Stormbringer Redux #31 - The Shield Hack from NUNA

One of the great things to come out of playtesting NUNA, my roleplaying game of Inuit & Iceships, is that it has given me lots of insight on the Stormbringer rules on which it is based.

I had this What If? comic back in the day. Absolute banger.

And it has helped me solve the riddle of shields.

Chinks in the Armor

In the old Stormbringer rules, shields were both touted as important but not given enough explanation or mechanics to answer why. The rules for Shields were, as usual, split throughout the rulebook, so as is my practice, I try to put them in one place so I can better understand what the designers were trying to do at a glance.

Here are the rules on shields.

[3.3.3] reminds us that you cannot try to Parry with a weapon then switch to Shield for a second Parry. Fair enough.

[3.3.3.1] adds that a Shield is the only way to Parry an arrow. Useful.

[3.5.2] gives us the stats for Shields as weapons, while [3.5.2.1] gives extra descriptions. A bit fiddly, so I always rewrote it in one place.

Buckler - Light & small, banded in iron, advantage is lightweight & ease of movement.

- (6 throwing) STR / 12 DEX / 1D4 (1D6 thrown for 9 meters) Damage / 30 cm or 1 ft Length / 50LB Price

Target - Larger round shield, covers most of torso. Wood covered in leather, banded in iron, BUT can be cast in iron, but not iron or steel. This confused me as a lad, but I now realize 'cast' doesn't mean made in metal, it means thrown, and indeed the Target is the one of the two shields on the projectile weapon list. Iron and steel are too heavy, so if you want to go Captain America and throw your shield, bronze is the only way, but doesn't cost any more or affect its durability.

8 (16 throwing) STR/ 7 DEX / 1D6 (2D4 thrown for 6 meters) Damage / 90 cm or 3 ft Length / 75LB Price

Heater - Typical mounted knight's shield, square at top and pointed at bottom.

8 STR / 9 DEX / 1D6 Damage / 90 cm or 3 ft Length / 100LB Price

Tower- Infantry man's shield, suitable for hiding behind. Best for shield walls, using short sword and fixing shield into ground.

12 STR / 6 DEX / 1D6+2 Damage / 150 cm or 5 ft Length/ 150 LB Price

But the meat of Shield rules come from [3.5.5] and [3.5.5.1], introducing the general concept of Shields and their use as weapons. We find that Shields are considered indestructible, and can only be killed by Critical Attacks or Demon Weapon Attacks (and Parrying demon weapons, one assumes). The description of a Shield rush, where you can bash with your Shield AND follow up with a weapon attack, is dropped in with little fanfare, except to remind us that an attacking Shield can't be used to Parry. This is a HUGE hidden rule, and could be applied to two weapon styles a la Moonglum, giving you the option of double Attacks or a combination of Attack & Parry.

There are more rules in the Magic chapter, but for now I want to stick to mundane Shields and their properties as listed above.

First, there seems to be some little inconsistencies. If both Target and Heater do 1D6, but the former is cheaper AND can be thrown, why use the latter? I'd be tempted to bump Heater and Tower up to 1D8 damage, but this would be unnecessary if their cover were mechanically supported.

The two biggest oversights seem to be elaborating Shield advantages such as lightness and cover without giving rules underpinning them. In the NUNA playtest, modern players were aghast they couldn't Dodge firearms, and so this oversight in Shield rules really stood out to me.

Here's what I did in NUNA.

The Benefits of Using a Shield

To make Shield rules clearer and add value to carrying one, I codified three advantages to using a Shield, in addition to the original uses in Parrying and Attacking.

1. Sword & Shield can reduce the Parry penalty versus multiple attackers.

This is not a new rule, just a clarification of the benefits of lugging a Shield about.

If you are facing three opponents and only hold a sword, your second and third Parry will be reduced by 20% and 40% respectively. This is a great rule and replicates the attrition factor of combat which I know well from my years in karate tournaments and SCA duels, without adding any other mechanics such as POW depletion.

