Grand Heresy Press News.
Just a quick (if anticipated) update. You can now pick up Release 5 from our Downloads page. This update includes Chapter 12: Skirmish, as well as some minor edits and changes. Some clarifications have been made following forum feedback, and the rules for fighting multiple opponents have been rewritten.
Chapter 13: Wounds and Healing is nearly complete, save for the examples to be written, and will be following next week.
Let us know what you think.
Thanks for sticking around,
-The GH Crew
If you've been hanging around the forums lately, you'll already be aware of our Dueling Kit, an abridged arms, armor, and wounds document designed to get you up and fighting while we hack away at the next sections of the book.
Version 3 has just been uploaded, featuring some feature corrections and the usual errata but also a rebalance to wounds based on player feedback. If you haven't gotten your copy already, head over to our downloads section and give it a look.
As always, our forums are up for any questions or feedback.
- The GH Crew.
Last week we said we'd be delayed until Friday. We were right(ish). We just got the wrong Friday. Oops.
Release number 4 is now available on our downloads page. This week's update includes a number of minor fixes and clarifications, some technical updates to the file itself, and even the proper cover finally formatted and applied.
However, the most exciting update is the addition of the ranged combat section, letting you pour copious amounts of arrows, bolts, and bullets into people you dislike. A discussion thread will be up on the forums, as always, and any feedback is welcome.
Next week we hope to get caught back up and on schedule. Stay tuned!
- The GH Crew
Another Thursday, another release. Last week we got a ton of feedback on 90 pages of content and some very interesting discussions going on the forums. You guys have been phenomenally helpful. We tried to incorporate as much of that as time allowed, but we've still got a great deal of it ahead. That will be a project to carry us through the weekend.
In addition to some editing for clarity, this week we introduce two chapters that you have been eagerly awaiting.
Chapter 09: Full Contest gets into the core rules we use for chases, debates, and other prolonged skill-based conflicts.
Chapter 10: Melee Combat gets into the meat of our fighting system, which many of you have been speculating over for months now.
We haven't had as much time to work on everything this week as we had hoped, so the examples are still missing in certain areas. If our schedules allow, we may toss in a mid-week update before next Thursday to get everything taken care of and our release schedule back on track.
You can pick up your copy here or on our downloads page. As always, we'll be opening discussion threads for feedback on our forums.
Thanks for sticking with us, folks. Enjoy.
- The GH Crew
We've added a downloads section under the Band of Bastards bar across the top of the site. In addition to wherever we plaster the beta links, we'll be keeping the most current copies there as well.
Because so many of you have asked, we've gotten the character sheets updated and placed there as well. These are set up in both bandwidth-friendly png size and high-quality vector. Enjoy!
What a week. With the last edits as fresh as this morning, we've pulled through. Grand Heresy is happy to announce release 2 of our rolling beta. This week we cover a ton of material, going from about 15 pages to 95, putting us up to Chapter 08.
You can download your copy here
Chapter 03 Anatomy of a Bastard takes you through the structure of character creation, starting with creating your band of bastards first and establishing the overall tone and expectations for the campaign ahead.
Chapter 04 Attributes & Skills has full writeups for each, exactly as you'd expect, as well as some more specific rules on using them in play.
Chapter 05 Proficiencies & Maneuvers is what many of you have been looking forward to. It covers a character's training at arms, our proficiency system, and the maneuvers 'Bastards uses to make combat interesting. In addition, it also covers Simple Combat, allowing for less intensive combat resolution for quick scuffles or groups that are less interested in the ebb-and-flow of melee.
Chapter 06 Edges & Flaws is thus far the largest single chapter in the book, accounting for 23 pages on its own. Therein we list all of the information for the various options available to your character, and how to get the most out of your flaws in play.
Chapter 07 Story Aspects details the mechanic that really drives our game forward, covering the role it plays in allowing the player to guide the story, the reward cycle, and how SAs play into character advancement.
Finally, Chapter 08 Supporting Cast covers how players can establish NPC relationships at character creation, or make new contacts and enemies through play.
