A character is described by what they are made of and what condition it is in: the anatomy that decides where a blow lands and what it costs, the health that tracks the toll of injury and privation, and the gear carried into play.

Skills, attributes and affiliations are covered in their own sections; what follows here is the character as a physical body in the world.

Body Structure

Every creature in the game is defined by a body structure — a hierarchical anatomy that determines where blows land, how armor protects, how badly a wound hampers you, and how close it drives you to collapse. The structure has three tiers: body zones, the body parts within each zone, and the body locations within each part.

A fourth idea cuts across the three tiers: body roles. A part is tagged with the roles it fulfills, and skills and attributes name the roles that impair them. Roles are the wiring that carries an injury from the place it landed to the things it should degrade.

The worked examples throughout this page use a human body structure. Every value shown — zone weights, part weights, location weights, Shock Values, bleeding and amputation tiers — is a property of that particular anatomy, not a universal constant. Other body structures carry different values, and a creature may have more zones, fewer parts, or locations a human does not possess at all. A serpent has no legs to stumble on; a dragon has wings and a tail; a spirit has no body structure at all and cannot be struck.

Body Zones

A body zone is the broadest anatomical division — the region a blow lands in before any finer detail is settled. A human has four zones: Head, Arms, Torso, and Legs. A quadruped might instead have Head, Forelegs, Torso, Hind Legs, and Tail.

Each zone carries a weight — how much of the creature’s targetable bulk it represents. Zones are dealt a contiguous run of zone numbers in the order they are defined, sized by that weight. The human zone weights are 1 / 4 / 4 / 6, so the zone numbers run:

The highest zone number on a body — 15 for a human — is the edge of the creature. A blow that resolves past it has gone wide and misses entirely (see Determining Hit Location). A zone with weight 0 owns no zone numbers and can never be struck.

Zone numbers are what make an attack aimable: attacking high means aiming at a low zone number, attacking low means aiming at a high one, and everything between follows the creature’s own anatomy rather than a fixed table.

Body Parts

A body part is the primary anatomical division, and it is the unit at which injury is felt. A human has six parts: Head, Right Arm, Left Arm, Torso, Right Leg, and Left Leg. Other creatures differ — a quadruped might have Head, two Forelegs, Torso, and two Hindlegs; a dragon might add Neck, Wings, and Tail; a serpent might have only Head, Fore Body, Mid Body, and Hind Body.

Each body part carries:

Zone. The one zone the part belongs to. Once a blow settles on a zone, the part struck is drawn from that zone’s parts.

Weight. The part’s share of its zone. Once a zone is struck, each part in it is drawn in proportion to this weight — so two equally-weighted arms split their zone evenly, while a heavier part takes more of it.

Roles. The functional roles the part fulfills — see Body Part Roles below. This is how injury to the part reaches the skills and attributes that depend on it.

Can Hold Item. Whether the part can grip an object. A human’s two arms can; the head, torso, and legs cannot. This is the part’s anatomy, not its current state — see Immobilized, unusable, and holding on for when a limb that can grip nonetheless cannot.

Permanent Impairment. A lasting penalty the part can never be better than — an old maiming that never fully mended.

Permanently Unusable. A flag marking the part as gone or dead for good: a withered or fully amputated limb.

Two further properties are derived from the part’s roles rather than set directly:

• Whether it affects mobility — true when the part holds the Vital, Core, or Locomotor role. Injure a leg or a torso and you move worse; injure an arm and you do not.
• Whether it is critical — true when the part holds the Vital or Core role. Critical parts drive the far harsher column of the Health ceiling.

Dominance

Most people favor one side of the body — not the hand alone, but the whole side working together. A being’s favored side is read from the characteristics it carries:

• Left Dominance alone — the left side is dominant.
• Right Dominance alone — the right side is dominant.
• Both, or neither — the being is ambidextrous and has no dominant side.

An ambidextrous being has no off hand, and so never suffers a penalty for using one. This is the answer wherever a favored side matters — most visibly the off-hand reduction to the Strength Impact Modifier.

A weapon counts as off-hand only when every limb gripping it is on the non-favored side. A two-handed grip includes the dominant hand, so it is never off-hand.

