Social Actions (Warhammer Cards I Forgot to Blog, Part 1)

I made these cards for my Warhammer Campaign (that wrapped up two months ago). I apparently forgot to post them to the web at all. Oops.

I thought about them today because of a thread over in the Fantasy Flight Forums about how to encourage players to actually invest in Social Actions.

So, here's a number of new Social Actions for Warhammer 3rd Edition. Feel free to use these in your game. None of them have been tested much at all, because these were made available very late in the campaign, at a point where the PCs had become very accustomed to solving things violently. I think I'll just post them here alphabetically:

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"A Second Of Doubt" is a Social Action in name only. Really, it's just a way to penalize one NPC's initiative roll, and/or buy your whole party a moment to get into position. There's nothing here that stops you from using it in physical combat, though green side is just a little better in Social encounters than either side is in an actual fight.

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"Evil Eye" lies somewhere between Social Action and Hedge Magic. It's a quick way to bury someone in Stress and Shame. It inflicts the Ill-Fortune Condition, which if memory serves correctly can be very potent should the social conflict later devolve into actual physical battle. The double-chaos-star line is rather disastrous, so you need to be very pick about choosing targets with a low Willpower. The action itself uses Willpower, so it may be appealing to characters other than those typically making the social checks in your group.

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"Hidden Mean Streak" relies on a variety of Condition cards to do its dirty work. It's for characters that are normally very Charming and noble, but who can unleash unexpected temper when pushed too far. The Reckless and Conservative sides of the card play very differently.

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"Holier Than Thou", like "Evil Eye", lets you influence the target with your Willpower, and the Thunderstruck condition softens them up should the situation later devolve into combat. It doesn't deliver quite the beating that "Evil Eye" does, but the downsides of a bad roll aren't nearly as dangerous, either.

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"Muse" is unlikely to see much use by PCs, but it was kind of a fun idea to try to model in-game. You'd need a pretty unusual campaign for it to be worth the XP. It's stronger when being used on an NPC, since rarely do you want to Influence a fellow PC. The bonus dice are fairly low, but most of the time you'll also be able to add 1 or 2 Fortune dice for the "Assist" manoeuvre, and they'd certainly stack with this.

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"Shift The Blame" lets you redirect trouble so that your rivals go down in your sinking ship. It's actually pretty potent, but requires just the right situation to use. If the social encounter has some mook support for the villain, this is a good way to break them up. And since it's a reaction, it doesn't stop you from engaging in more shenanigans in your own turn as well.

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"This Could Get Ugly" is a Strength-based Intimidation check that drains A/C/E from NPCs and breaks up Henchman groups on a good roll. I made it specifically to address the way that the existing Intimidation actions (like "Fear Me") were unlikely to actually reduce the effectiveness of packs of mooks. The majority of the power lies in the comet effects, to make it worth spending your XP on yellow dice in Intimidate.

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"Unwanted Attention" is an aggressive use of Charm to "out" someone that's up to no good. It's meant to be a way to apply pressure to suspected villains. It's a contested check against their Skullduggery, so experienced criminals will resist it better than common street thugs or misbehaving noblemen.

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The Reaction cards above are just guesses at an appropriate power level, because there's few Social reactions to use as a template or guide.

The normal Social Actions in the above are pretty well balanced against existing Social actions like "Flirt" (not "Inspiring Words" which is arguably over-powered with it's area-effects and low difficulty).  I did this big number crunching about the relative value of various effects at a variety of different triggering (1 boon, 2 boons, 1 comet, etc) levels. I wanted cards that were good, but not out of line with most of the official Social actions.

The red sides of the cards are (more often than not) a little "better on paper" than the green sides to compensate for the green dice generating better boon/bane results than the red dice do.

I had a few more Social Action ideas I'd sketched out but didn't make cards for. I just glanced over the text file where I did all the math on trying to balance them, but I don't feel the others were close enough to done to be worth sharing here.  At the time I'd planned to come back to them later, but today my math notes like daunting and I'm not even GMing the game any more. So, "don't hold your breath" is what I'm saying.

