Recently, I became aware of the Quar. Aren’t they neat?

A squad of Quar soldiers, with officers, standard-bearer, and messenger squirrel handler. Source: https://rhyfler.com

These funny anteater people are the stars of a couple of miniature wargames, the 28mm-scale Clash of Rhyfles and the 15mm-scale This Quar’s War. Both of these have their rulebooks freely available here, which is also where the image above comes from.

An individual Quar is a funny little person who just wants to chill with a hot cup of tea and a plate of moth cakes. Quar societies however are very, er, quarrelsome, so most of their history is an endless procession of wars.

I was motivated to write this article both because I think the setting is neat, and because the technical information about Quar weapons in the Clash of Rhyfles game made me think I can stat them up in GURPS.

Very Short Setting Summary

The wargames cover a particularly turbulent period in the history of Aldwyn, the Quar home world. It’s marked by at least twenty years of worldwide trench warfare between two large multinational coalitions. The tech level is somewhere between WW1 and WW2, and this is pretty much the war that introduced industrial warfare to their world.

If the idea of these adorable creatures being fed into one of the worst meat-grinders imaginable is horrifying to you, then you get the setting’s main idea. I’ve heard it described as “grimsical”. It replaces the “dark” vibe from “grimdark” with “whimsical”, but it’s still grim. The cuter the miniatures for their soldiers and tanks get, the stronger the dissonance becomes.

The Clash or Rhyfles quickstart book centers on the two main factions of the war. The Crusade is a coalition of former monarchies who successfully toppled their old regimes and became republics. They’re led by the Republic of Tok, and made up of many smaller nations that follow the same standards for equipment and tactics. The rules here could be used for quar from any of those places.

On the other side, the Kingdom of Coftyr leads an alliance of the world’s remaining monarchies to stamp out this revolution. Each kingdom here tends to be visually distinct, as their whole thing is adherence to ancient traditions and heraldry. Therefore, the book only covers Coftyr itself.

Free add-ons provide details for “sub-factions” allied to either side. These are Crusader or monarchist nations who do their own thing on the battlefield.

As usual for wargames, both sides are morally ambiguous. Opposing monarchy is a good thing in my book, but the Crusade is also the side that introduced industrial warfare to the world. Coftyr flavor text is all about honor and chivalry and heroism, but they adopted industrial warfare just as readily and at the end of the day are still defenders of absolute monarchy.

I get the impression that the world of Alwyn could settle into a more or less stable configuration if everyone just stopped and signed a status quo peace treaty, but they’ve all been fighting for 20 years by now and none of their leaders show any sign of wanting to stop.

As usual for wargames, you pick the side you think looks neater, paint them up, and pit them against other factions in battles that would fit somewhere in those decades of war. Most of these battles focus on infantry with the occasional tanks thrown in. There seem to be airships, but I don’t know if they have airplanes yet.

Quar in GURPS

The typical Quar is about 1.5 meters tall and weights around 60kg. They follow a largely humanoid body plan. Their skins can take on any of a large number of hues, from yellows and greens to blues and purples and oranges. Often, they’re a little mottled. Their diet tends to include lots of bugs, though those are often prepared as ingredients in dishes that we would otherwise recognize.

Stat-wise, I’d say they are absolutely identical to humans. If you insist on being strict, make them about a foot shorter than their ST would indicate, but do not adjust their stats in any other way. Being a Quar costs 0 points.

Because that’s the thing, you see? Quar are just people. The horrors inflicted on them are horrible because war is horrible, not because Quar are adorable.

Quar Guns in GURPS

Guns in Clash or Rhyfles don’t actually have damage ratings, just range and optional traits. The results of a ranged attack roll depend entirely on the degree of success for your skill roll. They might leave a target unaffected, Gobsmacked (stunned) or Taken Out, which is different from “dead”: they might still be rescued during or after the battle.

However, the skirmish game rules include enough fluff about the infantry weapons of the Crusade that I kinda want to try statting them up in GURPS. If I ever get the same information for the Coftyri ones, I’ll stat them up too.

The book mentiones the muzzle velocity and caliber of a couple of the weapons, and if I make a guess about the weight of the bullet I can plug those three things in the simplest possible version of the unofficial official GURPS ballistics equation to get a damage figure.

That link also contains a complete spreadsheet that demands things like chamber pressure, which I have no chance of figuring out. So stuff like Accuracy and range will be derived by the older method of eyeballing existing guns, as will bullet weight.

The numbers in the original material are just there for color, of course. None of them affect the rules of the miniature wargame itself. But if we take them as true, we see that Quar are very fond guns with big bullets and powerful propellant charges, fired out of guns with short barrels and very light construction. The recoil on those is gonna be ridiculous.

