Encounter two: Boarders in the Fog¶
Blitz Eternal: Adventures Beyond the Mists — v0.3 Draft¶
The tight-terrain fight, where the deck is a weapon and the danger opens with an ambush. It exercises positioning and the Double Sixes maneuver menu, chokepoints and reach, and the Unaware rule, which lets the surprise strike bypass a Company and land on a Character's Card. Same budget as the opener, but sharper, because the boarders engage at once and the mimics get the drop. Statted to the benchmark party (Pool 14, Depth 43). Scale it with 06-gm-guidance/level-1-encounter-budget.
The scene¶
The party's cog is boarded as a mist rolls in that no one ordered. Grapples bite the rail, cutlasses come over the side, and crossbows wink from the rigging above. The boarding is loud. The fog is silent, and it did not come off the water.
Something came aboard with it. Down in the hold, among the coiled cordage and the lashed cargo, two shapes wait that are not cargo. Mimics, the lurking kind, patient until a back is turned. The pirates do not know the hold is occupied. They will find out at the same moment the party does.
The map¶
A ship's deck: all rail and chokepoint. The gangway and the hatches are the only ways fore and aft, which rewards a Halberdier holding a two-square line across a narrow deck and a Blade slipping along the rigging to flank. The rail is the map's best feature. A Double Sixes Shove pushes a boarder over it for the hazard's 1 damage and a swim, and a pirate in the water is a pirate out of the fight. Sunder strips the grapples. The hold below is close, dark, and where the mimics fight best, so a party that clears the deck still has the worst room left to enter.
The ambush¶
The mimics spring first. Before Initiative, they strike from the cargo at whichever Characters have not yet acted, and those Characters are Unaware (core-rules, Part Eleven): the strike bypasses the Company entirely and lands on the Character's own Card, because a Retainer who does not know a fight has started cannot interpose. Intercept is unavailable against it and no new Guard can be banked in response, though Guard already banked still applies. A Character stops being Unaware the instant they take their own first action.
Run it as one strike per mimic against separate Characters where possible, spread the surprise rather than gang it. After that opening, the mimics are ordinary Veteran melee.
The roster (benchmark, Party Pool 14)¶
Stat blocks follow core-rules, Part Fourteen.
Pirate Cutlass (×6). Trained (5-6), 2 Hit Points, Speed 6, Range 1. No keywords. They come over the rail on the first round and press the deck.
Rigging Crossbow (×2). Trained (5-6), 2 Hit Points, Speed 4, Range 8. No keywords. They shoot down from the rigging from the first round and are worth climbing to silence.
Pirate Captain (×1). Veteran (4-6), 5 Hit Points, Speed 5, Range 1. No keywords. A duelist, not a butcher; he leads the boarding die and fights clean, which makes him a fair single-combat foil for a Character who wants one.
Hold Mimic (×2). Veteran (4-6), 3 Hit Points, Speed 5, Range 1. No keywords in the stat line; their teeth are in the ambush above, not a keyword. Once seen, they are simply fast, ugly, and cornered.
Eleven bodies, 27 Hit Points, and 11 enemy dice against the party's 14.
How it plays¶
The fight front-loads. Everything engages on the first round and the mimics have already drawn blood on a Card or two before Initiative, so the party starts a step down rather than a step ahead. The recovery is positional: seize the chokepoints, put the rail to use, and climb or shoot the crossbows out of the rigging before they whittle the line. A party that fights the deck as open ground will bleed; a party that fights it as a corridor will win it.
In simulation¶
Against the benchmark four across twenty thousand trials: the party wins effectively always, in about five rounds, losing close to two Retainers, with a Character spending a Life in roughly one run in four, and never two in the same fight. The Unaware opening is the whole reason the Life rate sits above the opener's despite an identical budget: the same bodies hit harder when the first blows skip the Company. Real play runs a touch shorter and safer than the simulation, which under-models the party's own tools (see the budget note).
The dials¶
Pool. Add or remove one Cutlass per point of Party Pool off 14.
The ambush is the sharpest dial. Against a shallow, Company-light party, cut the mimics to one, because an Unaware strike straight to a thin Card is the single most dangerous thing on this deck. Against a deep, shield-rich party, keep both mimics and add a Cutlass, since bypassing the Company is exactly what punishes a party that leans on it.
Tier, for tough parties. Past roughly Pool 18, give the Captain a keyword (Rend 2 reads well for a boarding axe) rather than adding more Cutlasses.