Frayed Knights 2: Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 17, 2014

In Frayed Knights 1: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, I established the existence of alchemical grenades. They made the hobgoblins a lot more deadly, but they could also found and used by players, or manufactured by a certain alchemist.

A certain twisted, evil, black-hearted part of me really liked the idea. But then, I’m a guy who has my D&D characters stock up on Alchemist’s Fire all the way up to level 7 or so for fun and burning. It’s so useful for cleaning out those hard-to-reach monsters. So, in Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath, I kinda … expanded on the idea. Especially since spells have become so random.

In Frayed Knights 2, you have “shots” (as in “shot-put”) and “bombs.” Shots are single-target throwable items, and bombs affect a group. They can be used by anyone, although those with higher throwing skills will have an advantage. They serve a number of purposes:

1. They provide access to baseline attacks of different types to attack enemy weaknesses. So if you encounter a fire-based enemy that is vulnerable to cold, even if you have no cold-based spells, you are likely (unless you’ve used them all up) to have at least a couple of cold-based bombs or shots in your inventory that you can use.
2. They provide easy access to ranged attacks without the need to switch weapons. Positioning matters in Frayed Knights – and casters like to hang out in the back of groups where they are harder to hit with melee weapons.
3. People other than sorcerers (which will usually, but not always, be Chloe) can have occasional access to some of the group-damage “minion clearing” attacks.
4. When endurance runs dry, parties can fall back on throwing money at the bad guys. Yes, it’s a weird way to look at it, but when limited but “free” resources run dry in a fight, you can throw more expensive but effective weapons at them.

Bombs and shots have a range of attack types and levels. There are a couple that might not make the final cut for balance reasons, like sleep bombs. That may be a little bit too powerful no matter how much I raise the cost and lower the effectiveness. Then again, so are the sleep-based spells, so we may have a bit more work to do.

Of course, this being Frayed Knights, the bad guys are going to have access to these kinds of weapons, too. I want to be cautious about this, because if overdone, it makes the combats far too similar. You don’t want a battle against soldiers to feel like a battle against mages with better armor, with constant spells getting thrown in the form of bombs and shots. A little bit spices things up, a lot makes things tedious, boring, and unremarkable.

 

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