Bringing Down the House

[Andrew M]

In a recent game the Create Fissure spell was cast on a building the spell says it does 1d6 damage to the armour points of the building. After a signifigant amount of time spent searching then and more since I cannot find any reference to how many AP a building has in the rules. Have I missed it?

 

Edit OOPS. Should have been in the RQ Forum

 

Edited January 5, 2023 by Andrew M
Put in wrong forum

[Chao]

I'll usually go rule of cool when I run into situations like this, and try and match my player's expectations without going too overboard.
Is your player spending all their RP in this spell? Then it should probably do what they intended, as long as their not trying to bring down a fortress or something. If it's just a one or two point fissure, then maybe collapsing a wall or two would be sufficient.

If you really need a more concrete ruling, maybe your player is really into the crunch, I'd look for something similar that is ruled, and go from there. If your building is made of stone, the Mostali construct Jolanti are also made of stone, and are maybe about double the size of a person. Their HP is around 30, so it might be reasonable to rule a small stone wall as having about the same. As a general rule of thumb, I've found that inanimate materials, like stone or wood usually have equal HP and AP, so ruling the AP of a wooden wall as a couple times the HP of a large wooden shield, depending on its thickness, could also work.

[Andrew M]

I settled with an on the fly decision, but I expected that there was a rule given the mechanic in the spell and so wanted to find out for the many times the spell will be used in the future. Trying to get a feel for how destructive a 1 pt fissure should be, in this case it damaged a fairly solid wooden building but no immediate collapse, over the next few weeks unless someone fixes it there will be a partial collapse on one end of the building.

[Chao]

That sounds good for a 1 pt fissure spell. I am by no means a Runequest master, so it's possible that there are rulings for building armour, I've just never run across them. There are unfortunately a number of absences like this in the core rulebook, in general I wouldn't spend too long looking for specific cases like this and just run with what makes sense and what works for your table.

They don't cover this specific case, but if you haven't found them yet there are some "rune fix" documents that answer some common questions up here: https://www.chaosium.com/runequest-rune-fixes/

[soltakss]

The Book of Doom gives values for HPs of structures. It also says that spells and creatures that do damage do 1 HP damage per D6, so a Fissure 1 would do 1 HP damage, for convenience.

 

 

[Andrew M]

I do have your book and am using parts of it in this campaign so I will check on those as well to help going forward. I had not expected the players to aquire these spells but one of them made an unexpected spiritual pact wit the Cthonic goddess from the starter scenario I threw into the campaign