Braces are up-close-and-personal actions—pushing or pulling foes around, or pulling yourself together.
Heroes can take four basic brace actions: Grapple, Shove, Stand Fast, and Survive. The first two actions are opposed and require close physical contact with a foe, established by the Take hold attack action. Grappling a foe keeps them in a hold and weakens them. Shoving a foe staggers them and, if they’re holding you, lets you escape.
Even if your character isn’t keen to engage in close-quarters combat, they may not have a choice. Many monsters use grapples!
Brace Actions
An opposed brace roll is a ✦ Success if it beats the foe’s Stamina. It’s a ⬖ Struggle if it beats the foe’s Strength. A brace is a ⓧ Failure if it doesn’t beat either the foe’s Stamina or Strength.
Grapple
Roll Brace to overpower a foe your size or smaller. You can only use this action if you’ve taken hold of a foe with an attack—or if the foe is grappling you.
✦ Success: You inflict -1 guard and grapple the foe.
⬖ Struggle: The foe can take -1 stamina to resist your grapple; otherwise, you succeed.
ⓧ Fail: The foe resists your grapple. No effect.
While you grapple a foe, you have brace advantage on your attacks against them, and they have brace disadvantage on their attacks against you. Additionally, if you’re grappling a foe your size:
Close combat: Both of your attacks are limited to close melee attacks.
Rooted: Neither of you can take movement or maneuver actions.
Friendly fire: If someone outside the grapple makes a ranged attack against either of you and the result is an odd number, the attack targets the other character in the grapple instead.
If you’re grappling a smaller foe, the foe suffers these effects, but you don’t. Likewise, if a larger creature is grappling you, only you suffer these effects!
Your grapple ends if you take any amount of lethal damage, or if you’re Shoved. You can also freely release your grapple at any time.
Shove
Roll Brace to violently push a foe. You must first take hold of the foe, be in a grapple with them, or otherwise establish physical contact before taking this action.
✦ Success: You send your foe stumbling backward, inflicting -2 Guard. If you and your foe were in a grapple, it ends.
⬖ Struggle: The foe suffers -1 guard.
ⓧ Fail: The foe withstands your shove. No effect.
You can Shove a foe in a grapple, regardless of who initiated the grapple. Some abilities, such as Stand Fast, enable you to Shove a foe without taking hold of them.
You can also Shove a foe into dangerous terrain—like off a cliff. The Guide may impose a -2 penalty (or more) on the roll based on environmental factors, like the presence of a parapet or railing that would ordinarily prevent someone from falling over the edge.
Stand Fast
Take -1 stamina and roll Brace to to gather your strength and determination.
You gain guard equal to your roll.
You can gain overflow guard (above your maximum), but only up to your Strength, and it only lasts only until the start of your next turn.
Before your next turn, if you block or dodge a melee attack, you can make a free Shove against the attacker (no Take hold needed).
Survive
Roll Brace after your life drops to zero to hold your soul within your body.
✦ 5+: You stabilize.
⬖ 3–4: You can take -1 stamina to hold onto your soul—but only until your next turn, when you must make this roll again.
ⓧ 1–2: Your soul detaches from your body. On your next turn, you must take the Return compel action.
An ally standing close to you can use Bolster, a Compel action, to increase your odds of success.
If you stabilize, you’re unconscious and your Life, Guard, and Awareness remain at zero for an hour. At that point, you can choose to recover some of your Life in exchange for a reduction to your maximum Stamina (see the Tracking Your Stats page).
Breaking and Disarming
Certain attacks trigger a free Brace roll to break or disarm the defender’s armament. These brace rolls are simplified. They don’t have a struggle outcome—they either succeed or fail.
If either of these braces succeed, the defender loses guard equal to the armament’s guard bonus. For example, if you break a foe’s shield with your heavy mace, they take -3 guard for losing the shield (along with the -2 guard from the actual mace attack).
Breaking
Heavy maces and the limbs of huge monsters can break armaments that block their attacks. When you attack a foe with a breaking weapon and they block the blow, roll your Brace die.
If the result beats the defending armament’s durability rating (DR), the armament is smashed to bits. Otherwise, it has no effect.
Disarming
Sickleswords, axes, and other attacks with the hook trait can pull an armament out of a defender’s grasp. When you attack a foe with a hook weapon and they block the blow, roll your Brace die.
If the result beats the defender’s stamina, you pull the defending armament out of their hand, and it falls to the ground. Otherwise, no effect.