Paired parts — two arms, two legs, two wings — are recognized as a left and a right by the presence of their opposite number. A part with no counterpart is central, and belongs to neither side.

Body Part Roles

A body role is a tag describing what a body part is for. There are four:

A part may hold more than one role, and a role may be held by more than one part. This is where non-human anatomy diverges most sharply: a centaur’s forelegs might be Locomotor while its arms are Manipulator, but a raptor’s foot is plausibly both — Locomotor when it walks and Manipulator when it seizes prey. A tentacle is a Manipulator with no Locomotor claim at all. Roles are assigned per creature, and nothing requires them to mirror the human arrangement.

Roles matter because skills and attributes do not name body parts — they name roles. Each skill and each attribute carries a list of the roles whose injury impairs it. Climbing might be impaired by both Manipulator and Locomotor injury; Legerdemain by Manipulator alone; Agility by Locomotor; a Lore skill by nothing physical at all.

This indirection is what lets one skill definition work on any creature. A skill that says “Manipulator injury impairs me” is correct for a human with two arms, a serpent with none, and a dragon whose Manipulator role sits on its forelimbs — without the skill knowing anything about the anatomy it will be used on.

Roles also decide which mishap a wound to a part threatens: a Manipulator part threatens a fumble (dropping what you hold), a Locomotor part threatens a stumble (losing your footing), and the Vital and Core parts can threaten either.

Body Locations

Each body part contains several body locations — the specific anatomical areas where a blow actually lands. A human’s Right Arm contains five: Right Shoulder, Right Upper Arm, Right Elbow, Right Forearm, and Right Hand. The Head contains eleven, from Skull to Neck.

Injuries are always recorded against a specific location, and armor is tracked per location — a mail hauberk covers the thorax and abdomen but not the pelvis; a helm protects the skull but not the neck.

Each location carries:

Weight. How likely the location is to be struck once its part is hit, measured against the other locations in the same part. A human’s skull vastly outweighs an eye, so a blow to the head overwhelmingly finds skull.

Shock Value. How stunning a blow to this location is in itself, before severity is considered — see Shock below. The skull, eyes, nose, and neck are the worst on a human at 5; the forearm and calf the mildest at 1.

Bleeding Susceptibility. A tier — none, low, medium, or high — governing how readily a wound here becomes a Bleeder. It is not a single threshold but a grid against injury severity and weapon aspect:

No wound below S3 ever bleeds by the table, whatever the location.

Amputability. A tier — none, low, medium, or high — governing whether the location can be severed. An amputation check happens only on a G5 edged wound to a location whose tier is not none. The check is a Strength test modified by the tier: low +20, medium 0, high −20 (the harsher the modifier, the likelier the limb comes off).

The outcome turns on that Strength test: a critical failure severs the location and it bleeds even where it normally would not; a failure severs it and it bleeds only if the location bleeds at all; a marginal success keeps it attached but costs −20 on the resulting Shock roll; a critical success keeps it cleanly. Severing a neck is fatal regardless.

Fumble and Stumble flags. Whether a serious wound here can make the creature lose its grip or its footing — see Mishaps.

Natural Protection. Intrinsic protection against each damage aspect (blunt, edged, piercing, fire) before any worn armor — the toughness of bone, hide, or scale.

Determining Hit Location

When a blow lands, where it lands is settled by Zone Number and Zone Die.

The attacker aims at a body part; the part’s zone supplies the target zone number. The strike mode supplies a Spread — how loosely that mode can be placed (see Strike Modes). Spread is rolled as a die, and the result walks the aim upward from the target zone number:

Hit Zone Number = (Target Zone Number − 1) + Spread roll

The zone owning that hit zone number is the zone actually struck. A weighted draw among that zone’s parts picks the part, and a second weighted draw among that part’s locations picks the location.

Three things follow from this:

• Spread 1 is perfectly precise. The roll can only be 1, so the hit zone number equals the target zone number every time. The blow lands in the zone aimed at.
• Larger Spread scatters downward. A Spread of 6 aimed at zone number 1 can land anywhere from 1 to 6 — on a human, that is the head, the arms, or the top of the torso. Because the walk is always upward, a loose strike drifts low, never high; aiming high is how you reach the head at all.
• A blow can scatter clean off the target. If the hit zone number exceeds the creature’s highest zone number, there is nothing there to strike and the blow misses. A Spread-6 strike aimed at zone number 12 on a human (highest zone number 15) misses outright on a roll of 4 or better. The same happens if the hit zone number lands in a zone that has no hittable part.

