Whev, it took a bit to get this one done. Between work projects, a bit of feeling under the weather and so on, it kept getting pushed back.
But enough excuses, here we go.
Note that this looks super long when you type it all out, but in reality each of these steps only takes a few moments. The entire process should only take you a couple minutes (at least until you go rooting for that one miniature that you know you have in a box and where was it...?)
Generating an encounter when we set out to go find some trouble.
The point of playing a miniatures game is of course to go fight people, so you can use all your miniatures on the table.
Unless we are traveling to a specific location, we will use the "Adventuring" column of the main encounter table. Essentially this is us just roaming the country side looking for trouble, as adventurers usually do.
If the number ranges look a little differently on your copy, make sure you have downloaded the latest version. The tables were changed some in the Marmoset update.
Normally you would roll and just take the encounter you get, however for the purpose of this example I am going to just say I rolled a 72, giving us one each of Roadside and Combat encounters.
Roadside encounter
If you roll both, you always generate the roadside encounter first. If we were using Roads well traveled we could use the expanded table there (Pretty slick bit of product placement there, right?) but for now, we'll just roll on the rulebook table.
The roll is a 24 meaning we've met a pilgrim wandering somewhere. We can choose to just say hi and move on or stop to interact. Of course, we'll do the latter this time.
The interaction roll is a 62, which means the Pilgrim is Friendly to us. Clearly, they are relieved to see a group of professionals looking to help make the area less monster-infested.
This means we will write down that we've made a Pilgrim friend. Later in the campaign, no matter where we are, if we meet another Pilgrim, we can declare that it is our old friend and roll on the Special Interaction table.
The combat encounter
We need to know who we are going to be fighting. This is just a D6 roll with the highest Threat score being encountered on a 3-6 and the second highest on a 1-2. If you preferred, you could just make it an even chance of all available Threats.
For us, the roll comes up Outlaws with the exact enemy type being Thieves.
We narrate that the Pilgrim barely escaped from a gang of thieves with their life intact and has given us a pointer on where to track them down.
Next, we roll for the encounter type. The dice come up a 58, which means we encounter them while traveling (instead of being ambushed or finding a camp or lair). This is just a normal encounter battle.
Enemy composition
Now that we know who we are fighting and how, we can determine what exactly we're up against.
We need to determine if there is any leadership present. The D6 roll is a 2, so the travel encounter table says they do not.
If they did, we'd have had to add extra figures to their count.
Since there are no leaders, a second roll is required to see if a Personality is present. This is just a 4+ roll and a 5 indicates we do meet someone. The D100 roll gives us a Brute: A big mean fella who is clearly the muscle of this gang.
For the number of opponents encountered, we always roll 2D6, pick the highest and then add the "Number" modifier from the enemy tables. I roll 2 and 4, so 4 on the die +3 (number) is 7 thieves. Any leader or personality is in addition so we'll be fighting 8 opponents in total.
The enemy table says thieves get 2 archers, so the composition is 1 brute, 2 archer thieves and 5 regular thieves.
We could try to bribe thieves, but we're here to have a fight right?
The Variations tables are optional but we'll roll for them. Basically we take two regular opponents, not archers, and roll to see what is special about them. This works best if we have a couple mini's that look a bit distinctive. (As a note, personalities and leaders are not subject to this even though the book isnt explicit on the point. It has to be a bog standard grunt).
I roll on each table and get:
One thief who is Manic and will be unaffected by morale checks.
One thief who is Untrained. Since their combat skill is already +0, this won't matter unfortunately.
Next up is deploying for battle, which we will tackle in a separate post.
