Bashing, Lethal, and Aggravated damage are the 3 kinds of damage.
Characters can suffer three types of damage.
Fists and feet, along with other kinds of low-impact trauma, deal bashing damage. Brass knuckles, knives, and speeding trucks deal lethal damage.
Some horrifying powers deal aggravated damage. When something deals aggravated damage directly, it’s quite obvious. Flesh bubbles and sloughs away. Skin turns black, blue and green, growing gangrenous in seconds.
If a character’s Health track is filled with any damage, his player must make a reflexive Stamina roll each turn for him to remain conscious.
If it fills with lethal damage, then each minute thereafter in which the mortal receives no medical attention — mundane or supernatural — he suffers one more injury. One Health box currently marked with an X is upgraded to an asterisk for aggravated damage, from left to right on the character’s Health chart.
Once all boxes are filled with asterisks, he’s dead.
Marking Damage
When a character suffers bashing damage, mark it with a slash (/) in the leftmost empty box of his Health track.
When a character suffers lethal damage, mark it with a cross (X) in the leftmost box of his Health track that doesn’t contain lethal or aggravated damage. If you mark over a point of bashing damage, it moves one box to the right.
When a character suffers aggravated damage, mark it with a large asterisk ( * ) in the leftmost box that doesn’t already contain aggravated damage. If you mark over a point of bashing or lethal damage, it all moves one box to the right.
Always mark the most severe injuries at the left of a character’s Health track, and push any less severe injuries to the right. Characters heal their rightmost Health boxes first and progress left.
Wound Penalties
As a character takes damage, it impairs her ability to act.
When one of her three rightmost Health boxes has damage marked, she suffers a penalty accordingly. Subtract this penalty from every action she performs, including rolling for Initiative, but not including Stamina rolls to stay conscious.
| Health Boxes Marked | Penalty |
|---|---|
| Third-to-Last | -1 |
| Second-to-Last | -2 |
| Last | -3 |
Upgrading Damage
If your character’s Health track is already full of bashing damage, any further bashing or lethal damage upgrades the leftmost point of bashing damage to lethal — turn one of the slashes into a cross.
If your character’s Health track is full of lethal damage, any further damage upgrades an existing point of lethal damage to aggravated. Turn the leftmost X into an asterisk.
When a human’s rightmost Health box has bashing damage marked in it, she has to make a Stamina roll each turn or fall unconscious.
If it has lethal damage, she takes another point of damage each minute (upgrading existing lethal damage to aggravated) until she receives medical attention.
Resistant Damage
Some extremely rare effects cause resistant injuries — for mages they are almost always the result of containing a Paradox with Wisdom.
Resistant injuries are bashing, lethal, or aggravated like other wounds, but the player should mark them with a dot above the Health box. They cannot be healed by magic, or have their healing times accelerated by magic — only recovery at the rates on the Healing page will work.