Treatment, Healing & Recovery

Every wound entry splits treatment into two tiers, and the difference between them is the difference between surviving the night and being whole again.

Field treatment — stabilize

What a steady hand, a medic kit, and minutes can do: stop the bleeding, ease the pain, keep the damage from spreading. Field treatment halts a wound's bleeding entirely and, after an hour of proper care, softens its pain penalty by half (round down). Splints and slings restore partial use of a broken part — enough to limp, not enough to fight.

Field treatment never mends anything. A splinted forearm is still a broken forearm; it is just a broken forearm that has stopped getting worse.

Surgery — mend

What a real surgeon (or a healer with equivalent craft) must do, with tools, time, and safety: set the bone true, reinflate the lung, tie off the bleed. Surgery is the only remedy for grievous wounds — punctured lungs, ruptured organs, internal bleeding — and for any wound whose surgical line says so.

Finding a surgeon is a story problem, and often the whole adventure. Doing the surgery by a campfire is how patients die of the cure.

Healing

Each wound carries its healing time. Days count only when the sufferer genuinely rests; a fortnight of hard travel does not knit a femur. When the time passes, the wound closes, the pain penalty ends, and the impairment lifts — usually with a scar and sometimes with a lesson.

Complications can reset the clock, and untreated complications can end the story instead.

What healing leaves behind

• Broken bones knit straight if set straight, crooked if not — a crooked set costs something forever.
• Lungs that were punctured never quite restore full wind.
• Nerves regrow a slow inch a month, if at all; many heal numb.
• Livers, remarkably, regrow — the one great organ that forgives.

Recovery at a glance