Mounted Warriors

The Creatures section of A Time of War starts on page 238.  It is fantastic for finding a beast to maul your party that they can put down without having to get into politics or potential alliances or anything else; a bear just wants to off you, and isn't going to be wildly clever about how it does so.  I am not paying a visit to this section to evaluate the combat statistics of creatures, though: I am here to evaluate their usefulness as impromptu aircraft.

A number of creatures have it mentioned in their write-ups that these animals make suitable mounts for humans.  Indeed, the Creatures table on p 246 contains a note indicating which animals listed there are appropriate for such a task.  Our favored animal of the campaign, the branth, is among them.   So with some trepidation I opened up A Time of War to read the rules on how mounted combat works.  This is never an easy rules condition in any human-centric RPG I've gamemastered or played in, so I was braced for an arcane array of checks and conditions to put the maintenance rules to shame.

The rules weren't arcane.  They weren't torturous.  They weren't even there --  although what animals are fit to carry humans are distinguished from those who are not, there are no rules for what checks are required to mount one, or how carrying passengers affect their performance characteristics (of particular interest to a flying creature.)

So I am trying to establish what mounting a branth looks like from a mechanics point of view.  Fortunately, we can piece some rules together here.

First, mounting.  Animal Handling has a subskill of Riding.  The rules on page 143 describe this skill as being something you make when attempting a special maneuver of some kind, but for a marginally-tamed giant winged reptile, we're going to call climbing aboard a "special maneuver."  Modifiers are specified for the physical and emotional state of the animal (not good in our poor lab rats' cases), demeanor of the rider, and general stimulus (such as alarms and gunfire.)  So let's presume our characters are going to be making an Animal Handling check to climb aboard.

Second, navigation.  Again, these won't be trained riding branths, so an Animal Handling check will probably be required each turn to keep them under control once they're aloft, with a Margin-of-Failure threshold determining if they go in the wrong direction or try to dislodge the rider.

Finally, landing.  Simple check to determine how well the riders is able to bring down and dismount the branth.  Again, likely with a Margin-of-Failure between "uncooperative" and "pissed off."

For the moment, I'll assume that the branth's flight characteristics aren't changed when it has a rider (which is patently absurd considering a human would be something like 13% of it weight, but so it goes).  Now I have a set of checks to add some adventure and excitement to the branth escape scene, especially if Alex Black is forced to flee that way.  He has Animal Antipathy, you see.