Resistances: magic resistance and the elements

How magic resistance is rolled against a spell, how fire, cold, shock and poison resistance reduce damage, and what the manual does not say about the rest.

verified 6.37updated 2026-10-02 · Jake7 min read

A unit’s resistances are its ways of shrugging off things that armour does not stop: spells, fire, frost, lightning and poison. They work in two quite different ways. Magic resistance is a number a unit rolls with when a spell tries to take hold of it. The elemental resistances are a number taken off the damage of one kind of attack. This page covers both, and says plainly where the manual leaves a question open.

All figures here are the ones the game’s manual states. We have not re-measured them, so this page reports what Illwinter says the rules are.

Magic resistance

The manual describes magic resistance as defence against magic, the way defence skill is defence against a blow in melee. It adds a warning, though: not every spell has to get past it. Many spells never ask for a resistance check at all.

Where a spell does ask, the manual calls magic resistance protection from magic. It is most often all or nothing: the target either resists or does not. Against a few spells a successful check only softens the result, so that the target suffers crippling injuries instead of dying outright.

The resistance check

A spell whose description says that magic resistance negates it is settled with two rolls, one from each side:

• The caster rolls 11, plus a DRN, plus half of any skill the caster has in the spell’s magic path beyond the spell’s own requirement.
• The target rolls its magic resistance, plus a DRN, plus half of its own skill in that path.

The caster wins a tie. Most targets have no magic skill at all, so most of the time the target’s roll is simply its magic resistance plus a DRN.

Easy and hard to resist

Spell descriptions can say that magic resistance negates the spell easily. In that case the caster takes a -4 penalty on the penetration roll. The manual says this is the same thing as a spell being easy to resist, and that a spell that is hard to resist gives a +4 bonus to the roll instead. The spell tables mark the easy kind with an MR- flag and the ordinary kind with MR.

The same rules apply to battle enchantments that keep acting on the units on the field and call for a resistance check each time. A skilled caster, or one carrying an item that boosts penetration, gets the benefit there too.

Other effects that ask for a resistance roll

Spells are not the only users. The manual names these:

• A medusa’s gaze petrifies an attacker who fails a magic resistance roll. When the petrification wears off, after about three to six rounds, the unit rolls again; if it passes it returns to normal, and if it fails it dies.
• A dream seducer must beat a difficult magic resistance roll before the usual morale check, and the lure of the sirens begins with a difficult magic resistance check too. In both, items that boost penetration help against the resistance roll.
• The clouds listed on the status effects page mark some of their effects as easy to resist or as resisted by a normal check.

Raising or lowering magic resistance

The manual lists several places where magic resistance moves:

• Level 4 of the Astral path gives a pretender or mage +1 magic resistance as an indirect magic bonus.
• A blessing can give resistance as one of its effects.
• The manual’s experience table gives +1 magic resistance at 400 experience points.
• Pretenders and prophets in friendly dominion gain half a point of magic resistance per level of dominion, and lose half a point per level in enemy dominion.

Elemental resistances

The unit sheet and the spell tables abbreviate the four elemental resistances as CR, FR, PR and SR: cold, fire, poison and shock. A unit can also be vulnerable to an element; the manual says fire vulnerability counts as negative fire resistance, and cold vulnerability as negative cold resistance.

How the reduction works

An elemental resistance works something like protection, with an extra step. The resistance value is subtracted from the damage, and then the damage that is left is cut by a percentage equal to twice the resistance value.

Followed to its end, the rule makes any unit with 50 points of resistance to a kind of damage immune to it. The manual works through one case:

1. A Pillar of Fire spell of fire damage 35 hits a unit with fire resistance 15 and armour of protection 10.
2. The damage DRN comes out at 11, so the blow is worth 46 fire damage.
3. The spell pierces, so the armour yields 5; the resistance yields 15 untouched. A defensive DRN of 6 brings the sum to 26.
4. 46 minus 26 leaves 20. Twice the fire resistance is 30, so 30 percent comes off that 20, and the target ends up with 14 points of damage.

The armour is halved by the attack, but the resistance is not.

Fatigue damage counts double

Some attacks, such as the thunder spells, hurt by adding fatigue rather than removing hit points. Against those, an elemental resistance gives double protection. The manual’s figures: shock resistance 5 takes 10 off the fatigue effect of a thunder spell, and shock resistance 15 gives a protection of 30 against the fatigue damage of a Thunder Strike.

Extra effects of each element

A resistance does more than shave damage. The manual’s rules for the lingering effects use the resistance value directly:

• Fire resistance. Each round, a burning unit has a 25 percent chance of putting the fire out, plus its fire resistance. A unit with 5 or more fire resistance takes only half the burning damage, and a unit with 10 or more cannot catch fire at all. See status effects for burning.
• Cold resistance. A frozen unit has a 25 percent chance of thawing each round, plus its cold resistance. A unit with 10 or more cold resistance never freezes.
• Poison resistance. It reduces the total poison damage when the poison first lands. It has no effect on how long the poison lasts; once it has taken hold, resistance does nothing more.
• Shock resistance. The manual gives it no effect beyond the damage reduction above, and the double effect against fatigue damage.

Bless and path bonuses

Several of the manual’s tables hand out elemental resistances:

• The Fire bless at level 2 gives fire resistance. The Air, Water and Nature blesses give shock resistance, cold resistance and poison resistance at their matching levels.
• The manual’s indirect magic bonus table gives a mage 5 fire, shock or cold resistance at skill 3 in Fire, Air or Water, and 5 poison resistance at skill 3 in Nature. The same table lists a further +5 at skill 4 and does not say more about it.
• Several nations’ descriptions give their people partial resistance to cold, fire or poison, and the spell lists include spells that grant elemental resistances.

Slash, pierce and blunt resistance

Unit entries use SlR, PiR and BlR for a unit that is resistant to slashing, piercing or blunt blows. The three kinds of blow themselves are on the damage types page. The manual’s flame jelly summon is one example: it is listed as piercing and blunt resistant, with fire resistance and poison resistance of 15 each.

The manual does not say what these three flags do in numbers. It does not give a percentage, a number of points, or how they combine with armour-piercing. This page cannot tell you more than that the flags exist.

What this page does not cover

• How affliction resistance, which the Earth path grants, works. The manual lists the bonus but not its effect.
• Whether and how elemental resistances apply to the damage of battlefield clouds. The manual says cloud damage ignores armour; it does not mention resistances.
• The numeric effect of slash, pierce and blunt resistance, as above.
• Anything about how often resistance checks are won by a given number. The roll is described; its odds are not.