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Revision as of 23:43, 5 April 2024
The galaxy is full of obstacles waiting to trip up heroes as they strive to fulfill their destinies. Every planet has its own perils whether menacing plant life, an unsafe atmosphere, or something worse and any explorer can confirm that the greatest danger when traveling to a new world is encountering some new hazard not yet known to the galaxy at large. Stormtroopers and Sith Lords are obvious threats to the safety of just about everyone, but it is often the unseen and unexpected hazards that bring heroes down.
Hazards, first introduced in the Saga Edition Core Rulebook, appear throughout Star Wars films, novels, comics, and other sources. Until now, hazards have been basic rules elements used to address a variety of situations that might come up during a game. This section’s goal is to make hazards more appealing as a regular part of adventure and encounter design. When the heroes visit strange worlds in the Unknown Regions, they should feel as if every step could lead them into dangerous territory. By using hazards more frequently, you can emphasize the fact that the heroes are far from home in a place where many of the galaxy’s niceties simply are not present.
This section introduces a new format for hazards, along with rules for designing your own hazards and suggestions for using them in your adventures. Additionally, the section provides many sample hazards that are ready to be used in a game; these examples also will help guide you in creating your own hazards. The samples are grouped by environment, so you can choose hazards appropriate to the setting and level of your adventure and drop them in as needed.
Hazard Basics
A hazard is an obstacle that can hurt, slow, kill, or otherwise impede your heroes, their associates, or their equipment. Usually, hazards are not living beings but are sources of potential harm that do not normally receive a full statistics block, such as an avalanche, a rockslide, a carnivorous plant, an exposed plasma conduit, or a black hole. Some hazards (such as an ice cave, an asteroid field, or a laser gate) are associated with particular locations, whereas others (such as poisons or diseases) can be mobile. Although hazards can take many forms, as a rule of thumb, anything that has a chance to harm or impede the heroes and is not a creature, a droid, or a vehicle can be classified as a hazard.
The Gamemastering chapter of the Saga Edition core rulebook introduces a number of hazards. This section recasts many of those hazards in a new statistics block format to make it easier for you to drop them into your encounters. In addition, if you compare the hazard statistics in this book with their descriptions in the core rulebook, you should be able to determine how to convert other previously published hazards to the new format.
Hazards in Combat
Hazards are a great way to spice up combat in your game, and they can serve as small distractions, major threats, or anything in between. You can also use them to create dynamic terrain in an encounter. For example, the droid factory sequence in Attack of the Clones is filled with hazards that break up the terrain of the encounter. When designing the battlefield in which your encounter takes place, consider using hazards that encourage or force movement. For example, a free-swinging girder that sweeps through the encounter area every other round forces the heroes to keep jumping out of its way, and it also might encourage them to try to bantha rush their enemies into the girder’s path. This addition creates a more dynamic encounter, and treating the girder as a hazard should ensure that it presents an appropriate challenge for the heroes.
Hazards Alone
Throughout the Star Wars saga, characters often deal with hazards outside combat. For example, Luke stumbles through the icy wastes of Hoth, battling a blizzard (a clear hazard) in an effort to escape from the wampa. R2-D2 navigates the droid factory on Geonosis, saving Padmé from certain death while dodging hazards the whole time. Similarly, you can use hazards as scenes unto themselves, presenting them as obstacles that the heroes must overcome before the story can progress. Hazards are great challenges to throw at the characters when the pace of the adventure begins to slow, and they can add tension to any sequence.
Designing New Hazards
Designing hazards is much like designing new terrain or other challenges that can spice up an encounter or an adventure. Unlike the process for designing an enemy character, beast, droid, or vehicle, the process for designing a new hazard is somewhat simpler, and it helps you cater directly to the needs of your particular adventure by creating elements that add diversity to encounters. You can follow a series of basic steps to design a hazard that challenges your players and makes sense in the context of the adventure.
The first step is to determine the basic concept of the hazard. It might be a natural hazard, such as a slick patch of ice or a carnivorous plant, or it might be an artificial hazard, such as an automated blaster turret or a gravity trap. Typically, you should base the hazard’s form and function on the setting in which it will be used. For example, lava pits on Mustafar make sense, but lava pits on Hoth require more of an explanation, and you do not want the players to sidetrack the game by trying to find that explanation. Similarly, if you know that your heroes will spend time trudging through a network of glacial caverns on Csilla, you might design an icy cave-in that will occur during a combat sequence on the planet.
As suggested above, tailor the design of the hazard to the way in which it will be used. If you want a hazard to be a minor distraction, design one that is a nuisance to the heroes rather than a major obstacle to be overcome. Alternatively, if you want a hazard that serves as a set piece for an entire encounter, think big and create something that interacts with many or all of the heroes on a round-by-round basis. In the Csilla example above, the icy cave-in will affect all combatants, so it is best used to create a scene full of tension.