But this did remind me of a whole lot more cards I made (not just for Social Encounters, but mostly NPC-only cards), that I've never posted here. If I find time in the near future, I'll stick them up on the blog.

Push 'Em Off The Pier

Here's an NPC action I made for my Warhammer Campaign. It's very situational, only any good for staging a brawl on the docks.

The card also hasn't been tested at all, so I make no promises about it. The PCs in my campaign short-circuited the encounter before the henchmen could even show up. They dropped the villain to within 2 wounds of a KO before he could act (or call for help), and then shot him again after he surrendered.

My plan had been to use the "Overboard!" card from the Dreadfleet Captains POD expansion as the "new terrain card" mentioned on the triple-success line, but you might choose a less daunting card if your water isn't quite so deep and fast.

MINOR SPOILER ALERT: The above card is very loosely based off an encounter from The Enemy Within, and to a lesser extent the Grapple card from the core set. I scaled it back considerably from the effects of the opposed Athletics rolls on page 132 of TEW because the original tests were a bit over the top. In the adventure, the NPCs only needed a single success to automatically knock a PC out of the fight. This meant a simple Ruffian NPC with 1 Expertise had a 30% chance of effectively one-shotting a min-maxed melee-oriented PC and as high as an 80% chance of doing the same to the party's wizard or other low-strength character. I know the game is pretty deadly, but those numbers seemed un-fun. My version cuts those numbers down to 7% and 20%.  (GM's who feel I'm going too easy on the PCs could change the triple-success line to a double-success line to set the numbers at a more threatening 16% and 63%.)

Skaven can't hit the broad side of an inn

My party of 4 PCs in the Warhammer Fantasy campaign tore through over 30 skaven last session.  Dead ratmen were scattered all around the inn they'd been staying at. Most of those were wimpy skavenslave henchmen, but it was still impressive. Even counting each stack of 4 henchmen as a single NPC, they were still outnumbered by 3-to-1 or so. Only two of the PCs ended up wounded at all in the fight, and then only lightly. Well done, players!

It was kind of remarkable just how badly the dice hated the skaven. Their basic "Cheap Shot" attack includes a Chaos Star trigger that lets the target make a free counter-attack. Again and again the skaven kept rolling this result, and each time it resulted in multiple dead henchmen in the middle of the skaven's turn. It was brutal.

A couple weird observations about specific skaven subtypes in the 3rd Edition of WFRP:

• Stormvermin aren't nearly as tough as I imagined them to be. They only get one action card beyond the basics, which limited their ability to hit well. They had good dice pools on the attack, but since I chose an action with a large recharge rating, it only got to fire off once in the whole fight. That particular one action ended up paired with a bad die roll, so it accomplished very little. They do have a lot more armour than lesser skaven do... but it turns out it's not enough extra for it to actually matter. 3 of the 4 Stormvermin ended up being one-shot kills, IIRC.  Instead of being added challenge, it just meant the PCs didn't waste any unused damage points.  At least the PCs got to be bad-ass monster-killers. That's okay.
• Poison Wind Globadiers are incomplete to the point of being unusable as-written. They have stats in the Creature Guide and Creature Vault, but no actions. The implication being the GM is expected to just have them use Basic Ranged Attack and their DR of 3. That means you'd be representing a vial full of poison gas as just a normal (kinda weak even) single-target attack that technically doesn't even use the Poison effect. It's odd. As written, their protective gear doesn't actually protect them from their own weapon either, since it only uses normal damage and no resilience checks. I realized the day before the game that there's no card representing the Globadier's weapon / action, so I cobbled something together.  It wasn't perfect, but it worked well enough for a single encounter. It was certainly the only real threat in this particular fight.

Memo to Myself: I probably need to make my PCs take Easy (1d) Corruption tests at the start of the next session. I posted the action above to the Warhammer Forums and got an immediate response of "don't the books say that one of the ingredients in the Poison Wind Gas is Warpstone?" Oops, yep, the books do say that.

