel. Ironwood weapons behave like steel weapons, but maintain their natural properties (effectively, they are not conductive, do not offend druidic sensibilities, and can be used against creatures vulnerable to wood). Their major limitation, other than the expense of the process, is that they are harder to mend if broken than a steel weapon.
• Mithral: Also known as “truesilver,” mithral is found deep within the earth and combines the best elements of silver and steel. Weapons made of mithral are half the weight of a steel weapon, count as silvered for purposes of fighting monsters, and are harder to break (at the GM’s option).

Weapon Traits

The following are common enchantments found on magical weapons.

• Magic: All enchanted weapons have the “magic” trait, and, for some, this is the only trait possessed. A magic weapon is more able to resist breaking and magical effects that would destroy or ignore mundane weapons (treat Toughness as +5). Most importantly, certain highly magical creatures resist mundane weapons, and magic weapons bypass this effect (as silver bypasses lycanthropic defenses). Finally, many magical weapons emit light (with a high variation on the strength of the glow and whether the wielder can deactivate it).
• Bane: Many weapons are given a purpose to defeat a particular type of creature. When fighting the creature, the weapon gains a bonus damage die and AP +2. Additionally, if the creature type is vulnerable to a material, the weapon will almost always be made of this substance (e.g., lycanthrope-bane weapons are typically silvered or mithral).
• Elemental: A common weapon enchantment is to make the item coruscate with energy. The most common types are flame (fire), frost (water), and electricity (air), but some weapons have also been known to secrete acid or thunder on impact (earth). The wielder can often turn this effect on and off with a command word, and the weapons tend to automatically disable their effects when not in a wielder’s hand (sheathed or dropped). These weapons deal a bonus die of damage and all damage dealt by the weapon is considered of the energy type if the target is weak to that energy in some way.
• Ghost: Undead hunters often enchant their weapons to be able to strike ghosts, spectres, and other ethereal beings. These weapons are considered fully present on both the physical and spirtual planes, allowing them to wound creatures through which normal weapons pass harmlessly. However, these weapons can sometimes be a risk: spiritual beings that normally cannot affect the physical plane can wield these weapons as easily as can mortals.
• Keen/Impact: Magic can be used to sharpen a blade finer than is physically possible or to focus the impact of a blunt weapon to a much smaller point. Attacks made with such a weapon raise on every 3 degrees of success instead of every 4.
• Ethical: Certain weapons are tuned to support the ethos of a religion, cutting down all that oppose it. In practical terms, these weapons are Bane against any being that is considered a core enemy by the tenets of the religion. For “good” religions, this is often a broad swath of amoral creatures and blackhearted men, while “evil” practices hurt the innocent, the just, and the virtuous. Ethical weapons almost always bypass the defenses of outsiders loyal to opposing deities (much as silvered weapons harm lycanthropes). At the GM’s option, bad things happen to wielders of such a weapon that it would consider opponents.
• Disrupting: Another great aid to those that oppose the undead, disruption weapons weaken the target’s connection to the energy source that powers it. These weapons are automatically Bane against undead. Undead creatures incapacitated by such a weapon are automatically destroyed (typically in a dramatic blast of decay), and this almost always overcomes the abilities of creatures such as vampires and liches to reconstitute themselves when destroyed. Undead can always sense the presence of such a weapon within 5 feet times the die size of their Notice (e.g., an undead with d10 Notice can sense Disrupting weapons within 50 feet), and will respond typically respond with fear or anger.