Death's Door and Rest

Hit Dice

Your hit dice are your reserve: the body's ability to recover from punishment. You have one d8 for each level.

A hit die is in one of three states.

• Available: ready to spend.
• Spent: used, and waiting to recover on a long rest.
• Scarred: burned at Death's Door. It does not recover with the rest, only slowly, and only in a safe place.

Hit dice do not all come back on a long rest. How many you recover depends on where you rest.

Death's Door

When you drop to 0 hit points you stand at Death's Door, the edge between alive and not, and burn through everything you have left.

Step 1: The overkill

Note how much damage you took past 0. Roll your available hit dice one at a time, adding your Constitution modifier to each, until the total covers it. Every die rolled in this step is scarred.

Step 2: Fight on

Roll every hit die you have left and add your Constitution modifier to each. That total is your hit points. These dice are spent, but not scarred. You keep fighting.

Step 3: When the fight ends

When the fight is over you collapse, unconscious, at whatever hit points you have. You are stable unless something is still hurting you: poison, bleeding, burning.

You gain:

• one level of Exhaustion, and
• a Wound.

When the door does not open: death saves

Death's Door opens once per fight. If you drop to 0 again in the same fight, or drop with no hit dice left to roll, it does not hold. You fall unconscious and start dying.

At the start of each of your turns while you are dying, make a death save: roll a d20, with no modifier.

• 10 or higher is a success. 9 or lower is a failure.
• A natural 20: you come back with 1 hit point, conscious, and stop dying.
• A natural 1 counts as two failures.
• Taking damage while you are dying counts as a failure.
• Three successes and you are stable: unconscious at 0 hit points, but no longer dying. Damage starts the saves again.
• Three failures and you are dead.

An ally can steady you with an action and a DC 10 Survival check: you become stable. Healing does not reach you in a fight, since hit points come back only through hit dice and Mend the Body.

When the fight ends you do not wake until you complete a long rest, or until someone tends you with a successful Survival check, at the DC for your worst wound (see Short rest).

Ash to wind, spark to stone.

Wounds

Severity

The more of your hit dice were scarred, the worse the wound.

Extreme wounds come only from climactic foes. The GM decides.

Origin

What hit you shapes the wound.

Describe the wound with your GM, to fit the fight that gave it to you.

What a wound costs

A Minor or Serious wound is pain and a story. A Grievous or Extreme wound costs more until it heals:

Healing a wound

A wound heals when every die it scarred is restored. Scarred dice come back one per long rest, and only in a Core Zone or another safe haven: a sanctuary, a town with a healer. An Extreme wound leaves a lasting scar even when it closes.

Exhaustion

Each level of Exhaustion gives -1 to every d20 roll you make: attacks, checks, saves, initiative. A long rest removes one level. While you have any, you cannot recover Gambit Points.

Resting

Short rest

A short rest is an hour of quiet: binding wounds, eating, catching your breath.

• Tend your wounds. You may spend one hit die. Make a Survival check (or let an ally make it for you). On a success, roll the die, add your Constitution modifier, and heal that much. On a failure, the die is not spent.

The DC is set by your injury, whichever is worse: how much of your hit points you have lost, or your worst open wound.

A Healing Tonic or Field Salves, used before the check, gives it advantage.

• Mana. In a Core Zone, a short rest restores all your mana. Elsewhere, none.
• Once per long rest, choose Catch Your Breath or Mend the Body (see Gambits).

Long rest

A long rest is a night's sleep, eight hours, with no more than an hour of watch or interruption. It always removes one level of Exhaustion and restores all your Gambit Points (unless Exhaustion or poison prevents it). The rest depends on where you are.

Treated means someone else spent time tending you during the rest and made a successful Survival check to do it.

The farther you go from a Totem, the longer a fight's damage stays with you.

In the wild, a night's sleep restores nothing but your Gambit Points and one level of Exhaustion. Recovery there runs on the body's own clock: a week of real rest, sheltered and fed, to come back from a hard fight, and the GM says how far it brings you. Mana does not return in the wild at all, except from what you carry.

Food and water

A long rest uses a day's food and a day's water: a ration, and a waterskin's worth. Your sheet counts both from what you carry, and the long rest takes them. A host, an inn or a well-stocked camp can feed you instead, and then your packs are spared.

Go to sleep without either and the rest is a poor one: no hit dice, only half your Gambit Points, and no relief from Exhaustion. Mana still returns as the zone allows.

A waterskin holds a day's water. Refill it at a stream, a well or a town.

Healing Supplies

None of these restore hit points on their own. They work through your hit dice.

Breathstone is found, not made. It forms in the fissures where leylines run close to the surface: caves, deep cuts, the cracked floors of old Totem ground. Ashbone Dust is ground from the bones of a beast that lived for years inside a Totem's Core Zone. Grinding it is Apothecary work, a DC 16 Craft check, and bones from anywhere else make only ash.

A sharply bitter herbal extract stabilized with powdered glyph crystal. It smells like cut iron and rosemary. Old railhands call it kickroot.