Five Leagues Skill Compendium + KPS 1.07

 Blog post a few days late, but the Skill Compendium for Five Leagues is available, offering a comprehensive list of all 2nd edition 5L Skills, including clarifications on both individual skills and their use in general.

Quite a few people have asked for this to make their lives easier, so I am happy to oblige. Included are also 4 new skills for Follower level characters.

https://www.wargamevault.com/product/348567/Five-Leagues-Skill-Compendium

Additionally, KPS version 1.07 is out now and available to download. This features the following changes:

* Fighters dying no longer forces a Bravery test (after all, they're expected to die horribly).

* Groups now test Bravery when they are reduced to 1 man left (which should make 3 figure groups a bit more fragile).

* Since it caused confusion to no end, I have clarified the rules for individual figures (to basically align with how most people were in fact playing it): Individuals do NOT belong to a troop class. However they can be given a bow as an upgrade. Currently that doesn't affect their stats in any way but does add a point or two to their cost. 

FiveCore 4 first look. Actions

 It may not come as a surprise that the default dice mechanic will be "Kursk Dice" also known as the "Man to man" option in the 3rd edition rulebook.

Essentially, you will roll your handful of action dice and assign each to a single figure or a group of up to 3, who will then act according to the die issued.

1's will Scurry, allowing them to move without attracting reaction fire.

6's will Quick Fire, allowing them to shoot without attracting reactions.

Other dice will move and fire normally, but will cause reactions to be incoming. 

In a typical squad-level fight, you will have 3 action dice but it can of course be scaled up for larger actions. This means each turn moves quite quickly.

FiveCore 4 and rules. First look

 Over the next days and weeks, I am going to talk a bit about what specific mechanics of FiveCore 4 will look like. 

We are starting with something very simple: Characters on the table.

FiveCore players are familiar with the concept of "a soldier is a soldier" meaning that a basic combatant does not require any stats or rules, since the game system already tells us what will happen.

With 3rd edition, the idea of Benefits was introduced to add bonuses to certain rolls, along with the more detailed mechanics of the skill and level system.

For 4e, we're getting rid of that since in most cases a +1 movement bonus or whatever is not all that interesting.

Instead, we will have a default set of 9 core skills which any figure can have, each having a particular effect. 2 of these are actually flaws, 1 is used to denote leader figures and the remaining 6 affect game mechanics. 

These will all be fairly significant in game terms and can be used to create specialists, elite squads or superior characters. For example a Runner can Dash and still fire normally, while a Brave character can attempt to rally without requiring an activation to be spent. 

A character with one of these skills (excepting the two negatives) is considered to be Level 1, a character with two of them is Level 2 and so forth. A highly trained assassin might be a Brawler and Independent, making them a Level 2 character. 

In a pick up game, you can simply give each side a set amount of levels to hand out, such as a Level 2 and a pair of Level 1 characters. Then players can simply pick the skills they would like. Campaign games will of course be able to award them over the course of multiple battles as well.

The 5X series and swapping out parts

 Over the years, I've seen all manner of interesting emails, blog posts and so forth, discussing replacing parts of the 5X system with an aspect from another game.

For the purpose of this discussion, I'll focus on Five Leagues. I've seen or heard from people replacing the combat mechanics with Thud&Blunder, Song of Blades&Heroes and even a very ambitious Rangers / Five Leagues mash-up. I'd be shocked if there wasn't a Mordheim / Leagues mash-up out there. 

While I always try to provide for a fairly modular structure, I think it's super interesting that people have been able to do so with relatively little difficulty. Of course, you have to adapt things like experience and rewards, but if you are already on the road of writing your own mash-up game, that's no great challenge. 

Of course, it's difficult to tell which mash-ups comes from someone being unhappy with the Leagues combat system, versus someone being unhappy with the campaign in the other system. Or they just wanted to see what would happen, which is a very "gamer" thing to do!

In any event, I fully support it and I think it's really cool. Definitely let me know if you get up to anything like this. 

Renegade Scout 2.05

 Version 2.05 of Renegade Scout is available, adding the following tweaks. The Army Builder includes these changes, the standalone Elite builder will be updated over the weekend.

* Armor points values have been adjusted up a little bit to better reflect their value. 

Combat, Drop trooper armor raised by 1 point.

Heavy armor raised by 2 points.

Assault and Breach armor raised by 4 points.

* Troop types:

Cost of Enforcers, Field Agents and Hulkers have been raised by 2 points.

Cost of Soulless has been raised by 1 point.

Cost of Mutants and Horde has been lowered by 1 point.

* Weapon mounts:

Vehicles can mount hull-mounted guns limited to a 90 degree field of fire. The points costs in the army builder have been adjusted down roughly 10% to account for this. 

* * * * *

These tweaks are not massive changes, but they should help bring troops a bit more into line with how they relate to each other. I'd rather make a small change and then go back to increment it more, than make a huge adjustment and then realize it has to be walked back.

For example, Hulkers may still be under-costed by a little bit, but this will help tweak it.

If you have opinions or thoughts on the values of assorted weapons and items, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Five Parsecs Mind Bullets v2

 With a year of additional testing and player feedback, an update to Mind Bullets is available

This adds psionic characters to the Five Parsecs campaign, with 10 abilities possible. It also includes the option to add psionic enemies and both options can be used independently if you prefer to just use one or the other.

The rules are integrated into the campaign sequence and should be clearer, easier to use and more polished, compared to the original beta version. 

There is no need to restart your campaign and they should work with any version of 5P, as long as it has the 1.12 "Expanded" enemy tables instead of the old single-table enemy list. 

Squad Hammer Core - Update

 Release 1.02 adds scenario generation to the Squad Hammer Core rules. 

This is based on the original generator in the Squad Hammer v1 rules, but polished up and improved based on feedback and playtesting. In particular, "unit objectives" ended up being awkward and leading to a lot of shenanigans, so I opted to remove those.

Rules can be obtained below