Fate of the Norns

So when running games I'm fairly quick to use the rules as guidelines that are second to a good story/challenging fight. I'm curious how often other Norns do that though in this system. Example is I had the players fighting what could be best described as a Death Elemental, a force of nature that couldn't even be killed and they were in fact supposed to flee from it. I didn't even give it hard stats. I just said it has these moves that do this amount of damage and can move this fast. Now I'm not saying I would do this for every fight of course, just when the system doesn't offer me the options I need, I use it as a guideline and move on.

I try to find something that is within the system if I can and have time before hand, but at the table, all bets are off. I've done all sorts of things (see rabble and underlings somewhere around here, for example)

I've found that the best encounters have a battlefield that is as developed as the encounter. The problem is that sometimes the rules don't support what I have in mind for an encounter. I'd go into more depth but my players read these forums and I haven't run this encounter I've got in mind yet. An example though was they were fighting in a cavern that was collapsing. Random chunks of cave falling onto people. I just gave everybody a 1 in 3 chance of being hit by a big enough piece and pulled runes. If I got a physical they got hit for damage. Then put a smattering of rough terrain marks on the board.

I would love to read your encounters since we have this planned for our Monster Manual kickstarter. Not only will we have zero-prep monsters, but we also want to create encounters with special environmental considerations (like a longship battle against a kraken). We also have room for a few add-on environment rules in the bestiary, so making your own environmental mechanics would be easier. This is a super relevant topic for us. Hopefully we can discuss your encounters, suggest solutions using RGS and you can test them out and report back as to how well they worked. Then we could factor in the feedback into the bestiary beta cycle.

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I've already talk about this in another thread, but no harm in repeating it

In LotA, there is now an option to add extra initiative tiles for the environment. I did a fight in Muspelheim and those tiles representent the lava and agas that was affecting the players. So sometimes i would do damage, sometime give conditions like degeneration or blind. So you could also do things like that. In another fight the player had to deal with the boat getting drag by the whirlpool they were in at the same time as fighting the Kraken.