Small creatures are correspondingly harder to place a loose blow on: fewer zone numbers means more of the Spread die falls off the far end and misses.

When a blow is not aimed at all, the zone is drawn at random weighted by how many zone numbers each zone owns, then the part and location follow by the same weighted draws.

From Blow to Injury

Once the location is known, the blow resolves against it:

1. Subtract protection. Effective impact is the blow’s impact less the location’s total protection (natural plus worn armor) for that weapon’s aspect, floored at zero.
2. Read the injury level. Effective impact is compared against the creature’s own injury thresholds. A human’s are 1 / 5 / 10 / 15 / 20 — so 1–4 is M1, 5–9 is S2, 10–14 is S3, 15–19 is G4, and 20 or more is G5. Bigger and tougher creatures carry proportionally scaled thresholds, so the same absolute impact reads differently by size: a blow that grievously wounds a cat may not scratch a bull.
3. Check for a glancing blow. An edged or piercing strike that would deal only a minor wound (effective impact 1–4) against a location covered by rigid armor glances off instead: it inflicts no injury at all, but the jolt still counts — it adds a point to the Shock Index and grants +10 on the resulting Shock roll.
4. Evaluate bleeding, amputation, and shock from the tables above.

See Injury for what the resulting wound then does over time.

Shock

A wound’s immediate effect on consciousness is resolved through shock. The chain runs Shock Value → Shock Index → Shock State.

How the Shock Index is determined

The Shock Index starts as the struck location’s Shock Value plus the wound’s Injury Level, plus one more point if the blow was a glancing one:

Shock Index = location Shock Value + Injury Level ( + 1 if glancing )

A blow to a human’s skull (Shock Value 5) that lands a S3 wound (Injury Level 3) opens at index 8; the same wound to the forearm (Shock Value 1) opens at index 4.

That opening index is a base, and it decides whether a roll happens at all:

• 4 or less — too slight to threaten shock. No roll, no shock state.
• 5 through 10 — a Shock test is made, and its result adjusts the index.
• Above 10 — beyond any test. The victim is dead.

The Shock test is a test of the victim’s Shock skill, and its result moves the index:

Two modifiers apply to that roll rather than to the index: a glancing blow grants +10, and an amputation check that ended in a marginal success imposes −20. Fatigue penalties apply to the roll; body-part impairment penalties deliberately do not — shock is a test of constitution, not of a working limb.

How the Shock Index maps to a Shock State

The adjusted index reads off a single table:

Continuing the example: the skull wound opened at 8, so a Shock test is made. A marginal success leaves it at 8 — Incapacitated. A critical success pulls it to 7 — Stunned. A marginal failure pushes it to 9 — Unconscious. The forearm wound, opening at 4, never rolls at all.

What the Shock States mean

While in any shock state a creature cannot concentrate. Ordinary shock is temporary — a stunned, incapacitated, or unconscious victim shakes it off with a re-test — and only a failed re-test drops the victim into lasting Extended Shock or a Coma.

A resulting shock state is always offered to the victim’s own player, never imposed, and only ever to worsen the current state. Injury is not the only source of shock: fear, heavy Bleeding, and other systemic forces raise it by their own measures. See Shock for the states in full, the re-test, Extended Shock, and Coma.

Impairment and Unusable Parts

An injury sits at a single location, but it is the whole body part that suffers. Each part derives its impairment from the injuries across all of its locations:

A minor wound only impairs while it is slow to heal — a Healing Rate of 5 or less. A minor scratch that is knitting cleanly costs nothing.

Impairment is worst-of, never additive. Three serious wounds on one arm impair it by −10, not −30. The part takes the single worst penalty among its injuries and its permanent impairment. As wounds heal the part climbs back up the ladder — unusable, then −10, then −5, then whole — and a permanent impairment sets a floor it can never rise above.

Injuries on different parts do not merge either. A wounded arm and a wounded leg are two separately impaired parts, each affecting whatever depends on it.

