"Smush!" - Illwinter

A creature with Trample walks over smaller creatures instead of stopping to fight them. It enters their square, everything standing there is thrown out into the surrounding squares, and each one of them is crushed on the way. The unit description shows the trait as Trample, with no value attached.

Trample takes the place of the movement block that an occupied square would otherwise be. It is not a chosen attack and not an area spell: it happens because the trampler tried to walk somewhere, or, when it has nowhere to march, because it went looking for a square to walk over.

A trampler can enter a square only when it is bigger than everything in it. Its reach is its own Size minus 1, and the square is judged by its largest occupant, so one big defender shields every small one sharing its square. A size 9 War Elephant reaches size 8 and below; put a single size 9 unit in the square and the elephant has to fight normally instead.

For a mounted trampler the mount supplies the size. The same resolution runs on the victims, so a trampled mounted unit takes the damage on its mount whether the trample lands or is avoided, and the rider is only touched if the mount dies under it.

A square that cannot be trampled is not skipped. The trampler falls back to an ordinary melee attack against it.

Every creature in the square is trampled, each with its own rolls, up to the ten that a square can hold.

The size of the victim appears nowhere in that arithmetic. A size 1 Crow and a size 8 Melqart face the same damage roll from the same trampler. Size difference does change how often the trample repeats, which is further down this page.

The damage is nonmagical and carries no damage type, so no elemental resistance applies to it. It is also not a weapon strike, which decides a good deal of what it does and does not set off.

The defence used here is not a normal defence check. It is the same reflex-style check that Earthquake uses, and it is assembled differently:

• Armour defence modifiers apply, penalties included.
• A shield subtracts its Encumbrance and gives no Parry bonus at all. A Blacksteel Tower Shield makes its bearer easier to trample.
• Weapon defence modifiers do not apply, in either direction. A Main Gauche of Parrying does nothing here.
• Fatigue costs 1 point of defence per 10 fatigue, and stops counting at 10.
• The Harassment penalty applies normally.

An open-ended 3d6 averages exactly 12, which puts the practical rates at:

The rest of the time the victim keeps its footing and takes 1 damage instead. That point is flat: it skips the soak roll entirely, so armour does nothing against it. Nothing walked over comes away untouched.

Trample hits the whole body, so it reads the average Protection shown on the front of the character sheet rather than a per head or per body value, and then halves it, rounded down, before the soak roll.

A size 9 War Elephant opens with a base of 16. Against an unarmoured target that averages 16 damage on every hit that lands; against 10 average Protection it is 11; against 20 it is 6.

An Ethereal trampler halves the 7 + size figure, rounded down, before anything is rolled. A size 9 Air Elemental starts from 8 where a solid creature of the same size would start from 16, and then adds its DRN as normal. Nothing else changes: the dice are the same, the trample lands just as often, and a victim that avoids it still takes its 1 damage.

Halving that figure does more than halve the damage, because the victim's soak is untouched. Against an unarmoured target the size 9 Air Elemental averages 8 where a solid trampler of its size averages 16, which is about half. Against 20 average Protection it averages 2 against the solid trampler's 6.5, which is under a third. An Ethereal trampler is a threat to unarmoured troops and close to harmless against armoured ones.

An Ethereal victim is a different matter, and follows the trait's ordinary rule. Trample is a nonmagical hit, so it has only a 25% chance of doing anything at all to an Ethereal target.

Protection against a trample comes at two separate points. The Awe family turns the trampler away before any dice are rolled, and it is the only thing that does. Everything else acts on the damage after the trample has landed, through the same saves that meet any other hit.

Ability	Acts	Effect on a trample
the Awe family	before the trample	turns the trampler back, and costs it a full round
Glamour, Mirror Image	on the damage	an image takes the hit and is lost
Ethereal	on the damage	negates the whole hit 75% of the time, see Ethereal creatures
Mistform	on the damage	subtracts 25, to a floor of 1
Mossbody	on the damage	subtracts 15 on 75% of hits, to a floor of 0
Twist Fate	on the damage	negates the hit. The 1 damage of an avoided trample does not spend it, unless the victim is down to 2 hit points
Fool's Luck	on the damage	negates the hit, then doubles the next one to land
Luck	on the damage	negates a killing hit 75% of the time
Protection	on the soak	half the victim's average score is added to the soak, see Protection
Invulnerability	on the soak	counts as Protection, and is halved along with it

The saves are taken in the order of the table, and the first one that fires ends the matter. Ethereal and Invulnerability both work here because a trample counts as a mundane attack, which is the same flag that decides those two against any weapon.

Awe is checked before any dice are rolled for damage, and it is checked again for every square the trampler tries to walk over.

• Shroud of Bewilderment and Aura of Bewilderment turn away an attacker on a Magic Resistance contest before it strikes. That contest belongs to weapon attacks, and a trample never reaches it.
• Repel cannot be attempted against a trample.
• Fear and Dread act on morale. They can rout a trampler and end the trampling that way, and they do nothing to a trample already under way.
• Flying and Floating give no escape. A creature above the ground is trampled on the same terms as one standing on it.
• A shield gives no Parry against it, as covered under the defence roll.

