The Demons of Volinn, Part 2: Combat, Crawls, and Carryingequipment

November 9, 2026

This is my second post about The Demons of Volinn, a new and in-progress game I started for Minimalist Jam V! Part 1 is here.

Equipment #

All of the things I want to talk about are a bit intertwined. We’ll start here because it makes the most sense. (Obviously there’s going to be other stuff than what I’m mentioning, but much of it’s kind of self-explanatory and works on a “it does what it says it does” basis - I’m not gonna wax poetic on, like, rope - or it’s something I’m gonna talk about when I get into the setting.)

Inventory is slot-based, as you do. You can hold 10 slots, or if your Might is higher than 10, that many slots. It counts what you’re wearing and carrying as well as stuff in your pack. Most stuff is 1, bulky stuff is 2, slight stuff doesn’t count. None of this should probably blow your mind if you’ve read anything in the lineage of the game.

Fatigue #

You can gain fatigue which takes up slots. If you take more than you’re carrying, you have to drop stuff. Again, hopefully not blowing your mind here. However, you can also take SKL, CON, and KNO damage to remove some Fatigue. This is important because of some changes to combat noted later, but just keep that in mind: if you’re willing to take more lasting harm, you can remove some.

Weapons and Armor #

Armor’s pretty simple; you can wear underarmor or overarmor, and each of those either gives you +Grace or +Defense. Shields don’t count towards Defense, we’ll get to them later. I might go back and make armor a little more something but it works for now and I don’t want to get too weird with it.

Weapons have a bit more going on. There are 3 tiers: common, military, and rare. These generally correspond to an increasing number of dice used (1 common, 2 military, 3 rare) but also, the higher tiers sometimes have types of weapons that just don’t exist in a more common form - swords are military and up, for instance, and firearms exist and are fantastic but are exclusively rare. (Bear in mind that because you don’t add every die together, having more dice just increases the chance of getting a high one, or if you rolled well on multiple, deal damage as well as use a Gambit.) (We’ll get to Gambits in a bit.) MB already has a few descriptors for weapons (Heavy, Long, etc) and I either adjusted those or added a few more; for the most part they speak for themselves, but the ones that don’t fit in like one line.

Spells #

Spells are represented by physical objects and take up inventory space. Better spells are bulky. There’s not much to say here that won’t overlap hard with setting stuff, but just know that it’s a very physical thing, you have to be holding it to use it, and anyone who has the implement in question can cast the spell - resisting the blowback afterwards is the harder part. We’ll get into these more when we get into the setting because there’s no “generic” ones.

Combat #

Combat has always been something notable for the Bastionland lineage of games. Into the Odd popularized no-hit combat. Electric Bastionland added the fantastic wrinkle of only taking the highest damage die, so there’s more tactical choice as far as targeting. Mythic Bastionland added feats, special bonus actions that require a save or you can’t do any more feats for the rest of combat, and gambits, ways to spend dice of value 4 or higher that don’t directly involve dealing that die’s worth of damage.

For my part, I decided to riff on the structure of a combat round in general; and in less drastic fashion, I extended the ideas of feats and gambits. We’ll do the latter first because it makes the round itself make more sense.

Feats #

MB has 3 feats: Smite (before rolling, add a d12 to the attack), Focus (after rolling, do a Gambit for free), and Deny (after rolling, discard one die). Each of these is tied to an attribute. I love these because they always work the first time, it’s mostly a question of if you can keep doing them afterwards - and given how fast combat can be, usually you only need one.

My first thought was that I wanted one per attribute as well; and that soulslike games have a few verbs that work well. So I landed on 2 reactive, which can be chained until you fail a save:

• Block: Remove 1d4 damage from an incoming attack (or a higher value if you’ve got a shield). Make a MIG save; you gain 1 Fatigue on a pass OR if you failed, you gain it equal to damage blocked and can’t block or dodge again this round. This only applies to the final damage die applied, so it’ll always do something, though it may not be enough.
• Dodge: Remove 1 incoming attack die and gain 2 Fatigue. Make a SKI save; on a failure, you can’t block or dodge again this round. This only removes one, so if you’ve got a lot of different attacks happening at once,

And 2 active:

• Press: Use while declaring actions to move again or make another attack. Make a CON save; you gain 1 Fatigue on a pass OR if you fail, gain 1d6 and you can’t Press again this round.
• Cast: Use as your action to use a spell. Make a KNO save; on a failure, you take attribute damage based on the school of the spell.

You can generally Block, Dodge, and Press as many times as you like in a round until you start failing saves, but that Fatigue will add up. Remember how you can remove Fatigue by taking attribute damage otherwise? This is a great reason why you’d do that, but it does make you worse at 3/4 of those, and taking damage makes you worse at the other one.

Gambits #

Gambits in this differ in a few ways. For one, instead of removing the die, you reduce it by 4 or 8. (This is similar in a lot of cases, but there’s a few reasons it might matter and we’ll get there.) There’s a few major changes to the ones available.

First, there’s a few more by default. Most of the ones in MB make a return save for Trap and Dismount (albeit with slightly different wording - notably the Impair equivalent just reduces die size by two steps instead of immediately making it a d4). I added two more as well: Interpose moves a damage die on an ally to you and Shift does the opposite. This gives a little more ability to be tactical and shift around harm explicitly.

