Frag Grenade

Lore & Background

The Lethal Company's supply manifests list the Frag Grenade under 'Expendable Ordinance, Class II.' The corporate memo that accompanies its purchase is characteristically terse: 'For use against biological anomalies. Operator assumes all liability for collateral damage to self or facility.' There is no further instruction, no safety briefing, no warning label beyond the obvious. The Company expects its employees to figure out the rest, which is to say, it expects them to die trying.

In the grimy warehouses and rusted processing plants that make up the Scavenge sites, the Frag becomes a psychological weapon as much as a physical one. The sound of a pin being pulled, the short whistle of the fuse, the concussive crack of detonation — these echo off concrete walls and terrify even the creatures that normally stalk the dark. Crews report that a single well-placed Frag can send a pack of Scavengers scattering, buying precious seconds to reach the extraction point.

Yet the Company's indifference to operator safety is not merely bureaucratic. The blast radius is unforgiving, and the grenades are manufactured in the same back-alley facilities that supply the rest of the Company's questionable equipment. There are no quality-control stamps, no lot numbers. You pull the pin and you pray the fuse is timed correctly. Most of the time, it is. The time it isn't, the incident report is filed under 'Employee Error' and the scrap tally is zeroed out.

In Their Own Story

The hallway smelled of wet rust and something older, something organic. Mara counted three Scavengers by the flicker of their eye-shine, maybe four. Her pistol had two rounds. Her partner, Dex, was down the corridor, his flashlight beam sweeping uselessly across the ceiling.

She didn't think. She never thought. Her fingers found the cold steel of the grenade in her vest pocket, and the pin came out with a soft, almost polite click. The fuse hissed — a thin, reedy sound that was somehow louder than the growling ahead.

She lobbed it. One, two, three…

The world turned white. The concrete floor buckled. When the ringing in her ears faded, the hallway was empty except for scorch marks and a single, twitching limb. Dex's flashlight was still on, still sweeping the ceiling, as if nothing had happened.

Mara exhaled. She had one left in her pocket. She decided not to think about that.

Reader's Guide

Frag Grenade — a throwable explosive that detonates after a short fuse, dealing heavy area-of-effect damage to everything in the blast radius, including you.

- Damage: High, concentrated in a short radius around the detonation point - Range: Throw distance is limited by your arm; the blast radius extends a few meters from impact - Fuse: A few seconds of delay between throw and detonation - Quantity: Limited per run; each grenade is single-use - Weight: Light enough to carry multiple, but each one is gone forever once thrown

TACTICAL NOTE: Deploy the Frag when you are swarmed, when a Stalker is cornering you in a tight space, or when you need to clear a room before pushing forward. It is the equalizer against numbers. AVOID using it in enclosed spaces where the blast will catch you, or when you are the only one in the radius — the self-damage is real and can drop you to zero. A common new-crew mistake is throwing the Frag at an enemy that is still twenty meters away, then standing still while the fuse ticks down. The grenade does not track. It lands where it lands. Move after you throw. Always move.

Did You Know?

• The Frag Grenade's self-damage mechanic means a crew member can take down their own teammate with a poorly aimed throw, and the Company's incident log will simply record 'friendly fire' with no further comment.
• Because the grenade is single-use and limited per run, experienced crews often hoard their Figs for the final stretch of a shift, treating them as insurance against the most dangerous encounters near extraction.
• The detonation's concussive force can shatter breakable objects in the facility, potentially opening new paths or destroying scrap you were about to collect — a trade-off the Company's memo does not mention.
• In co-op play, one player's Frag can save an entire crew from a multi-enemy ambush, making it the most 'team-saving' item in the arsenal despite its high cost.