However, with a sword and shield you can alternate between these for Parries and thus slow the rate of attrition. Facing the same three opponents, your first sword Parry has no penalty, ditto your first shield Parry. Only your third Parry faces the 20% penalty. This is a lifesaver in combat.

2. Advancing (or Retreating) under fire with a Shield increases your Armor Value

Taking a note from historical castle sieges and the NUNA playtest feedback about defense versus firearms, I implemented the following house rule.

When advancing or retreating under missile fire, you can hold your shield in front of you and get the shield's Armor added to your own. Shield armor is equal to its melee damage. Note that when doing this, you cannot Attack & Parry as usual.

For example, let's image you are wearing Leather Armor (1D6) and being fired upon by multiple archers and only have a sword and shield (Target 1D6). By the old rules you have to Parry EVERY arrow, which becomes more difficult the more attackers there are. Instead, with my Advancing house rule, you now get 2D6 armor for every arrow fired against you, so you have a better chance of Advancing and attacking or Retreating out of range.

Critical shots of arrows would avoid the Shield and be applied straight to the Armor. For attackers trying to shoot around the shield, its size would also give a penalty to the Attack roll as follows:

Penalties for Attacking vs Shields

Buckler      minus 20%
Target        minus 50%
Heater        minus 50%
Tower        minus 80%

Since there is no skill for Advancing or Retreating under a shield, noncombatant or unarmored characters can also use it to increase their survivability. Movement speed is half whether Advancing or Retreating, and if you Attack a nearby foe you lose the added Armor benefit.

Note that this applies to ALL missiles, so a shield can save your life when facing a firearm.

3. Shields are portable Cover

Similar to the above rule, if you are trying to peek out on a busy battlefield (ie make a See roll to find troop composition or gain a strategic advantage), you can apply the above Penalties for Attacking vs Shields above.

This house rule is especially important when using Theater of the Mind, in other words no battlemats or minis, just descriptions. I find that with battlemats, players can see EVERYTHING and have omniscient knowledge of the terrain.

That is fine if you want a superheroic and gamey feeling combat. But if you want gritty or tragic combat, characters should have to literally stick their necks out to get useful information, and the Fog of War around them should hide important information from characters who are busy fighting for their lives and can't see anything beyond their combat tunnel vision. I would suggest having characters trying to See an advantage make a Luck roll, failure of which means they are subject to an attack following the above Shield Cover rule penalties above.

Interested in Seeing NUNA?

If you are interested in seeing how different NUNA is from Stormbringer, check the links below.

The link to the FREE preview of 7 PCs from Inuit Hunter and Shaman Whisperer to Rigger Roughneck & New Scientist is HERE or at the link below.

PC Preview

https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/575125/NUNA-Rpg-Player-Characters-Free-Preview

The link to the full Quickstart, priced at $1.99 because I believe $15 quickstart PDFs are a scam, and which contains the Moorcock-inspired gonza scenario The Silver Machine, can be found HERE or below.

Quickstart

https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/575172/NUNA-Rpg-Quickstart

NUNA Update - Advancing to Bronze AND The Origin of Shaman Whisperers

Atelihai!

Labrador Inuit, 1880, Rigolet (McCord collection)

NUNA is officially LIVE today, but with the timezone difference it was open for purchase or download a few hours yesterday. In that short time we are already 20% of the way to Bronze in the DriveThruRPG ranking!

Thanks to all who bought a copy and pushed us further toward the goal! Keep spreading the good word.

Here are the links:

PC Preview

https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/575125/NUNA-Rpg-Player-Characters-Free-Preview

$1.99 Quickstart

https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/575172/NUNA-Rpg-Quickstart

Origin of the Shaman Whisperer

During the playtests for Nuna, people were very curious about the Shaman Whisperers. Why not just have a powerful Shaman, some asked.

Three reasons.

