Tarang

Tarang is an Indonesian transfer student with martial arts training.

His start attack is 1d6. Toughness is 2 and starting luck 3, all average. Health is 6, nothing too amazing, but certainly enough to let him stand in the front lines.

Tarang starts with the Gratitude ability, which enables him to gain 1 extra boost when anyone helps his attack.

HELPING: In Planet Apocalypse, you roll dice for your attack, and try to exceed a target’s toughness. For example, a First Circle demon has a Toughness of 3, so you need to roll 4 or more on a die to kill him. If a hero is in the same area with another hero, when he attacks, that second hero can spend 1 courage to “Help”. This increases the first hero’s die type by one step. For example, if Cindrew is attacking, her starting die is a 1d4. If she gets help from another player, that die gets bumped up to 1d6. If TWO heroes each help her, it rises to 1d8, and so forth.

Well, Tarang may only have 1d6, but because of his ongoing Gratitude ability, if just one hero helps him, he bumps up to 1d10 right away – that’s enough to give him a good shot at killing even Fiends (toughness 6). This is a good ability, but of course to use it, you need to get that help in the first place, which means you need to (A) be in the same area as another hero and (B) that hero has to be willing and able to spare 1 courage to bump up your attack.

Tarang’s other two abilities are Prayer and Silat. Prayer lets Tarang “regenerate” one point of health each turn for free. This is in addition to any First Aid he receives. Silat is an excellent combat weapon – if Tarang kills a demon with his attack, then he can kill another demon (of a lower circle) present. For example, say that Tarang rolls a 4 on his attack. That’s enough to kill a First Circle demon, so he does. In this case, if he has Silat, he can apply it to kill, for free, a Limbo minion as well. That’s two for the price of one, and he earns 1 courage for each demon killed.

Tarang’s flaw is Cowardice. He cannot enter an area with a might Third or Fourth circle demon unless another hero is already present. Sometimes this means he can’t move to a necessary destination, because a high-level demon blocks his path. This gets more and more important as the game progresses.

How Tarang works

Tarang is a tough combat warrior, who absolutely has to lean on other players to achieve success. His Gratitude bonus and Cowardice flaw both demand the cooperation of other players, or he will be crippled in play.

Tarang’s tech tree is interesting because his two Start options each give him one of his abilities, meaning they are front-loaded. So his first decision quite often is whether to go for defense (Prayer) or offense (Silat), and this depends on the make up of the team more than anything else. If the other players are mostly support-oriented, he should go for Silat. If they are also combat-effective, he should get Prayer.

His growth tree also adds 1d6 to his attack and boosts a die by a step (thus, without getting a combat gift, he can end up with 1d8+1d6, which is respectable). He also has a Toughness boost available to him, plus a gift which “only” gives him 4 Luck.

Tarang is a good all-around hero, though his dependency on other heroes means you’ll want to keep an eye on the other player’s activities. He’s no lone wolf.

Tarang only has one name, because I learned recently that many Indonesians have just one name, and I thought that was cool. He is loosely based on the hero of the extremely violent Indonesian film The Raid, which I dearly loved.