• I specifically chose not to use the Clan Skryre tracking sheet during this battle, because in general the monster's "Party Cards" never matter. They all rely on progress trackers that are 7 or 8 spaces long but only advance 1 space per turn. Fights are usually over in 2 or 3 turns, so it's not typically worth it. This time, though, the fight was actually a little longer than normal, and Chaos Stars advance the track. I actually kinda regret not using it.

Steal These Cards

As mentioned in my previous post, I spent part of the holiday break converting 2nd Ed Warhammer Spells into 3rd Ed Warhammer Spells and Blessings.

Here's a present for your local Priest of Ranald:


Click for a larger image.

Converting Ranaldian lore into 3rd Ed blessings was a little tricky. Between Ranald and his related god Handrich, there's a ton of redundant "bonus to Haggle check" spells in 2nd Ed that mostly weren't individually powerful, but could quickly get out of hand if the GM let them stack. I certainly don't want to convert them all, so I've tried to expend energies on only the most interesting ones and build in mechanisms to prevent them from stacking.

Eye of Ranald is a loose conversion of the 2nd Ed spell of the same name. I added the chaos-star line to make it feel like other Ranaldian blessings in 3rd Ed. Making it recharge at sunrise prevents the in-game economy from taking a beating.

Conveniently Open / Undeniably Open is a high-level conversion of Open. FFG had already made Open into Lockbreaker, but it was underwhelming. It let you roll Invocation + Fellowship instead of Skullduggery + Agility to open a lock, but gave you the same (nebulous) odds for lock-opening that you'd have if you did things by hand. Making this an Epic action gave me some freedom to make the effects more dramatic, and play with the differences based on stance. So the green side is Ranald arranging for the door to have been left unlocked, and the red side is Ranald forcing the door open for you.

Perfect Empathy is such a strange spell, and hardly feels like it should be in the Ranaldite repertoire. In 2nd Ed it was mainly a gigantic haggle-booster, which I nerfed because it would have broken the system. I left in the translation and interrogation aspects, because they're a heck of a lot more interesting than just saving you a few more silvers.

Rumour of Bounty is one of the more flavorful and interesting haggle-boosters in 2nd Ed, but the "reversed" version Rumour of Dearth seemed at first glance to be all but useless. Even in Warhammer FRP, how often are PCs actually merchants? Then it occurred to me, PCs always want to pawn or fence the crap they've looted from the battlefield and are never happy if the GM provides them with realistic pawn rates (5% to 20% of the retail price of the item). Now PCs can occasionally sell items for much more, provided they're willing to take the risks associated with a bad die roll.

I ended yesterday's Bright Order article with a list of other spells I may eventually convert. For Ranald, I'm afraid I don't really have a list. The only remaining spell I'd dream of converting is Trapsense, and that was technically redone by FFG as the terribly underpowered Gut Instinct.

I have, however, made a "Pilgrimage of Fingers" card for Ranald worshipers. I nearly posted it here, but it uses the "Secret Society" rules from Liber Ecstatica / Lure of Power, and that system very specifically states those cards are for secret tracking by the GM, and the PCs shouldn't know what benefits they are getting until they earn them. Effectively, they provide a plot line that helps the GM track how fast the character progresses on the "Quest" and what rewards they get for doing so.

New Spells From Old

One of the things I've done over the holiday break is make some new action cards for my Warhammer 3rd Ed campaign. The first several were loose conversions of 2nd Edition spells into 3rd Edition spells and blessings.  Here's some Bright Order spells I (re)made:

Click for a larger version.

Choleric Provocation is roughly a lighter version of "Choleric" from 2nd Ed's Realms of Sorcery. In the original, you got to choose who they were angry at, but they also got a lot of extra willpower rolls to try to shrug it off and would only actually attack if they really blew the test. I made it simpler and more elegant, but it lost some of the raw power in the translation. This seemed like a serviceable compromise.

Flashcook was pretty minor in 2nd Ed, where all it did was cook your food. However, I felt the precedent set by the Halfling Chef's meals enabled a 3rd Ed version of Flashcook that would actually be worth the XP.  So, here's a Flashcook that aids later Recovery checks. Cantrip can't do that. To eliminate excessive die-rolling, I made it possible to cook food for the whole party in one roll, and made sure it didn't stack with itself. It's just Rank 1, so it's not particularly potent, but healing is one of those areas where every little bit helps... maybe I should cut the power cost in half so you could make a banquet in a single roll?