Threads have already been set up on a chapter-by-chapter basis on our forums for feedback.
We look forward to hearing from you!
- The GH Crew
This wasn't how we intended to do it, but we figured we've kept you guys waiting long enough. Credit for the decision can actually go to some of the posters on our forums, who made an argument for a chapter-by-chapter release of the documents we have. Alright, you guys win.
This first release is going to be the intro chapter and basic mechanics. Each Thursday, we'll release another chapter or two to you guys to dissect and discuss. With the biggest chapters mostly behind us at this point, we expect the rest of the document to be finished in the next couple weeks anyway.
The download can be found here. If you share the link or the document, we'd appreciate it if you used the original link, just because we want to keep track of how many people downloaded the thing as we go.
This is for you guys. Thanks for sticking with us.
- The GH Crew
(Feel free to join us on our forums and post any feedback you might have)
We've been putting more work into writing than teasers lately, but we thought we'd share this one with you. It largely speaks for itself.
I present, the Band of Bastards Beta character sheet.
Pdf available HERE.
Let us know what you think on our forums!
Thought I would share a little of what we've been up to.
We're now in the process of going back and adding example text to everything, which if you've never done it is a huge pain in the butt. We have a character sheet done and it's looking pretty decent, if I do say so myself. In any downtime we've had (one of us waiting for the other to finish/check something) we've been working on some of the supplemental material and play-aids.
I'm happy to announce that at Beta launch, we'll have maneuver cards set up and ready to go.
We remember how hard it was to learn TROS the first time through. I know how hard it is to pick up something like Burning Wheel. The overwhelming trend in indie games these days is for rules-light games that are quick to pick up and we know full well we are bucking that trend, so we're making sure we do everything we can to make things easy to pick up, learn, track, and play.
The cards (like the character sheet) will come in two flavors - the fancier looking, but ink-heavy, and a more printer-friendly variety that is more or less text only. We've been printing them on colored card-stock, with offensive in one color and defensive on the other for easy recognition.
Hop on our forums and let us know what you think!
Last week we discussed the way in which wounds were determined and measured in 'Bastards, along the lines of type, location, and severity. This week we'll be talking about how you actually use that information in combat and track the results.
When a wound is taken, the victim suffers Impact, representing the immediate pain and distraction caused by an injury. This is measured by an Impact Rating and manifests as a number of dice discarded from your current pool, equal to twice the wound level received (4 dice, at level 2). This effect is immediate, and only effects the pool in the next tempo without the need for further tracking.
As you're probably aware by now, 'Bastards uses a d10 dice pool system based around the number of individual successes rolled, rather than adding them together. Each die that shows a number equal to or higher than you the Target Number counts as a success. For example, rolling seven dice against TN6 and getting 7, 6, 2, 2, 5, 3, 9 would be three successes.
The TN required is usually determined by what we refer to as the Base TN. By default, that begins at TN6 but when wounded or fatigued it can be raised. A broad guideline follows:
Had the character in our previous example been significantly wounded, they would have needed to roll vs a Base TN8 instead and would have scored only a single success.
In the case of multiple wounds, the Base TN is determined by the worst injury that the character has. A character with one level 2 wound and two level 3 wounds would make up Base TN8.
The escalating Target Number system in ‘Bastards has a number of advantages over the "wounds reduce die pool" system that we used in early testing:
No need to adjust the character's Combat Pool, meaning that we need to do less math and track less information between tempos.
Base TN only shifts when you receive a worse injury than you already have; breaking two fingers does not hurt twice as much as having one finger broken.
Making the penalties for wounds scale on TN instead of subtracting dice means that wounded characters are penalized evenly, no matter whether they are making a skill check with 6 dice, or have 25 dice in a pool with SAs firing.
It can sound complicated at first, but in practice it’s remarkably simple. The first significant injury often decides the outcome of a fight, placing the victim at a disadvantage, and limiting the amount of wounds that need to be looked up at all. Impact takes effect immediately, requiring nothing in tracking. The agony and disability of a wound is represented in the Base TN, which is represented by a simple mark on the character sheet.
