Not everything down there wants to fight. Almost everything down there can be confused.
The one concept that isn’t fundamentally about hitting things — a kit built on parley, misdirection, and redirecting threats. Useless to a min-maxer on paper, load-bearing in play.
Design Pillars
- Genuinely novel design space for a combat crawler
- Interacts with faction behavior rather than health bars
- Mechanics fully open — the hardest and most rewarding design job in the twelve
First-Pass Kit (draft — numbers unvalidated)
- Signature — Parley (action, at encounter start or out of combat): a Wits or Resolve check against the pack. On a success, the fight doesn’t start: they hold their distance while you talk, trade, or withdraw. Works only on the living and the reasoning — faction tags decide; the dead, the wards, and the vermin have no ears for it.
- Confuse the Issue (action, cooldown): raise doubts a target cannot answer — it is Shaken.
- Someone Else’s Problem (action, once per encounter): convince an enemy the real threat is elsewhere: its next attack targets the nearest other enemy. You will explain later. There will not be a later.
- Passive — Professional Courtesy: Boon on all social checks, and hostile factions that have parleyed with you once stay parley-able at a discount. Reputation is a currency.