Rolls, Resistance, Movement & Injury
Ordinary actions under ordinary circumstances just succeed — nobody rolls to walk, run, or use a skill routinely. Dice come out only when things turn dramatic or uncertain: danger threatens, a guard might notice, a fall occurs. Weapon skills and other inherently risky actions are the exception and are always rolled. Resistance Table rolls and most skill checks use percentile dice (D100); other dice types settle how much damage a given attack does.
To test a skill, roll D100: a result equal to or under the adventurer's current percentile succeeds, anything higher fails. A failed non-weapon skill may require some in-game time to pass before trying again, at the gamemaster's discretion; a failed weapon skill in combat is simply a miss. A roll of 00 always fails outright.
Every skill roll actually has four possible outcomes — critical success, ordinary success, failure, and fumble — and thrusting or stabbing weapons add a fifth, even better outcome called an impale.
The lower the D100 roll, the better the result: a critical success is any roll of one-fifth or less of the adventurer's skill percentile (rounding fractions up). A fumble is a roll that fails abysmally — for skills of 100% or less, only a 99 or 00 fumbles; for skills of 101% or higher, only 00 fumbles. Fumbles are rarer than criticals because people generally practice succeeding, not failing.
An unparried critical success typically does double the weapon's normal damage. On an unmodified roll of 01, an unparried attack from an impaling weapon (one that stabs or cuts and is slim enough to slip between armor segments) does full rolled damage and completely ignores armor.
When two characteristics are pitted directly against each other — an arm-wrestling match using Strength versus Strength, a game of wits using Intelligence versus Intelligence — the Resistance Table settles it without needing a dedicated skill. Compare the active (attacking, or higher) characteristic against the passive (defending, or resisting) characteristic; the greater the active side's advantage, the higher the chance of success on a D100 roll.
The underlying pattern is simple: a roll of 50 or less succeeds when both characteristics are equal, and each full point of advantage the active side holds shifts that target number by 5 in its favor (or against it, if the passive side is ahead) — capped at a minimum of 5% and a maximum of 95%. A few reference points:
| Active vs. Passive | Target Number (D100 ≤) |
|---|---|
| Equal characteristics | 50 |
| Active +2 higher | 60 |
| Active +5 higher | 75 |
| Active +9 or more higher | 95 (capped) |
| Active −2 lower | 40 |
| Active −5 lower | 25 |
| Active −9 or more lower | 05 (capped) |
Succeeding at a poorly-known skill teaches a great deal; an expert, who already knows most of what there is to know, improves more slowly. The gamemaster periodically calls for experience rolls — commonly at the end of an adventure, after a game week or so, or once a major task wraps up — and only for skills the player has checked off during play after a successful use. For each checked skill, roll D100 once: a result higher than the current skill percentage means the adventurer improves, gaining 1D10 points immediately; a result equal to or lower means no improvement this time. Once cleared, the check mark is erased.
Skills that have climbed above 100−INT percentiles have only an INT×1% chance to learn anything further on a check, and that chance never changes again even at extremely high skill levels.
Improving a weapon or shield skill through training means finding a willing teacher with a higher skill who wants the student to succeed — unlike a hostile opponent in real combat, a teacher wants their student to survive and improve. The student needs adequate Strength and Dexterity to use the weapon in the first place. Teacher and student train daily; every three game weeks, roll INT×3 or less on D100, and a success raises the skill by 1D6 points. Tandem skills like sword-and-shield are trained together at 1D6 points each. Training never pushes a skill above 80% — beyond that, only further experience can improve it. Nominal cost is 50 bronzes per week, though cheap teachers may not be very good, and good ones may charge more.
Training other, non-combat skills works similarly but on a slower three-month interval, testing INT×4 or less for a 1D10 point gain, with the same 80% training ceiling. Teachable civilian skills include Art, Bargain, Climb, Craft, Disguise, Evaluate, Million Spheres, Natural World, Navigate, Oratory, Other Language, Own Language, Physik, Pick Lock, Potions, Ride, Sailing, Scribe, Swim, Track, and Young Kingdoms; criminal or Nadsokorite teachers instead offer Conceal Object, Dodge, Fast Talk, Insight, and Move Quietly. Hide, Jump, Listen, Scent/Taste, Search, Throw, and Unknown Kingdoms improve only through experience, not training. Repair/Devise can't be trained or improved by experience at all — instead, train the related Craft skill.
Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Power can rise through a successful Resistance Table roll made during a genuinely dangerous encounter against a foe (not another player's adventurer) whose own score in that characteristic was higher. A success is checked on the sheet just like a skill, and later tested the same way — D100 equal to or under 21 raises the characteristic by one point, to a human maximum of 21 (Intelligence and Power have no such ceiling). Only one roll per checked characteristic per session.
Size can shift up or down by up to a point per week at the gamemaster's discretion, reflecting sustained gluttony or fasting — starving away half or more of it is fatal. Appearance only improves through deliberate training.
Strength, Constitution, and Appearance can also be deliberately trained toward the human maximum of 21, given a teacher whose own score is at least 19 and at least one point higher than the student's. The first training attempt can succeed after 30 days; each subsequent success doubles the required interval (60 days, then 120, and so on) until the characteristic maxes out or training is abandoned, while a failed attempt keeps the interval the same for the next try. When the interval is up, roll D100: 21 or under raises the characteristic by one point.
Gamemasters typically juggle several different scales of time and movement at once — a fight resolved blow-by-blow in combat rounds, a chase summarized in a sentence, a journey across a continent reduced to "eight days pass."
Humans and human-like beings can move up to eight units per combat round at a dead run; a unit is loosely five to ten yards depending on context, and exact distances matter less than relative position. Between creatures of different movement rates, subtract the slower rate from the faster to see how quickly one gains or loses ground each round. Runners of different speeds eventually converge or lose sight of each other; over a long chase the gamemaster may call for periodic Constitution rolls, with each failure costing one unit of movement from fatigue. An armed and armored adventurer generally can't sustain a dead run for more than about fifteen minutes.
Heavily armored runners chasing (or fleeing) a lightly-armored or unarmored one need successful Constitution×3 rolls to keep pace or keep away; two failures in a row and the gap closes, or the lighter-armored party escapes. Wounded, exhausted, overburdened, or cumbersomely armored adventurers move more slowly still, generally by no more than six units, at the gamemaster's discretion.
For medium distances, a cautious adventurer can advance roughly 120 yards in five minutes, walk about 300 yards, or run about 1,700 yards in that time — doubled on horseback. A trained military unit can sustain roughly that pace for half an hour without losing cohesion; irregulars and mobs string out and straggle much faster, especially at night, in bad weather, or near a tempting tavern. In a rowboat, a rower can sustain about 100 yards per five minutes indefinitely, or double that briefly.
Regional movement — journeys of days or weeks — is rarely played out in detail. The gamemaster usually just calculates travel time from a map and summarizes it, unless something of interest happens along the way.
| Pace | Miles | Kilometers |
|---|---|---|
| Walking | 20 | 32 |
| Forced March | 40 | 64 |
| Casual Horseback | 35 | 56 |
| Forced Horseback | 60 | 97 |
| Wagon-Speed | 10 | 16 |
Forced marches need a daily Constitution×5 roll or the traveler loses a hit point. Terrain and weather reduce these rates further — roughly a third off for forest, rolling hills, or desert; half off for heavy storms; two-thirds off for mountains or marsh; four-fifths off for ice and snow (though skis or a sleigh cut that penalty to a third). An unbridged major river costs a full day to cross. Multiple penalties stack.
| Route | Favorable | Unfavorable |
|---|---|---|
| Open Sea, hourly | 8 mi / 13 km | 1 mi / 1.6 km |
| Coast/River, hourly | 4 mi / 6.4 km | 2 mi / 3.2 km |
| Open Sea, per 24 hrs | 192 mi / 96 km | 24 mi / 38 km |
| Coast/River, daylight | 48 mi / 77 km | 12 mi / 19 km |
Wind, storms, tides, rocks, and sandbars all affect these rates, as do the vessel's design and the crew's skill.
Hit points measure how much punishment an adventurer can absorb before going down; wounds, poison, disease, and magic all draw from the same pool. Poison and disease behave a little differently — their effects can be randomized or delayed, and some drain hit points while others sap characteristic points or even skill percentiles outright. Physik, the ability Suture, and the Heal spell can all lessen, staunch, or heal injuries.
A minor wound costs half or less of an adventurer's total hit points — a sprain, a mild concussion, a wound that closes quickly. It doesn't impair Dexterity or the ability to think and fight. Several minor wounds taken the same day can add up to the equivalent of a major wound in total cost, forcing a POW×4 roll to avoid unconsciousness even without a Major Wound Table roll.
