What Is a Being?

A Being is a single person or creature in the game world. This includes player characters, non-player characters (NPCs), monsters, and animals. Beings are the most detailed actor type in SoHL, with a full anatomy model, skills, gear, traumas, and combat capabilities.

Most of your interaction with the system will involve Beings.

See also: Character Creation, Combat Basics

What a Being Contains

A Being can hold many types of items:

• Attributes — innate characteristics like Strength, Stamina, and Dexterity
• Skills — trained abilities like Sword, Riding, or Stealth
• Gear — weapons, armor, containers, miscellaneous equipment
• Afflictions — diseases, poisons, curses, and other conditions
• Injuries — wounds and trauma from combat or accidents
• Body Structure — body zones, body parts, and body locations that define the anatomy
• Movement Profiles — walking, running, swimming speeds
• Mystical Abilities — spells, prayers, and supernatural powers
• Actions — special procedures that can be triggered from the character sheet (see Actions on a Being)

The Being Sheet

The Being sheet is organized into several tabs:

• Facade — portrait and description
• Profile — attributes and affiliations
• Skills — all skills grouped by category
• Gear — carried and worn equipment, with encumbrance tracking
• Combat — equipped weapons, armor, and combat-relevant information
• Mystical — mysteries, philosophies, and mystical abilities
• Actions — available actions for this character (see Actions on a Being)
• Effects — active effects modifying this character

Facade, Gear, Actions, and Effects are the common actor tabs — the same tabs, working the same way, on a Vehicle or a Structure. They are documented once, in Understanding Sheets under Common Actor Tabs; this page covers what is particular to a Being. The rest of the tabs are Being-only.

The Being Sheet Header

Above the tabs, the header shows the portrait and name, a row of status indicators, a health bar, and a body-part grid.

Status indicators

Six condition pills are click-toggles — Sleep, Prone, Stun, Incapacitated, Unconscious, Dead — that turn a condition on or off. Two more, Aural-Shock and Fatigue, are read-only: they light up on their own when the Being has an active affliction of that kind.

Health bar

SoHL has no hit points — the health bar is a qualitative assessment, the way a doctor says “fair,” not a pool of points. It reads: Excellent · Good · Fair · Poor · Morbid · Dead.

Health is driven by impaired body parts only — an injury that doesn’t impair a part has no effect on health. Each impaired part imposes a maximum on overall health, based on how badly it’s impaired (Minor / Serious / Grievous / Unusable), whether it’s a critical part (one holding the head/torso vital or core roles), and how many parts share that state. The overall health is the worst (lowest) maximum across every impaired part — for example, a single serious wound to an arm caps health around Fair, while an unusable critical part is fatal. As wounds heal, the parts recover and the assessment climbs back toward Excellent. A living Being is never worse than Morbid unless actually slain.

(Fatigue, fear, and shock will impose their own maximums in a later update; the overall health will then be the lowest of all of them.)

Body-part grid

Each body part appears as a colored chip showing the worst injury among that part’s hit locations:

As injuries heal, a part’s color climbs back toward white. A part may also carry a permanent impairment — a lasting maiming that keeps it colored even with no fresh injury.

Creating a Being

Generally, you should not create a Being from scratch using the Create Actor dialog. Instead, duplicate an existing Being from the compendium (such as “Basic Folk”) and customize it.

See Character Creation for step-by-step instructions.

Beings on Scenes

Beings can be placed on scenes as tokens. Each token represents the Being’s physical presence in the game world. Tokens can be moved, have vision, and participate in combat encounters.

Actions on a Being

A Being carries a set of built-in actions — the procedures the system knows how to run for a character. You reach them from the Actions tab on the Being sheet, or by right-clicking the Being in the Actors sidebar and choosing from the Actions context menu.

Nothing here ever fires on its own. Every action runs because a person picked it, or clicked a button on a chat card addressed to their own character. Where an action would change your character’s state, the system asks first. See Actions for how actions work in general, and Base Item for the standard test dialog that most rolls open.

These are the actions a Being defines:

One further action, Answer the Rally, is hidden: it never appears on the Actions menu and is reached only from the button on a Rally card. It is documented with the Rally Test, where that card comes from.

Two of these are physician’s actions. Perform Treatment Test and Perform Blood Stoppage are run on the physician’s own sheet, not the patient’s. They roll the physician’s Physician skill and post a card that the patient’s own player accepts. A character with no Physician skill is told so and nothing is rolled.