The only other details aside from the shifting TN you need to track are the wound location and its severity. Some wounds also cause bleeding, which we didn’t cover here, but in all but the most severe cases, Blood Loss is something that takes place in the aftermath of combat, rather than in the rapid clash of steel.
In short, discard a few dice when you’re hit. Mark down the wound location and Blood Loss (if any). If the wound was worse than your character already had, shift the Base TN. Repeat until someone surrenders or stops moving. If you’re still standing, have someone ready with bandages.
Title image by Vicky Burton
Band of Bastards comes from a tradition of violent fiction and bloody ends. For all the work we've done on the fighting itself, it felt criminal to abstract damage out to some form of hit points. Instead, every injury in 'Bastards is measured in flesh maimed and blood lost.
So what does that mean in game terms? Band of Bastards measures all damage as Wounds, which represents the nature and severity of the injury received. There are three axes which combine to determine the exact wound taken.
The first axis is the kind of damage taken. For the overwhelming majority of Wounds, the damage received is of one of three kinds:
Piercing damage, as done by arrows or the thrust of a sword.
Cutting damage, as done by the swing of an axe or saber.
Blunt damage, as the result of a club or hammer to the face.
Each type of damage results in different kinds of wounds, and interacts with armor differently, having its own advantages and disadvantages.
The second axis is the location of the damage. Those of you who have been with us the longest may remember our very first teaser, the wound wheel
No attack is simply that. Each attack is specified to be a swing or a thrust, and a target wheel is chosen to receive it. If successful, a d6 is rolled to determine where the blow lands, starting at the top and going clockwise around the wheel. The outside wheel is used for swings, and the inner wheel used for thrusts.
Why is this important? There are two main reasons. The first is that different wound locations have very different effects. A blow to the hand or forearm is liable to make someone drop something. A blow to the head may disorient your opponent. A blow to the legs may trip them or knock them off-balance. The second major reason is that getting stabbed in the face is going to suck way more than getting stabbed in the arm. The latter could potentially cripple you. The former is liable to kill you.
Naturally then, characters will want to prioritize their armor to cover their most vulnerable areas first just as combatants have done throughout history. Armor in 'Bastards is thus relatively detailed, as it becomes tremendously important to know whether your neck is covered by a maille coif, an aventail, a gorget, or whether they were prancing around with an exposed jugular like this guy
Image by Vicky Burton
The final axis is the severity of the wound. The harder or more skilled the blow, the more trauma you have potentially caused your opponent. Damage is the end result of a number of factors including how well you rolled, the physical strength of your character, and the rating of the weapon you've used. Because the proficiency of your character plays such an important part, a skilled man with a dagger can do as much or more damage than an opponent with a zweihander.
Wounds are rated on a scale between 1 and 5 levels of damage, with 1 being a light or glancing blow and 5 generally maiming or even killing an opponent outright. The exact results depend on the location and type of damage dealt, above.
So you've taken your swing, overcome your opponent's defenses, and you know that your Kriegsmesser just scored a level 4 cut across your opponent's crown. What does that actually mean? This is where the fun comes in:
All of the above information is packaged in what we've taken to calling the Bloody Fortune Cookie. Each wound has all of the relevant information, effects, and a brief description in one place. In addition to having all of the mechanical detail, the flavor text gives a strong narrative picture of what's happening. This detail takes a lot of weight off of the GM's back in keeping combat fast and interesting. Gone are the ubiquitous shoulder wounds. Each blow is measured in blood and sinew. When the player finds himself on the wrong side of an axe, they'll remember exactly where and how badly they were hit.
Join us for part 2 next week, we’ll talk about how this all plugs in and the simple method we found for tracking and quantifying wounds and blood loss. In the meantime, join the discussion on our forums, where we're always interested in feedback!
Until next time,
It's Thursday™ and you know what that means: more teasers!
We're full steam ahead at GH-HQ, with the beta draft being formatted in InDesign as we speak. It turns out, formatting text isn't quite as much of a pain in the ass as writing it. There's still an editing pass to go to make sure everything lines up and that we don't make ourselves look entirely foolish, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. We are nearing the promised land.
