Battlefield Readiness

Announcements

• March topic: March Expedition — the Trials (quest-heavy, new roleplay elements).
• Sherwood pub crawl & show trip on Sunday of March event — support local Faire performers.
• Tickets: April & May 20% off until 30 days prior — helps with planning.
• May: 4 days, payment plan available; arrive Thu — leave Tue for a longer adventure.

Tonight’s Focus

• Combat readiness: how battlefield play works, safety, expectations, and prep.

Required Learning & Training

• Combat video + Safety test on https://hynafol.com/learn
• Passing the test + attending onsite orientations is required; archives will be checked.

Combat Trainings

• In-person battle orientation Saturday morning at each expedition.
• Practice opportunities Sunday/Monday before the first big battle at Grand Gathering.
• Do the orientations — don’t show up to the big battle unprepared.

Guiding Principles for Combat

1. Safety — top priority.
2. Fun — competitive but must be fun for everyone.
3. Candor — open, honest play (take hits, be frank about outcomes).

Combat Modes (two kinds)

• Skirmishes & Battles: competitive, objective-based, follow battlefield rules.
• Town / Roleplay Fights: story-focused, different tone — prioritize good story and fun.

Core Mechanics (very short)

• All weapons = 1 damage.
• Body parts: head, torso, arms, legs = 1 HP each. Head/torso hit = dead.
• Monsters = instant death on touch.
• No face hits; no back-of-head; no groin hits. Armor modifies HP.

Mandatory Safety Rules (highlights)

• Weapons inspection every event — mandatory (weapons, arrows, bows, crossbows).
• Safety briefings mandatory.
• Follow steward directions (orange/green vests) — their call is final on the field.
• No shield bashing (no using shield to push/force people over).
• No grappling, grabbing, or restraining weapons (limited batting okay).
• No thrusting to the head / eyes — protect eye safety.
• Wear eye protection (recommended; any safety glasses are fine).
• No excessive force — hits don’t need to be hard.

Equipment & Weapons

• Buy from approved vendors (recommended). Homemade weapons OK but not recommended — most fail inspection, no product liability insurance.
• Helmets recommended — protect your brain.

Armor & Heat

• Armor helps survivability but is hot, heavy, and costly.
• Texas heat can still be an issue in November; train in your armor if you plan to wear it.
• Layering (gambeson + armor) requires conditioning.

Physical Preparation

• Expect to walk 15–20 miles over an event; 12–13 hour days on your feet.
• Battlefield: run/fight ~30–60 seconds, die → 2-minute dead timer → walk back to respawn → repeat.
• Train with cardio & walking on uneven terrain (grass, trails, woods).
• Break in boots/shoes — do not wear brand-new boots. Buy good socks and many of them.

Battlefield Etiquette

• When dead: turn weapon upside down and go to one knee if safe.
• Dead = no talking, no tactical communication, and dead people walk (no running).
• Stay dead for the allotted time to give the opposing side advantage.

Final Reminders

• Take the combat test now; archives will be checked.
• Prepare physically, protect your gear/feet, and train if you plan to wear armor.
• Follow safety briefings and steward directions.
• Aim to make combat fun for everyone and be candid in play.

Combat Readiness Zoom Call (March 4, 2026)

Please excuse my groggy voice and sickness here, but I endeavor to press on and make this go anyway. Welcome to the Zoom call on March 4th, 2026. We’re going to talk about a couple of things tonight. I wanted to start with a couple of quick announcements.

Next week’s topic will be the March expedition trials. We’ll be going over the codex for that. We are cooking up some really awesome stuff. The March expedition is going to be totally ridiculous and very awesome. It is going to be unlike anything else we’ve ever done, so it’ll be very quest heavy. Lots of houses have volunteered to help us run a bunch of instances. There will be a whole bunch of different kinds of experiences to go on. You’re going to gather an adventuring party. You are going to have some selections to make for your character, which is going to be very exciting — think more traditional roleplay-esque elements added into our normal Hynafol stuff that will help you face the trials. It’s going to be very fun. The team has come up with a lot of really great ideas for this one, and I think you’re really going to like it. Make sure you’re there.

