Bodies, Organs & Injuries

Siegmore's System replaces hit points with anatomy. Everything the player-facing rules promise — wound depth, blood loss, complications, surgery — is backed by two file types and three computed fields. This chapter explains the intent and how to extend it without breaking it.

The design intent

Realism through consequence, not bookkeeping. The system deliberately keeps the familiar d20 attack roll and adds exactly one new axis: margin of success converts to tissue depth. Nothing tracks each organ's status on a sheet. The anatomy lives in a reference library, wounds cite it, and the character sheet derives only what play actually needs: Defense, bleeding rate, and stacked pain.

The Body Part library

/Body Parts/ holds the anatomy: brain, heart, lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, stomach, intestines, skeleton, muscles, skin, eyes, spinal cord, peripheral nerves, great vessels, and the throat. Each file declares:

• System, tissue layer, location — what it is and how deep a strike must go to reach it (skin → flesh → bone → organ/nerve/vessel).
• When damaged, graded — glancing / serious / destroyed. Always write all three rungs; the graded text is what the GM reads aloud at the table.
• Vulnerability — what protects it and what reaches past that protection. This is combat-relevant, not flavor.
• Lethality — harmless → debilitating → dangerous → fatal → instantly fatal. Reserve instantly fatal for heart, brain, great vessels, and throat.
• Paired — paired organs follow the paired rule: one loss survivable, both the stated lethality.
• Healing — the honest medical answer (the liver regrows; the spinal cord never does).

Adding organs: create one only when the anatomy genuinely lacks it — for a setting with gills, a second heart, or an organ that stores magic, this is the right place. Keep the medical realism; the realism is the tone.

Injury templates

/Injuries/ holds wound templates — Bruised Ribs through Ruptured Spleen. Each references a body part, carries a severity (minor → grievous), a pain penalty (0–6), a bleeding rate in blood units per hour, an impairment, and the two treatment tiers: field (stabilize — stops bleeding, halves pain) and surgical (mend — the only remedy for grievous wounds). Complications (infection, sepsis, shock) are the unscheduled deaths.

Create new templates freely as play demands — a severed Achilles, a burn covering the back — always citing an existing body part. The character sheet's injuries list stores instances (template + days suffered + notes), so templates stay shared and reusable.

The wiring

• Character — defense computes as 10 + Dex modifier + load($self.armor)?.armorRating; bleedingRate and painPenalty sum over the injuries list via load(e.injury). The blood field (max 10) is the only health number that exists.
• Equipment — weapons carry damageType (blunt/cutting/piercing) and damage (added to margin for depth); armor carries armorRating (soaks margin) and coverage. The character's weapon and armor fields filter pickers by category, so a shield can't be wielded as a hauberk.
• Hostile — defense and anatomy are the whole stat block needed to fight under these rules; resilience and tactics carry the wound behavior in prose (the troll regrows, the knight's plate reroutes strikes). If a creature needs a body that defies the library — a golem with no organs — say so in anatomy rather than inventing organ files.

Extending conventions

1. New anatomy goes in the library first; wounds cite it second.
2. Keep the depth ladder honest: margin 1–3 is skin, and skin wounds should never matter much. If a "skin" wound kills, it belongs at organ depth or the weapon's damage is too high.
3. Lethality claims must match the healing text — nothing "instantly fatal" heals, nothing "harmless" needs surgery.
4. Threat level on hostiles is pacing guidance for the GM; anatomy is the tactical truth. When they disagree, anatomy wins.