What impairment costs

This is where roles do their work. When you make a test, the skill or attribute being tested names the roles that impair it, and every part holding one of those roles is consulted:

• If any such part is unusable, the test automatically Critically Fails. You cannot climb with two ruined arms, and no roll is made to pretend otherwise.
• Otherwise, the test takes the worst penalty among those parts — −5 or −10.

A test whose skill names no roles, or a creature with no impaired parts, is untouched.

A second, narrower rule applies to weapons: a strike mode that requires particular limbs to wield checks those specific parts, not the role at large. An unusable off-hand does not spoil a one-handed strike with the good hand — but an unusable gripping hand fails it automatically.

Permanent impairment

A wound that was slow to mend can leave a mark that never heals — a withered arm, a stiffened knee. Permanent impairment is scaled by how long the wound took to close, from −5 at twenty days to a floor of −25 at a hundred, and it applies from then on as the part’s minimum impairment. Permanent impairment never renders a part unusable on its own; only a grievous wound or an outright severed limb does that. See Injury → Permanent Impairment.

Immobilized, unusable, and holding on

A limb can be out of the fight in two quite different ways, and the difference decides what happens to whatever it was carrying.

Immobilized — the limb is held fast: pinned in a wrestler’s grip, tangled in a net, bound with rope, or locked rigid by a spell. It cannot be moved, so it cannot strike, block, parry, or be brought to bear on anything, and any test needing it fails. But it is still a working limb: the fingers still close, and it keeps whatever it was holding. A hold is not a disarm — taking the weapon out of a pinned hand is a separate act of prising it loose.

Immobilization is recorded as the Immobilized condition naming the affected limb, whatever imposed it. A grappler’s hold and a binding spell impart exactly the same condition, and both end the same way: remove the condition and the limb is free again on the spot.

Unusable — the limb is out of action altogether: ruined by a grievous wound, or permanently gone (withered, severed). An unusable limb is immobilized and has lost its grip, so it drops what it was holding the moment it is disabled. Picking the item back up afterwards is an ordinary act and nothing re-drops it.

So the three states nest: a sound limb moves and grips; an immobilized limb grips but does not move; an unusable limb does neither.

Impairment and Health

Impaired parts are also the only thing that sets Health. Health is not a pool that a blow subtracts from — it is a ceiling imposed by which parts are impaired and how badly, and whether those parts are critical (holding the Vital or Core role) or limbs (Manipulator or Locomotor). A creature with an unusable critical part is at nothing at all; a creature with a single minorly impaired limb is barely off Excellent.

Mishaps: Fumble and Stumble

A wound serious enough, to a location that invites it, can cost you your grip or your footing. Each location may be flagged for the mishaps it can cause — typically the locations of a Manipulator limb are flagged for fumbles and those of a Locomotor limb for stumbles — and the wound’s severity decides whether the mishap is in question or certain:

When a test is called for, it is a keep-control test:

• A Stumble Test — keeping your footing — rolls the better of your Agility or your Acrobatics skill. Keep control and you stay upright; fail and you fall prone, the worse the failure the harder the fall.
• A Fumble Test — keeping your grip — rolls the better of your Dexterity or your Legerdemain skill. Keep control and the item stays in hand; fail and you drop it, a critical fumble flinging it from your grasp entirely.

You roll whichever of the attribute or skill serves you better, and a character with neither cannot make the test. The roll belongs to the character who took the wound: a keep-control test is theirs to make, never made for them.

Compound Injuries

When a new injury lands on a location that already bears wounds, it may compound. Total the injury levels already at that location; if the new injury’s level meets or exceeds that total, the worst existing injury worsens by one level. Already-damaged tissue is fragile, and concentrating attacks on one spot is correspondingly deadly.

Armor and Protection

Armor protects at the location level, tracked separately for each damage aspect — blunt, edged, piercing, and fire. A mail shirt gives edged and piercing protection at the thorax and abdomen and nothing at the skull, arms, or legs. Layering (a gambeson under mail) adds the values together at each covered location.

Locations may also carry natural protection — the intrinsic toughness of bone, hide, or scale — which is always present and adds to whatever is worn. Whether a location is covered by rigid armor additionally decides whether light edged and piercing blows glance off.

The Human Body Structure

Reproduced for reference. These are the values of this one anatomy — every other body structure defines its own, and non-humanoid creatures differ in the parts and locations they have at all.