First, the shaman (angakkuq) of Labrador were essentially wiped out by the arrival of the Moravian missionaries in the late 1700's. In my childhood, everyone around me was either United Church or RC. But at night my lovely nan, the Inuit painter Phyllis Pritchard, would tell me spine-tingling stories of the shaman, who would help you, but at a terrible price. Like Inuit kids all across Canada, my nan told us not to whistle at night, and certainly not when the Northern Lights were visible. Fastforward 30 years and when I began researching the shamanism of Inuit in Purvirnituq (Povungnituk), I encountered many stories of shamans cutting off their own limbs and reattaching them, and other horrific magics. Purvirnituq created the first Inuit artistic collective in Canada, and kept the old stories alive in their soapstone paintings. In the interviews I read from people there, some felt it was better off the shaman were gone, and that they were also angry at being cast aside. This was my inspiration for the NUNA conception of shaman as angry dead trying to control the chosen people they whispered to, and thereby find their way back into the land of the living.

Second, Nuna is a gritty game base but with gonzo powers added on through the presence of New Scientists and Shaman Whisperers. Those powers come with a terrible price - unpredictability and alien source for the New Scientists, and the rancor of the dead Shamans and loss of control to them for the Shaman whisperers. This is a feature of NUNA, and I don't want to replicate the old fantasy game trope of quadratically scaling magic users with (boring) fire & forget magic. I want something horrific yet entrancing, and that is what I have created with NUNA magics.

Last, the RPG image of a power fulshaman using nature magic is a colonial trope that is often used as a foil against the heroic western wizard and his magical tomes. I didn't want to replicate that dynamic, but instead lean into the depiction of power, whether scientific or magical, as also risky and fraught with danger, much like the US army colonial outposts in Labrador, which left DDT polluted dumps and radioactive material that affected Labradorians' health for generations.

NUNA Politics, Pricing, & Download Links

Hi all! NUNA goes live tomorrow so I want to tell you a few things about it.

A scene from the adventure The Silver Machine.

If You Don't Know NUNA By Now...

First, if you're new to NUNA and want to read the backstory, there are tons of fiction and descriptions on the Kickstarter I ran back in 2024 after winning the Chaosium RPG design contest. We didn't fund due to my lack of familiarity with the platform, but it was worth it to make community and connections, and gain experience.

TLDR Nuna is a BRP system game set in a post-apocalyptic Labrador where the Land has healed from resource exploitation and the Inuit are back as its stewards. Various Outsiders have also survived as Riggers out on the oil platforms and they all have to work together to build Community against the threat from magic and mythic monsters that have also returned.

Kickstarter link is HERE.

Link to my interview on the World of RPGs podcast episode about indigenous roleplaying HERE.

The Politics of NUNA

Indigenous roleplaying is, due to the history of colonialism, inherently political. Look at Coyote & Crow, which avoids the historical reality of Columbus and his start of the indigenous apocalypse by replacing it with a natural phenomenon. But like all good RPGs, it also echoes real world politics. There is the stigma of slave ownership of the Keetoowagi Federation, and the imperialist aggression of the Ezcan Empire, the North Korean cognate of their world. This inclusion of politics makes the gameworld all the more compelling.

Being a NunatuKavut (Labrador Inuit) is inherently political. What do I mean?

As a youth in Labrador I was Inuit, full stop, and enjoyed the strong family ties and casual discrimination that comes with it. No Inuit organizations existed before 1971, the year of my birth, and the first, entitled the now unacceptable Brotherhood of Eskimo, started that year. The Brotherhood changed its name several times until it called itself the Inuit Tapirisi Kanatami (ITK) in the 2000s.

The ITK slowly consolidated its power eastward until it covered Inuit Nunagat, or the 4 Inuit Homelands of Nunavut (central), Inuvialuit (west), Nunavik (French), and Nunatsiavut (Labrador).

The ITK has never fully accepted Labradorians. Unlike in the other 3 regions, where the Inuit were isolated from colonists and intermarriage was rare and started later, Labrador is on the Atlantic Coast and so settlers came and married Inuit from the very start. The Labradormuit were displaced from the north two times, first by Moravian missionairies in the 1700's, then again in the 1950's after Labrador was given to Newfoundland and joined Canada as one province, so we have lost much of our language and culture.

