Beasts and mounts¶

Blitz Eternal: Adventures Beyond the Mists, working document¶

This document collects a family of Kits and one small unlock that all put an animal on the field with a Character, prompted by the Houndmaster Kit from the Ranger pass (ranger-migration.md). Deployed to canon 2026-08-01: the Kits are kits.md entries 23 through 26 (Houndmaster, Falconry, Vermin-Caller, Lance) and the Rider unlock is in universal-specialties.md. This document remains as the design record. Every entry is a rough draft flagged [PLAYTEST]; see the decisions section at the end.

The whole family rests on one distinction, which is what keeps it from fighting the rules.

A beast that fights for you is a Kit. A beast that carries you is not. When the animal is your weapon, the hound that bites, the hawk that stoops, the swarm that harries, it is the fiction of your own personal dice and never a separate die, exactly as Bare Fist and Hobnail treat unconventional weapons. When the animal is your mount, it does not attack through your dice at all; you attack with whatever weapon you already carry, and the horse only gives you Speed and a charge. So a mount is not a Kit and must not be one, because "Mounted with a sword," "Mounted with a lance," and "Mounted with a bow" are not three loadouts, they are your existing weapon Kit with a mount layered on top. Building them as Kits would duplicate every weapon Kit and multiply the whole list by mounted-versus-not. The mount is therefore a single unlock that rides on top of any Kit.

Both halves obey the one-die-per-combatant rule, which is load-bearing for every Command Capacity number in the game (companies-and-command, Part One): neither a fighting beast nor a mount ever adds a die to the Pool.

Part One: The beast-as-weapon pattern¶

Three Kits share one chassis. Rather than repeat it in each, the shared rules are stated once here; each Kit below adds only its own perk.

The beast is your personal dice. Your personal die or dice are the animal's attacks, not a second combatant's. More personal dice make a deadlier single animal, never a pack of separate rollers. The animal reads no Combos of its own and adds nothing to the Pool beyond the dice your Class already grants.
Hands stay free, and you carry a sidearm. These Kits are Hands 0. You wield no weapon of your own beyond an ordinary sidearm (kits.md, Sidearms and backups), a knife or short blade at Range 1.
Driven off, not disarmed of a blade. If a Hit is assigned to the animal, it is driven off exactly as a disarm removes a weapon (core-rules, Part Eight): your personal dice leave the Pool until you recover the animal after the fight or replace it in downtime. Drawing your sidearm is a Free Interaction, so you fight on at Range 1 with your personal dice until it returns. Losing the animal costs all your personal-die output at once, which is the real price these Kits pay for their reach and freedom.
They coexist with the bonded companions. A Character whose Class grants a bonded animal on its second personal die (bonded-companions.md: the Ranger's Hunting Hound, the Skirmisher's falcon, the Warden's Warhound) may carry the matching Kit too. It is the same animal in fiction and does not double-count, since neither the Kit nor the companion adds dice beyond the Class schedule.

The melee member of this family, Houndmaster, is already drafted in ranger-migration.md: the beast roams up to Speed 6 and your personal-die attacks are made from wherever it stands. The two below are its ranged and its control siblings.

Falconry¶

A hawk on the fist, loosed to strike from an angle no shield covers.

Weapons: A trained hunting bird (falcon, hawk, or eagle), plus a sidearm.

Range: 6, from the air. The bird needs no adjacency and strikes over screens and cover.

Hands: 0.

Perk: On the Wing. [ROUGH DRAFT — not yet reviewed] Your personal dice are the bird's strikes, made at Range 6 against any target in the open, the bird stooping from above. The bird is the fiction of your personal dice and adds no die (the shared pattern above). It is hard to pin while aloft: a Hit is assigned to it only by an enemy attacking at range or by the bird's own dive putting it in reach, and being driven off works as a disarm. Because the bird travels to its target, a foe under heavy cover or indoors may be out of its line entirely, at the GM's call.

Status: New, rough draft. The aerial, ranged sibling of Houndmaster. Deliberately shorter-ranged than the Bow and Arrow Kit (Range 8) and balanced against it on the downside: a bow is simply stowed when inconvenient, but a driven-off bird takes all your personal dice with it until recovery, a far steeper loss than switching weapons. Overlaps the Skirmisher's bonded falcon in fiction, not in dice. [PLAYTEST] the Range 6 value against the Bow, and whether the bird should take a turn to reach a very distant target rather than striking the same turn.

Vermin-Caller¶

Snakes underfoot, rats in the dark, a haze of biting insects. You do not strike the enemy so much as afflict them.

Weapons: A controlled swarm of small creatures, plus a sidearm. The swarm's form is yours to choose and to change between fights: snakes pouring underfoot, rats boiling out of the dark, a plague of locusts stripping the air, or a sudden storm of butterflies whose beating wings blind and unnerve as surely as any sting.

Range: 2. The swarm spreads to enemies near you.

Hands: 0.

Perk: Plague. [ROUGH DRAFT — not yet reviewed] Your personal dice are the swarm harrying enemies within Range 2. Each Hit may, at your choice, either deal its 1 damage normally or forgo the damage to apply Weakened to that target until the start of your next turn (core-rules, Part Nine), the swarm sickening and blinding rather than wounding. The swarm is the fiction of your personal dice and adds no die; it is driven off as a disarm. Once per turn, in place of a single target, you may loose the swarm as a Radius 1 Area of Effect (core-rules, Part Sixteen), applying its one roll to every enemy in the radius.

