So we had a weird situation come up in a game recently. A rune golem was engaged with some spearmen that were in the forest. The spearmen during their turn shifted. Looking through the rules it says that you can shift if engaged in terrain and to treat it as a disengage when you exit (81.8). The rules for disengaging say that you have to shift away from the contacted edge, but with terrain we were unsure how this worked. So in this example the spearmen player wanted to shift out and get position on the rune golem because he argued there isn't really a contacted edge while in terrain since you always treat it as fronts touching. Was this allowed, it's a bit unintuitive to me that you can disengage closer to an enemy but I didn't see anything super clear about contacted edge while in terrain. Or should you just have to shift on the direct opposite side that the rune golems.

I made an incredible ms paint drawing to show what happened with blue being the rune golem, black box the terrain, filled-green as the spearman and the blank box where they wanted to shift.

Thanks

I think you did it right. Follow the rules for exiting terrain, and count it as disengaging.

There IS a contacted edge for terrain. It's the front edge, always.

What this means for exiting terrain with a shift while engaged? Any position is acceptable, including the one shown above, however, since your contacted edge is your front edge, your shift MUST still be away from that contacted edge. So, your position can be anywhere, so long as your FRONT edge is contacting the terrain you just exited when you're done, not your side edge.

Alright so... after re-reading 81.4 I'm not as confident in what I said.

81.4 reads "IF the unit exits a piece of terrain by performing a shift action, any part of either the unit's front or side edge must be touching the edge of the terrain"

So, basically, in the case of exiting terrain, the direction of your shift doesn't matter, because you're not *actually* shifting.

Sort of like how a regular shift lets you move forward still, whereas shifting out of terrain, you can't do it and have your back edge touching, so...

I amend my previous answer to "Your position can be anywhere as long as either your front or side edges are contacting the terrain you just exited, even in the case of a disengage, though you still suffer the panic token for disengaging.