The Mechanics of Adventuring

Stamina, Mana and Resting

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.

You can regain Stamina and Mana by sleeping. For every 2 hours of sleep, a character regains ¼ of their maximum Stamina and Mana. However, if that character hasn't eaten in the last 24 hours, they suffer a random injury when they awake.

Outside of combat, you can spend 10 minutes 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 to refill a cryture’s Health by spending 1 Mana.

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 concentrating with no Stamina or Mana.

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.

Cash and Currency

In the Crytures world, human civilization is sparse and scattered. Because of this, official coinage is rarely minted by governments, as it wouldn’t even be recognized once it leaves the borders of the local lord’s domain. Coins do exist, however, but their value is predicated purely on their material composition, and with the range of exotic materials that can be smelted, grown, or mixed, the coinage that travelers may come across is practically limitless. Fortunately, most people have a good sense for what these materials are worth, so currency differences are rarely an issue. As such, the amount of monetary wealth that people carry around with them in-game is abstracted as a Cash value.

For roleplaying purposes, world builders are encouraged to dole out monetary rewards in various flavors of currency and assign a cash value to them for the sake of streamlining gameplay. Players may choose to record different currencies individually (with their cash value included) or simply lump them all into a single entry for cash.

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. If you try to concentrate while your Mana is at 0, you will suffer a random Intellect or Sense injury, even outside of combat. 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.