Shock Test

What it does and when to use it

Shock is the body’s collapse under a sudden systemic load. It is not only an injury matter — blood loss, terror, exhaustion, or a GM-ruled cause can all drive a shock test. Whatever the cause supplies a base Shock State Index (SSI), and this action rolls the character’s Shock skill to see how well they hold up.

Use it when something has just hit the character hard enough that staying conscious is in question and no other card has already offered the roll. When a wound is the cause, the injury card’s own Shock Roll button is the usual route — it computes the index for you.

Before you start

• Know the base Shock State Index. For a wound it is the struck location’s Shock Value plus the Injury Level; for any other cause it is whatever value the GM or the rules assign.
• An extreme index needs no roll. Below 5 the result is always No Shock and above 10 it is always Dead, so the system skips the roll and goes straight to the outcome. Only an index from 5 to 10 is actually decided by the dice.
• Fatigue counts against you. The character’s fatigue penalty is applied to the roll automatically. Injury impairment is not — shock is a whole-body response, not a limb’s.

What happens on screen

1. The Shock Test dialog opens, titled {character}: Shock Test, with one field:

   • Base Shock State Index (Location Shock + Injury Level, or the cause’s value): — type the index the cause supplies. It starts at 0.

   Press Roll to continue, or Cancel to abandon the test.

2. The Shock roll posts to chat as an ordinary test result card.

3. The result adjusts the index — Critical Failure +2, Marginal Failure +1, Marginal Success 0, Critical Success −1 — and the final index becomes a state: 6 or less No Shock, 7 Stunned, 8 Incapacitated, 9 Unconscious, 10 or more Dead.

4. The “Set Shock State?” dialog asks before anything changes, reading Set {name}’s shock state to {state}? with two buttons:

   • Set State — applies it. The matching condition is turned on and any other shock condition is cleared.
   • Leave Unchanged — records nothing. The roll still stands in chat; you can apply the state by hand from the sheet’s status pills.

   Shock only ever worsens here: a fresh test never improves a state that is already worse. Improving is the Shock Re-Test.

5. If the character entered ordinary shock, the Set a Shock Re-Test Reminder? offer follows (the shared offer-schedule dialog described on Base Item). Accepting arms a reminder — at the end of each of the character’s own turns while Incapacitated, or ten minutes later while Unconscious. Declining arms nothing.

For the full rules — the Shock State Index table and what each state means in play — see the Shock rules.

Shock Re-Test

What it does

This is how a character climbs back out of ordinary shock. An Incapacitated or Unconscious victim rolls their Shock skill at −20 (plus their fatigue penalty) to shake it off. Any other state — already recovered, merely Stunned, or already in lasting Extended Shock or a Coma — is told “A Shock Re-Test applies only to an Incapacitated or Unconscious victim.” and nothing is rolled.

You will not find this on the Actions menu. It comes to you: when the reminder armed by a Shock Test falls due, the system posts an owner-gated card in chat with a Perform button, and the re-test runs only when the victim’s own player clicks it. Until then nothing happens — the reminder nags, it never acts.

What happens on screen

1. The Shock roll posts to chat at −20, with no pre-roll dialog.

2. The result is applied immediately — the click on Perform was the consent:

   Result	What happens
   Critical Success	Recovers from all shock
   Marginal Success	Improves to Stunned
   Marginal Failure	Falls into Extended Shock — a lasting trauma at Healing Rate 5
   Critical Failure (Incapacitated)	Falls into Extended Shock at the worse Healing Rate 4
   Critical Failure (Unconscious)	Falls into a Coma — a lasting trauma, and the character stays Unconscious

3. A new Extended Shock or Coma offers a Course Test reminder. Those lasting conditions do not recover through further re-tests; each recovers through its own Course Test.

4. The ordinary Re-Test reminder is cleared either way. A performed re-test ends that cycle — the character is out of ordinary shock, one way or the other — so nothing re-arms itself behind your back.

A Coma’s Healing Rate is derived from the worst active wound (12 minus its location’s Shock Value minus its Injury Level). See the Shock rules for Extended Shock and Coma recovery, and Afflictions Injuries for living with the resulting trauma.

Stumble Test and Fumble Test

These two are the same test wearing different clothes: a combat mishap has knocked something loose, and the character rolls to keep control of it. Both roll the better of an attribute and a matching skill — ties go to the skill, and either one alone is used when the character lacks the other. A character with neither is told so and nothing is rolled.

Both are offered, never imposed: a mishap on an attack card tells you the test applies, and it happens only when you pick the action.

