Fate: Dark and Stormy report #3

Yesterday, we had our third session in our current Fate adventure through the tor called Hightower.

Last session we had ended having just engaged in a skirmish against two noggit raiders. Equipped with shortswords and javelins, these noggits had charged the PCs. Rwake and Elros were on tables, and Leo was about to take action. This is where yesterday's session began. As a reminder, Leo had an automatic +1 to his action because Rwake had earned spin (3 shifts or more) on his block action.

In SotC, every character starts with 5 stunts. Stunts are really cool ways to guarantee an advantage for your character in certain situations. Leo has two cool stunts which he pulled directly from the SotC book. His Close at Hand stunt allows him to draw his weapon(s) as a free action. This allows him to immediately attack whenever he wants to without suffering the penalty (-1 to his action) of a normal supplemental action (like drawing a weapon). His other useful stunt is called Anything Goes. This allows him to use pretty much anything as a weapon. The way we're using this is that, as long as it makes sense for the scene and he colors it well, he can always have weapons handy. This fits the character anyway, who has little pockets containing gadgets and throwing weapons all over his person.

This is a situation where Leo could have drawn and immediately attacked. But, J, his player, informed me that Leo had had his weapons drawn all along, so it didn't matter. But his stunts would matter later, as you'll see. For this action, he threw two knives at the noggit who was engaged in combat with Rwake (we called him noggit A). He rolled a 2, added 4 for his thrown weapons skill and 1 for the bonus given by Rwake's previous defensive spin. This gave him a total of 7 against the noggit's combined total of 3. So Leo was successful with 4 shifts which were applied to the noggit's health. So I looked on my noggit stats sheet and marked off box 4 on his stress track.

All participants had taken actions and we were back to Rwake. Llama (Rwake's player) had created a stunt for Rwake called The Vital Spot which allows him to give an enemy a temporary aspect of "Vulnerable to Rwake" for one round. On Rwake's next action, he gets to tag that aspect for free. After that, the aspect is gone. So Rwake used this stunt to spot a small opening in the noggit's armor and prepared to deal some damage on his next turn.

Elros, rope in hand, then swung across the room to attack the second noggit with his sword. This counted as a supplemental action which gave him a -1 to his attack roll, which came up a 3. These 2 points, plus 5 for his Swordsmanship skill, plus 1 for his Weapon of Destiny stunt gave him a total of 8 for this action. The noggit blocked with his javelin for a total of 5 (roll of 3 + 2 for Weapons skill). Elros' 3 shifts caused 3 health stress to the noggit (we called him noggit B).

Still eager to make the room dark, noggit B grabbed another bucket of water nearby and threw it across the floor, extinguishing all remaining torches. Leo possessed the only remaining light - a magical orb of light which he had been given by a Cavern Laani PC (played by me) in our last adventure. This orb was laying on the ground in front of Leo. The room now had an aspect of "dimly lit". Meanwhile, noggit A attacked Rwake, successfully dealing 2 stress. (If you haven't picked up on it yet, "stress" is the term used for any damage taken, either physically, mentally, or socially, in SotC.)

Rwake now attacked noggit A, tagging the noggit's "vulnerable to Rwake" aspect to help him achieve 4 stress. Because noggit A had already received 4 damage earlier from Leo, he was now forced to roll him damage up and mark off box 5 on his stress track.

Elros once again attacked noggit B, rolling a -2. Using his Never Good Enough aspect, he rerolled, achieving an adjusted outcome of 6. Unfortunately, noggit B also achieved a 6 on his block.

Noggit B returned the favor, striking out at Elros with his javelin, which Elros blocked. With his shifts, he colored his action by wrapping the end of the rope quickly around the end of the javelin, hoping to stall the noggit.

Noggit A quickly grabbed the orb of light at Leo's feet and threw it down the long hallway as far as he could, leaving the room totally dark.

Next week, we pick up, once again, with Leo's turn.