Hearts of Fire is probably the best one in the group here, being much easier to use than the version in 2nd Ed. The problem with the old spell was you had to know in advance that you would be needing to take Fear tests, and cast no more than 10 minutes before the encounter. That wasn't likely to happen very often, so the solution was to make it a Reaction. For a relatively modest 4 power, you're getting bonus dice on the whole party's Fear checks, and giving them something useful to do with Boons on those rolls.

Soothing Red Wind is more or less a conversion of Shield of Aqshy, which had already been roughly converted by FFG into Shielding Winds of Aqshy. In the process, they changed the nature of the spell, instead of being protection from fire it was magical armour. It felt like "fire doesn't burn me" was totally a thing that Fire Mages ought to be able to do, so I made a card for it. Making it a Reaction frees up the caster to not have to anticipate the need nor waste a turn casting. The total damage or fatigue prevented is pretty small, but that's actually in keeping with the scale of the existing location and condition cards. It won't invalidate the dangers of a dragon, but it will let you escape from a burning building or most miscasts.

Other Bright Order Spells that I may convert down the road if I find time:

• Boiling Blood and/or Breathe Fire: Bright Mages really don't need more single-target kill spells, but these at least have interesting visuals to go with them. If I can think of a way to make them interesting instead of redundant, maybe I'll take a stab at them.
  
• Burning Vengeance and/or Consuming Wrath: Spells that make people angry and violent. If there's elegant ways to make them distinct from each other, Choleric Provocation, and all those many "white die to certain rolls" actions FFG made, I just might convert them one day.
• Cauterize: FFG already converted this one, but basically made it an unreliable healing spell that's not worth it unless you have Spell Mastery (or your GM hasn't read the Player's Guide and still lets you spam-cast healing spells). In 2nd Ed, it was a reliable way to save the life of a mortally wounded ko'd character, but it did no actual healing. Also, you could use it to brand people. I've got my eye on it.
• Inextinguishable Flame: Technically FFG already converted it (into Unquenchable Flame), but the duration of their version is in mere actions (not weeks or months), so a higher-level version that fixes that flaw would be a lot more useful.
• Ruin and Destruction: This was also technically converted by FFG (into Destructive Fires) but their version takes 8 turns to accomplish, and is thus useless during a fight. So, maybe a faster Rank 5 version is in order? I'm not certain.
• Taste of Fire: It made booze stronger and food spicier. So, it'll probably just stay "cantrip" unless I can think of some elegant way to make that useful in-game.

Half-Dead

I recently returned to running my Warhammer Fantasy campaign after a long break.  (My wife was in an accident a few months back, so gaming was out of the picture for a few months during the worst of her recovery.) I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to pick back up, despite the overall complexity of the system.

In last week's session, my players headed somewhere a little off the map. I'm running The Enemy Within (a published campaign from FFG), but with some extra subplots generated by the PCs during character creation. The father of one of the PCs has been added as an extra villain, and the PCs had an opportunity last week to break into his property while he was away. I had done some prep for such an eventuality, but that prep was done over 6 months ago and wasn't terribly fresh in my mind. I had to improvise a bit.

The evil father had dabbled in necromancy, tragically raising his dead wife from the grave as a bound ghoul. Now the PCs were breaking in while the father was away, and the undead mother was home. The PCs, of course, didn't know she was no longer dead.

I grabbed the bound ghoul card/sheet, but it's really more intended as a sidekick than a stand-alone fight. It's the necromancer's equivalent of the Ratcatcher's Small But Vicious Dog. I needed to dial it up a notch, and in a hurry, so I grabbed some extra cards while the PCs were plotting the break-in. I also boosted the ghouls Fear rating to Terror 2 on the basis that undead you knew in life are more traumatic and horrifying than just generic monsters.