Stumble Test

Rolls the better of Agility and Acrobatics to stay on your feet. The standard test dialog opens first (see below), then the result card reads:

Fumble Test

Rolls the better of Dexterity and Legerdemain to keep hold of what you are carrying. Same flow; the result card reads:

Neither test changes anything on the sheet — the card is the record, and what a stumble or a dropped weapon costs is played out at the table. Falling prone is described in the Prone rules.

The standard test dialog

Both tests open the ordinary pre-roll dialog — Target, the modifier breakdown, Situational Modifier, Success Level Modifier, and Roll Visibility — described once on Base Item. Cancelling it abandons the test.

Fear Test

What it does and when to use it

A test of Will against something frightening — a horror, a sorcery, a sheer drop. Use it when the GM calls for one; the roll is made on the frightened character’s own sheet.

Fear is tracked per source. Each frightening thing the character faces gets its own record, so being afraid of the wight in the barrow is separate from being afraid of the fire. The character’s overall fear state is the worst of them.

What happens on screen

There is no pre-roll dialog — the Will roll goes straight to chat, and a Fear result card follows. If the character is currently Brave (see below), +20 is added to the roll automatically.

The Fear card and what changes

The card shows the character’s name, the resulting State (green on a success, red on a failure), any Psyche Stress gained, and the effect notes for that state. It carries no buttons — it is a record of what happened.

On the sheet:

• A frightened result records a trauma for that source, or worsens the one already there, and adds any new Psyche Stress.
• A success clears that source entirely; a Critical Success leaves a short-lived Brave marker good for five minutes.
• The fearful condition is kept in step with the character’s overall fear state across all sources, so the token shows it exactly while some source still frightens them.

See the Fear rules for what each state permits, and Psychological Condition for Psyche Stress.

Morale Test

What it does and when to use it

A test of Initiative against a reason to break — the line collapsing, a friend cut down, odds that have turned hopeless. Where a Fear Test asks whether you are frightened, a Morale Test asks whether you are still willing to fight.

Like fear, morale is tracked per source, and the character’s morale state is the worst across them.

What happens on screen

No pre-roll dialog: the Initiative roll posts to chat, and a Morale card follows. A currently Brave character rolls at +20.

The card shows the resulting State, any Psyche Stress gained, and the effect note for that state; it carries no buttons.

On the sheet, a shaken result records or worsens a morale trauma for that source and adds any Psyche Stress; a success clears the source, and a Critical Success leaves the five-minute Brave marker. Morale sets no condition on the token — the trauma items are the record.

A shaken character can come back two ways: their own Reaction Test, or an ally’s Rally Test. See the Morale rules.

Reaction Test

What it does

A shaken combatant’s attempt to pull themselves together — an Initiative test made on their own behalf, or in answer to an ally’s rally.

Only a shaken character (Withdrawing, Routed, or Catatonic) can make one. Anyone else is told “Only a shaken (Withdrawing, Routed, or Catatonic) combatant makes this test.” and nothing is rolled.

What happens on screen

The Initiative roll posts to chat with no pre-roll dialog, followed by a state card showing the result:

• Success — a Catatonic character improves to Routed; anyone else snaps back to Steady, and every shaken morale source is cleared from the sheet.
• Failure — the state persists; nothing changes.

Rally Test

What it does and when to use it

A leader’s attempt to steady shaken allies — once per round, as a free action. It rolls the leader’s Command skill, falling back to Initiative when the character has no Command.

A rally is offered, never imposed. A successful Rally Test does not reach into anyone else’s character sheet; it posts an open invitation, and each shaken ally’s own player decides whether to take it.

What happens on screen

The Command (or Initiative) roll posts to chat with no pre-roll dialog. Then:

• Critical Success — a Rally! card posts offering shaken allies an immediate steadying.
• Marginal Success — a Rally! card posts offering shaken allies a Reaction Test instead.
• Failure — an informational card posts reading “Unresponsive — no allies rally; no further Rally Test for now.”

The Rally! card

This card is open: anyone may click the button, and it acts on the clicking player’s own character, not on anybody else’s. The card stays in the log, so an ally can answer it late — or ignore it entirely.

Answer the Rally

Your character’s response to an ally’s rally. It self-gates: only a shaken character can answer, and anyone else who clicks is told “Only a shaken (Withdrawing, Routed, or Catatonic) combatant makes this test.”

What it does depends on how well the leader rolled:

• From a Critical Success rally — your character becomes Steady at once, and every shaken morale source is cleared.
• From a Marginal Success rally — your character makes a Reaction Test, which may or may not steady them.

Resist the Pall

What it does and when to use it

The Pall is a spiritual miasma that clings to certain places. A character standing in one tests Spirit at the start of their turn to hold it off. The test uses a spirit skill where the character has one, and falls back to the Aura attribute otherwise.

