Beast Riding

Beast Riding
Use: Unskilled
use penalized. Macro skill use for long-distance travel.
Sample specializations: Horse,
camel, unicorn, elephant, dolphin) or whatever other “beasts” may be used as
mounts in a land.
This
skill is used to ride horses, camels, and other mounts. When a rider first
climbs aboard an animal, he generates a beast
riding total using the mount’s Mind value as
the difficulty number. If this check succeeds, the rider gains control of the
mount and may proceed. If the check fails, the beast runs away, bucks, or
throws the rider off (at the gamemaster’s discretion).
The
rider must make a similar roll whenever a situation would spook the mount. The
difficulty of getting the mount to perform a specific task, such as jumping
over a fence, is determined by the gamemaster using the Difficulty Number Scale
and should be based on the animal and the task itself. Getting a horse to jump
a fence might be an Average task but getting a camel to perform the same maneuver
might be a Very Hard task, and it would be better to just let an elephant go
through the fence (elephants can’t jump.) Besides controlling the mount, beast riding can be
used to increase the animal’s speed with a speed
push (see Chapter Four) in place of the
animal’s own running skill.
The macro version of this ability, the forced march, will increase the animal’s
movement value by one with a successful skill check against the mount’s Mind. The
forced march will last for a maximum of three hours and can only be used once a
day. A character’s beast riding skill
can be substituted for a character’s dodge
and maneuver
skills while the character is mounted
in combat. If engaged in close-range combat while mounted, the character’s beast riding skill may
be substituted for the character’s normal defensive skill value. The difficulty
of all beast riding checks
is increased by 8 on an untrained/undomesticated animal.