In general, a hazard should do one or more of the following:
- Provide a flavorful background element that reinforces the details of the setting
- Add tension and danger to a scene
- Require the heroes to spend actions to deal with the hazard
- Create interesting terrain that requires the heroes to move to avoid it
- Give the heroes a chance to use skills to overcome the threat with or without combat
Challenge Levels
Each hazard has a basic Challenge Level (CL), which works like other CLs in the game. You choose the CL of the hazard, and it affects everything the hazard does. Typically, you should create a hazard with a CL that is less than or equal to the average level of the heroes, although from time to time you can use a hazard with a higher CL to increase the tension and danger of an encounter.
As a general rule, you can include one hazard of the appropriate CL in an encounter without having to take its CL into account when determining the encounter’s difficulty. (The heroes still receive experience points for overcoming the hazard; this reward is added to the XP they receive for dealing with the encounter.) Any hazard beyond the first and any hazard with a CL higher than the average level of the heroes should be considered an enemy when calculating encounter difficulty. If you are including a skill challenge (introduced in Galaxy of Intrigue) in the encounter, take into account the CL of all hazards when determining encounter difficulty.
Continuing the Csilla example, assume that you are designing an adventure for a group of 8th-level heroes. Since you want the icy cave-in to be a significant hazard, you should give it a CL of (or near) 8. Because it is the only hazard in the encounter, it does not count when determining the encounter’s difficulty.
| Table: Hazard DCs by CL | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adventure CL | Easy DC | Medium DC | Moderate DC | Hard DC | Heroic DC |
| 1 | 13 | 18 | 23 | 26 | 31 |
| 2−3 | 14 | 19 | 24 | 27 | 32 |
| 4−5 | 16 | 21 | 26 | 29 | 34 |
| 6−7 | 17 | 22 | 27 | 30 | 35 |
| 8−9 | 18 | 23 | 28 | 32 | 37 |
| 10−11 | 19 | 24 | 29 | 33 | 38 |
| 12−13 | 21 | 26 | 31 | 35 | 40 |
| 14 | 22 | 27 | 32 | 36 | 41 |
| 15 | 22 | 27 | 32 | 37 | 42 |
| 16−17 | 23 | 28 | 33 | 38 | 43 |
| 18−19 | 24 | 29 | 34 | 39 | 44 |
| 20 | 26 | 31 | 36 | 41 | 46 |
Keywords
All hazards have one or more keywords that describe how the hazards function mechanically. Some creatures have bonuses against certain types of hazards (for example, a beast might ignore environmental hazards in certain terrain). The following keywords represent most of the existing mechanical elements of hazards, but feel free to create new ones for special conditions that are common in your campaign. When you design a hazard, be sure to select the right keyword(s) based on its nature.
Acid: Hazards with the acid keyword deal acid damage. All acid hazards should have the contact keyword as well.
Area: Hazards with the area keyword make area attacks, and their damage can be halved or negated by heroes who have the Evasion talent. Not all hazards that deal damage to creatures in more than 1 square are area hazards; only those that specifically make area attacks have this keyword.
Artificial: Hazards with the artificial keyword are manufactured or produced and do not occur naturally.
Atmospheric: Atmospheric hazards are those that fill the air. They are also considered to be inhaled hazards for the purpose of being negated by a breath mask.
Contact: Hazards with the contact keyword are triggered by touch. Contact poisons and acids are good examples of these hazards.
Disease: Diseases are a special type of hazard that attack the immune systems of creatures. They always attack the Fortitude Defense of a target, ignoring equipment bonuses to Fortitude Defense, damage reduction,. and shield rating. If a disease moves a target down the condition track, It likely imposes a persistent condition as well , which cannot be removed until the disease is cured or until it fai ls an attack roll against the target tWice. Some diseases require special equipment to treat.
Energy: Hazards with the energy keyword deal energy damage.
Fire: Hazards with the fire keyword deal fire damage.
Ingested: A hazard with the ingested keyword is triggered only if consumed by a creature.
Inhaled: A hazard with the inhaled keyword affects creatures that breathe within its area. Creatures that do not breathe (such as droids) and creatures wearing breath masks or environmental suits are immune to the effects of an inhaled hazard.
Natural: Hazards with the natural keyword are created with no intervention from sentient beings.
Poison: Hazards with the poison keyword represent toxins that are harmful or fatal to creatures. They always attack the Fortitude Defense of a target, ignoring equipment bonuses to Fortitude Defense, damage reduction, and shield rating. If a poison moves a target down the condition track, it likely imposes a persistent condition as well, which cannot be removed until the poison is cured or until it fails an attack roll against the target.