Also, as a reminder, if you’re coming to March, Sherwood is in full swing, so we are going to go over to Sherwood on Sunday and do a pub crawl and Sherwood show tag along. We’re going to try and see as many of the shows as we can and hit as many pubs as we can along the way. We have some Hynafol people in some of those shows, so we’re going to cheer them on. It’ll be a really good time and show some support to Sherwood Faire, because they host us for the Grand Gathering every year, so we want to give back a little bit. If you’re around, please come to that.

A small reminder that tickets are still on sale for April and May at 20% off. The reason we are offering 20% off up until 30 days before the event is that helps us plan ahead. The vast majority of you that come to our events buy your tickets the day before the event. If you’re ever like, “Why don’t they have enough toilets?” it’s because 50% of the people that attended the event bought their ticket the day before, and we couldn’t get enough toilets out on time. So we’re giving you a discount of 20% off to allow us to plan for you to be there. So if you can be there, be there.

May still has a small payment plan, so you could pay in March, April, and then early May. It is a larger cost for May. May is four days long and you can arrive early, so you can arrive Thursday and leave Tuesday to make it a big long adventure down at River Forest Haven if you would like. May is going to be totally and utterly ridiculous. You don’t want to miss it.

Like I said last week, if you’re new, this call is primarily for you. If you are a Hynafol person that has been around for a while, I’m now going to give an overview of what Hynafol is. I’ll be doing this every call. Last week we had a person join at 10:30 p.m. who had missed the entire call. I hope that person is here, because now I’m going to give you the overview of what Hynafol is that you missed. Hopefully this will answer the vast majority of questions you have, and yes, veterans, you can hop in the chat and be silly.

What is Hynafol? Hynafol is an ongoing participant-driven fantasy saga with Arthurian — the King Arthur story as our backdrop. We have taken the King Arthur story and have molded it and made it our own, so it is not directly lifted from any source. Everything that we do, the players make choices, and that guides the story where it goes. It is living and breathing. We have events all year round. The majority of those are our weekend-long expeditions, and we also have a couple of other alternative weekend events. We’ll do a medieval ball or a fantasy ball this summer. We have an event called Courtly Night, which is primarily centered around politics and intrigue. Then of course we have the Grand Gathering, our seven-day event that runs in November. That is our capstone biggest event of the year; we expect many hundreds of people there, and it runs for a full week. That’s where you get to experience all of what Hynafol is.

How’s Hynafol structured? Hynafol has a large overarching narrative that is always running and building on itself. Inside of that we have courts — five courts — led by a cast of very famous characters from the Arthurian tales: Mordred, Merlin, Arthur, etc. Then we have kingdoms. Kingdoms are player-led organizations, exactly the way you’d expect. Houses are the building block of Hynafol society: smaller groups of around 10–20 people; the largest houses are in the 20-ish numbers. Houses make up kingdoms. There are independent houses too. Guilds are what you do — your job, profession, or vocation. We have all different kinds of guilds listed on the website. We’ll go over each of these things in detail in a future call.

What do you do? You make a character and live out that character’s story throughout each of our events. One of our biggest things is that everybody plays a character and has to be in medieval costuming/clothing the entirety of the event. The whole time you’re there, you will be immersed as much as possible in this medieval fantasy decorum area.

How do events work? Each event is bookended the same way: there’s always an opening ceremony that frames the narrative for the event, then a bunch of stuff happens in the middle, and then there is a closing ceremony to wrap up what happened. We don’t always know how the closing ceremony will go. We always have more than one thing prepared so that we can react to what you decide to do during the event. At the last event, not enough quests were completed, and one of our court leaders lost their big mythical magical weapon and a mage died as a consequence — very serious business. In between there are battles, quests, more stuff than you can possibly do in one day or at any event. At the Grand Gathering there is no shortage of things to do: lots of quests that begin and end at the archives, skirmishes, large-scale battles with hundreds of people, ceremonies, rituals, and lots of social interaction. The guilds each have a life of their own with a myriad of activities depending on which guild you join. All of that adds up to what Hynafol is.

Tonight I’m going to cover preparing yourself to fight in these big battles and get into a bit of the details of the combat itself, which is slightly different than the last time we covered combat, which was strictly the rules. If you have questions about attending an event or buying tickets, around 9:30 Central Time I’ll stay and answer all of your questions; everybody else will go into a breakout room so I can answer ticket questions while they make friends.