Second, as mentioned in equipment, different weapons allow different gambits. I flagged Swords (Parry, remove a die of the same value), Axes (Split, prevent further blocking if it’s blocked), Maces (Break, remove defense for a bit), Spears (Repel, this attack resolves first, we’ll get to why that matters in a bit), and Two-Handers (Sweep, add Blast). All of these require various saves (MIG or SKI, depending).

Third, I made strong gambits more of a thing. In MB, these are just taking a normal gambit and saying it doesn’t get a save. Here, that’s also true, but it’s also a little more distinct. There are three things that you can do with a strong gambit here that you can’t do with a normal one:

• Intimidate: Force a morale save immediately.
• Strong Bolster: Bolster is just +1 damage. This is +1d6, so multiple high-high rolls can swing like crazy.
• Disable: Damage from this attack incapacitates instead of kills.

It’s not an accident that 2/3 of these involve potential nonlethal ends to combat, if you’ll recall Sin from part 1. It’s not supposed to be trivial!

What’s in a round? #

Alright, now that we’ve laid some of the groundwork, let’s get back to structure. I felt like the standard back-and-forth turn-based wasn’t quite chaotic enough for what I wanted out of this, so I did something way more annoying.

We’re going to consider two sides here. These could be people and demons, two sets of people, whatever. This is how it plays out:

1. Initiative. Determine which side is declaring first. If one side is people and one side is demons, demons declare first in regions with neutral or sanctified regional tendencies, and people declare first in defiled tendencies; so every combat is always on the back foot if the place is messed, and there’s a major incentive to not be fighting when a region is defiled. If both sides are people, everyone makes a SKI save; everyone who fails is first, everyone who passes is second. You want to declare second because you can react to everyone who declared first. (If someone declares a move or attack and you move away or do something similar that invalidates it, you make a SKI save to see if it happens or if the first thing takes precedence.)
2. Decision. The side that declares first can declare one move (within about 40ft, we’re being a bit fuzzy here/use your best judgment) and one action, in that order. At this stage they can also Press, as noted above, to Move or Attack (or sometimes a Title lets them do something else too).
3. Roll damage and actions, assign gambits. This is when damage (and casts, which are also mostly checking to see if the caster takes damage, though a few spells do an extra thing on successful cast) is rolled. Once it’s rolled, each side assigns gambits in the same order.
4. React. Block and Dodge as noted above.
5. Resolve. Everything resolves at once, with the note (again) that only the highest damage die matters. (Remember how we flagged Repel? That’s the exception to this - spears get the ability to get a hit in before a counter-hit, meaning the counter-hit might not resolve if the target is down first.)

You get a lot of situations where everyone gets messed up at once.

So what’s the context to doing combat? Well,

Crawls #

We don’t really have dungeons as such. Instead, we have regions, which I’ve mentioned a few times without context. This is a place, in general. The two regions I’ve included (thus far, I intend to make and include more) are the Hunting Grounds and Gate District, to give you some idea; they’re overarching areas. There are three kinds: Outer (which typically are the least dangerous and least fruitful to delve into, and serve as entry and exit points to the Kingdom); Inner (which are more dangerous, but can hold actual secrets); and Heart (which are much more dangerous, but hold even more interesting things). This is definitely a new concept and not something I’ve done before.

Thinking about this from a practical perspective, the traditional method is to just map out an actual physical space for these, but that’s not really my intent here; a region is intentionally a somewhat abstracted place. Luckily there’s a great method for this sort of thing out there: flux space. I can’t leave anything alone, so I did tweak it heavily.

Within a region, you have features. This is, like, a setpiece or a notable Place. Features operate on the same spectrum: Outer Featuers, Inner Features, and Heart Features. You’ve got a few “overarching” things you can do in this kind of flux space:

• Discover, which rolls as per Peregrinate in the original to find features. There’s a catch here, which is that first you roll Outer; then, if something has already been discovered, you roll Inner. If that’s been discovered AND the region is fully sanctified or defiled, you go down the Heart list. (Outer regions don’t have heart features.) People who have the origin that makes them come from the kingdom get a freebie outer feature every region.
  
  Heart features are where you get the Good Shit in a region that’s often already been picked over by other explorers: nasty encounters, unique items, revelations about the setting, connections between regions that didn’t exist, and so on.
• Explore, which is the meat and potatoes “zoom in to moment-to-moment exploration” thing that you’ve presumably come here to do.
  
  One key thing I made explicit here is that sometimes good exploration can Discover regions for you: for example, in Hunting Grounds, there’s a point where you can climb a high thing, and if you do you’ll see the smoke from a campfire which lets you mark a particular feature as having been discovered. In some cases talking to people can discover areas too: like if someone’s asking to be taken to a safe zone, they’ll let you know how to get there if they know.
• Travel, move between adjoining regions or between features that have been discovered already. Depending on if it’s Natural or Urban, this takes more or less time, and certain Titles/Origins get the ability to try to speed up travel at the risk of getting lost.
• Rest, which I hopefully don’t need to explain to you.

These work on a similar Watch-based 6-per-day structure to Flux Space (I’m calling them segments) for the most part. Some actions can take a few, or some exploration actions can take a bunch of time. You have both a Segment Event and Daily Event table; the former gets rolled every time a segment is spent doing something and is more local (this is your typical overloaded encounter die), the latter gets rolled every day and is more general (this is what I mentioned in the first post, this is where things are happening “offscreen” and affecting the map generally).

Next time is probably time to get into the setting: Volinn itself; the relevant nations/areas of Atriana, Lykha, Milos, the Salt Barrens, and the furtive Londryl (so easily forgotten); their respective magics and religions; and what it all means.

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