Running combat

Combat in Skryrún is one shared state, not a tracker on one screen and a map on another. Initiative, health, conditions, and targets are the same data whether you are looking at the GM Screen, the battlemap, the player portal, or the TV at the table — change it in one place and everywhere else follows.

Starting a fight

Open Combat Stage from the GM Screen. Two layouts:

Press Start Combat to begin. If you have a prepared encounter active, its roster stocks the initiative tracker directly — you don't retype what the Encounter Builder already knows. For a fight you started on the spot, add combatants by hand, then write objectives for it and promote it to a real encounter later if you want it to outlive the session.

Getting pieces on the board

From the initiative tracker, put a combatant on the map three ways:

• Drag the initiative row onto the map
• Tap to place — click the row, then click the destination cell
• Place all waiting — everyone not yet on the board, in one go

Take a piece back off the same way. A token placed from a row inherits that row's identity: its stat block, its player character, or its NPC entity, so its card, artwork, and health are already correct.

Tokens linked to a stat block support stat-block peek — double-click a token to open its card without leaving the map.

Turn order

The tracker steps through combatants in order, tracking the round. A combatant marked defeated is skipped.

Two states, deliberately separate:

• Down — health reached zero. Shown the instant damage lands; nothing has to be decided.
• Defeated — your ruling that the creature is finished. It persists on the row, skips the turn, greys out on the table display, and counts toward the session debrief.

A monster at zero is usually both, but not automatically — you may rule it unconscious, surrendering, or dragged off by its allies. A player character at zero is only ever down, because marking them defeated would suppress the death-save prompt that exists to catch exactly that.

Turn prompts

At the top of a turn, Skryrún surfaces the bookkeeping a turn is supposed to trigger:

• a player at zero health owes a death save
• a creature that took damage while concentrating owes a check, at the DC the damage implies
• whose turn it is, what they can reach, and who they declared they were attacking, on one surface instead of three

Concentration is tracked as a condition, so it rings the token, expires by round, and writes to the combat log like any other.

Daggerheart

Daggerheart doesn't step a turn order, and Skryrún doesn't pretend it does. The spotlight passes to a token or a tracker card instead. The GM's Fear pool is tracked across the campaign (capped at 12) and spent from adversary features that name a cost, and every combatant carries a Stress track beside its health. See Daggerheart.

Declaring targets

Press T, or use the token's quick menu, then click the tokens the selection is attacking. Up to three at once — enough for a cleave or a line of enemies, not a free-for-all.

Target brackets and range lines draw on your board and stay in sync on the player portal and the table display.

Movement and reach

Select a token and the board shows how far it can move this turn, accounting for walls and difficult terrain. Movement trails read at a glance:

• within normal movement
• requires extra effort
• beyond the combatant's speed

The acting creature's reach is drawn alongside its declared targets, so "can it actually get there" is a look rather than a measurement.

Players can move their own character's token from the campaign portal. You can pin any token in place when you don't want it moved.

Resolving an attack

A creature's printed actions are the control. Click the action line on its stat card to declare it, aim it, and roll it.

How far that click carries is your setting, not ours. Open Combat options on the Combat Stage header:

Roll to hit is the default because it is the only level that changes nothing about who decides damage.

The result arrives as one package rather than scattered numbers: the attack roll, the target's defence, the damage type, the damage, and any effects the action carries. Below Resolve fully you review it before it lands; at Resolve fully it lands and you review it after.

Either way it applies once, and you can undo it from the attack panel if the ruling changes — an undo never overwrites a combatant who was edited afterwards.

Area actions

An area action on a stat block arms a template at the exact size the action describes, and carries its save, DC, damage formula, damage type, and conditions into the result.

A token is caught when its centre is inside the template or its footprint reaches the boundary — so a fireball that clips half a dragon counts the dragon, which is what you meant.

From there you can roll the NPC saves, review each target's defences, spend Legendary Resistance, set condition duration, and apply the whole result in one pass.

Effects on the board

When an attack lands, its effect plays on the battlemap — or cast one by hand from the effects library. Everyone sees the same thing, whether they are on the GM Screen, the player portal, or the table display. Map Settings decides whether effects draw above or below tokens.

Health, conditions, and what players see

Set NPC starting health per table in Combat options: Average uses the number printed on the stat block; Roll per combatant rolls hit dice fresh for each one.

Conditions fan around a token as a ring you can tap through. Choose how cards spell them out — Labels ("Poisoned") or Badges (coloured discs, hover for the name).

Player-facing surfaces never see exact NPC numbers. They see a health tier instead:

Player characters show exact health, because players at the table know their own.

The combat log

Everything a fight does is recorded — damage, conditions, turns, defeats — and survives a reload. The Event log panel sizes down to a single line, a panel, or full height, on the free canvas and inside Combat Stage alike (it's one log in two places, so hiding it hides it everywhere).

At the end, the fight is summarised into the session debrief.

Players get their own version on the table display and in the portal — who acted, what it hit, which conditions landed, and damage dealt. Remaining health, maximum health, and AC are deliberately withheld; the player log is built line by line rather than filtered late, so nothing new leaks into it by accident.

Troubleshooting

Activating an encounter didn't fill the tracker. The encounter has to be the active one for the session. Select it from the sidebar before starting combat — activating it is what stocks the roster.

Clicking an action rolls nothing. Automation is set to Off, or no target is declared yet. With no target, the first click hands the board over to target selection; click again after choosing one.

An attack rolls but stops before a verdict. The target's defence isn't a number Skryrún can compare against — a hand-typed row with no stat block, for instance. The roll still happens and is logged; the verdict is yours.

Damage applied to the wrong creature. Undo the result from the attack panel. It only reverts the combatant it wrote to, and refuses to overwrite one that was edited since.

A player says their token won't move. It's pinned, or it isn't linked to their character. Only a player's own character token is movable from the portal.

See also

• Battlemaps — grid, walls, lighting, and vision
• Encounter builder — prepping the fight beforehand
• Table Display — the shared screen at the table
• GM Screen — the surface all of this lives in