A major wound costs more than half of total hit points — a severed artery, overwhelming pain, the loss of a hand. Its effect is immediate: the wounded adventurer can keep fighting only for as many further combat rounds as they have hit points currently remaining. A Luck roll determines whether the wound leaves lasting, permanent damage (failure) or heals cleanly despite the pain (success) — either way, the specific location and nature of the injury comes from rolling on the Major Wound Table, which covers results from minor limping and scarring at the low end up through crippling nerve damage, mutilation, and combinations of lost characteristic points at the high end, with the worst rolls leaving the adventurer unable to fight at all. An adventurer left with two or fewer hit points after a major wound collapses immediately, unconscious for about an hour from shock and blood loss — which incidentally offers a convenient way for an enemy to capture rather than kill a defeated adventurer.
A fatal wound costs more hit points than the adventurer currently has. It causes death — unless hit points are somehow raised back to at least +1 within that round or the next, in which case the adventurer survives, having come very near death without quite crossing over.
Adventurers heal naturally at about 1D3 hit points per game week until fully recovered, with multiple wounds treated as one combined total for this purpose rather than healed separately. Physik, Suture, and the Heal spell all speed things along: a successful Physik roll restores 1D3 hit points per wound immediately; Heal can be cast once daily per wound (applying it to a different wound each time magic points allow); and Suture fully heals any wound outright, though it always leaves behind a lingering taint of Chaos.
| 1 cm | ≈ ⅓ inch |
| ⅓ meter | ≈ 1 foot |
| 1 meter | ≈ 1 yard |
| 1 kilometer | ≈ ⅗ mile |
| 100 grams | ≈ 3 ounces |
| 1 kilogram | ≈ 2.2 pounds |
| 1 metric ton | ≈ 2200 pounds |
| 1 liter | ≈ 1 quart |
| 4 liters | ≈ 1 gallon |
| 0°C | ≈ 32°F |
| 20°C | ≈ 68°F |
| 40°C | ≈ 104°F |
| 100°C | ≈ 212°F |
| SIZ | Weight |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1–12 lbs |
| 8 | 109–120 lbs |
| 16 | 220–239 lbs |
| 32 | 880–959 lbs |
| 64 | 7.1–7.7 tons |
| 96 | 96 tons |
| 160 | 384 tons |
| 256 | 1516 tons |
| 330+ | SIZ ≈ weight in short tons ÷ 10 |
SIZ tracks volume and height as well as raw weight, so this table is a loose guide rather than an absolute rule — it won't hold up for anything lighter than air or able to change its own mass.
A sampling of how long common tasks and events take in game time:
The book walks through how these systems interact using a short scenario: a thief has just lifted a valuable gem from a rival cult's treasure room and now has to get out alive. The sequence below follows the shape of that example in general terms, showing how the pieces fit together round by round rather than reproducing the original scene's exact wording.
Slipping away from the strongroom, the thief takes a dagger in the shoulder from an unseen attacker — a hit, reduced by soft leather armor, for a handful of points of damage. Ducking into the next room and bolting the door, he tries to treat the wound himself with Physik and fumbles badly, worsening the injury and losing another hit point to a shaking hand.
Someone's pounding at the door behind him. He makes for the window and his prepared escape rope — only to find it's been cut, leaving him trapped unless he risks the drop to the street. Before he can decide, a hidden archer on a nearby rooftop puts an arrow into him: with the added wound this qualifies as a major wound, and a failed Luck roll means the injury is permanent — the roll on the Major Wound Table shows a weakened shoulder that will trouble him from now on. Reduced to a handful of hit points, unconsciousness looms within a few rounds.
With the door starting to splinter, he chooses the drop rather than capture. A successful Jump roll softens the fall just enough, but the accumulated damage finally drops him unconscious in the alley below — at only a couple of hit points left.
He's found, minutes later, by an ally who hauls him onto a horse and gets them both clear. Back at a safe hideout, that ally alternates Physik and a Heal spell across the following rounds, gradually working his hit points back up into safer territory — though full recovery from the arrow wound will still take a couple of weeks of natural healing.
The twist: in all the chaos, nobody ever thinks to check whether the stolen gem is still on him. It isn't — somewhere between the fall and the rescue, it's gone missing, and the adventure isn't quite over after all.
This condensed retelling shows the shape of the original worked example — hit points, wounds, Physik, Heal, and Luck rolls all interacting turn by turn — without reproducing its exact text.