Death and Sanity
Your sheet carries three pools — Health, Sanity, and Energy — and two of them can take your character away from you.
Death
When your Health hits 0, your character dies. There is no dying state and no last-breath roll — the fiction catches up with you and your character is done. Mark the Dead flag on your sheet and make peace with it: dead characters are out of play, and their stories end where they fall. Bring in a new character when the GM says the moment is right, and give them a reason to trust the survivors.
Death should never be a surprise ambush by the rules. It comes from the fiction: pressing on when wounded, standing your ground when running was smarter, or a plan that came apart in your hands.
Sanity
Sanity is your character's ability to make sane decisions, and it runs on its own scale — 5 down to 0. Even at full sanity your character is wild; as it drains, they come apart.
| Sanity | You are… |
|---|---|
| 5 | Wild — functional, but jumpy, reckless, hard to reason with. |
| 4 | Frayed — moods swing; laughter runs long, anger runs longer. |
| 3 | Worn — paranoid, distractible; small compulsions creep in. |
| 2 | Cracking — irrational fears, unreliable memory, wrong priorities. |
| 1 | Barely there — impulse and delusion. |
| 0 | Gone — totally chaotic and uncontrollable. |
If your sanity hits 0, you lose control of your character. The GM takes the wheel and plays them — chaotic, unpredictable, acting on whatever frightens or tempts them most — until something restores their sanity. You watch your own character do things you would never have chosen. That is the point.
Treat sanity as your real health bar. Health comes back with a breather; sanity comes back slowly, rarely, and only when the world allows it.