Damage

Taking Physical Damage

When you take physical damage:

• Reduce the damage taken by your Armour Rating.
• Subtract any remaining damage from your Vitality.

If armour absorbs all the damage, you lose no Vitality. Some abilities and effects may bypass or reduce armour; these exceptions are explained in their own rules.

Reaching 0 Vitality

When your Vitality falls to 0 or lower, you become impaired and must immediately make a Critical Damage Check as follows:

Corpus save: d20 + Corpus modifier vs. Difficult (16):

• Success: Your Vitality becomes 0, but you take no attribute damage from that hit.
• Failure: Apply the excess damage directly to the relevant attribute—usually Corpus for physical attacks and sustain a condition depending on the attribute damage sustained.

Excess damage is the amount by which the attack reduced your Vitality below 0.

While your Vitality remains at 0, all further damage goes directly to the relevant attribute. You do not make another Critical Damage Check.

Shields and Absorb the Blow

A shield normally adds to your Armour Rating. You may instead use it to Absorb the Blow, taking damage on the shield:

• Buckler: absorbs up to 3 damage
• Shield: absorbs up to 6 damage
• Tower Shield: absorbs up to 12 damage

Conditions

After taking attribute damage and being stabilised, you gain a Condition based on the amount of damage taken. Each attribute has one slot for each Condition level (Minor, Moderate, Severe, and Extreme) which is triggered when you have sustained attribute damage past a defined threshold:

• Minor: 1–2 points of attribute damage
• Moderate: 3 or more points, up to half the attribute’s maximum score
• Severe: More than half the attribute’s maximum score, leaving at least 3 points
• Extreme: The attribute is reduced to 1 or 2 points

Minor Conditions

Moderate Conditions

Severe Conditions

Extreme and Special Conditions

Extreme Conditions

Extreme Conditions depend on the situation, but they are permanent or chronic. Examples include blindness, deafness, and missing limbs. They permanently impair the affected attribute.

Special Conditions

Special Conditions are usually temporary. They include:

• Blinded
• Encumbered
• Fatigued
• Poisoned
• Restrained or Held
• Bleeding
• Bound
• Charmed
• Cursed
• Diseased
• Distracted
• Dominated
• Exhausted
• Frightened
• Knocked Prone
• Locked
• Petrified
• Sickened
• Slowed
• Stunned

Blinded

You cannot see. Attacks and sight-based checks are at Extreme Disadvantage, and attacks against you have Moderate Advantage.

Encumbered

While Encumbered, your movement is reduced and you cannot run. Your normal carrying capacity is 10 inventory slots, modified by your Corpus modifier. For example, Corpus 16 gives a +3 modifier, for a total capacity of 13 slots. Movement Rates and Load bands are:

Fatigue

You cannot recover Vitality or attribute points if you lack food, water, or rest. After 24 hours without food, water or rest, make a Corpus save; on a failure, gain 1 Fatigue marker. Each marker takes up one inventory slot. If you have no free slots, you must drop an item or become Immobilised until you make room. Repeat the save each Watch you remain without them.

Removing Fatigue

• An uninterrupted Short Rest of 1 Watch removes 1 Fatigue marker.
• An uninterrupted Full Rest of 2 Watches, or 8 hours, removes all Fatigue.

Fatigue Ceiling

Your Fatigue Ceiling equals twice your Corpus modifier, with a minimum of 2. Examples:

• Corpus modifier +2: Fatigue Ceiling 4
• Corpus modifier 0 or lower: Fatigue Ceiling 2

If your Fatigue exceeds this limit, you become Immobilised. You cannot move or act, except to speak or make saves.

• Immediately make a Corpus save against Average (13). On a failure, lose 1 Corpus.
• Repeat this save every hour you remain at or above your Fatigue Ceiling without addressing the cause.

Eating, drinking, and completing a 4-hour Short Rest end the Immobilised condition and stop the hourly saves.

Corpus lost to Fatigue recovers at a rate of 1 point per Full Rest as per normal. If Corpus falls to 0, you die. If Corpus falls to exactly 1, immediately make one Corpus save against Average (13):

• Success: Remain at 1 Corpus.
• Failure: Die.

Make this save only once, when you first reach 1 Corpus.

Example: A character with Corpus 14 has a +2 modifier and a Fatigue Ceiling of 4. The fourth Fatigue marker causes no extra effect. When the character would gain a fifth marker, they become Immobilised and make a Corpus save. On a failure, they lose 1 Corpus. They repeat the save every hour until they eat, drink, and rest.

Poisoned

Minor Disadvantage on Corpus checks and saves, plus any effect the poison lists, until it runs its course or is purged.

Restrained or Held

You cannot move or take physical actions, and attacks against you have Moderate Advantage. Repeat the save at the end of each round unless the source says otherwise.

