Adventuring | Crytures

The Mechanics of Adventuring

Travel and the Overland Map

Stamina, Mana and Resting

When adventuring in the wilderness, terrain is divided up into a grid of 6-mile hex spaces. Each space has a Biome with a different Density and random tables.

Travelling through known terrain, or simply passing from point A to point B, takes place in Passing Time and uses a Labor Action. You also must spend 1 Stamina for each space you travel through. The distance a party can travel is based on the lowest Speed of the party members, as well as the Density of the terrain.

Travel Speed dictates how much Density you can travel through in a single Labor Action. Your party's Travel Speed is equal to 6 + the lowest Speed among your party. If you exceed this amount, each party member loses 1 additional Stamina for each Density beyond the Travel Speed. Each space you travel through also triggers a Complication roll.

Travel Actions

During overland travel, party members can perform certain actions along the way.

Navigate

Cost: 1 Stamina per space

Labor Action

Effect: You chart a course to travel, then make the following check.

Roll: Sense + Survival

Difficulty: 5 + Spaces Moved

Complexity: Number of spaces moved

Success: You move through the intended spaces.

Failure: You move along your course for one space per success, then move in a different direction for the rest of the move. Roll 1d10. For every 2 of this roll (rounded up), you move clockwise from your intended destination.

Stamina is a resource that represents your ability to exert physical effort. It’s used to perform advanced combat maneuvers, refill your Health, and perform strenuous tasks. Mana represents your capacity for mental activity, including magic. Mana is used to heal and maintain control over multiple crytures, activate magical artifacts, and perform complex mental tasks.

In Strategic Time, you can spend a Passive Action to take a short rest. During a short rest, you may refill your Health by hydrating yourself with 1 unit of water and spending 1 Stamina. You may also meditate as a Focused Action to refill a cryture’s Health by spending 1 Mana.

In Passing Time, you can regain Stamina and Mana by sleeping with a Rest Action. Under normal circumstances, you and your crytures regain all Stamina and Mana. However, if your character hasn't eaten in the last 24 hours, they suffer a random injury when they awake.

When away from the comforts of civilization, you may not get the full benefit of a Rest Action without jumping through some hoops, such as engaging in a Camping Scenario.

Injuries

While player characters are out on adventures, they often need to overcome challenges by making talent checks. When a player fails these checks, they may suffer an injury, which takes the form of a penalty to their talents. With proper treatment from the Healing skill, a player will heal one injury per day while resting. Otherwise the penalties persist until proper medical care can be applied.

Each injury a player suffers inflicts a -1 die modifier to rolls that use the injured talent.

A character suffers an injury when they -

Are reduced to 0 Health.
Spend Stamina or Mana they don't have.
Fail a Talent check with an injury as a penalty.
Try to do strenuous activity, such as spending Stamina or Mana when they have none left.

When a character suffers an injury, the World Builder will randomly choose between Fitness, Agility, Intellect or Sense, (unless specified) and describe a fitting injury to affect that particular talent. The player will then mark it down on their character sheet next to the affected talent.

For roleplaying purposes, examples of injuries that may affect each talent are as follows.

Fitness

Anything that could affect your ability to exert physical force or endure physical hardship could be a fitness injury. Muscle injuries to the arms or upper body can make it hard to swing a sword or climb a tree. Contracting a flu can make a person weak in general, and inhaling smoke or toxic gasses can weaken the lungs and make physical activity difficult.

Agility

Leg injuries will make it difficult for someone to move with any speed or finesse. Even a jammed finger can hurt your fine motor skills, making it hard to pull a bowstring, pick a lock, or perform sleight-of-hand. Sickness can cause a person to become shaky and weak-kneed or lose their sense of balance. The same effects could be caused by toxins found in the wild.

Intellect

Head injuries are probably the most obvious way of damaging intellect, as they can make it difficult for a person to focus. Any consistent pain could be enough of a distraction to qualify as an intellect injury though, as long as it doesn't affect the physical talents directly. Poisons from plants or other environmental hazards can cause brain fog as well.

Sense

A hit to the head may cause blurry vision or a ringing in the ears, while a bloodied nose impairs your ability to smell and taste. Biological substances are probably the more common way to describe a sense injury, though. Even a common cold from sleeping in cold rain can dull all your senses significantly. Toxins may have even stronger effects on senses, such as hallucinations.

Healing Injuries

To heal an injury, someone needs to treat it with medical supplies, and succeed at a skill check of Intellect + Healing on the injured person. The difficulty of the check is equal to 10, minus the character's injured Talent, while the complexity is equal to the number of injuries that player currently has, in total. If the healer doesn’t have any medical supplies, they recieve a -2 roll modifier on this talent check. Once a treatment has been successful, the character must get 8 hours of rest, including at least 4 hours of sleep, at which point the injury is removed. A character may only heal one injury per day this way.

Death and Incapacitation

Simply being struck down in combat is not necessarily enough to kill a person outright. As long as other characters are around to help, being reduced to 0 Health only inflicts an injury and incapacitates the character until an ally can help them. Once an entire party is incapacitated, however, death is the assumed result, unless help arrives before they’re eaten by wild crytures. In addition, a character also becomes incapacitated when their injuries in a certain talent are equal to their score in that talent. If those injuries are left untreated for too long, that character will die.

Passive Stats

When surprises and complications arise on your adventures, the World Builder may need to make rolls against your Skills, with or without your knowledge. This is handled by rolling against your Passive Stats - Vigor, Reactions, Insight, and Alertness.

Vigor (Fitness + Athletics)

Vigor represents your ability to shrug off physical hardship. This may be illness, poison, exhaustion or similar afflictions.

Reactions (Agility + Reflexes)

Your Reactions represent how quickly your react in the heat of the moment, whether it's to a surprise attack, a triggered trap, or some environmental danger.

Insight (Intellect + Discipline)

Insight determines how well you can read people and situations. It reveals when people are trying to deceive, manipulate, or hide something from you.

Alertness (Sense + Observation)

Alertness is what keeps you aware of your surroundings and potential danger. It can spot sneaky enemies, environmental hazards, traps or other such hidden things.

Carrying Capacity

The normal carrying capacity for a character is equal to 10 x their Fitness + 25 lbs. A character that exceeds their carrying capacity gets a -1 penalty to their Speed, and an additional -1 for every 10 lbs beyond it.

Concentration

Some actions may require you to Concentrate. Outside of stressful situations, like combat, concentration costs nothing for you to perform, but it does require intense focus. During combat, however - or any other time where turns are being tracked - concentration becomes more difficult to pull off. To concentrate in these situations, the character performing the action must spend both their major action and minor action on the action they need to concentrate on. Concentrating also provokes an opportunity attack in combat.