Sonic: A hazard with the sonic keyword deals sonic damage. Sonic damage is also considered to be energy damage.
Triggers
Every hazard has a trigger-an event that causes the hazard to become active or to attack or otherwise interact with something else. Most triggers are simple and might require only that a target touch or come close to the hazard. When designing a new hazard, ask yourself what must happen to require you to use the hazard&rquo;s statistics. Answering that question will help you determine the trigger. A trigger can be an event, or it might be a metagame concept; for example, one trigger might be a hero passing through a doorway, whereas another could be the party making initiative checks at the start of combat. There is no absolute rule or formula for coming up with an appropriate trigger; the sample hazards in this chapter offer examples that should help you create your own. In the hazards presented in this chapter, if the target of the hazard differs from the creature or object specified as the trigger, that information is included in the trigger line.
Continuing the Csilla example, if you want the cave-in to take place during a combat encounter to heighten the tension , you might choose "A creature in the ice cavern f ires a weapon that makes noise" as the trigger for the hazard. Not only is this trigger thematically appropriate (since loud sounds setting off a cave-in is a common trope), but it also seems assured to occur once combat breaks out. Because the cave-in will include more targets that only the creature that triggered it, you should also include information about what the targets will be.
Area
Every hazard has a specific area in which its attacks take place. When you include a hazard in your game, you should decide in advance the area that the hazard will affect (unless the area of effect is already included in the existing hazard). Hazards such as poisons or animal traps might affect very limited areas, perhaps as little as a single square. Other hazards, such as loose sand, avalanches, and turret blasters, affect larger but still discrete areas. Hazards such as atmospheric hazards and vacuum might affect the entire area in which an encounter takes place. When you choose a hazard to use in an encounter, choose an area of effect for the hazard that is appropriate to its type and its use in your game.
Attacks and Damage
| Table: Average Damage per Die | |
|---|---|
| Die | Average Damage |
| d4 | 2.5 |
| d6 | 3.5 |
| d8 | 4.5 |
| d10 | 5.5 |
| d12 | 6.5 |
Hazards make attack rolls as enemies do, although not always with the same focus or direction. Almost everything a hazard does to a creature, a droid, or an object is categorized as an attack roll of some kind. A hazard attacks one of the three defenses (as appropriate to the nature of the attack), and it typically makes no more than one attack per round against the target. When you design a hazard, you choose which defense it attacks. In general, attacks that can be avoided physically are made against Reflex Defense; those that affect the integrity of the body are made against Fortitude Defense; and those that attack the mind or intellectual capacity of the target are made against Will Defense. A hazard’s attack bonus should be equal to its CL + 2.
Likewise, many hazards deal damage to the target, and some deal damage on a miss (representing the fact that, no matter how good the target&rquo;s defenses are, the hazard eventually gets the best of them). On average, a hazard should deal damage equal to 10 + one-half its CL. Choose a dice expression (such as 3d8 or 2d4+2) that is likely to produce this average damage result. Table: Average Damage pr Die shows the average damage result per die type. If the hazard deals damage of a particular type, select the type as well. Hazards that are meant to affect vehicles may have a damage multiplier (x2 for starfighters and transports, x5 for capital ships).
Continuing the Csilla example, you know that the cave-in will be CL 8. Since its attacks (falling ice and rock) can be avoided physically, the hazard attacks Reflex Defense. Its attack bonus is approximately +10 (the hazard&rquo;s CL + 2), and it deals about 14 points of damage per attack (10 + one-half its CL). looking at Table: Average Damage pr Die, you see that a d12 has an average damage of 6.5, so 2d12 has an average damage of 13. Thus, you set the hazard&rquo;s damage expression at 2d12+1 to meet the expected damage dealt.
Special Attacks
A few hazards, such as the vacuum hazard, have special attacks that occur only under certain circumstances. Typically, these attacks represent the inevitable nature of the hazard (for example, the vacuum hazard&rquo;s special attack automatically deals damage to unconscious creatures}. If you give your hazard a special attack, it should occur only under specific conditions. Special attacks can be a bit more deadly as long as they take place less frequently.
Cumulative Damage
Some hazards deal cumulative damage, which is damage that grows larger round by round. Cumulative damage is extremely dangerous and should be used only in situations when escaping from or eliminating the hazard&rquo;s conditions is necessary for survival. For example, suffocation (drowning) uses cumulative damage because each round that you endure the suffocation hazard, the situation grows significantly worse. Usually, only special attacks deal cumulative damage, and only if they will kill or destroy a target that is exposed to the hazard, regardless of the target&rquo;s level. When a target takes cumulative damage, increase the damage by the same amount each round. For example, the vacuum hazard deals 1d6 points of damage in the first round, 2d6 points in the second round, 3d6 points in the third round, and so on.