Let’s jump into our topic: actually getting onto the battlefield and what it’s like. Last time we went over the rules, and there is now a test you have to take for learning all about Hynafol combat. If you haven’t seen that yet, there is an ever-growing learn page. Click on combat and you can watch the video we did last week and take the Safety test. To pass the safety test, you don’t just have to watch the video; you also need to read some of the material in the document, otherwise you will probably not pass. Last time I checked, everybody who had taken the test had passed. Congratulations if you have taken it: you are good to go. You can find that at hynafol.com/combatguide or hynafol.com/learn. In the near future we’ll be checking at the archives to make sure you have taken that test. We’re doing that because we want to increase safety at events regarding combat. We want to continue to do large, fun battles, but we want everybody to be as safe as humanly possible because getting hurt is no fun — the whole point of Hynafol is to have fun.

So, rules aside, today I want to talk about expectations, safety fundamentals, and how to prepare yourself for the battlefield. If you’re planning to just come to the Grand Gathering, you have lots of time. If you come to our events often, you already know what fighting on the battlefield is like. Many people start coming, try battles and skirmishes, and realize they’re out of shape, get winded, and decide to prepare so they can be better at them. I am not a doctor; this is friendly advice from having run these things for 12 years.

Combat at Hynafol is really, really fun. The battles are large and chaotic. There are arrows flying, ever-increasing large shield walls, nine-foot spears, halberds. There are monsters on the battlefield that kill you in one hit. There are a myriad of objectives for you to secure and earn points for your side. At the last event we had a real wooden palisade door and a foam gigantic battering ram to smash through it. We’re always dreaming up new and interesting scenarios. We’ve built our first really amazing wooden cart — no more burlap-covered wagons — you will pull a real wooden cart from here on out. The battlefield is big, chaotic, and there’s lots going on, so you have to prepare if you’ve never done anything like this. It can be overwhelming.

Hynafol offers combat trainings at every event. Even though we have the test, we also do the battle orientation first thing Saturday of every expedition and at the Grand Gathering. We have several opportunities for orientation and practice on Sunday and Monday before the first big battle so you can find out if you like combat. I’ve seen many people who first come and are unsure, then eventually want to join the big Saturday fight without attending any orientations or practices, and they feel lost. Don’t do that. Go to the orientations and trainings. The worst thing is wasting 30–45 minutes of your seven days to find out you don’t like something versus actually finding out.

Feel free to use the hand-raise react if you have questions as I go through this. We have three guiding principles for combat at Hynafol: safety, fun, and candor. The safety stuff is covered in the previous call and in our Google Drive; watch the video and take the test to cover most safety requirements. Fun is self-evident, but combat is intended to be fun and competitive. Most people who enjoy foam sword fighting also enjoy the competitive aspect. Keep fighting fun for everyone — if your actions only lead to fun for you, people will complain and you will end up speaking with stewards.

Candor is the quality of being open and honest in expression — frankness. In our context, when you get a hit you should take the hit; when you hit somebody else and they don’t take the hit, keep fighting and have a good time. We try to make combat as open and honest as possible in something that is clearly subjective.

There are two kinds of combat modes: skirmishes and battles, which are competitive with objectives and require taking hits, and town/roleplay encounters, which are more about telling good stories and dying glorious deaths. Differentiate the two. When you’re on the battlefield, follow the rules from the combat video. When fighting for roleplay, think about whether you’re doing it for the fun of everyone or just trying to win. You can’t really “win” Hynafol overall; you can win instances, but not the whole saga.

A couple of safety things: weapons checks are mandatory every single time. Every event you come to you have to get your weapons rechecked — that includes arrows, bows, crossbows, and anything used to directly strike or fling things. Pay attention to what the rules say about what’s allowed. We found a few flaws last week, so we’ll update the document. Safety briefings are mandatory.

If a steward gives you a direction on the battlefield, you have to follow it. Don’t argue with officials trying to keep everybody safe. Biggest piece of advice: can you make your own weapons? Technically yes, but we do not recommend it. Buy from approved vendors and follow manufacturer guidance. Even if you claim to be the best weapon maker, manufacturers carry product liability insurance; many home-made weapons fail inspection and people waste time and money.