The Pall’s depth bites: the roll takes a penalty of 5 × the total Pall Strength affecting the character, so a deep Pall is very hard to resist.

What happens on screen

The Spirit roll posts to chat with no pre-roll dialog, followed by a state card:

A failure accrues Pall Stress Levels on the character’s single Pall Cloud trauma, creating it on the first failure and adding to it thereafter. A success changes nothing on the sheet.

See the The Pall rules for Pall Strength, what the accumulated Cloud does to a character, and how it clears.

Calculate Impact

What it does

The bridge between “the blow landed” and “here is the wound.” It rolls (or re-uses) the damage for a strike and posts a damage card whose button hands the result to the target so their side can resolve the injury.

This is a plumbing step in the combat flow rather than something you would normally pick off the menu: the attack cards fire it for you with the impact details already filled in. Picking it by hand with nothing to work from will report that it needs an impact in its scope and stop.

The damage card

The button acts on the target’s character, so the target’s own player (or the GM) settles the wound. See Combat Basics for where the damage card fits into an exchange.

Resolve Injury

What it does and when to use it

Turns a blow into an actual wound on this character: where it landed, how much armor stopped, how bad the injury is, whether it bleeds, and — for the worst edged wounds — whether the limb comes off. It is the single entry point behind the combat cards’ injury buttons and the sheet’s Add Injury, so it behaves the same however you get there.

Use it by hand when a wound arrives outside combat — a fall, a trap, a GM ruling.

Before you start

• The character needs a body. One with no body structure is told "…has no body; it cannot take an injury."
• An incorporeal character cannot be wounded by a physical blow; the system says so and stops.

The Resolve Injury dialog

Titled {character}: Resolve Injury. Every field is pre-filled from whatever sent you here, so from a combat card you usually just confirm.

• Target ZN: — the body Zone Number the blow was aimed at, from 1 up to the body’s highest zone. Used only when the Location is left to derive; it is disabled while an explicit Location is chosen.
• Zone Die: — the die rolled to scatter the hit away from the Target ZN. A bigger die means a wilder spread. Also used only while the Location derives.
• Location: — the hit location. Leave it on (derive from Target ZN + ZD) to let the aim and the scatter die decide, or pick a location outright to override the roll. An overridden location is flagged on the result card.
• Aspect: — Blunt, Edged, Piercing, or Fire. This drives which injury table applies and how armor behaves.
• Impact: — the damage value before armor.
• Armor Reduction: — armor negated by the blow. It is applied only for a piercing aspect; for any other aspect it is ignored.
• Bleed Impact Penalty: — extra impact counted only when deciding whether the wound bleeds, not when computing the wound itself.
• Treatment Modifier: — a modifier recorded on the resulting wound, applied later when a physician treats it.
• Add to Character Sheet — when ticked, a real wound is recorded as a trauma item on the character. Untick it to resolve a blow without writing it down. Its starting state follows the world’s record trauma setting.

Dismissing the dialog abandons the whole thing; nothing is rolled or recorded.

The Amputation Test dialog

A grievous edged wound at a severable location triggers a Strength test before the result is posted. The dialog explains that the location may be severed and offers one field:

• Amputation Test Modifier: — the modifier for the Strength test, pre-filled from how amputable that location is. Adjust it if the GM rules otherwise.

The Strength roll then posts to chat. A failure may sever the location — which kills the character outright if the location is vital — and may leave the wound bleeding or penalize the following Shock Roll.

The Resolve Injury card

If the scatter die sends the blow off the body entirely, a miss card posts instead: it shows the aim trace and reports that nothing was hit. No wound, no record.

A recorded wound becomes a trauma item on the sheet, shows up in the body-part grid, and drives the health bar. See Afflictions Injuries for living with it, the Injury rules for the tables behind it, and Bleeding for what a bleeder costs.

Contagion Check

What it does

Posts a card telling this character they have been exposed, with a button offering them a Contagion Test. It rolls nothing and changes nothing.

Anyone can post a Contagion Check on anyone. That asymmetry is deliberate: exposure is something the world does to a character — the GM opens the plague ward, another player’s character coughs — but whether they catch it is their own roll to make, on their own sheet. The check hands the decision over; it never takes it.

There is no such thing as transmitting an affliction at someone. The check is always on the receiving side.

Contagion Test

What it does and when to use it

Rolls whether this character catches something they have been exposed to — bad water, a plague ward, a rat bite. The roll is a d100 against the affliction’s Contagion Index × the character’s Endurance, and failing it means the character contracts the affliction.