Bleeding

Lose 1 Vitality at the end of each round (each Tick outside combat) until stopped by a Healing power, a herb that stops Bleeding, or 1 Tick of first aid (Wits check, Average 13).

Bound

You cannot move beyond Close range (3 m) of the point or creature that binds you, but you may still attack and cast.

Charmed

You treat the charmer as Friendly (or better, if the effect says so) and will not knowingly harm them. The effect ends if the charmer or their allies harm you.

Cursed

A lasting magical affliction with the effect its source describes. It ends only by the remedy the source names.

Diseased

Suffer the disease’s listed effect at the end of each day until cured. The disease’s rank sets the cure required.

Distracted

Moderate Disadvantage on Anima checks.

Dominated

You follow the controller’s verbal commands as though they were your own intentions. You cannot be made to kill yourself, and you repeat the save each time you are ordered to act against a core belief or a Vow, or to harm an ally.

Exhausted

Minor Disadvantage on all checks and saves, and you cannot run. A Full Rest clears it.

Frightened

You must move away from the source at full speed each round and cannot take offensive actions. Repeat the save at the end of each of your turns. Fear effects use this condition.

Knocked Prone

You are on the ground. Standing costs your Move action. Melee attacks against you have Moderate Advantage; ranged attacks against you have Moderate Disadvantage.

Locked

You cannot cast spells, powers or sigils for 1 full round.

Petrified

You are fully immobile and cannot act. Your Armour Rating is 6 while it lasts.

Sickened

Minor Disadvantage on all checks and saves, and you cannot eat or drink.

Slowed

Your movement is halved, you take only one action per round, and your attacks are at Moderate Disadvantage.

Stunned

You cannot act, and attacks against you have Moderate Advantage.

Full Recursion: Death

Core rule (used by Hail Three Wyrd Sisters; Escape the Bleak Forest uses its own Recursion instead). When a character dies, make a final Doom save against Average (13).

Success

The Sisters return the character to the road with:

• 1 Vitality
• 1 fewer Doom
• All worn items
• One chosen possession
• All Skills, Fragments, Identity Marks, and Road Degree

All other physical inventory is lost.

Failure

The character is permanently lost and becomes a Fragment that may provide information to other characters. The player creates a new character at one Road Degree lower, with the appropriate Skills and Identity Marks.

Echoes

Death leaves traces. Each time a Player Character dies and Recurses, they gain 1 Echo. When death occurs mid-session, all Echoes are banked and resolved at the start of the next session — see Echo Bank below. You may hold a maximum of 3 Echoes at any one time. Echoes persist through Recursion. Echoes you held before dying are retained and count toward the cap of 3 — you then gain 1 new Echo from the death, provided you are below the maximum. However, Echoes may only be spent during your current life or in the first Watch of a new life after Recursion. Any Echo that has survived two consecutive Recursions without being spent is lost — the Forest does not allow grief to accumulate indefinitely.

In Escape the Bleak Forest, spend Echoes as follows:

• 1 Echo: Keep one rolled starting skill result
• 1 Echo: Retain one item from starting gear or loot
• 2 Echoes: Mark one future Challenge attempt as Learned (ignore Mishap dice for that attempt)
• 3 Echoes: Transform one Scar into a Vow

Echoes ensure that even failure builds meaning — but only if you act on what you have learned.

Echo Bank

Echoes

Each death before Recursion grants 1 Echo. Echoes are banked; up to 3 at a time; and may be spent in the first Watch after returning. Under the core death rule (Hail Three Wyrd Sisters), spend them as follows:

• Spend 1 Echo: Retain one specific item that was lost on death.
• Spend 1 Echo: Restore 1d6 Vitality beyond the 1 Vitality received on return.
• Spend 1 Echo: Carry forward knowledge of one thing the character witnessed at the moment of death; a Fragment, a Herald's location, a Seal Condition. Counts as a discovered Fragment.
• Spend 2 Echoes: Retain one Identity Mark (Vow, Scar, or Knot) that would otherwise have been lost.

When a character dies mid-session, the mechanical consequences of Recursion are resolved at the start of the next session, not immediately. Death is narrated at the table — describe how the character falls, what the Forest takes, what the last sensation is — but the dice are set aside. The reroll of attributes, the spending of Echoes, and the declaration of starting equipment all happen as the opening act of the next session.

All Echoes held at death are banked and available at the start of that next session. They may be spent freely during the first Watch of the new life. This ensures that Recursion never collapses a session into a reroll sequence — every session ends with meaningful play, and every session begins with a clean, intentional opening.

Exception — If death occurs in the final minutes of a session and both player and narrator prefer to resolve it immediately, they may. The Echo Bank is a pacing tool, not a requirement.