All page references are to The Fantasy Trip In the Labyrinth rulebook, unless noted otherwise.
A collection of my own musings, not to be taken too seriously. -HJC
The Fantasy Trip Companion reprints the Classic edition Flinger article at page 15 and notes that the rules have been tweaked to restore the power of the light crossbow over the Flinger in Legacy, but does not spell out how this works. So how exactly does one defend against the Flinger?
Short answer: Use the defend option.
For the longer answer let me expand on a non-combat character type from Legacy and show how this dominates the strictly combat focused Flinger.
The ITL page 58 "Table of Jobs" lists the requirements for the Professional thief "job" as the talents of Streetwise, Silent Movement, and Remove Traps. This then implicitly requires the Detect Traps talent for a total of 6 memory points. Adding in Knife and Dagger Expertise requires DX 12, IQ 11, and a total of 10 memory points. Putting the last (of 32) attribute points into IQ gives ST 8, DX 12, IQ 12, and 2 memory points left to allocate. Let's take the talents of Climbing and Locksmith to be able to reach balconies and open doors.
See the completed character sheet for my example of a Professional thief for gear and such.
Now with only one expert weapon talent this surely isn't a combat focused build, but what are the other talents used for?
The thief uses her Streetwise talent to find a client who needs a certain item retrieved from a specific townhouse. She cases the joint at day then applies her Streetwise talent again to find a wizard who'll cast spells off the books. He charges her double the usual Guild rate of three silvers (ITL page 60, one hour's wage of an IQ 8 wizard to cast the spell, plus one silver for the fatigue point, rounded up) to cast a Light spell on the tip of the blade of her secondary dagger. She has light proof scabbards for her blades, but scabbards apparently don't cost anything in this game so that's no big deal.
She returns to the townhouse and waits that evening for things to settle down so she can make her entrance.
She uses her Climbing talent to get over the back fence in one turn, two turns to cross the garden at her Silent Movement MA of 4, she has the rope and hooked grapnel from her Labyrinth Kit at her belt. So she takes one turn to ready this, three turns to aim at the back balcony. The toss four yards up is at -4 (ITL page 119) so a net -1 to her DX so she needs to roll an 11 or less on three dice. (Taking Thrown Weapons would have helped here, but she's very tight on memory points.)
Climbing up the four yards of rope takes her two turns (ITL page 118).
Walking up to the balcony's door the next turn she doesn't instantly spot the trap that must surely be there so she spends another 6 turns to search for traps (ITL page 70) and finds an alarm trap on the door. With Detect Traps and IQ 12 she instantly spots 3d6 hidden items and has a one-third chance of spotting even 6d6 hidden items. The Mechanician having spent all of his time hiding the trap made the removal only a 2d6 roll which the thief merely needs to avoid rolling a 12 on two dice which she does over the next 12 turns. She then spends 12 turns picking the ordinary 3d6 lock, which she manages on the first try.
If only she had been born a wizard she would have saved a lot of time here, at the cost of a few points of fatigue.
Once inside the townhouse she no longer has the starlight that negated darkness penalties (ITL page 119) and so readies her off-hand dagger to unmask the Light spell. She makes her way out of the first room and stops at the door she was told the item would be behind.
She is examining this door for traps and locks when she hears footsteps. (From 5 hexes away as this is around a corner. See ITL page 73). She assumes that the light from her dagger that she was using to examine the door has given her away. And so spends this turn standing up from her knelling position.
Next combat round:
The Flinger is exactly as specified in Phil Rennert's article, with two each of boomerangs, bolas, and bags of sha-ken.
He enters the combat by rounding the corner and stands to toss a boomerang from five hexes away at no penalty for distance.
The Thief stands her own ground, and spends 3 MA to carefully draw her own dagger.
The Flinger acts first at adjDX 15 (+2 DX for Thrown Weapons, -2 DX for being under strength) and throws the boomerang. The Thief declares a defend option. The Flinger asks "Say what?", and she points to defend being a valid option against any thrown weapon on the GM screen and also implicitly at ITL page 117.
As per Weapon Expertise (ITL 41) the Flinger must now roll 15 or less on five dice, a 30.52% chance. He rolls a 16 and just misses.
The next turn she wins intuitive and moves up five hexes to engage him. He picks engage option (m) CHANGE WEAPONS to to ready his second boomerang and then by Thrown Weapons he tosses again at point blank range, hitting with a roll of 15 and doing 2d-2 (boomerangs do one less point of damage in Legacy edition, and he's two points under ST) for 2 hits. This is marked as wounds on her, as she has no armor.
And so the fight continues for a few more turns and she takes another 2 hits from Sha-ken before the Flinger goes down. At this point the household is alerted and she makes a hasty escape, vowing to get Dark Vision cast for her next caper.
The Fantasy Trip(t.m.) is a trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and their rules and art are copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by Steve Jackson Games.
This game aid is the original creation of Henry J. Cobb and is released for free distribution, and not for resale, under the permissions granted in the Steve Jackson Games Online Policy.