A character with no Endurance attribute cannot make the test and is told so.

The Contagion Test dialog

• Affliction — a drop-down of every contagious affliction found in your world and in the installed compendium packs.
• Situational Modifier — added to the roll; how bad the exposure was.
• Success Level Modifier — shifts the result a whole level either way.
• Add the affliction to the character sheet if contracted — whether a caught affliction is actually recorded. It starts ticked or cleared according to your world’s Record Trauma setting, so a table that tracks illness by hand is not nagged into keeping two sets of books.

Dismissing the dialog stops there.

What happens next

The d100 posts to chat as an ordinary test result.

• Marginal or critical success — nothing happens; the character shrugged off the exposure.
• Marginal failure — the character contracts the affliction, and its onset is the full roll of the affliction’s Onset Formula, in days.
• Critical failure — the character contracts it and it takes hold twice as fast: half the rolled onset, rounded down. An onset of 0 days is immediate.

If the checkbox was ticked, the affliction is created on the sheet with its Contracted date stamped as now and its incubation set to the rolled value.

Nothing offers to schedule another Contagion Test. Exposure is an event, not a condition — if the character walks back into the plague ward, that is a new check. What the affliction does from there is its own business; see Item Affliction and the Afflictions rules.

Perform Affliction Treatment

What it does

The physician’s half of treating someone else’s affliction. Only a character with the Physician skill can answer; anyone else is told so and nothing happens.

It rolls this physician’s own Physician skill as a Success Value test and posts a result card. The Value Diamonds earned become a proposed Course Bonus, which the patient accepts through their affliction’s Treat Affliction action — nothing is applied to the patient until they press that button.

Perform Treatment Test

What it does and when to use it

The physician’s half of treating a wound. Your character rolls their own Physician skill against someone’s injury and proposes a Healing Rate for it. You never touch the patient’s sheet — the result goes to chat, and the patient’s own player accepts it.

Run it when a wounded character asks for treatment. If a wound has posted a Treatment Requested card, any qualified physician can answer it by clicking its button; the wound is filled in for you and no dialog opens.

You need the Physician skill. Without it you are told “Your character has no Physician skill; the Treatment Test is not available.” and nothing is rolled — which leaves an open request card live for someone who does.

The Perform Treatment Test dialog

Opens only when you run the action by hand. Titled {physician}: Treatment Test.

• Injury UUID (optional) — paste the wound’s UUID here, taken from the injury’s sheet header with Foundry’s Copy Document UUID. Filling this in targets a real wound, and the result card gets an Accept button the patient can use. The hint below the field says as much.
• Severity: — 1 to 5. Used only when the UUID is left blank, for a GM-directed test where the wound is described rather than linked.
• Aspect: — Blunt, Edged, Piercing, or Fire. Also for the blank-UUID case.

A pasted UUID that is not an injury is rejected with “Only injuries can be treated with a Treatment Test.”, and an already-healed wound with “This injury has already healed; no treatment is needed.”

The roll follows, at the modifier the wound’s aspect and severity require.

The Treatment Result card

Only the patient’s side can press Accept, and pressing it is what actually changes the wound — the physician proposes, the patient records. A GM-directed test with no linked wound posts the same card without the button; someone applies the result by hand.

See Afflictions Injuries for treating and healing wounds, and the Healing Base and Infection rules for what a Healing Rate does over time.

Perform Blood Stoppage

What it does and when to use it

The urgent cousin of the Treatment Test: your character tries to staunch someone’s bleeding before they lose too much blood. It rolls your own Physician skill and posts the outcome for the bleeding character to accept.

Use it the moment a bleeder appears. A bleeding wound posts a Request Blood Stoppage card; any physician can answer it, and the wound is filled in for you.

You need the Physician skill here too, with the same message when you do not have it. A previous attempt that ended in a Marginal Failure carries +10 into this one automatically.

There is no dialog — the roll happens straight away.

The Blood Stoppage Result card

The four outcomes are:

As with treatment, only the patient’s side presses Accept, and that press is what changes the wound. See the Bleeding rules for Blood Loss Advances and what running out of blood means.

See also

• Actions — how actions, the Actions tab, and the context menu work.
• Base Item — the standard test dialog and the offer-schedule dialog these actions share.
• Afflictions Injuries — wounds, diseases, and conditions on the sheet.
• Combat Basics — where the damage and injury cards fit into an exchange.
• Combatant — the combat tracker row and its own actions.
• Skill Tests — the d100 roll-under test underneath all of these.
• Character Creation — building the Being in the first place.
• Actors — the other three actor kinds, and how to choose.
• User Guide — back to the index.