Odds and Ends

The Key Rules

There will be lots of situations in any campaign of The Shadow of Yesterday that there are not explicit rules for. It would be a waste of my time and yours for me to make a huge list of how fast a human can climb, how hard it is to shoot an arrow in gale-force winds, or penalties for singing a song to a drunk and hostile crowd.

The Key Rules are here to help with that. There's two of them.

The first: the GM is the arbiter of any measurement-based question. The entire group may join in the discussion, but someone's got to decide and that's the GM.

The second: the GM can give up to two penalty dice to any action for reasons he sees fit. (Bonus dice are taken care of by the players.) Any action the GM deems to be of major difficulty, as opposed to moderate difficulty, can result in the player rolling one penalty die. Any action the GM deems to be of extreme difficulty can result in the player rolling two penalty dice.

GMs: these penalty dice should not be given out lightly. A task must be pretty damn hard to receive even one penalty die. This is characters leaping chasms at the limit of human ability, climbing very sheer cliffs, trying to calm a hostile mob with a song, or the like. Two penalty dice should be reserved for tasks that are near impossible: climbing a vertical slick metal wall or shooting someone far off in a brutal thunderstorm.

Weapons and armor

Weapons and armor are greatly simplified in The Shadow of Yesterday. They are defined their damage rating and properties.

For the damage rating, all weapons and armor have a score from 1 to 4. (Zero is normal damage with fists and feet, and normal resistance with clothes and skin.)

Weapons are rated by their size. A list of examples follows:

Damage rating 1: Small weapons, melee: a dagger, sap, or bag of iron; missile: thrown daggers, darts, hand crossbows, and blowguns
Damage rating 2: Medium weapons, melee: short swords, batons, and smaller clubs; missile: throwing axes, bow and arrow, bolas
Damage rating 3: Large weapons, melee: a broadsword, a large club, a mace, a short spear, or a warhammer; missile: crossbows
Damage rating 4: Huge weapons, melee: any two-handed weapon; missile: a catapult or a ballista attacking a person

Armor is rated by its toughness.

Damage rating 1: Light armors, such as leather, cloth, or light hides
Damage rating 2: Heavier armors, such as thick hides, leather reinforced with some metal, or bamboo
Damage rating 3: Very heavy and tough armors, usually made of metal, such as chain mail or plate, or maybe a cured four-inch thick oliphant hide armor
Damage rating 4: Superbly tough armors, such as a suit of obsidian, or full metal plate from head to toe

Every weapon either has the blunt or sharp property. This is determined by sheer common sense. Every armor, on the other hand, has either the soft or hard quality. Armors made of flexible materials, even if exceptionally heavy (such as the oliphant hide armor above) are soft. Armors made of non-flexible materials, even if relatively light, such as bamboo, are hard.

When a character is hit with a weapon, that weapon's damage rating adds to the attacker's Success Level to determine the damage.

The defender's armor damage rating may be subtracted from this damage. Soft armor protects against blunt weapons, and hard armor protects against sharp weapons. Figure out how much damage is done to the defender and then compare that with his armor. If the armor damage rating is greater than the total damage, no damage is done at all, no matter what type of weapon was used to attack. If the armor damage rating is less than the total damage, and the armor protects against the type of weapon used to attack, the armor's damage rating is subtracted from the damage done.

Movement

(coming soon)

Size

Characters come in different sizes. What's more, the Arcane Secret of Living Morph allows you to double or half the size of another creature. In order to deal with this in the game, a few rules have to be introduced.

When two characters of vastly different sizes are opposed in tasks, you first figure out how many "doubles" larger the larger opponent is. If a character is eight times larger than his opponent, for example, that's three doubles. The character whose size benefits him gets a number of bonus dice equal to the doubles, and the character whose size hinders him gets that many penalty dice. For example, if a pixie (1/8th of human size) was fighting a human, the pixie would get three bonus dice to hit and the human would get three penalty dice, as the pixie's small size makes him a hard target. If the two were playing tug-of-war, though, the human would get three bonus dice and the pixie three penalty dice.

The only exception to this is damage. With damage, add the doubles to the larger character's damage, and subtract them from the smaller character's damage.

Economics

(coming soon)

Common tasks, and how to do 'em

Most tasks, combined with a good reading of the skill descriptions in Chapter 3, will be self-explanatory. Just for reference, though, I've included a list of the most common tasks, what you roll to do them, and what's rolled to resist them.

Task description	Skill used	Skill to resist
Hitting someone with a melee weapon	Melee	React
Hitting someone with a missile weapon	Aim	React
Out-running someone	Athletics	Athletics
Convincing someone one-on-one	Sway	Resist
Convincing a crowd	Orate	Resist
Convincing someone to sleep with you	Savoir-Faire	Resist
Using magic on someone	Any Magic Skill	Resist
As you can see, Resist is pretty useful.
Tracking someone in the woods	Woodscraft	Usually, no resistance.
Lifting something heavy, breaking down doors, bending bars	Bash and Hold	n/a
Wrestling, holding a door closed	Bash and Hold	Bash and Hold