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Skip Navigation LinksHigh Fantasy HERO>Content>Campaign Guidelines>Arms & Armament Variant>Weapons
Killer Shrike's Arms & Armament Variant

Arms & Armament Variant

Weapons Defenses Special Considerations
WEAPONS
The standard means of handling Weapons in the HERO System is to write up an attack, usually a Hand Killing Attack (HKA), and add certain specific Limitations to it to model a "Weapon". While this is internally consistent and plays nicely with the rest of the rules, I find it cumbersome for Fantasy weapons as it isn't very good at modeling slight nuances in similar but distinct Weapons.
To add a slight benefit or hindrance to a particular Weapon in the standard system, such as a +1 OCV or -1 OCV, requires a fairly clumsy Power Construct, and adding more subtle differences quickly becomes much more trouble that it's worth and the standard Weapon write ups tend to lack differentiation / flavor in my opinion.
Thus for my own campaigns I am opting to use a modified form of the "Equal Damage" variant, described on page 177 of the Fantasy HERO genre book.
Instead of worrying about exact Power write ups, this system instead abstracts weapon damage by size and then uses various Traits in combination to define various considerations, such as bashing, piercing, slashing (and so forth).
This system is somewhat complex; thus its particulars are organized into several documents, linked to below.
  • CATEGORIES: This document explains the breakdown of weapons by size and the default effects and assumptions inherent to each category.
  • TRAITS: This document explains each of the special Weapon Traits used to define the game effects of weapons using this alternate system.
  • WEAPON LIST: This document lists out many different weapons, described using the categories and traits defined in the previous two documents. This list is done at a high level; for a detailed version giving a verbose description see the Weapon Chart instead.
  • WEAPON CHART: This document is the same as the Weapon List, except that it gives the full verbose version of each weapon, providing the actual abilities the weapons have rather than just listing the traits.