The Labrador Inuit long faced neglect from the UK and Canada, and rejection from other Canadian Inuit organizations due to their mixed composition. In the 80's and 90's Labrador Inuit started two groups, the Nunatsiavut (originally Labrador Inuit Association) and the NunatuKavut (Labrador Metis Association). Now, the Nunatsiavut and ITK have attacked NunatuKavut as not being Inuit enough, accusing them of changing the name of their organization (despite the fact that all 3 organizations having changed names), of not having blood ties (my mother is Nunatsiavut, as are many family members), and of hoarding tens of millions of government funds (although the Nunatsiavut gets 3 to 5 times as much).

(I have to add that individual Canadian Inuit response to my game has been mostly positive, with only one negative response. I see the dislocation between Canada's Inuit peoples as a political problem, one that says very little about the kindness of individual Inuk or their communities.)

It is important to note here that NunatuKavut members were victims of Canadian residential schools and recognized by the Canadian government in 2018. If we are Inuit enough to be victims recognized by the colonial state, we are no different from other Labrador Inuit.

The insane part is, in my family, my mother and her generation are all Nunatsiavut, and my generation are NunatuKavut. So this political distinction is in reality a result of the Indian Act and its policy of reducing indigenous populations by instituting a racial cutoff or blood quantum on the matriarchal line, and is useful to the ITK to access Labrador's mineral resources and Canadian government funding. This exclusion of indigenous people from their identity is a big problem in Canada, and has resulted in pretendian witch hunts, and I admire America in this respect, where percentage of blood does not count, and all indigenous are invited to reconnect to their roots and the land they grew up in.

So NUNA, my game, is a fantasy where Inuit of the North and South Labrador are brothers again, and their land is all they know. The Inuit are large and in charge, and lead the other peoples of Labrador in reconnecting to The Land and building healthy Communities there.

(But there is still resources to be salvaged and monsters to be defeated, have no fear!)

The Low Low Price of...

I have consciously set the price of the NUNA Quickstart at $1.99 for several reasons.

First, I see lots of Quickstart PDFs for $15 to $20 dollars on Drive Thru RPG. I think this is scandalous. I'd agree to paying that for a full game PDF, but not a Quickstart. NUNA Quickstart has the full actions, skills, and combat engine, some cool PCs, a mind-blowing psychedelic first adventure scenario, and lots of history about the world. But it is missing the Community building and Status rules, as well as a bestiary and full gazeteer.

Second, my goal with the Quickstart is to build buzz by getting as high as possible a medal for sales on Drive Thru RPG. So every sale pushes us higher on the DriveThru ranking system as the price exceeds the minimum needed to earn medals.

Whatever is earned on the Quickstart will be seed money for the Corebook, and a nice dinner with my son.

Where Do I Get NUNA?

If you want NUNA, the following links will be live July 15th.

For the FREE preview (7 player characters), click HERE.

The link for the 66 page Quickstart rules, written and illustrated by me, is HERE.

Thank you for supporting NUNA, and spread the word!

Nekkumek!

Why You Should Read The Mabinogion

This absolute banger of Welsh folklore is the second on my summer reading list:

If you are a fantasy gamer, here is why you should find yourself a copy.

1. Lots of Fantasy Game Items Are In Here

I've only read the first 3 tales, and already I've seen a Bag of Holding and a Black Cauldron (which supposedly inspired Disney's cult foray into dark fantasy of that name). There was also a giant iron house used to trap and kill a giant, a disappearing castle with a golden bowl that freezes anyone who touches it, as well as a horde of magical crop-eating mice and a shining white boar. I can't say I understand all of it, as there is a millennium between myself and the writers of these tales, but they are all compelling even to modern readers.

2. Lots of Fantasy Writers Were Inspired By It

Just reading The Mabinogion you can tell that it has provided inspiration to great fantasy authors. Especially important to me, Michael Moorcock based his Corum chronicles on Welsh mythology, and the scene of Corum being frozen by Arioch's heart was an echo of the Mabinogion's golden bowl that froze any who touched it. Ditto Elric's promise to return to Cymoril after a year, which is echoed in the many promises made between the lovers Pwyll and Rhiannon to reunite after 1 year when certain conditions are met. I am sure I'll find many other instances as I continue reading.