Zones and parts

Locations

Weight is relative within the part; Shock is the location’s Shock Value.

The skull’s weight of 500 against the rest of the head is why a blow to the head nearly always finds skull, and the eyes and ears at 15 are the rare, terrible exceptions.

Anatomy Is Intrinsic

A creature’s body structure is part of what it is, not something it possesses. Every creature has exactly one, and it cannot be put down, taken away, or traded. A creature whose body structure is empty has no anatomy at all — it is incorporeal, a spirit, and cannot be struck.

Everything else that concerns the body refers to a location rather than containing it: an injury is recorded at the location it struck, and armor covers the locations it is worn over. Wounds and equipment change constantly in play; the anatomy they name changes almost never.

A new kind of creature is described by its anatomy alone — its zones and their weights, its parts, its locations, and the roles those parts carry. Nothing else about a creature needs to know what shape it is.

See also

• Injury — injury levels, healing, and impairment over time
• Shock — the shock states in full, re-tests, Extended Shock, and Coma
• Health — how impaired parts set the health ceiling
• Bleeding — bleeders, blood loss, and stoppage
• Strike Modes — Spread and the other properties of an attack
• Skills — how skills declare the roles that impair them
• Prone — the consequence of a failed stumble

Health

Health is a single figure — a percentage from 0 to 100, with a plain-language band beside it — that answers one question: how badly is this character hurt? An unharmed character sits at 100%, Excellent. A character who has been wounded reads lower, and the word beside the number says what that means.

Health is not a pool of hit points. Nothing is subtracted from it when a blow lands, and it is not spent, tracked, or restored point by point. It is a ceiling — the highest level of function a character’s current injuries still permit. Heal the injuries and the ceiling lifts on its own; there is no separate score to repair.

This matters most in the moment a fight turns. Health does not slide gently downward one blow at a time. A character stays at Excellent through minor knocks and then drops hard the moment a wound is serious enough — or numerous enough — to impose a real ceiling.

What sets the ceiling

Every wound a character carries impairs some part of the body. Three things about those impairments decide the ceiling, and nothing else does:

1. How badly the part is impaired — a scale from a minor impairment through serious and grievous to outright unusable.
2. Which part it is. A part is either critical — it holds something vital or is core to the body, such as the head, the chest, or the abdomen — or it is a limb: an arm, a leg, a hand, a foot. Harm to a critical part costs far more than the same harm to a limb. Which of the two a part is follows from its body roles: a part carrying Vital or Core is critical, and a part carrying only Manipulator or Locomotor is a limb.
3. How many parts are in that same state. A second injury of a given severity costs much more than the first, and by the third the ceiling has usually bottomed out.

A character’s Health is then the worst ceiling any of these impairments imposes — never a running total. Injuries do not add up: five bruises do not kill anyone, but one crushed skull does. If a character has a minor limb wound (a ceiling of 80) and a serious wound to the chest (a ceiling of 20), their Health is 20% — the chest wound governs, and the bruised arm changes nothing while it stands.

Limb impairments

Critical-part impairments

The gap between the two tables is the whole point: a minor wound to an arm barely registers, while the same minor wound to the chest halves a character outright. A critical part rendered unusable drives the ceiling to nothing at all — a mortal state, from which a character who is still breathing reads 1% (see the floor below) until they die in fact.

The bands

The band is the number in words — what a companion would say, looking at them.

A living character never reads 0%. However ruinous the injuries — even injuries whose ceiling is nothing at all — a character who is still alive is held at a minimum of 1%, Morbid. 0% means dead, and nothing else does. So Morbid is the floor of the living: a character there may be past saving, but they have not died yet, and the figure will not pronounce them dead before they are.

What Health does not cover

Health measures bodily injury only. It is deliberately blind to every other way a character can be taken out of a fight — being winded or weary, stunned or unconscious, afraid, or otherwise overcome. Those are tracked separately and have their own effects.

So Health is not a readiness score. A character can read Excellent and still be unconscious, exhausted, or paralysed with fear. Read Health for how hurt they are, and read their conditions for whether they can act.

See also: Injury for how wounds and their impairments are determined, Trauma for the wider picture of harm, and Healing Base for recovery.