Wounds, Blood & Pain

You have no hit-point pool to gamble with. You have ten units of blood, a body that stops working where it is broken, and pain that compounds.

Blood

Bleeding injuries drain blood by the hour, at the rate on the wound, until someone stabilizes them. As blood falls:

• Below 6 — weakened: −1 on everything you attempt.
• At 3 — incapacitated: barely moving, no fighting, no fleeing.
• At 0 — dead.

Recovery is slow and honest: about one unit per full day of food, water, and rest. Nobody shrugs off exsanguination by sleeping it off overnight.

Pain

Every fresh wound carries a pain penalty (on the wound), and they stack. The total is subtracted from every roll you make — attack, defense, climbing, persuading the guard you're fine. Splinting, binding, and a dose of something bitter ease it but rarely erase it; only healing does.

A rib bruise alone (−1) is an annoyance. A broken forearm (−2) on top of a punctured lung (−4) means you are −6 on everything, which is the game's way of telling you to lie down.

Recording a wound

When a character is struck, an entry goes on their injuries list citing the wound's nature, how long it has been suffered, and notes (which side, what treatment, any complications). The wound entry itself tells you:

• What it forbids — the impairment. A broken forearm means no gripping, lifting, or blocking with that arm, full stop.
• Its severity — minor, moderate, serious, severe, grievous. The ladder runs from "an ache" to "death within a day without surgery."
• Its timeline — bleeding rate, healing time, and the complications waiting if it is left untended.

Complications

Wounds have opinions about being ignored. Each wound lists what can go wrong — infection, sepsis, shock, a bone that knits crooked. A wound left untreated past its comfort is fair game for its complications: the GM introduces one when the days pass unattended, and they kill more adventurers than swords do.

The paired rule

Organs that come in pairs — lungs, kidneys, eyes — forgive exactly one loss. A punctured lung is survivable with surgery and leaves you short of breath for months. Both is not survivable, and the anatomy entries say so plainly.

Death

Death here comes from blood loss, from an organ failing, or from a wound's complications — not from an abstract counter. That makes it avoidable: stop the bleeding, splint the break, get the surgeon in time, and people live through things that should kill them. Ignore all three and the anatomy will do what anatomy does.