In that spirit, I thought I'd leak a little something here both for feedback and a good tease. I hate writing sales text of any sort, so bizarrely this was one of the hardest sections for me to write in the entire book.
Band of Bastards - Introductory Text
Let us know what you think on our forums!
Agamemnon here, and I thought I would drop something for your consideration.
As we're making the final passes on the beta, the subject of the cover has come up and been tossed around. While we haven't settled on something yet, we did have an unorthodox idea that did have a certain appeal. You can get into the reasoning behind it on Sword and Scoundrel (which, incidentally, is where most of my "what was he thinking" rants wind up), but I will leave it here for discussion as well.
Tell us what you think, either in the comments, or by joining our discussion on the forum topic.
Regards,
The birds have been eaten, our stomachs are full. Except for Higgins. They don't appear to have Thanksgiving in Estonia, which is a shame because it's delicious. It's been an extremely busy month, and we're extremely proud of the amount of work we've gotten done. Today, however, we are taking a well-earned break. We hope you are too.
Happy Turkey Day!
With November in full swing, we're trucking right along and things are looking good. November is National Game Development Month (NaGaDeMon, if you insist), and while we've put a good couple years of work in (and nearly a year reformatting in transforming into the current incarnation of Band of Bastards), we can still take some inspiration from their goal: write a game in the month of November.
Editing is coming fast and furious, with some sections being restructured for clarity. The magic system is underway, and we've made some real strides in other areas of the game. Also of note, two of the Grand Heresy team have spread their wings and begun blogging as well.
Agamemnon writes and maintains Sword and Scoundrel, wherein he keeps us updated on dev work he's doing, games he's playing, and game design philosophy. Higgins has recently begun authoring Pommel Strike, which will be his home for everything from game design commentary to his own personal adventures in arms and armor.
As for us, our current write-up is nearly complete and most of the kinks have been ironed back out. We'll toss you more updates as we have them.
Thursday™
As always, join in the discussion on the forums!
While the Band of Bastards Role-Playing Game is about a lot of things, it’s hard to deny that the portion closest to our hearts is its quick and bloody combat system. We set out to make combat as authentic and brutal as possible while still maintaining that sweet spot between simulationist detail and playability, doing everything in our power to keep the learning curve as generous as possible.
The core of ‘Bastards bloody combat system revolves around the use of specific maneuvers to emulate real-world techniques used in melee combat throughout history, each both providing narrative benefits and their own method of juggling your dice to gain an advantage on your opponent. In Band of Bastards, as in real-life combat, the first person to win the upper-hand often wins the fight.
While maneuver-based-combat has been done before, where ‘Bastards really shines is in the way it has organized and streamlined these maneuvers into something that can be approached in a way that is both fluid and new-player friendly, while losing none of the crunch more veteran players crave. We accomplish this in a few ways:
At the core of the combat system are a handful of Basic Maneuvers. These maneuvers are all available to anyone regardless of what proficiency or weapon they use (with the sole exception of Block, which requires a shield), and cover sufficient bases that an entire campaign could be played with them alone and you’d still have a quick and dirty cinematic combat experience. The Basic Maneuvers are relatively quick to learn and master, and are a godsend for getting new players used to the way combat flows and handles.
Advanced Maneuvers expand the repertoire of more experienced players by granting them new and additional tricks to play that are more proficiency-specific than the Basic Maneuvers. Once your players have gotten the hang of combat, breaking out the Advanced Maneuvers can add a layer of depth and tactical complexity to your game, and really bring out the nuances between the various combat styles.
Rather than having several dozen free-floating entries, many maneuvers are linked together by a mechanic we’ve been referring to as Augmentations, allowing a player to group things together by more thematic associations. Through this method, more specialized attacks like Wraps or Draw Cuts are both listed as a kind of upgrade to the Swing maneuver, allowing the purpose of the attack to be augmented at the cost of a die from their combat pool. This arrangement keeps “maneuver management” to a bare minimum, while sacrificing nothing in terms of flexibility.