The Condition Track
You can create a hazard that has attacks that move the target down the condition track instead of dealing damage (or in addition to dealing damage). That movement should be taken into account as a part of the hazard&rquo;s average damage. Moving −1 step on the condition track is worth about the same as 5 points of damage, and moving −2 steps is worth about the same as 10 points of damage. No hazard should move a target more than −2 steps on the condition track at a time. For example, if a hazard normally deals an average of 15 points of damage, you could reduce its damage to 10 points and also have the hazard move the target −1 step on the condition track.
Many hazards that move a target down the condition track also impose persistent conditions. When this occurs, the condition is assumed to have a lasting effect on the target&rquo;s health and well-being. Although you do not need to reduce the damage output of a hazard that imposes a persistent condition, you should consider reducing the attack&rquo;s frequency or accuracy so that an entire group of heroes are not affected by persistent conditions as the result of a single hazard.
Recurrence
Most hazards have a recurrence-a frequency with which the hazard makes its attacks. A hazard should not affect an individual target more than once per round; in some cases, the frequency of recurrence can be much lower, perhaps once a day, once a week, or even less often. Diseases and poisons in particular have infrequent recurrence. Possible recurrence options include:
- At the start or the end of an affected target’s turn
- On a particular initiative count
- When the triggering condition is met
- At a specified time interval (such as daily, hourly, or weekly)
Additionally, a hazard&rquo;s recurrence indicates how long it continues to attack a target. Some hazards, particularly diseases and poisons, continue to make attack rolls until successfully treated. Other hazards cannot be stopped (such as suffocation in a vacuum) and must be escaped to prevent recurrence. Be sure to specify whether a hazard&rquo;s recurrence can be stopped.
Skill Difficulty Class
Heroes can use their skills to interact with many hazards. For example, a scout might use a Knowledge skill to identify the nature of a particular hazard and a different skill to avoid or disable it. Pick a few skills that can interact with your hazard, particularly skills that the heroes have and might try to use. Then assign skill Difficulty Classes (DCs) based on the hazard&rquo;s CL; Table 4−2 contains sample skill DCs based on the CL of the hazard. For each CL, the table gives an easy DC, a medium DC, a moderate DC, a hard DC, and a heroic DC. Most skill DCs for hazards should be easy, medium, or moderate; hard and heroic skill DCs should be reserved for skills that have only an outside chance of affecting the hazard.
Some skills can actually be used before the hazard is encountered, allowing heroes to avoid the hazard (if possible) or prepare to minimize its effects. Whenever a hazard&rquo;s skill line lists a skill that allows the hero to identify it, the Gamemaster must determine whether or not identification ofthe hazard is enough to avoid it, based on the current circumstances.
Continuing the Csilla example, you decide that the heroes could notice that the ice on the roof of the cave is cracked and unstable. Thus, you choose the Perception skill and assign it a medium DC of 23, since the hazard is CL 8. Particularly nimble heroes might be able to avoid the falling ice, but that could be more difficult given the size of the cave. To reflect that possibility, you assign a moderate DC of 28 to an Acrobatics check to grant a hero a +5 bonus to Reflex Defense against the falling ice.
Special Effects
Unlike beasts and enemies that are built with talents, feats, and other existing mechanics, some hazards have unique effects or rules that come into play only when the hazard does. These effects are not always negative; sometimes they provide special ways to circumvent the hazard, or they are neutral effects that neither harm nor help the targets. For example, the disease known as the Cardooine chills can affect a creature only once, and the Krytos virus is weaker against Humans. Usually, such effects and other special rules are determined by the nature of the hazard. Be careful that they do not make the hazard too hard or too easy; look at the special effects of the hazards in this chapter for inspiration. Typically, when designing your own hazard, keep the special effects to a minimum to ensure that the hazard remains balanced.
Hazard Statistics Block
Finishing the example of the icy cave-in on Csilla, after taking the preceding rules into account, you might come up with the following statistics block for the hazard.
Csilla Cave-In (CL 8)
Acrobatics (DC 28): As a move action, a character can make an Acrobatics check to gain a +5 circumstance bonus to Reflex Defense against a falling ice attack made against the character at the start of their next turn.
Perception (DC 23): A character notices that the roof of the ice cavern is unstable and believes that a loud noise could cause a cave-in.
Sample Hazards
This section presents a list of hazard groupings organized by environment that should give you enough examples and guidelines to help you design your own hazars. Most of the hazards originally found in the Saga Edition Core Rulebook can be found in their respective groupings and have been reformatted using the rules from this page. Some of the hazards from the core rulebook do not exactly conform to the suggested hazard attack and damage numbers, but have been reproduced in the new format for ease of use.
Some hazards belong to more than one group given their nature.
See Hazard Groups for a more complete description of they types of hazards.