Going Big

The Golden Lands Supplement for Into the Odd is going to deal with how to handle large scale expeditions in your game. Naturally, a part of this will be handing large scale combat. This can mean both mass battles involving thousands of men on either side, and individual entities so large as to require special attention. 

I'm currently brainstorming the latter. 

The core book already has a couple of big monsters in there as examples. Like this guy:

Colossal Shell Beast

STR 19, DEX 6, WIL 6, 20hp, Armour 3. Pincers (d12)

Driven to feed in monthly gorges. Attacks causing less than d12 damage are Impaired. Anyone taking Critical Damage is swallowed whole, losing d6 STR each turn in the gut. 

So obviously it has big STR, damage, armour, and HP, and a nasty ability. Standard fare for your big guys. It's there to be a big scary thing that smashes up towns and you can't really fight head on. Its special ability of Impairing attacks of less than d12 damage is something I'm not 100% happy with, but it works with its Armour 3 to pretty much require you to bring out the big guns if you're going to break its shell.

Then we have the Detachment rule for mass combat. You may not recognise these from your version, as they're going to be in the updated PDF to coincide with the print run. 

This is an abstracted way of handling groups of dozens of soldiers as a single Detachment, with just a few changes. 

Detachment attacks against individuals are Enhanced. Detachments are not harmed by attacks by individuals unless they are explosive or suitably large-scale. When a Detachment takes Critical Damage they are broken and cannot act until rallied. At STR 0 the Detachment is wiped out.

Here I gave in to plain-speak and rulings-not-rules, by letting the Referee decide whether an attack is "suitably large scale" to harm a Detachment. 

Am I missing an opportunity here? Would it be all that bad if the Colossal Shell Beast was just treated as a Detachment? 

Detachments do everything I want a giant creature to do. They ignore little attacks, and they smash individuals hard. On Critical Damage they're Broken, rather than Incapacitated, but it's really the same thing. 

But what if you want to have a Detachment of Colossal Shell Beasts? Is that crazy?

I'll talk about that next time.