A trample step costs a fraction of an attack. Two things set the wait: the trampler's Combat Speed, and how many sizes bigger it is than the largest creature in the square. That second figure is the one this section focuses on, and it is measured against the same creature that decides whether the square can be entered at all. A size 9 War Elephant walking over size 2 humans is 7 sizes bigger than everything it treads on.

This is the only place where the difference in size between trampler and victim changes anything. A bigger difference divides the attack time further and gives extra passes; it never adds a point of damage.

Squares trampled per round, at ordinary attack speed:

Because the comparison is against the largest creature in the square, one nearly matching defender standing among small troops slows the whole trample against a square.

Each trampled square costs the trampler its full Encumbrance in Fatigue, exactly as a melee attack would. On a mounted trampler the mount pays it and the riders pay nothing, because the mount is the creature doing the trampling. The amount is the mount's own encumbrance; carrying two riders does not double it.

The cost is per square rather than per round, which is what tires a fast trampler. A War Elephant has 3 encumbrance and tramples a little over four squares a round (against normal troops like Militia), so it gains about 13 fatigue a round where a soldier swinging once a round usually gains 3 to 5. It recovers 1 point a round, so it reaches 50 fatigue after about four rounds of steady trampling and 100 after about nine.

Reaching the enemy line does not turn a trampler back into an ordinary fighter. A creature acts whenever its action timer runs out, and each time a trampler's comes up it looks for a square to walk over before it considers swinging: trampling takes the place of its weapon attack for that action, and the wait until its next action is then the short trample timer rather than a full attack. That is why a trampler in contact gets so many more actions than the creature next to it. It swings its weapons only when there is nothing it can trample: no enemy next to it, an enemy too big for its reach, or Awe turning it back.

Which square it walks over is not chosen tactically. The trampler gathers every living enemy in the 3x3 block of squares around it into one list and draws one entry at random, then tramples the square that creature is standing in. Each enemy is a separate entry, so a square holding five enemies is five times as likely to be drawn as a square holding one - thus, the trampler drifts toward the thickest part of the line.

After a trample the trampler has a 25% chance of an immediate free attack against an adjacent enemy. This is the only way a trampler that tramples on every action still gets to use its weapons, and it is why a Chariot lands the hoof+spear attack between passes.

It is a whole ordinary attack, not one swing. A creature with several weapons uses all of them, on the same terms as any other attack it makes.

On a mounted trampler the attack runs for the whole group: the rider attacks and the mount attacks, even though only the mount did the trampling. A mount at 50 or more Fatigue sits out its own half of it half the time, which the battle log calls "mount resting".

The attack's cost is charged to a second timer, kept apart from the one that sets how often the creature tramples. Trampling therefore never gets slower because of it. That second timer is also the gate, so free attacks cannot stack up: after one, the next has to wait roughly an ordinary attack interval no matter how many squares get trampled in between. A trampler crossing a formation at four squares a round does not get four free attacks; it gets about one.

A routing trampler, and a trampler carrying out the Guard Commander order, ignore the friend-or-foe test and walk over their own side's squares as readily as the enemy's - happily crushing your own troops.

Swallow on Trample takes the place of the damage on a successful trample: the victim is swallowed whole and removed from the battlefield. A victim that avoided the trample is not swallowed, so the ability only fires on the hits that would have dealt full damage.

A swallowed creature is out of the fight until its swallower dies, and it is digested while it waits. The damage per round is set on the swallower rather than fixed: a Gelatinous Cube deals 4 acid damage a round and rusts what its victim is wearing. Digestion ignores Protection entirely.

Being off the battlefield suspends the effects that need a square to happen in. Phoenix Pyre does not fire for a creature that dies inside a swallower, and neither do the death explosions or the affliction rolls. Regeneration keeps working, so a regenerating creature heals while it is being digested.

Four creatures carry the ability in the unmodded game: the Gelatinous Cube, and the Eater of the Dead through all three of its stages, including its final Unfettered form.

Trample itself is not a weapon strike, and it is not treated as one. That cuts both ways.

• Fire Shield, Astral Shield, Banefire Shield, Poisonous Barbs, Contact Poison and Acid Splash do not fire.
• The Charge Bonus does not apply.
• Effects that key on taking damage work normally, because trample deals ordinary damage. Damage Reversal and Blood Vengeance both fire, and both aim at the mount of a mounted trampler, since the mount is what did the trampling.

Kills made by trampling count as melee kills on the unit sheet and toward the Hall of Fame score.

Two items grant Trample to a commander that does not have it, and they are the only sources outside the monster trait itself. No bless and no spell grants it, and nothing removes it.

Item	Slot	Requires
Boots of the Behemoth	feet	Construction 1, 1
Stymphalian Wings	body	Construction 3, 4

The monster commands are #trample and #trampswallow, and neither takes a value.

#trample is also an item command. Written under #newitem it marks the item rather than a monster, exactly as the two items above do, and the bearer counts as a trampler for as long as it is carried.