Called Shots Secondary Effects

     The Called Shot section is a little dry. There may or may not be secondary effects that will be outlined in the GMG whenever that comes out, but for now, players that use Called Shots will be disappointed. To amend that until further rules come out, the following rules have been made:

     Called shots allow a character to apply secondary damage effects (the charts for which are found here) to their damage. Obviously, the location is based on where the character was aiming but the severity is based on the lesser of the two die with DR subtracted as deemed appropriate (Note: all suits of armor come with helmets but fingers may or may not be covered.). If the attack was greater then the defense roll by 5, then it's the larger of the two damage rolls and if greater then 10 then it's both damage die. This is further added to any penetration damage that should be rolled.
     Obviously, this only gives a broad overview. If the character is aiming for fingers and hits, use the Arm hit location for a general guide line of what happens. In this case, the enemy is more likely to drop what ever they're holding. A good guide line is to add the penalty to hit for the location to the effective severity (meaning that while the fingers are harder to hit, they're also fairly easy to sever once hit.)

A&8s Secondary Effects

     I love the extra combat damage effects that Aces&Eights uses to add a little more danger to their combats. Because of this I've adapted those charts to work in Hackmaster.

     Secondary effects come into play on a penetration and where they land is determined by the difference between the attacker's and defender's roll.
     1-5          Legs
     6-10        Arms
     11-15      Body
     16-20+    Header
   
     The severity of the secondary effect is based the damage from penetration die minus DR. The secondary effect is tacked on to the total wound damage and it doesn't go away until that wound is fully healed.
     The charts are found here:

Battle-Axes are Two-Handed Weapons

     The more research that I do, the more I see that traditional battle-axes are used with two hands, as opposed to what it says in the PHB. Additionally, there's already a one handed ax in the weapons section so it seems rather redundant to have another, obviously superior weapon. After to taking this all into consideration, I've decided to make battle-axes a two handed weapon with the following exceptions.

     Battle-axes don't receive the +3 to damage that one handed weapons used two handed get but that also don't suffer from the speed penalty that they also normally receive.
     If you are using one, you may also have the ability to use a buckler at the same time. This is the extent of the battle-axes shield use. You lose the buckler's shield bonus (and incur the -4 to defense) should you choose to attack aggressively with it.

Shields and the Wielder's Size

     The shield values make complete sense when applied to humans and human-sized creatures but not a whole lot of sense to larger and smaller races, so the following deviation is made to tailor fit the rules more properly.

     A shield's defense bonus and cover value is increased to the next shield size for each size category smaller then medium size that the wielder is. On the other hand, for each size category larger then medium a creature is the defense bonus and cover value shrink to the next smallest shield size.

     All other values (DR and breakage chance) remain the same.

     So a medium shield would be considered a large shield to a halfling or gnome but would be a small shield to a bugbear. A buckler would be a medium shield to a pixie fairy but would be worthless to a bugbear (except to eliminate the -4 non-shield penalty).