Physical preparation: again, I’m not a doctor. Hynafol is physically demanding. You will walk somewhere between 15 and 20 miles during an event. You’re on your feet all day, walking around for 12–13 hours a day. If you’re going to go on the battlefield, you will walk from respawn to the fight, fight for maybe 30 seconds to a minute, die, wait two minutes, then walk back to respawn and repeat. Our battlefield is getting larger this year at the Grand Gathering, so things will be more spread out. If you work a sedentary job, start basic cardiovascular exercise by walking regularly. Every Grand Gathering people report sore ankles, shin splints, knees, and hips by mid-week because the event is long. Medics are on site for real injuries, but they can’t do much for joint pain. To have the best time, start walking and training on uneven terrain — grass, trails, woods — since Hynafol takes place in Sherwood Forest and on open fields.

Make sure you have exceedingly comfortable, broken-in shoes or boots. A huge mistake people make is buying brand new boots and wearing them for the first time at the event; it will destroy your feet. Find socks you like and buy lots of them.

Question from Gervon about armor: Do you need big armor or can you wear decorum clothes and a sword? Answer: Yes and no. For every person wearing a bunch of armor, there are as many or more people wearing zero armor and having a great time. You do not need armor to have fun; you’ll die more, and that’s fine. Armor is expensive, hot, and tedious to put on and take off. You’ll likely live longer with armor, but whether you have more fun is up to you. You don’t have to spend $1,000 to have a good time — a simple kettle or Norman nasal helm and some inexpensive chain mail help a lot. I recommend starting with a helmet — protect your head.

Armor and heat: consider how you’ll deal with Texas heat. Armor is hot, even in November. Layering a gambeson and armor is out of the question for most people; some hardcore people do it, but many put it on and have to take it off after 20 minutes due to heat. Train in armor before the event — go for hikes in your medieval getup to prepare for sustained heat.

Core mechanics of fighting: it is exceedingly simple. All weapons do one point of damage. Your head, arms, legs, and torso each have one health point. If you get hit in the head or torso, you are dead because those are vital areas. You can’t hit people in the face or directly in the back of the head, and you can’t hit the groin. Armor stacks on top of that and is listed in the rules. The only exception is monsters: if a monster touches you, you’re dead.

Some safety rules to highlight: shield bashing is not allowed — you can’t use shields to apply pressure because that turns into pushing bodies and toppling people. You can place your shield in front of another shield wall and fight, but you may not smash into people with your shield, even if they don’t have a shield. You are not allowed to grapple, grab, or restrain other people’s weapons. There is gray area for batting things away or spears getting stuck, but don’t try to grab weapons out of hands. No thrusting to the head; that includes arrows. One common mistake is pointing spears up to poke people in the face — don’t do that. Protect eyeballs: our recommendation is that everyone wear eye protection on the battlefield. It does not have to be decorum — any safety glasses that protect your eyes are fine.

We have an excessive force rule: you should not hit people hard for hits to count. All you have to do is make contact with your weapon. In early years we had people using halberds to chop like Paul Bunyan, and that isn’t allowed. Stewards have final call on the battlefield; if someone in orange or green tells you something, their word is law — you can escalate after the battle if needed.

Etiquette: when you die, turn your weapon upside down and go down on a knee if safe. If it’s not safe, you can get up and go to respawn. You’re supposed to be dead for around two minutes. Dead people don’t talk and cannot communicate. There’s a lot of fudging of this rule, but dead people don’t talk; until you’ve respawned you can’t give tactical directions. Dead people walk — they don’t run. Stay dead for an appropriate amount of time. The reason is that the side that defeated you should get the advantage; you don’t get to immediately respawn and rejoin the fight.

Recap: remember our three pillars — safety, fun, and candor. Make sure you take the combat test on the website; we’ll be checking for it at the archives by the Grand Gathering if not sooner. Prepare yourself physically for Hynafol with cardiovascular exercise and by taking care of your body. Walking is necessary. The fun doesn’t come to you — you find it by walking around for a week straight. Battles are long slogs of fighting with foam-covered sticks and a lot of walking. Start preparing now: get good boots, break them in, and find socks you love.

That’s my spiel tonight. Thoughts, questions, comments — do the hand-raise thing about combat or anything else. If nobody has any questions and you have ticket questions, stay here; otherwise we’ll do breakout rooms. Thanks for coming and dealing with my nasality. Love you lots. Bye-bye.