Houserules/Eldmar

Back to Eldmar

I intend to include a variety of house rules in this section, relating mainly to the Dragon Blooded game that I run called 'Curse of Chaos Fang'. That said there will be house rulings from the Solar game in which I play.

Character Creation

1. Characters were initially limited to Realm based Dragonblooded characters only. However the game has now left the Realm and is travelling through the Northen satrapies and so other types (God blooded only) may be considered, with prior approval required.

2. Custom artifacts are encouraged, but approval required.

3. A well written character history is requested (not mandatory) but stories and game effects will be based around the histories. Artistic licence will be employed by the ST where no Character history exists.

4. Backgrounds were initially restricted to feasibly what a teenage student DB in the Academy of Bells is likely to have access to (no artifacts or manse's above level 4, no unusual allies, no command and no influence). this has now been lifted as the group has graduated from the Academy, and joined the Realms Navy.

5. Character creation otherwise follows cannon rules except for any alterations listed on this page.

Immaculate Martial Arts

My first ruling is regarding the 2 prerequisite charms Spirit Sight and Spirit Walking.

After much debate we thought that it was a little silly having Spirit Walking requiring essence 3, as a prerequisite for a charm that has Essence 1 as its prerequisite. As a solution, I decided that characters could get up to but not including the Form charm (i.e. the first four charms) of their respective Immaculate style after learning Spirit Sight, but then to progress to learning the Form charm or above would require the character to have learnt Spirit Walking. This hasn't really had any impact on the way the game has been played out other than the characters can access their first Immaculate M.A charm slightly quicker, long term development would work out as per cannon.

My second and third ruling relates to the Wood Drgon style.

I have decided that Eyes of the wood dragon, which adds the users essence as damage (rolled seperately, soaked normaly) has now been altered so that it simply adds the users essence to the base damage of the attack. All other parameters of the charm remain as per the book.

I have also decided that the charm Wood dragon vitality which adds MA to soak, is altered from a simple charm to a reflexive charm. This is because the almost identical but slightly more powerfull Earth dragon version is also reflexive, and it makes sense that they are both the same type.

Specialties

Our House ruling on specialties is that a player may have many different specialties for the same ability.

• e.g. Melee - (Sword), (Axe), (Spear), (Multiple oponents)....

Each specialty can have a maximum of three dots, and multiple relevant specialties can be combined in a dicepool. However the maximum bonus to a dice pool from specialties can never be higher than three.

• e.g. a swordsman with the specialisations (sword) 2 and (multiple oponents) 2 would only have three specialty dice not four, when fighting with a sword against multiple attackers.

This rule allows players to diversify more - otherwise you tend to get the same old (sword - 3) cropping up on charactersheets. With this rule players can specialise in several different areas of the base skill. After all a Swordsmaster is the master of the Sword, but a Weaponsmaster has mastered many different weapons.

Craft

Craft is treated as a broad ranging skill, with the following exception. For each dot that a character has in the Craft skill, they may choose one specific craft area in which they are capable of working.

• e.g. my Twighlight character Eldmar (now deceased) has craft 5. His chosen areas are; Armorer, Weaponsmithing, civil engineering, Siege engineering and Manse construction all at skill level 5. There are no bonus dice or any other mechanical effects for these choices, they are simply the areas in which he is proficient.
  

Splitting Dice Pools

I have altered the ruling regarding taking multiple actions. only actions taken after the first are counted for working out dice pool penalties. So a character taking 4 actions is actually taking 3 extra actions, thus his penalty would be -3 to the first action, -4 to the second, -5 to the third, and -6 to the forth action. Activating an extra action type charm precludes splitting the dice pool for multiple extra actions as normal.

Defence Pools

In our Games, we do not allow characters to attempt both a dodge and parry/block against the same attack. You have to decide which defence to use, other wise some characters would never get hit by anything other than a perfect attack. Also the idea of blocking is that you stand your ground and put your shield in between yourself and the attack, when you dodge you are moving yourself away from the attack.

E.g. My Sidereal character has a persistent dodge pool of 19 dice and a base parry of 22 dice not including charm bonuses such as BotBm this would give her a base defence of 41 dice.

Minimum Damage

We completely ignore the minimum damage = to your permanent Essence, and have left it as 1 dice ping damage.