Mechanically distinct from skills, Proficiencies measure not just your character’s ability to fight, it says a lot about how they fight, with each proficiency granting access to different Advanced Maneuvers that reflect their individual style of combat. In keeping with our belief in empowering characters from the very beginning, each Proficiency has access to all of its associated maneuvers from the moment it is taken. While many of these will overlap with other proficiencies, the real defining feature for each proficiency is its Emphasis, which modifies the way it interacts with certain maneuvers or grants new maneuvers unique to that proficiency, incentivizing that style to behave in the ways most natural to it.
In ‘Bastards, it wasn’t good enough for us to create the very best system we could to replicate the kind of combat we wanted to see. We wanted to make sure that it was accessible enough that you’d actually want to run it at your table. That’s where we’ll measure our success.
(And as always, join the forum discussion HERE )
We have a special love of Matt Easton, and his youtube channel Schola Gladiatoria. As we've been developing Band of Bastards, it seems like every time we turn around he's either answering a question we just began to debate, or confirming a decision we have already made. Forget about leaked celebrity images, we have a growing suspicion that Matt's been hacking the 'Bastards google drive, looking for inspiration for his videos.
Exemplary of this phenomenon, he just recently posted a video that goes along with one of our more controversial - and favorite - decisions thus far: the dynamic weapon system set up in the Codex of Arms. In one presentation he basically echoes and reinforces our entire train of thought on the project and the conclusions we drew. If you've got a bit, it's well worth the view.
Enjoy!
And as always, follow the discussion here, on our forums.
Agamemnon here. I'd like to apologize for things losing some steam here. I haven't been updating and maintaining things like I should have, and it is unprofessional.
I've been dealing with some difficult stuff lately. For the last six months or so, a family member has been in steady decline. In the last month or so, it became clear she would not be returning home. Things have been tough in general, financially and emotionally, and I haven't been able to devote the time I needed to our current projects.
Higgins has been toiling away as best he could in my absence, which is more than commendable. I have a pile of things from him sitting on my desk that I need to go over, edit, and put together for human consumption. So if anything, send him some applause for being awesome. I'd also like to thank Barbarossa for keeping the lights on for us while I sort everything else out.
That said we've got a lot of things coming up in the near-future. Band of Bastards is nearly complete for beta release. I'm just going to need to sit down and frantically edit everything. Likewise, we'll have another dev blog show up here before long. I just have to sit down with it.
Thanks for bearing with us. We'll be back in action shortly.
-Agamemnon
obligatory forum link here
Title Image by Tijs Zwinkels
In some of our announcements, we've mentioned that we have included a system for “dynamic weapons.” Since I've gotten some questions on it (and honestly, we’re kind of excited) it seemed a fitting topic for our next Teaser. More importantly, the first teaser under the name Band of Bastards.
In any conversation about historical weapons, you have three primary troubles when the goal is modeling them with accuracy.
The first comes from terminology. The fact is that in most period sources, regardless of its characteristics a sword was called (you guessed it) a sword. This shows up in many cases whether we’re talking about shorter swords, fatter swords, longer swords, one-handed swords, two-handed swords -- very few swords were called something other than “sword” in their period, and most often when they were it was usually something that translated to “Big sword” “large sword” “two-handed sword.” Very distinctive. The interest in precise categorization of different kinds of weapons is a relatively modern phenomenon, and this makes classification quite difficult with any kind of authenticity. Even the venerable longsword goes by a myriad of names, and the term longsword itself has even been applied to single-handed rapier-like blades in certain manuals.
The second problem you will encounter is that even if one can come up with definable categories for these individual weapons (agreeing exactly on what constitutes a side sword compared to an arming sword blade retrofitted with an elaborate guard, as was often historically done) you are then stuck with the unenviable task of trying to work out what an “average” item of this type actually is, how it performs, and so on. This itself is kind of a frustrating exercise, as even two swords which look identical may be vastly different based on how they are weighted. Slight changes in balance make one a nimble thrusting weapon and the other a dirty great chopper.
