My player’s char­ac­ters will encounter a giant ape with four (!) arms soon. It’s a magic beast which is able to stand on his legs and attack with its four arms. The ape is around two an a half meter high and has a mas­sive frame.

Two ques­tions: Would you say, the ape can act on the lime­light of two PCs at once? The rule­book says, only huge ani­mals can and my ape seems to be only a large one. But these four arms must be good for some­thing, right?

Sec­ond ques­tion: The ape’s pri­mary weapons are his fists. Giant fists are not listed as an ani­mal weapon. Should I use the stats for claws (-1) with­out blood­loss?

Regards,
R.

For the first ques­tion.
Maybe depends how intel­li­gent it is!
I would run it more as a one on one type com­bat­ant, it would pick out the alpha threat and go all out on that. Maybe grap­ple another and crush it in a hug but not punch­ing against two foes.
My 2d.

Claw sounds ok, I would still keep the blood­loss, it has claws. I don’t see it balling up its hands to punch.

Allan

Hello there

For 1: If you want to stay true to the rules then no, but that isn’t always fun is it? Then again you can jug­gle the rules a lit­tle since it doesn’t actu­ally state other crea­tures CANT do it, the gist of the excep­tion being: “A crea­ture able to engage more than one PC at once can within one and the same Round of Lime­lights act upon more than just one PC’s Lime­light”, the key­word being An Able Crea­ture

Then there’s the big­ger rules that are the Rule of Cool and Rule of Com­mon Sense. Does it make sense that your big ape can engage sev­eral PCs at once due to his high agility, mul­ti­ple arms and over­all badassery? Does it LOOK COOL? Maybe a bit of nar­ra­tive power and sce­nario descrip­tion helps pic­tur­ing this, for exam­ple the ape­dude flings from side to side through vines and plat­forms while engag­ing the PCs that are in dif­fer­ent areas.

I usu­ally use the limelight-​per-​pc to por­tray boss-​like NPCs that could cin­e­mato­graph­i­cally engage the PCs in cool fash­ion. While your basic elite glad­i­a­tor or ban­dit war­lord might not fit the cri­te­ria, think of mag­i­cal alien-​like beasts that can fling around & walk the ceil­ing, were­wolves, the Naga and the 6(!)-armed Kali (from sinbad’s), a medusa, a fly­ing gar­goyle or some sort of Dracula-​like ancient being that is sim­ply too expe­ri­enced and super­nat­u­rally fast, even per­haps with some sort of tele­port or pre­cog­ni­tion abil­ity.

Any­way, i’d say go for it if you are going for more of a “boss” type of fight or some­thing more cin­e­matic or just stick with the reg­u­lar rules but per­haps give him an extra MP or two or some spe­cific asset due to his multiple-​arms, if you are so inclined.

For 2: If the ape use his fists for punch­ing, then use the punches and kicks stats, if he uses his claws use claws stats, seems like a no-​brainer.
Another thing you can do that isn’t in the core rules is giv­ing assets to your more crafted NPCs. For exam­ple, your ape­dude could have the Brawler asset for some unarmed badassery. Another thing to note is per­haps to not use michael’s rule-​addon regard­ing unarmed com­bat (that is, mul­ti­ply­ing unarmed suc­cesses for 0,66) in regard to large, huge or pow­er­ful crea­tures. Other than that, I fig­ure this crea­ture will have a high amount of brawn (9 or per­haps even 10) which is some seri­ous dam­age out­put and dam­age reduc­tion, dam­age halv­ing rules notwithstanding.

Thanks both of you. Some good ideas and advice. The apeguy will be a boss-​type encounter. I pic­ture him jump­ing and scream­ing through the scene. Attack­ing one PC with all his might, jump back and attack another. Yes, he is strong (Bn 10) and he can intim­i­date with his scream. But he has three or four expe­ri­enced Conan types against him. So I guess I will give him the Huge Beast Advan­tage. But he will always try to use Ter­rain Checks to be able to attack only one at a time. This could be described as jump­ing around, maybe giv­ing him bonus dice for Ter­rain checks.

The ape will have the giant asset (reach S instead of H). Maybe he’s capa­ble of “triple attack” with three arms against one char­ac­ter. Or simul­ta­ne­ous grap­ple and fist attack. Brawler seems to be another use­ful asset, yes. I’m also con­sid­er­ing throw­ing some smaller mon­keys against the PC to dis­tract them. This should be a tough fight.