The most important card I added (and the only one that got used) was "Half-Dead". It's from the Dreadfleet Print On Demand set. That set wasn't particularly well-received by the Warhammer community. For one thing, it was basically a marketing gimmick, being a cross-over product between a very expensive RPG and a very expensive board game. For another, it had power balance issues. This POD had 3 types of cards in it: Ridiculously high-level NPCs, ridiculously high-powered actions intended for use by those NPCs, and terrain cards which included 1 ridiculously high-powered captain's quarters. Assuming that you're aware the power level is through the roof, and willing to accept whatever ripple effects that has, it's got some interesting material.

Half-Dead is an attack card that can only be played when the attacker is dead or KO'd. It's your clichéd monster-movie ender, where the badguy they just killed suddenly lurches up for one or two more quick attacks. The villain recovers wounds, stress, and fatigue when they make the attack. The action doesn't recharge until the end of the encounter.... but that means the villain is technically unkillable.

My players broke in, failed some Terror checks and loaded up on Stress and Fatigue. The PC whose mother it was actually got to the point of the next Stress would make him pass out and the next Fatigue would give him an Insanity.  Party Tension went up every time the others attacked his mom. They got to Tension space #9, and on space #10 everyone would have suffered 1 Stress and Fatigue. That was deliciously intense, and fit the scene rather well. If not for the PC Priest using a blessing that reduced Stress and Fatigue in the middle of the fight, things would have ended poorly.

They killed the undead mother. The son grabbed her lifeless body and sobbed uncontrollably.

That's when I broke out the Half-Dead card, which the players didn't even not existed. At this point, the son had critical wounds and a disease from a previous scene, plus was right on the edge of insanity. It would have been a perfectly fine decision to have his undead mom take a bite out of him right then and there... but I've picked on this particular PC for several sessions in a row (as evidenced by the Crits and Diseases), so it was about time I be nice... well, as nice as you can be in the scene where you reveal that the character's father turned his mother into an unholy creature of the night.

So instead of ripping out his throat, momma protects him. "I won't let you hurt my baby boy!" she howls as she claws the face of his axe-wielding dwarven buddy standing right next to them.

Half-Dead doesn't restore a lot of Wounds, so she went down to the next hit. Then they beheaded the corpse. All this struggling was enough noise to wake the servants, so the PCs flee into the night.

A few minutes later, they realize they left damning evidence at the scene, so half the party sneaks back onto the property. The encounter had officially ended, so the headless corpse could use Half-Dead again... and since it was undead, being headless was at most a minor inconvenience. 

They had to kill her a third time. Then they burned her, and the building, to the ground. No more evidence. 

Technically the Half-Dead card as phrased would let the pile of ash attack them in the next scene (I said the Dreadfleet POD had power-balance issues), but felt like it had done enough already.

Good game all around. Very memorable and tense.

Later that same session, our Dwarven Runesmith was dishonored and became a TrollSlayer, but I'll save that story for another time.

Booster Packs full of Gamma Rays

UPDATE:  I've been directed to a video that gives more information about the game and it's randomized components, so after my original post I'm adding my thoughts on the new info.

Within the past week or two Wizards of the Coast released a new edition of the classic RPG Gamma World. I played a lot of Gamma World back in the day, and would be happy to try out a new edition, at least in theory. As it turns out though, there's one fact about the new edition that leaves me really cold. In general, when people grouse and complain about how expensive gaming is, I just roll my eyes. When they claim an RPG company is just in it for the money, and doesn't care about doing what's best for the game, or doing what makes the gamers happy, I tend to stand up for and defend the publishers. But in this particular case, I'm on the hater's bandwagon. Clearly, somebody at Wizards put profits  above functionality.

They replaced the mutation charts with a deck of cards.