3. It Models Great Roleplaying and GMing

I find a lot of modern roleplaying gets bogged down in a slavish attention to either replicate the 'real world' or flatter the egos of players and GMs. Characters in The Mabinogion inhabit their worlds completely, and follow its internal, mythic logic.

In terms of roleplaying what is on your character sheet, the second tale, Branwyn the Daughter of Lyrr, models this excellently. When Branwyn's gigantic brother sails his fleet to Ireland to check up on his sister after hearing of her mistreatment, the simple (low INT) fisherfolk tell the Irish king "a wood we have seen upon the sea, in a place where we never yet saw a single tree... We saw, Lord, a vast mountain beside the wood, which moved, and there was a lofty ride atop the mountain, and a lake on each side of the ridge." The Irish king & his retainers are dumbfounded, and upon asking the wise Branwyn to decipher, she explains that the 'wood' are the masts of her brother's ships, and the mountain none other than her sibling, with the lakes being his gigantic eyes.

Just imagine how compelling would it be if GMs tailored all descriptions through the INT of those giving them?

Additionally, the magic items are not simple fire and forget technology with no downsides of many games. The Black Cauldron revives any dead on the same day, but they come back without the ability to speak. The Bag of Holding can only be used for a specific purpose, and let's just say that unless your are filling yours with mounds of meat and unwanted suitors, you not using it in a Mabinogion way.

Get A Copy For Your Appendix N

The original Appendix N referenced the fantasy literature that sprang from older works such as the Arthurian Chronicles and The Mabinogion. Why not take a step back to their folklore inspirations, and infuse your games with the ancient aura of Welsh mythology?

July 15th NUNA Quickstart & Free Preview

Hello friends,

Below is the announcement of the NUNA Quickstart launch I've posted on my gaming profiles.

TLDR Free preview (players characters) and 65 page Quickstart drop the 15th.

Please spread the word and watch here for updates.

---

Atelihai (Hello)!

I'm Tedankhamen, I'm a Labrador NunatuKavut Inuit and I won the 2024 Chaosium RPG Design contest for my Inuit RPG, NUNA. I've always disliked the depiction of the Arctic as 'savage wasteland' in games and fiction so NUNA presents the Inuit as masters of a living north who have awe inspiring Cultural ablities. I am also saddened by infighting by Canada's Inuit groups, so this game is a love letter to Labrador and a wish for peace between the NunatuKavut and Nunatsiavut, the two groups of Inuit created by colonial policies of Canada.

The 65 page Quickstart rules will be available at DriveThru RPG on July 15th, so please spread the word and pick up a copy. There is also a free preview of the Player Characters, which include an Inuit Hunter and a Shaman Whisperer. The Quickstart has combat rules and the scenario The Silver Machine. I intend to publish the full Corebook, which includes Cultural abilities and rules for supporting Communities, by year end.

I have run playtests at Rain City Games here in Vancouver, and am talks to do a promotional event and distribute physical copies there.

Also, on my roleplaying blog I've been writing a review of Coyote & Crow that has gotten thousands of reads, so check it out (https://tomboftedankhamen.blogspot.com/) if you want to see what is great about decolonial gaming in general and Coyote & Crow specifically.

Nekumek!

NUNA Player Characters Free Preview

 Just submitted it to DriveThru.

Look for it and the PWYW Quickstart in 3 days!!

Now time for an ice cream with sonny.

PS Looking good.

NUNA Update - The return of whimsy, the start of the hardest part, and Elric's Secret Part four

The text of NUNA is filled with art, and once I finalize the cover, it will be ready to go. Some of the interior pictures are quite whimsical and I think whimsical art is kind of dwindling these days. Most modern RPG art is professional and pompous and overly self-important, so glad to give a bit of that old-school vibe back.

It has also been nice getting my drawing skills back. I can see things improve the more I draw. But I need to get into coloring and broader techniques at some point.

Now that the text is ready to go, the hard part begins.

I'm talking networking, promotion, beating the drum.

But I am excited for the challenge!

If anyone is interested, here is another installment in my Elric's Secret pastiche series.