Little White Bull

I've been doing some testing for a small change to the Palaeo Diet rules to fix a bug in some of the reaction tables, so have been running some hunts with affected beasts to see how they work.

Here's some aurochs. They are not some of the beasts affected, but still make a nice centre-piece for the hunt. One of them is a rare white bull, and the job of the hunters is to kill that one and one other. I ran the aurochs as giant grazers, but with a resistance of 4+ and only 3 bulk.

I had five hunters in play. You can see two of them here.

The others went on a wide sweep. The plan was to use the one archer to drive the white bull away from the rest of the herd and into these three hunters

The hunters in position.

A couple of shots failed to wound the white bull, but did drive it towards the waiting hunters.

The waiting hunters then proceeded to botch the hunt, failing to inflict any wounds on the bull, whilst taking wounds themselves.

And all that gory action attracted some nearby Outfolk (the subject of some of my testing). I had an outlying hunter whose job it was to keep them back with threats and shouting.

My hunters finally managed to injure the bull, but they were making heavy weather of it.

And, ignoring my hunter, the Outfolk came in to join the hunt, just as one of my hunters was gored and put out of action.

To add insult to injury, the archer had been doing a great job of driving the white bull back towards the hunters, but ended up being wounded by another member of the herd.

And it gets worse. The Outfolk scared off my hunters and then killed the white bull. I had to drive them off the kill immediately or they would claim it as their own*.

I didn't. So the hunt was a complete failure. I lost one hunter out of action and two wounded.

Anyway, the thing I was testing didn't seem to be too bad. Basically there is a logic flaw in the reaction table for some beasts, if they have a column headed 'Hunter within one M'. This is generally the second column from the left in the reaction table, and when testing for reactions you work from left to right until you hit a relevant column. So all of the columns to the right of it can only apply if there are no hunters within M. However there are reaction results in columns to the right of it that only have an effect if there are one or more hunters within M of the reacting beast (Roar and Pelt, specifically). They are redundant results. Rather than change the results, because there are some interesting ones in there, I am experimenting with moving the 'Hunter within one M ' column further to the right - to just before the 'Any Other Circumstances' column. This will make the other columns, which are generally fairly specific situations, more likely to happen along with their more interesting results.

From a couple of test games it doesn't seem to cause any weird issues, but I will do some more testing.

If you have the rules (and supplements), this affects the following beasts:

Hominids (Palaeo Diet)
Outfolk (Fireside Tales)
Witch Doctor (Pulp)
Mummy (Pulp)
King Carnivore (Pulp)

*If they were in contact with it at the end of the turn each Outfolk hunter would eat one bulk of the kill. The three of them would basically scoff the lot.