Actually, at first glance, I really like the notion of cards. I've been a fan  of using card decks instead of charts and rulebooks for a long time.  It saves you time looking things up in the books, because you can keep your most commonly used cards at your fingertips all the time.  For a mechanic like mutations, or other special powers that help individualize PCs, using cards instead of charts can help with "niche preservation" (if you've already drawn that card, no one else can draw the exact same special power). Another reason I like the idea of mutation cards is because they let me tailor the "charts" on the fly. If there's a mutation I think is unbalanced, or too goofy, I could theoretically cull it from the deck. If there's one that I'd like to make more common, I could add an extra copy (assuming I'm not too hung up on the "niche preservation" mentioned previously). In short, I could really like this. When FFG used cards for the latest edition of Warhammer FRP, I really found it awesome.

The problem with the cards in Gamma World is that Wizards put them in random booster packs, selling an RPG like a CCG. By offering the cards in random boosters, most of what I like about cards goes away.  I'm almost certainly going to end up with multiples, so niche preservation goes out the window, unless I'm willing to waste some percentage of my investment.  I may buy a booster that's full of cards I already have and wouldn't want to put multiple copies of in the deck.  I may want to include an extra copy of some particular card, but can't reliably get one (cheaply, any way). Just bad all around, in my opinion.

If they were complete sets, decks of 50 non-random cards available for $10 or even $15, I'd happily embrace this game. Instead, it's boosters of 8 random cards for $4. Too pricey for my blood. 50 cents per line-item that could be on a chart in a rulebook sounds a little overpriced in and of itself, but knowing that past your second or third pack you'll be looking at a lot of random repeats just sours me to the whole idea. (As an aside, it's 8 cards for $4, whereas Magic: The Gathering by the same publisher, is 15 cards for $4.29, so even by their own precedents this is nearly double the average cost per card.)

Worse yet, the packs aren't just mutation cards, there's also technology cards. While I could perhaps warm up to random mutation card boosters (though it would have to be at a cheaper price to compensate for the frustrating duplicate cards), I don't imagine myself, as GM, being happy with restricting the weaponry of my NPCs (or the treasure to be gained, or the macguffin central to the plot) to whatever happened to be in the handful of boosters I might be willing to buy. So, rather than run a high risk of making a purchase I'm not going to be happy with, I'll just be steering clear of this new Gamma World entirely.

If they weren't random, I'd probably buy quite a few of them. Paizo Publishing does a "Game Mastery" series of card decks with just pictures of fantasy equipment and magic items. I buy a copy of nearly every deck they put out, because they come in set decks at reasonable prices, and you can look up the card list online first to see if any given set has cards you'll be likely to use. If Gamma World followed that business model, I'd certainly pick up the main game and at least the first two expansion decks, but I'm not willing to drop money on boosters.  For the record, random packaging is what eventually drove me to stop buying prepainted miniatures, too.

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UPDATE:  I've been directed to a video that gives more information. I'm a little less up in arms about it now, but I still think it's a weird decision to make, and can't help but feel it was a business decision first, and a game innovation second. So while I'm less upset about it, I don't think it would be a good match for me.

Video link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fccpiG09YbU&feature=related

In particular, the stuff I don't like:

• The idea that your mutations change every day is a little weird to me. I imagine I could warm up to that, but my initial reaction was not positive.
• The fact that players build their own technology decks bothers me. For one thing, this could lead to weird imbalances if one player buys more boosters than the others, or just has better luck. Even assuming a play group that shares a single card pool, though, I dread the metagame issues that come up from players making their own treasure decks. It seems like suspension of disbelief is likely to suffer as well if I describe you're fighting mutant chickens armed with clubs, and after the battle 1 PC finds a death ray and the others all find nanotech. 
• At the end of the video, they specifically address play balance, and say that the various mutation cards are not balanced against each other, some are just better than others. If that's the case, then why would a player put that in the deck they build for themselves? Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems like a really bad idea, for largely the same reasons I just mentioned about metagaming the Technology decks.
• On a related note, I am also a little worried by the statement that you'd draw a new Cryptic Alliance card each session to find out which secret society you are working for this week. Suspension of disbelief gets tricky when a mechanic forces weekly randomization of setting/flavor/fluff/conceptual information. Who the PCs are working for seems like it should be dictated by the needs of the scenario or the actions of the characters, not by a weekly random card flip.