Status: New, rough draft. The control sibling of the family, trading clean damage for a Condition, in the same either-or pattern as the Chain-Dancer Kit's Entangling Lash. Treads near the Chancellor's Pacify (also Weakened) and should be priced and worded so the beast loadout is not a strictly better source of it; the difference is that this comes at the cost of the Character's own personal-die damage rather than a withheld command die. [PLAYTEST] whether the once-per-turn Radius option is too strong for a Kit and should be dropped to leave a purely single-target control tool.

Part Two: Mounts as a layer, not a Kit¶

A mount is one unlock that sits on top of whatever Kit a Character carries. This is the answer to every "Mounted with X" in one purchase.

Rider (specialty unlock)¶

Cost. 2 Advancement Points.

Requires. None beyond narrative access to a trained mount.

Flavor. You come to the field already moving, from a height, at a speed the ones on foot spend the whole fight trying to answer.

Effect. You keep a trained warhorse or comparable mount and may ride it into battle. While mounted:

Your Speed increases by 4. A mount's whole contribution is reach across the field, never extra attacks: it adds no die to the Pool and reads no Combos, in line with the one-die rule and the mounted-Retainer guidance (companies-and-command, Part One).
You may charge. Moving at least 3 squares in a roughly straight line toward a target before you attack counts as a charge, which enables charge-keyed effects such as the Lance Kit's Couched Charge below. The charge grants nothing on its own without a weapon that uses it; it is the setup, not the payoff.
The mount layers onto any Kit you carry. A mounted archer, a mounted lancer, and a mounted sword-and-shield rider are all just this unlock plus the Kit they already have.

Drawbacks. A mount is a large body that a braced spear line is built to punish. The Halberdier's 2-square reach, the Pike's 3-square reach, and any Set Against the Charge or Polearm Reaction perk all threaten a charging rider before they arrive (kits.md and companies-and-command), and a mounted Character has no special protection against them; cavalry losing to a set spear wall is the intended shape. A mount is also useless where it cannot go: corridors, stairs, dense woods, and rooftops all strip the benefit. Being unhorsed, when a rider is caught by one of those reach reactions or thrown, is handled as a dismount rather than a wound at the GM's call: you lose the mount's benefits and must remount, an Action or a downtime beat. The exact unhorsing trigger is left loose here on purpose. [PLAYTEST]

Design note. Modeled as a specialty rather than a Kit precisely so it does not multiply the weapon list, and rather than free gear so that riding into battle is an earned choice with a cost, consistent with how the game keeps power on the Advancement ladder. It is the Character-side companion to the Retainer growth option Fleet or Mounted (companies-and-command, Part Three), which does the same job one layer down for a soldier in the Company. The +4 Speed value is a first pass. [PLAYTEST]

Lance¶

The one cavalry piece that genuinely is a weapon, and so genuinely is a Kit. On foot it is an awkward long spear; from the saddle it is the whole reason knights terrify infantry.

Weapons: A cavalry lance.

Range: 2. You may strike at 1 or 2 squares, like a Polearm.

Hands: 2 (couching the lance takes both).

Perk: Couched Charge. [ROUGH DRAFT — not yet reviewed] Once per turn, if you moved at least 3 squares toward the target this turn (a charge), your Hit against that target carries Rend 2 (core-rules, Part Fourteen: a single indivisible hit dealing 2 damage). On foot you will rarely have the Speed to reach a 3-square charge; mounted, through the Rider unlock above, you will routinely, which is the intended pairing.

Status: New, rough draft. Realizes the "Rend instead of doubling" cavalry guidance in companies-and-command directly, and ties Lance to Mounted without welding the mount into the Kit, so the lance still works on foot and the mount still works with any other weapon. Its explicit hard counter is the Pike's Set Against the Charge, the correct rock-paper-scissors of a pike wall beating a lancer. [PLAYTEST] the Rend 2 value and whether a shield-and-couched-lance one-handed variant is wanted alongside the two-handed war-lance.

Decisions and open items¶

Deployed 2026-08-01. Decisions recorded here; the entries now live in canon.

Names, settled. Lance is used as the Kit name, with a style-guide carve-out added (style-guide.md) noting capitalized Lance now also means the cavalry weapon, distinct from the retired household usage. The mount unlock is named Rider, not Mounted, to keep it clear of the Retainer "Fleet or Mounted" state. Vermin-Caller keeps its name and gained the locust and butterfly flavor.
Deployed to canon. Houndmaster, Falconry, Vermin-Caller, and Lance are kits.md entries 23 through 26. Rider is in universal-specialties.md under "Mounts and cavalry."
Carried as [PLAYTEST]: the shared driven-off drawback across the three beast Kits (whether Falconry should be easier to drive off to offset its safety); Rider's +4 Speed and unhorsing trigger (the cleanest unhorsing rule may reuse the beast-driven-off pattern); Vermin-Caller's once-per-turn Radius; Lance's Rend 2 and a possible one-handed shield-and-lance variant.
Held by design: beast and mount Characters bring only a sidearm, not a second full weapon, to keep the beast or mount the star. Revisit if that proves too restrictive.