The Bannerfall Compendium

Knightly order of the coast

Disciplined imperial legions

Elusive wardens of the deep woods

Deep-mountain forgeclans

Restless hosts of the grave

Warbands of the burning steppe

Scholarly conclave of stormcallers

Swift clans of the open vale

Found as battle and ruin loot, then carried by a hero. Effects stack.

Stronger artifacts, found in a dungeon crawl's treasure — occasionally on the first floor, more often the deeper the party goes — or handed over by a forge room at any depth.

Powers beyond raw might — flight, farsight, mana, warding, healing and more — found only in a Rich Artifacts game.

The mightiest enchanted relics, drawn from the same dungeon treasure and forge rooms as the relics above once a crawl is a Rich Artifacts one.

Hero-only sites. The hero's stack fights the ruin's guardian, then rolls a reward — gold, an item, an ally, or hero XP. The four themes are cosmetic terrain flavour, and a ruin's tier (near / mid / far from the nearest capital) only describes how hard the guardian hits: it does not change that roll. In a Dungeons game a hero-led stack opens a crawl instead of rolling once, and there the tier does decide the haul — a far ruin runs deeper, its guardians hit harder, and its treasure is worth more.

Sacred sites that appear only when a game is created with Mystic Sites enabled.

Temple

Any visiting stack is blessed: each unblessed unit permanently gains +1 strength, once. No hero needed.

Sage

A hero encounter offering three paths: reveal the surrounding lands, locate an artifact, or take gold.

Your realm's settlements. City levels — walls, income and which units they can build — apply only in City Levels games (see the Rules tab); each level above the first adds +10 gold/turn. Base income below is a level-1 city.

• Each unit has a Strength (Str). A stack fights with its members' combined strength, highest-Str units defending last.
• A battle is a series of one-on-one exchanges: each is a strength-weighted coin flip (the side with more effective strength is more likely to win it), and the loser takes 1 hp. This repeats until one side is destroyed or retreats.
• Leadership: the single highest Leadership among a stack's non-hero units adds to the whole stack — it does NOT stack (only the best applies). Elite units give +2, heavy +1.
• Command, Leadership, Walls and Terrain bonuses are added together but capped at +5 for either side.
• Favored terrain: if any unit in a battle favors the tile it's fought on, the whole side gets +1. Ground units favor their faction's homeland; heavies also favor Hills, cavalry also favor Plains.
• Marsh is nobody's home ground: no side gets the favored-terrain bonus fighting on a marsh tile.
• Siege: a siege engine in the attacking stack cancels the defender's city Wall bonus.
• Naval: strength at sea is capped (a land army can't project full force onto the water).
• Wounds carry between battles: a unit that survives fighting hurt stays hurt until something mends it (see Wounds & healing).

• Most soldiers have a single hit point: they are alive or they are dead. Heroes, your faction's elite, summoned creatures and a few others have more, and those are the ones who can be wounded and mend.
• Wounded units mend by RESTING. A unit that neither moved nor fought during a turn banks that turn's rest, and 4 turns of rest in the open field restore one hit point.
• In a city you hold, a single turn of rest restores a hit point — 4 times faster. Every city counts, at any level: what mends a soldier is being off the line and among your own people, not the height of the walls.
• The moment a unit moves or fights, it loses whatever rest it had banked. An army that attacks every turn never mends, wherever it stands — and a hero cannot ride out, fight, and ride back for a free heal.
• A besieged city — one with an enemy army standing right beside it — mends at the open-field rate instead. The garrison is cut off, not abandoned.
• An ally's city is somewhere you are a guest: it mends your units at the open-field rate, not at your own city's rate.
• A party inside a dungeon cannot rest: nothing about a crawl gives a unit the quiet turn that mending takes, so wounds carry from chamber to chamber for as long as the party stays down there.
• The exception underground is a shrine. Claiming one — the same way the party claims any other room's find — mends every wounded unit in the party by a hit point and wards them, so the next fight in the crawl is fought at a bonus. Each shrine gives this once; passing back through a spent one does nothing.
• The Mend Wounds spell restores every wounded unit in the army to full in a single cast — the fastest healing there is, and the only one that does not care where you are standing.
• A mending artifact (the Standard of Mending, the Reliquary of Mending) restores hit points to the whole army at the start of every turn, wherever it is. It resolves BEFORE natural rest, so a unit it does not fully heal can still gain a hit point from rest in the same turn.
• A unit with the Regenerate ability recovers its wounds immediately after any battle it survives — unless it was poisoned in that battle, which denies the regeneration.
• None of these ever push a unit past its own maximum: every heal stops at the ceiling that unit actually has, including the extra hit points a hero bought with the Toughness skill.

