Hello everybody.

Today I'd like to get a little debate going about the question of ambushes out of veils. During our last gaming session the winter knight in my game decided to veil himself and do a magical attack (could have been a maneuver my memory is a little fuzzy) onto two mortals that where guarding a train. He stated that since he was veiled and sneaky the ambush rules should apply.

In that situation I wasn't sure how to react. On the one side I can see some validity in the statement of my player. The concepts of veils and ambushes are reasonably comparable, yet the idea of ambush rules out of veils can lead to some pretty nasty rule breaking / power gaming. Imagine: It's relatively easy to create a powerful veil around your self. I won't go into detail on this, because I believe that by now we all understand the magic rules good enough to acknowledge this as true. The power of the veil makes it pretty much impossible for mortals and low to mid-level supernatural baddies to break it. Not only is the wizard able to carry his ambush around with him (since veils aren't stationary as common ambushes usually are) he is also able to cast a powerful magical attack from out under it that, if ambush rules apply and the ambush/veil isn't discovered is apposed only by mediocre skill-levels. The extra shifts that can come out of this are ... well ... potentially insane.

As I didn't want to create a precedent at my table I didn't allow the combination of veils and ambush rules at that point, but neither me nor my players where really happy with it. I'm curious on what other GM think about this and if similar situations have come up elsewhere.

My only idea so far is to make the ambush rules still apply in some form. For example the stealth role could still apply to set up the ambush. Since setting an ambush has lots to do with good positioning and terrain abuse this makes some sense to me. But how to do it? You could make the stealth roll aided by the power of the veil. You could do it the other way around and modify the discipline role for the veil by the stealth skill. It all seems clumsy to me.

Input please!

Hey everybody!

Right now I'm pondering over the question what construes "magical affinity". It's only mentioned once in YW169 in the first paragraph of the "Marked by Power" passage.

What does this entail? Is somebody with an average or fair lore skill affine to magic? Do you have to be a supernatural being to sense "Marked by Power"? Do you need wizard senses or is it enough to be a practitioner of some sorts? Are Knights of the Cross magical affine?

You see it can be read as dreadfully inaccurate or you can simply decide that everybody with the slightest connection to the supernatural world will be aware of it. Now: I know that it should come down to what's reasonable in the given situation, but I'm looking for opinions here.

Hey there fellow GMs it's me again with an other question I was confronted with during our last gaming session.

What happens when the circle of a complex ritual is prematurely broken to prevent the ritual from going through. For example: what happens if the circle of a sanctum invocation or an entropy curse is disrupted by throwing something through it while there have been a couple of dozen shifts channeled into the construct?

There are two imaginable outcomes and I'm not certain witch one would make most sense where the DF canon is concerned:

• The spell fails, releasing it's energy as backlash or fallout upon the caster in the circle. This is potentially very very bad and I'm not aware of any example of this within the canon. Yet it has a certain appeal in a dramaturgic way. The rules say that backlash and fallout happen if the channeling of energy fails... but in this situation it technically doesn't. So: Is backlash/fallout viable when disrupting a charged ritual circle?
• The spell fails, releasing it's energy into nothingness. The effort of the ritualist goes to waste, as the channeled energies hold by the circle disperse into the natural magical background. As for the first point there aren't a lot of examples for something like that. The only thing that comes to my mind is from Welcome to the jungle comic
  (click to show/hide)

  where Harry throws a stone at the cauldron of the Hacatian Hags to spoil their ritual of assention
  .

How do you handle the breaking of a ritual circle. I'm looking for opinions here. Have I overlooked something in the rules?

I'd like to run something by you to see if I got it right. I thought about how to handle throwing people and how to do it. Here is what I figured out, let me know if you'd do it the same way.

So here is the situation: Big bad nasty Troll wants to pick up the vigilant hero and throw him a couple of zones into the next nice brick wall to make his head hurt a little ... well a lot actually.

First the Troll needs to get a grapple going. So he does an maneuver with fists to get hold of the hero and create the aspect GOTCHA. The hero rolls poorly on his defense so the aspect gets applied. On his next turn the Troll initiates the grapple but instead of doing the normal grapple attack he decides to throw the hero.

Lifting a normal person is an average difficulty. Lets say the troll has might at Fair (+2) and he gets +6 on lifting because he has supernatural strength. To use something as a throwing weapon your might has to be +6 better on the lifting table, than the difficulty of the object you'd like to throw is. As his combined lifting strength is +8, the Troll can throw the hero as a weapon no problem...

Now comes the tricky part: The hero sails through the air and hits the wall. He should at least be able to defend against the attack by the normal grapple rules. Perhaps he might even defend like against any other normal attack. But again the luck is not on his side and he crashes hard into the wall. What damage do we apply?

I'd decide on the wall being a Weapon: 4 and use normal rules on applying shifts. In the case the Troll decides to throw the hero off of his bridge then falling rules should apply, witch in most cases would be really really bad.

Have I gotten this right? I'm not sure if the damage is in paar. To spice it up we could let the wall defend against the throwing attack and distribute the damage between the hero and the wall (wall is Ledgendary +2 to break ). But I can't decide if that would be to much of a fuzz ...

Hey there. We just finished a session were the wizard of my group wanted to do a zone wide attack on four mercenaries who wanted to lay destruction onto his homestead. He gathered eight shifts of power witch would have inflicted six stress (-2 shifts to make the attack a zone attack).

Now, the rules state clearly that everybody who is in the attacked zone suffer the stress of the attack if they are not able to counter it (YW 251). And thats where the debate started. I as the GM (who arguably isn't totally solid in all the rules during the third session) was of the opinion, that potentially 24 or more points of stress (four targets in the attacked zone) are very very much for an evocation with the power of eight. I still stand by this. In my opinion the effect is far to great for the coast and the risk invested, but the rules state clearly that everybody in the zone gets attacked.

Have I read something wrong? Do the spray attack rules apply in this case and the damage gets divided?? I'm confused and a bit angry about myself, because I ruled the enormous damage down at the gaming table and the following debate got rather heated (again sorry to my guys). How do you guys handle this?

Edit: Sorry if this has come up before. It's really late here and I just wanted to drop the question before going to bed. I haven't searched as much as I could have...

I have an other question related to crafting.

The PC/NPC that I plan to create for the occasional tag along with my group is a master gunsmith. I want him to be able to make guns of exceptional quality for his vampire hunting and to sell in the little custom gun shop that he runs as his day job.

The rules for crafting mundane objects are easy enough. Basically, given enough time, my PC can create any item/gun of any quality he likes. But how would that reflect in the Item? There is the example of the warden swords which are crafted so well that they gain a damage bonus. Would that apply to a exceptionally good gun too?

Unfortunately the rules for crafting are a bit weak when it comes to the everyday stuff. What do you think? Can the rules for the magical item crafting be modified to apply to mundane crafting?

I'm interested in how you guys would handle something like an immunity to poison, i.e. the addictive saliva of the Red Court. I'm not aware of anything specific in the book. There is a potion mentioned that counters the venom but I don't think that it fits very well. If we go with Physical Immunity it seems somewhat expensive for the benefit it gives, stacked catches seem to be a possibility though.

The idea is, that a PC has come in contact with the saliva so often, that he has become immune to its narcotic and addictive effects. How would you represent this on your sheet? I guess it applies to other sorts of poisons and venoms too.