Combat Rules In the preliminary rules you have already gone through some basic rules of fighting in Arkania. If you wanna leave them as they are you might. Otherwise you will find some more detailed and realistic rules in here. Basic Rules Okay, let us forget our new system for a moment and remind us what we had so far as fighting rules: The fighter have got values called attack (AT) and parade (PA), they hold weapons in their hands with definite hitpoints and they are clothes in armours with definite armour (AR). In a fighting turn every fighter may attack once and parade once. If the hero succeeds in attacking (,i.e. if she throws a D20 and the result is less than or equal to her AT-value), the enemy has to withstand that attack, i.e. he has to parade (by rolling a D20 and rolling less than or equal to his PA-value). If the attack fails, or attack and parade succeed both, nothing happens, only the right to hit changes and the previous attacker will have to stand her parade. If the attack is successful and the parade fails, the attacker hit the enemy. The player has to throw a D6, to see, how many hit points she made and adds the D6 to her weapon's hitpoints. The enemy subtracts his armour from the sum to give a result called damage points. Then he subtracts the damage points from her life energy and the fight continues until a fighter surrenders or the life energy fell beneath the unconscience level (of 5 points for humans). Expanded Rules So far, so good. A fight after the standard rules is run very quickly (even with many combatants) and despite this very dramatic. But it is somehow "plain fare", and in times like these there is always the popular demand for more spice. Voila! Thy will be done. On the following pages you will find the expanded fighting rules to spice up your life as a fighter in Arkania and to widen your use as a warrior under the assumption that you already use the talent system which is urgent need for the fighting rules. These fighting rules are not creme de la creme, that is, there is even an improvement to these rules which have been found in the german rules for a long time already, if you want to get involved with fighting on a horse and feinting, strange weapons and what ever a warrior's heart wants. But this is not the place to explain all this stuff, the future will show what will be important enough to be translated... Essential Notes Before running onto the battlefield, we want to give you some notes on the fighting system of Realms of Arkania. (If you are not interested in game philosophies, feel free to move to the next page). The development of a fighting system is a complicated act of balance for the authors of a RPG: They may not forget the factors realism, dramatism and last but not least fun. The preferences and interests of various players are absolutely different, and what can be a hell of fun for one group of players, may be a dull orgy of dice for the other. The first question arises already, when we determine to simulate a real "sword fight", because there are only rare reports on fighting with swords in the middle ages and because, where there is evidence of such a fight, they were always fighting for life. So they were really careful when trying not to get hit by the enemy to avoid any injury. But such a fight is not a fight we want to simulate, we do not want to be spectators and we do not want to design rules for such a cruel case. Our direction is much more to simulate a fight as they are shown in films about knights or musketeers or novels and comics, when heroes are "real heroes" and fights are quick and a fun for the public, with the elegant dancing of fine blades and acrobatics. These fights are the godfathers of the fighting rules for Realms of Arkania. Fantasy RPGs shall include fantasy and not some seminars on medieval combat. So far for the subject of realism. It is this reason that lets us forget such "apparently inevitable" tables for tactical location, length of weapon, humidity and the hair colour of a hero, which lead to the result that somebody missed your hero by length of thumb after only a couple of minutes surfing around the net (or in the old-fashioned way leafing through some 200-pages thick book). We also spare you some localizing pattern or zoning system, that lets you grasp whether a rapier hit the kidney or thigh. First of all, it is very doubtful that such a system can be realistic, and on the other hand, we doubt even more, that a game dealing with slaughtered bodies and slashed bellies is essential. We think (and the translator thinks the same), it is advisory to leave that to the cruel reality and splatter movies. You will, however, find out, that the fighting rules in Arkania does not lack of elements that takes you nearer to what we call "fantastic realism" and gives your hero an individual profile. We hope, that our rules will be your fun for more than just a couple of evenings and even long nights, when in dark chambers and foggy forests the heroes stab to raise their blades against the fierce enemy...