The Dark Knight we Deserve

There’s some pretty cool stuff to talk about here, some of it familiar, some of it brand new. Furnace is a little faster than Anvil with a slightly higher MOV attribute of [5”/7”]. He also has a [2”] melee zone, so he is capable of threatening enemies from a longer distance than Anvil can with his [4”/6”] MOV and a [1”] melee zone. Furnace’s [2”] melee zone is also very helpful for adding additional Ganging Up bonuses for friendly players or applying the Crowding Out penalty to enemy players. Furnace has a respectable DEF of [3+] and ARM of [2], something that you can’t quite see on the player card art is that Furnace is sporting a huge kite shield on his left arm so it makes a lot of sense to represent that in his attributes.

Like Anvil, Furnace has several Momentous Push Playbook results and a Momentous knock-down Playbook result. This type of Playbook is indicative of a Blacksmith Master and is hugely important for a player designed to set up enemy models by Pushing them into the right position for Ganging Up bonuses and knocking them down, generating Momentum Points for the team along the way. However, Furnace has a Momentous [1] damage Playbook result, which is significant too, but we’ll return to that later on. Something that a number of the Master Blacksmiths have in common, with the exception of Anvil, is that they tend to have Playbooks that have a smaller number of columns than they have TAC. Furnace has a respectable TAC of [6] and a Playbook that is only five columns in length. These slightly compressed Playbooks were another conscious decision taken during the Blacksmith’s Guild development to illustrate the Master Blacksmith’s skill at their craft. Master Blacksmiths are reasonably efficient at Pushing enemy players around and knocking them down.

Moving onto Furnace’s Character Plays, we start to discover one of Furnace’s subthemes. The Character Play One at a Time Lads! is another effect which interacts with the Ganging Up and Crowding Out rules. Furnace can change the dice-math of a melee quite dramatically with One at a Time Lads! by causing any player (not just friendly players) to ignore both the Ganging Up bonus and the Crowding Out penalty. For example, if Furnace is engaged by [3] enemy players, Rage, Grace, and Fangtooth, and Furnace needs to knockdown Grace, Furnace will only be rolling [4] dice when he makes an Attack due to suffering the Crowding Out penalty from [2] enemy players. Rolling [4] dice against a DEF [4+] enemy player and looking for [3] hits in order to achieve a knock-down Playbook result does not have a high chance of success. However, if Furnace places his One at a Time Lads! AOE so that he’s inside it when he makes his Attack, Furnace will be rolling his full TAC of [6] and therefore have a much higher chance of being successful. This Character Play will have a number of tactical uses when placed on friendly or enemy players and is certainly one worth thinking about how to get the best use out of.

Furnace’s second Character Play is one we have seen many times before, Tooled Up. A great Character Play for any team looking to inflict multiple take-outs and an ability that makes a huge amount of thematic sense for the Blacksmiths Guild. After all, these guys MAKE most of the weapons seen on a Guild Ball Pitch. With Tooled Up, someone like Sledge can inflict [8] Momentous damage with only a single Playbook result, ouch!