What I do like:

• The commons (5 out of 8 cards in each booster) are not random, but preset so if you buy four consecutive boosters straight out of a fresh display they won't have any duplicate commons. However, having managed a game store for years, I suspect this won't in practice work as well as it does in theory. All it takes is one customer selecting a couple random packs out of the middle of the display pack to disrupt that for everyone that shops after them. A customer might do so out of ignorance, a desire to get duplicates of a particular common, or a desire to grab the pack that "feels lucky". That last one is something I'd see all the time when I ran the store.
• The general formula that each adventure adds new components and rules as well, like the Cryptic Alliance cards being added in Famine in Far-Go. I was apprehensive about a similar approach in Warhammer FRP, but eventually decided I kinda liked the "potpouri" "cornucopia" "hotdish" "mixed bag" method that gives you a lot of little expansions in each Warhammer product. I could live with that in Gamma World, if the rest of the concept weren't scaring me off.
• They rewrote the end of the world to blame it on the LHC. That amuses me. The reality implosion also justifies the weirdness of the Gamma World setting, and could plausibly explain the wonkier of the new setting/mechanics stuff such as mutations changing every session. I'm still not at all happy with randomized boosters or the metagame issues that come from players building their own decks, but they at least make some effort to justify some of this weirdness in the setting.

Actions Wanted

Brainstorming a short list of action cards that I think Warhammer 3rd could really use. Most of these would be actions you can buy with XP, not new basic actions.

• Hold Them At Bay - a card that makes it tricky for people to engage you, or get past you. This sort of thing can be done with existing Location rules, but it's a little fuzzy, and someone who rushes you will always get to attack first. This could be an on-going effect that causes fatigue or penalty dice to anyone trying to get close to you while it's recharging. Since Fatigue=Wounds for most NPCs, that would work pretty well, I think.
  
• Set To Receive Charge - a card that does bonus damage if it's your first attack since the opponent engaged you. (Alternately, this might actual be some sort of interrupt / pre-empt type action, but the game doesn't do much of that. Fake Out is the only such card I can think of.)
• Feint - Strikes me as odd that they made Parry, Dodge, and Block into action cards, but didn't include the other assumed part of melee combat: the Feint. This would probably be a card to let you boost other attacks later. The trade-off would have to be pretty good, since you'd be losing an attack in one round to boost the later attack. Or maybe it could work like an active defense that gives bonus dice instead of penalty dice, but doesn't use your action?
• Double Parry - The one extra black die given by a Main Gauche seems a little under-powered. Perhaps that's for the best since it doesn't require any skill or investment to get it. There's certainly room for a better (or more frequent) two-weapon parry.
  
• Trample - An attack card that uses your Riding skill, with damage based on your mount. There's attacks that use Observation, Skullduggery, and even Leadership, so why not Riding?
• Trick Riding - Currently, any sort of Trick Riding would be done with the Perform A Stunt card. I feel that it's an oversight to not have any cards in the whole game that make you roll Riding. You can be generically "good" at riding, but not have any specific tricks that give a real benefit or showcase your talents, which is pretty odd given how many other cards there are that give tricks and special moves for various skills.
• Something good for Roadwardens - This probably overlaps with the last two, since riding is one of their skills. There's just nothing special for Roadwardens at the moment. They have an odd combo of attributes and skills that just don't apply collectively to very many action cards. If there was an Intelligence + Weaponskill card, it'd be great for them, but no such thing exists.
  
• Boating Tricks - The Boatman Career has the special power of reducing a black die of penalties suffered for being on a boat. Which really only matters if you can talk the rest of the PCs into getting onto a boat with you. If you want to make the boatman stand out a bit more, you could easily add some sort of Master of the Tops or similar swashbuckling actions. Crazy flamboyant actions along the lines of the Roger's pirate swordsman school from 7th Sea.
  

The game already has a lot of actions, so the demand for actions in general is perhaps not great. At least not unless someone wants to make a particular character type. Coachmen and Boatmen, for example, don't have much to make them special, so the riding and boating tricks could be really useful if someone in your group drew one of those for their starting career. I could easily see how a Watchman or Soldier character might want the ability to hold a spot of ground.