• A stack moves at the pace of its slowest member; entering a tile costs that terrain's move points.
• Plains: 2 move
• Forest: 3 move
• Hills: 3 move
• Mountains: impassable to most
• Water: impassable to most
• Marsh: 4 move
• Flyers ignore terrain (2 per tile everywhere) and cross water. Ironhold tunnels mountains (5); Sylvan move cheaply through forest; cavalry are fast on Plains, slow in Forest.
• Marsh is the slowest passable ground (4 move) and grants no home-ground bonus; only flyers (2) and the Duskborne, who wade it at 2, cross it quickly.
• Roads cut a step's cost to 1 move — cheaper than any open terrain.
• Bridges let a land unit cross water at the same 1 move cost as a road.
• A city keeps the natural ground it was founded on, so entering one costs that same terrain's move points — a city on Forest or Hills costs more to reach than one on open Plains.
• Movement points reset in full at the start of your turn.

• Every city gives its defenders a flat +1 Str Wall bonus on defense (City Levels is off, so a city's level never changes it).
• Terrain still matters in a siege: a city keeps the ground it was built on, so the Favored terrain bonus (see Combat & strength) applies fighting there exactly as it would in the open field — for whichever side it favors.

• A capital starts producing 25 gold/turn and a captured neutral city 15 gold/turn.
• Every unit costs gold upkeep, credited and debited automatically at the start of your turn.
• If your treasury can't cover upkeep, your army goes bankrupt: non-hero units desert PERMANENTLY, highest-upkeep unit first, until what's left is affordable. Heroes never desert. This is core to every game — it can't be turned off.

• Heroes gain XP from battles and level up (need level × 12 XP). Strength = 5 + (level − 1).
• Command bonus by level: L1–3 → +1, L4–5 → +2, L6+ → +3 to the whole army.
• Heroes regain 2 mana at the start of your turn (plus any mana-regenerating item carried), up to their maximum.
• Mana grows with level (base max = 3 + level × 2, so a level 3 hero holds 9 before bonuses) — the Arcane hero skill and mana-boosting artifacts raise this further.
• Spells cost mana and require a minimum hero level.
• Spell Learning is on: a hero only knows the spells it's learned (one per school at level 1, more from level-up picks) — not the whole roster.
• An army (stack) can never hold more than 8 units at once.
• Heroes can carry found items, whose bonuses stack on top of everything above.
• If a hero carrying items dies, the items pass to another hero in the same fight or stack. With no hero left to bear them, they're sold for 80 gold each rather than lost.

• A ruin is not fought, it is entered. A hero must lead the party — no hero, no delve — and the party is at most 4 units including that hero.
• Whoever you leave behind garrisons the ruin tile in plain sight, and they can be attacked while you are underground. A party climbing back out rejoins them, up to the same 8-unit limit every army has; anyone over it is disbanded.
• How deep it runs is the ruin's tier — the same near / mid / far reading the map already gives you. A near ruin is a single floor; the deepest run 3 floors, and each one has to be reached through the last.
• Torches are the crawl's clock. The party carries 6 per floor, and every move from one chamber to the next burns one. At zero the party cannot go anywhere: the only thing left is to fight what is in front of it or climb out.
• Going down a level relights them. Reaching the stairs and descending restores the full torch budget, so a floor cleared efficiently pays for the next one — but the stairwell's guardian has to be dealt with first, and there are no stairs on the bottom floor.
• Fleeing a fight is not free. It costs a torch — so a party with none cannot retreat at all, only fight or leave — and about 35% of the time one of the soldiers with you is cut down covering the withdrawal. It is never the hero, and it can be the last soldier you have.
• If the party is destroyed, everything it was carrying is lost with it — every coin, every relic found down there. The ruin is not consumed, though: it stands unexplored, and another hero may try it.
• If the hero falls but the rest of the party wins the room, the delve ends there — nobody is left to lead it deeper — and the survivors climb out with everything the party had won. Every chamber they cleared still counts.
• Relics come out in a surviving hero's hands. With no hero left to bear them they are sold rather than lost, at the same price as anywhere else.
• Walking straight back out costs nothing. A party that looks at a ruin, decides every guarded chamber is beyond it, and leaves without clearing a guardpost or plundering a room does not burn the location — it stays on the map, and the next attempt finds a different layout inside.
• Nothing mends underground except a shrine — see Wounds & healing, which is the one place all of it is described.

• Non-hero units earn XP in battle and rank up every 10 XP, to a maximum of rank 9.
• Each rank adds +1 Str, permanently.

• "Mana" and "MP" are the same resource — the Spellbook shows it as MP, everywhere else calls it mana.

• First Strike: Lands a free, unanswered opening blow before the melee begins.
• Ranged: Opens the fight with a pre-melee volley that can wound before blows are traded.
• Poison: A winning strike can poison the foe, wounding it beyond the blow itself.
• Assassinate: A winning strike can instantly slay a full-health non-hero (never a hero).
• Regenerate: If it survives the battle, it recovers its wounds afterwards.
• Resist: A chance to shrug off a matching attack (poison, magic, ranged or death).
• Immune: Wholly unaffected by a matching attack (poison, magic, ranged or death).