Resting, Healing, Dying

Resting and Healing

A “Rest” is a 2 hour period of light, relaxing, non-strenuous activity. Resting includes, but is not limited to, eating, drinking, and sleeping. Sleeping for 8 hours is 4 consecutive Rests.

When you Rest:

• Remove 1 [exhaustion].

• If you are missing Crit Health:

  • Regain 1 Crit Health.

• Otherwise, either:

  • Regain 1d6 Standard Health.

  • Flip a coin. If heads, remove 1 [injury].

Dying

If you reach 0 crit health¹ you are down. All damage taken while you are down is crit damage, if your negative crit health exceeds your total crit health, you die. If your crit health becomes positive, you are conscious again.

At the beginning of every round in which you are down, the GM rolls for your character on an Individual Consequence Table. You do not know what is on the table, and you do not know what you roll until:

• You regain consciousness.

• Someone checks on your body.

• Someone attempts to administer aid to you.

The [stabilized] condition is a common consequence. Death is another. When you become [stabilized] you stop rolling on the consequence table and start Resting. If you take damage while [stabilized], you are no longer Resting, start rolling on the consequence table again. At some point, the GM might stop rolling for your character. Hopefully you’re [stabilized]!²

If the whole party is down, the GM rolls on a Party Consequence table. This is almost certain death. You never know though, maybe you get rescued/jailed/possessed/repurposed as a nutrient dense mulch.

Consequence Tables

There are three basic outcomes on a consequence table:

• Become [stabilized].

• Die.

• Something bad happens, you recieve a debuff of some kind.

A ratio of 1:2:3 for [stabilized] / die / “something bad happens” is tough but fair. This is easily handled by a table with 6 entries:³

• 1-2: Death.

• 3-5: Something bad happens.

• 6: [stabilized].

If you want to be more lenient you can change the ratios or rule that a character doesn’t have to roll on the first round that they are out. Get spicy, put something positive on the table, the world is your oyster.

Bad Bad Things

Some temporary debuffs:

• [lame] for an hour.

• Take 1 [exhaustion].

• [injury: disable an arm].

• Die if you are downed again before your next Rest.

Some permanent debuffs:

• Lose an eye. Your max PER is 1.

• Lower STR by 1.

• Lower Crit Health by 1.

• Lose an arm.

Many groups don’t like permanent debuffs! Make tables tailored to whatever sort of game you are running. Maybe replace one Death outcome with a permanent debuff, so you have 1 [stabilized], 1 Death, 3 temporary debuffs, and 1 permanent debuff.

The role of these tables is to increase tension by introducing a high degree of risk and uncertainty without necessarily having to increase the probability of character death.

Some Consequence Tables

Individual Consequence Tables:

Nothing d4

1. Death.

2. Nothing happens.

3. Nothing happens.

4. You are [stabilized].

Generic d6

1. Death.

2. Die if you are downed again before your next Rest.

3. Take 1 [exhaustion].

4. [injury: disable an arm].

5. Nothing happens.

6. You are [stabilized].

The Fungal Caves

1. Death

2. Your body is failing. You experience brain death. Through your travels in this dense fungal cave system, you picked up a very minor infection which has been incubating in your nervous system. Had you escaped the caves, you would have fought this infection off, but you did not. As you die, this thin fungal network makes it’s move, rapidly liquifying what is beyond repair in order to salvage the rest of your body and commandeer your nervous system. Your character is dead. Their body is [stabilized]. When the body wakes up, you play as a fungal network with -2 SOCIAL piloting your character. See the Parasitic Funginoid species page for more info.⁴

3. Take 1 [exhaustion].

4. Nothing happens.

5. The spores floating in the air attempt start to infect and consume your dying body. If you recover, you reach a state of symbiosis with the bioluminescent fungus, and your skin permanently glows. At best you have disadvantage on all stealth checks if you are not completely covered up. If you are not covered up, you simply cannot stealth in the dark.

6. You are [stabilized].

Party Consequence Tables

In most cases, the thing that makes most sense is that the whole party dies, but maybe if they are attacked while traveling, something else happens!

Things that are context specific will be italicized.

1. Everyone dies.

2. Everyone dies.

3. Flip a coin for each character that is not [stabilized], on heads they are [stabilized], on tails they die.

4. The party wakes up in cells in local jail with all of their things missing.

5. Miraculously, no one is dead. All of their things have been stolen.

6. The players wake up having been rescued by strange legendary creatures / local band of Merry Men etc.

End

These rules make the rules on the website completely obsolete. If that link is broken, it means the rules on the website are correct now.

Next week is “Week of SOCIAL, Part 2”. After that, I’m planning on making a post about medical skills, healing items, that sort of thing. I’m hoping to get these smaller posts done at a pace a faster than one per week.

1. I have not been capitalizing “crit health” and “crit damage”. I probably should be! I’m keeping it lowercase for now for the sake of consistency.

2. GMs are encouraged to:

• Film their rolls on the consequence table.

• Put instant death somewhere on the consequence table.

• Raise an eyebrow, shake their head.

• Say, in varying tones of surprise, shock, and dismay: “wow”, “jeez”, “that’s crazy”.

3. If a table doesn’t specify what die to roll with and it has 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20, outcomes, use a d-whatever.

4. This is a lie, there is no Parasitic Funginoid page (yet!). If you want to make one you can probably build them into any fungal/cave people, including the group in Veins of the Earth who (I think) are called “Funginoids”. That’s where I got the name. The Parasitic Funginoid probably has some strong urge to extend the secret mycelium network of the funginoids (I don’t think this was in VotE). The Parasitic Funginoid probably has some funny little spore-based abilities, probably can’t be in the sun for too long, etc.
Anyway, you understand the idea here. Throw in some wacky context-specific consequences.