The Bogen Rifle

The signature weapon of the Crusade rhyfler, the Bogen semi-automatic rifle is said to fire a 12mm bullet at 580m/s. It uses a 5 or 10 round magazine and weights 2.4kg “fully loaded”. Its effective range is 150-250 meters.

The closest real-world bullet to this one in GURPS High-Tech is the .45-something family of rifle rounds, which are 11.43mm in diameter and weight 31 grams. After some fiddling, I decide to go with a slightly lower 27 grams for the Quar bullet, which gives us exactly 7d damage. This is pi+ because of the caliber. Picture them as being broader, shorter and rounder than Earth rifle cartridges, which is in theme for all things Quar.

This gives us a gun that packs about the same punch as a real-world M1 Garand rifle while having almost exactly half its weight and about the length of an M16 assault rifle. That’s going to have a significant kick, to say the least.

TL Weapon Damage Acc Range Weight RoF Shots ST Bulk Rcl
7 Bogen 7d pi+ 3 900/3500 2.4kg/0.36kg 3 5(3) 11† -5 4

The Rhyshi (R4) Heavy Rifle

Only slightly longer than the Bogen, the Rhyshi fires a huge 20mm round with a 720m/s muzzle velocity. Its magazine carries seven of those, and it’s said to require a solid stance and firm support to shoot with any kind of accuracy. A squad mate’s shoulder will do for support, according to the book, but I’m going to give this rifle an integral folding bipod because I’m not a monster. A properly braced R4 has greater range than the Bogen, and can penetrate up to “medium” vehicular armor.

The closest thing to this I can find on High-Tech is the Mauser Tank-Gewehr 18, the WW1 German anti-tank rifle. Its caliber is “only” 13mm, but it’s the largest anti-tank rifle in that table that is even removely Quar-portable. Plugging its bullet mass, caliber and printed velocity in our magic spreadsheet, we get 10d+3 damage, which following High-Tech convention can be rounded and written as 5dx2. Let’s also give it an armor-piercing round, because I see the WW1 tank examples in the book have DR 45.

5dx2 is the same damage as the T-Gew18, but the Rhyshi again weights less than half of what the real gun does. It’s not that much longer than the Bogen either, so it’s gonna be a beast to handle unless it’s properly braced. As the book says, Quar Crusaders frequently attach a bayonet to the Rhyshi because there’s no way it can be fired in close quarters.

TL Weapon Damage Acc Range Weight RoF Shots ST Bulk Rcl
7 Rhyshi 5dx2(2) pi+ 4 1100/4400 7.5kg/1kg 3 7(3) 18B† -6 7

Grifkis Shotgun

This is a 10-gauge, six-kilo trench gun firing buckshot ammo. The only Crusade gun to still be largely hand-made, it’s carried by officers as a badge of honor and a symbol of courage. The illustration shows its barrel is fairly short, but it still has a shoulder stock.

No need to fiddle with spreadsheets this time, we have a 10G double-barrel shotgun in High Tech. Let’s borrow its stats and adjust for the shortened “whippet” barrels:

TL Weapon Damage Acc Range Weight RoF Shots ST Bulk Rcl
6 Grifkis 2d-1 pi 3 40/800 6kg/0.15kg 2x13 2(3i) 12† -4 1/7

The short barrels give this gun a more pronounced muzzle blast (+1 to Hearing and Vision to locate when fired in the dark). I’m using the listed weight for it here, which makes it about 50% heavier than the real world example from High-Tech. Big caliber, two barrels, extra chonky? This is basically the Doom Super Shotgun.

H-11a Light Machine Gun

According to the book, this LMG fires the same round as the Bogen rifle, and the Crusade likes to use it as an offensive squad support weapon. It appears longer than the rifle, and can also be used in vehicular mounts when the force can’t find heavier MGs to put in there.

I think I’m just going to crib from High-Tech again, and blend some of the Bogen’s stats with those of the MG34.

TL Weapon Damage Acc Range Weight RoF Shots ST Bulk Rcl
7 H-11a 7d pi+ 5 900/3500 15kg/2.5kg 15 50(5) 12B† -7 2

This gives us a gun that’s actually heavier than the Rhyshi rifle, and whose recoil is manageable enough that it’s worth firing more than one bullet per turn. It fires rounds from a non-disintegrating cloth belt.

Final Impressions

Look at those things. Just look at them. Their damage values combined with the light weight and short barrel means they have powerful powder charges. Quar like big booms and they cannot lie.

The recoil on these things means the act of firing them is somewhere between “comical” and “painful for the shooter”. I’m guessing that a Taken Out result in the wargame very often means the target got spooked and decided to play dead, instead of actually being hit. This also explains why a quar can take themselves out on a bad skill roll.