This gets even less fun when you get away from swords. Oakeshott typology and some serious scholarly work give us a pretty decent information about swords. But then you have to deal with axes, and maces, and crossbows, and guns. If there was an absurd amount of variation in types of swords and their characteristics, the amount of variation in even less standardized weapons borders on the infinite. We won’t even discuss the problems encountered if one wants to research early firearms and start defining terms. Arquebus, Spanish musket, late musket, caliver, petronel.. it was difficult enough to reach a consensus on which term means what to whom, but then getting common figures on calibers?
"What the hell caliber is this?" image by Kathy
The final trouble you encounter is, as Mike Loades said "ultimately, a sword is an iron bar with a sharp edge and a point." In most cases, the actual difference in performance between different types of swords that were actually meant to be used is surprisingly small, save for preferences in how they have been weighted and the trade offs they may have made in specialization. Weapons are meant to be an answer to a question. While swords represent an exceptionally wide variety of attempts to find answers, the answers they arrive at are very similar.
Weapons are very fluid in their “types” and except in situations in which a standard was imposed (such as the mass-produced sabers for the British army), the handling characteristics of a given weapon usually had more to do with the preferences of the person having it made than anything intrinsic to a “type” of sword. Rather than take up a quarter of the book with spread-sheets on 150 types of sword, we decided that we wanted to model that fluid, dynamic quality.
In ‘Bastards, weapons are handled through what we call Codices, which are systems we use to help you generate content for your game. In the Arms Codex, weapons are broken down by type: One-handed sword, two-handed sword, mass weapons, pole-arms, daggers, bows, crossbows, pistols and long guns. Each weapon type has its own base stats, and then a series of options you can take that alter the characteristics of the weapon you are having made.
image by Hans Splinter
- Ambushes at d6 Sequence
- Reaches up to Long range in a formation
- Damage becomes 2p if Draw Weight requirement is not met
Choose Bow Type:
- Self-bow (+1TN, in a pinch, can be crafted in a day with basic skills and limited tools)
- Recurve (-2DR when wet, composite*, crafting takes often weeks, requiring special tools and glues)
Optional: Change Draw Weight
- Child’s (-2 Damage, requires Strength 1)
- Target (-1 Damage, requires Strength 2)
- War (+1 Damage, requires Strength 4)
- Epic (+2 Damage, requires Strength 5)
Features: Increase Cost for Each
- Long (reaches up to Extended range in a formation; can’t be used on horseback)
- Heavy Draw (+1 Damage, one shot per round, always uses d10 Sequence)
- Whiskers (adds string silencers, subduing the twang)
Examples
Shortbow (4p, short/medium, instant, St3) Recurve
Poaching Bow (5p, short/medium, d10, St3) Self-bow, Whiskers, Heavy Draw
English Longbow (6p, short/medium, d10, St4) Self-bow, War, Long, Heavy Draw
Daikyū** (4p, short/medium, instant, St3) Recurve, Long
* composite and recurve are not separate traits -- the only way to get a recurve bow is to build it out of composite materials. this is contrasted by crafting a bow out of a single piece of wood, which makes a self-bow.
** this asymmetrical Japanese bow made out of bamboo strips is the only historical recurve longbow that we’re aware of
Like in the above example, each weapon section will give examples on how the parts can work together, and some very common “forms” of those weapons. To make life easy on the GM, a back appendix will feature the fairly complete kind of arms catalog you would expect for easy reference. So far, we haven’t come across any period weapons that we haven’t been able to easily replicate within our setup, and that makes us ridiculously excited.
The real strength of this system is two-fold:
First, it allows a far more subtle variation and characterization as you see in fiction. Even in a knightly setting with little variation where the default assumption is that everyone would have carried an arming sword, your hulking brute of a character may be carrying one that’s deliberately hefty and blade-heavy, meant to brutally hack his way through an enemy. By contrast, the guy at your table whose character is a pampered noble may decide that his character would have preferred a lighter, more nimble weapon. There is a sense of ownership when designing your character’s weapon, rather than just picking one off the rack.
Second, it avoids long debates over the relative merits of different swords and keeps the focus where it should be: on the people who use them.
Got something to say? Let us know on our Forums!
