Health, Injury & Recovery

Your body is not a number. It is the thing you live in — and it remembers what happens to it.

Injury matters

A wound can keep you from work, slow your travel, drain your household's coin and care, and change your plans for weeks. Serious harm can threaten life itself when the fiction genuinely supports it; an ordinary road will not kill you, but a real danger can. Treat every genuine risk with the seriousness your character would.

There are no hit points, no damage bars, no fixed healing timers. Harm is described for what it is: a gashed leg, a fever, exhaustion after a sleepless night, a shoulder that will not bear weight.

What helps

• Rest. Most recovery begins with stopping.
• Care. Clean tending, food, warmth, shelter, and steady attention from someone who knows the work.
• Time. Believable time — days, weeks, sometimes longer — not a countdown.
• Circumstance. Youth, strength, good food, and a safe place help. Hard labor, hunger, cold, and neglect slow everything.

Exertion, hunger, cold, and sleeplessness matter when they genuinely press. An ordinary skipped meal is nothing to track; a winter without stores is everything.

What you know — and don't

Nobody automatically knows exact medical truth. You see pallor, pain, weakness, a wound that looks wrong — not a diagnosis. A trained healer reads far more in those signs than a bystander, but even skill is not omniscience. If something looks bad, say so, seek help, and do not assume the best.

In Play

Avoid injury before treating it: sturdy tools, help with heavy work, caution on dangerous ground. When hurt, rest honestly — the character who "walks it off" for pride often pays twice. And care for others the same way: sit with them, feed them, keep them warm. In this world, nursing someone through a fever is heroism.