Magic Realm Combat 3 -- Luring with Natives

This is the first part of a larger tutorial:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3
Part 4

Quick tutorial today... we are going to battle with some natives on our side and talk about luring, deploying and battling on multiple sheets. Like last post, I am going to use RealmSpeak to manage the fight, which will make it a little easier on me... at the expense of being able to control the rolls. We'll see how it goes.

For the first battle, we are going to pit the Black Knight against two Heavy Trolls. This is a pretty good fight for the BK, though I would expect him to take a hit or two if he starts the battle unhidden. With a hireling, we should fare a little better. Let's give the BK a rogue companion and see how we can use him.

One way we can use hirelings is to lure enemies onto their combat sheet, tricking the monsters into attacking them instead of us. Every hireling you have can lure a single enemy to his sheet each combat round. Having a native lure an enemy can save us wounds and fatigue, and to allow us to ignore our defense to play more aggressive attacks. The risk is that the native is killed in the process, which will cost us notoriety and keep us from our precious victory conditions.

The Black Knight vs. Two Heavy Trolls -- Round 1

Round 1 -- Luring Step

This is how we are going to use Rogue 7 in this battle -- he is going to step in and take the first troll off our hands, allowing us to play an extremely aggressive attack on the second troll. To do this, R7 lures the troll in the Luring step.

Round 1 -- The lured troll goes on R7's sheet, not ours

To lure the troll, we simply place him on our hireling's combat sheet. Notice that we flipped R7 to his dark side. When we lure an enemy onto a hireling's sheet, we can flip him to either side. Rogue 7 has a side with a M3* attack and a 5 speed move, and another side has an L4* attack with a 4 speed move. Neither of R7's sides has an attack that can kill a troll who is heavy and armored, so we are going to play the side with the better move speed so that R7 does not get undercut and killed.

Once R7 has lured one troll, the other is deployed to our sheet. (If there were other characters in the clearing, they might have gotten attacked by the troll in the Random Deploy step.) So, R7 has a troll, as does the Black Knight. We are still going to have to withstand an attack this round, so did the native really help at all?


He actually helped quite a bit. Because we only have a single troll to worry about, we can play a highly aggressive attack in an attempt to kill the troll before he can even attack us. The first step in this attack is to play a FIGHT chit to alert our trusty mace. Unfortunately, trolls are pretty quick and so to alert our weapon, we are going to have to burn our FIGHT M3** -- using all of our effort asterisks for this round!

No need to be alarmed though. We don't need any more effort asterisks to undercut and kill our troll. The mace is a speed 3 on its alerted side, so we can play our slowest FIGHT chit, as long as it has a Heavy strength, we will hit and do enough damage to kill the hapless troll. So, we play FIGHT H6, and a MOVE H6 and the Black Knight will kill his troll this round.

Round 1 -- Position Step, our sheet

As for Rogue 7, it is just a matter of not getting hit. His move speed of 4 is fast enough to not get undercut on either of the Heavy Troll's sides, so it really comes down to a 1/3 chance on a die roll to see if the troll intersects... in which case, the Rogue dies. So, in this case, it doesn't matter how we play the combatants on R7's sheet, he lives 2/3 of the time, and dies 1/3 of the time.

Round 1 -- Position Step, R7's sheet

We roll a 6 for the reposition roll, which moves the Heavy Troll from the Thrust box, into the Smash box, and he does not flip (rolled 1/5). Our hireling stays where he is and does not flip because he lured the monster onto his own sheet. When a native is battling on his own sheet, he does not roll to reposition, or to change tactics. We control where he is played and what side he is played on. Keep this in mind, because when we deploy the native to a creature's sheet, this will change. So, R7 stays in the Charge box and the troll misses.

We have to fatigue one FIGHT asterisk because we alerted our weapon with a FIGHT M3**. We choose a FIGHT M4* because it is useless in this particular battle.

Round 2

This round is even easier than the last one. We are going to follow the same basic plan in which R7 lures the troll onto his sheet.

Round 2 -- Luring the troll onto R7's sheet

This round is better than the last one because the Black Knight has no enemies on his sheet and so he can alert his mace with any FIGHT chit he has. We pick a FIGHT M5, alert our mace, choose the troll as our target, and move onto the Position step.

Round 2 -- Position Step, R7's sheet

Since he is targeting a creature on another character's sheet, the BK plays his position step on R7's sheet. If you are battling other players, you still play your moves on your own sheet, keeping your plays hidden from the others, but playing solo, on RealmSpeak, we actually play our move on R7's sheet.

Our exact positioning doesn't matter here, because we are going to undercut the Heavy Troll and kill him with a speed 3 attack. Since this is the second round of combat, our speed 3 is certain to go before the troll, and so this is an automatic kill.

Round 2 -- Results

Making good use of our hireling allowed our Black Knight to kill two heavy trolls by spending a single asterisk in fatigue. Could he have won that battle alone? Certainly, we could have even played our aggressive strategy, but it would have cost us 2 fatigued asterisks, a wound, and possibly a damaged or destroyed shield, or a damaged suit of armor... and Rogue 7 isn't even that cool a hireling!

And to keep the concept of hiding (from the previous post in this series) fresh in your head... if the BK and R7 started the combat hidden, can you think of how you would play the battle to kill both trolls and take no fatigue or damage?