I’ve got to say, I’m really digging this whole “coast guard knight” theme that Cavalier has going on. Plying the treacherous waters in some 10,000 island archipelago… Fighting pirates… Investigating rumors of mysterious creatures… Might this be the first Handbook character to actually see play at the gaming table?

Eh. Probably not. Sad forever DM noises.

For serious though, I doubt such a PC would survive too long with that kind of job description. If Scylla and Charybdis didn’t get me, the fog would. Like underwater combat, magical darkness, and semi-professional wrestling matches, mucking about in The Mist is a sure way to catch a case of death.

From a tactical / mechanical side, it’s the perfect ambush. That’s because the ambushing creatures are always the type to have blind sense, echo location, or samurai super senses. And since we’re talking mist rather than darkvision, your character’s natural senses never seem to even the playing field. All of this combines to mean that when you’re fighting in fog, you’re fighting at a dramatic disadvantage. Your ranged characters can’t target the enemy properly, your melee characters suffer to-hit penalties, and the enemy gets to reposition with relative impunity.

Foggy conditions are also tough from a GM’s perspective, especially if we’re talking about a physical tabletop. A VTT like Roll20 is great for moving enemy tokens to a hidden layer, allowing you to hide positioning info from players. That’s impractical with a physical setup though. In fact, I’ve only made the effort once. It was a set piece encounter, and I wound up using a Battleship-style grid so that I could note where the monster had gone while the players struggled and guessed and searched around blindly. You’d better believe that they invested in some fogcutting lenses after that one.

So for today’s discussion, what do you say we trade our finest tales of foggy moors and misty mountains? Was it werewolf fog? Cloud elemental miasma? Jack the Ripper hiding down a hazy alleyway? Or was there perhaps an island fish slowly drifting toward you out of a soupy sea? Was it a fair and fun combat, or did you want to hurl your dice at your GM’s fog machine? Tell us all about your (least) favorite foggy encounters down in the comments!

 

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