Combat

Combat runs in Rounds. Within a Round everyone takes a Turn; when everyone has, the Round ends and a new one begins.

Your side and the GM's side alternate. After one of your allies finishes a Turn a Threat normally goes next — unless someone spends 1 Glory to Seize the Initiative and send another Agent instead.

What you get on your Turn

Action	What it covers
Combat Action	Your main act — an attack, or a Skill used with intent
Movement	Move up to your Speed
Simple Action	Reload, draw a weapon, kick a door, look around
Free Action	Shout a warning, roll Determination
Reflexive Action	React to something on someone else's Turn

One of each per Turn, plus any number of Free Actions.

A Full-Round Action consumes everything — Charge, Sprint and Full Defence work this way.

A Multi-Action takes more than one Combat Action in a Turn at a steep price: +2 DN to every Test that Turn per extra Action. Three Actions means +4 DN on all three.

Making an attack

Five steps. The GM runs them with you, but knowing the shape tells you where you get to intervene.

1. Declare. Say what you're attacking, with what, and which options you're using. Aim, All-Out Attack, a Called Shot, a Salvo option — all announced here.

2. Build the pool. Your sheet's Attack block already has this for your equipped weapon — the Skill, the pool, the damage, the ED, the AP. Read it rather than rebuilding it, then add situational bonus dice from range, options and abilities. (Ranged is Ballistic Skill + Agility; melee is Weapon Skill + Initiative, if you ever need to do it by hand.)

3. Test to hit. The DN is the target's Defence. Count Icons; meet or beat it and you hit.

4. Roll damage. You roll this. It is a second, separate roll and the GM should ask you for it rather than rolling it themselves. Take your weapon's damage value, roll its Extra Damage Dice (ED), and add the Icons. Melee attacks add your Strength.

5. Inflict Wounds. Your weapon's Armour Penetration comes off the target's Resilience — not their Armour Rating. Whatever Resilience remains is subtracted from your damage. What's left is Wounds.

A Boltgun does 10 + 1 ED. You Shifted an Exalted Icon for a second ED die. You roll a 4 and a 6 — 1 Icon plus an Exalted Icon, 3 extra damage — for 13 total. The Ork's Resilience is 10. It takes 3 Wounds.

Getting hurt

Wounds are real injury. Shock is exhaustion, fear, and the accumulated cost of staying upright — exceed your Maximum Shock and you become Exhausted.

Exceed your Maximum Wounds and you are Dying, which is worse than it sounds and worth understanding before it happens to you.

The moment you start Dying, without any roll: you suffer a Memorable Injury — a permanent scar, burn, or break that stays with the character for the rest of their life — and you fall Prone and cannot stand. You may only crawl, fall back, or make a basic attack.

Then it compounds. While Dying, any damage that would have been a Wound becomes a Traumatic Injury instead: a hand, an arm, a leg, an eye, gone. Worse, your dice pool starts filling with Wrath Dice — one for every Traumatic Injury you carry — and a Complication on any of them gives you another injury. The more broken you are, the faster you break.

More Traumatic Injuries than your Tier + 1 and you are dead. At Tier 1 that is the third one. Your sheet shows the count and the threshold; watch them.

There is also Annihilation: if a single attack does more than double your Maximum Wounds, you simply die. No Dying, no injuries, nothing to recover. Some things in the galaxy are not survivable and it is worth knowing that before you pick a fight with one.

Memorable and Traumatic Injuries are permanent. Resting does not clear them.

Wounded is a status, not just a number. If you have any Wounds at all, every Test you make is at +1 DN. It applies to Threats too — a hurt enemy is a worse enemy.

Determination is your out. When you take Wounds, roll your Determination pool as a Free Action: every Icon converts 1 Wound into 1 Shock. Trading injury for exhaustion is usually right, up until the Shock is what kills you.

Conditions

Beyond Wounds, combat inflicts Conditions — Bleeding, Blinded, Pinned, Staggered and others. Each is a record you can read, and the active ones appear on your sheet with their exact effect and how they end, so you never have to remember what any of them cost you.

Two rules govern all of them:

• The same Condition stacks. Hindered twice is +2 DN. Bleeding three times is 3 Mortal Wounds a Turn.
• Different Conditions do not stack their penalties. Apply only the worst. Blinded (+4 DN) and Hindered (+1 DN) together is +4 DN, not +5.

@Missing file lists all fourteen and explains the stacking rules in detail.

Critical Hits

Succeed on an attack with a 6 on your Wrath Die and you score a Critical Hit — not merely extra damage, but a specific and usually gruesome outcome the GM rolls for. Limbs come off. Ammunition detonates. People go down in ways that change how the rest of the fight feels.

Spending Glory makes a Critical worse for the target. This is Glory's best use, and the moment to spend is the moment it lands.

If your damage failed to beat the target's Resilience, a Critical still inflicts 1 Wound and still triggers its effect. The blow lands regardless.

@Missing file holds the table the GM rolls on and what Glory buys you on each result.

Combat options

There are around thirty named options — Aim, Charge, All-Out Attack, Called Shot, Full Auto, Pinning Attack, Cover, Full Defence, and the rest. Every one is a record in this project, filed by category, and you can read any of them mid-session.

You do not need to memorise them. Name the option and the GM resolves it. If you're not sure what one does, say so before you commit — asking costs nothing, and discovering the cost after you've spent your Turn is how people die.

@Missing file, @Missing file and @Missing file are three worth reading before your first fight — they come up constantly and each has a cost that isn't obvious from the name.

Recovery

Two kinds of rest.

A Regroup is about an hour — checking ammo, catching your breath between encounters. If someone has a Medicae rating they can heal one character, restoring Wounds equal to their Medicae dice pool.

A Respite is six hours or more of genuine rest. Uninterrupted, it drops your Wounds and Shock to zero and resets your Wrath to 2 — note resets, which can lower it as easily as raise it. An hour or more of strenuous activity interrupts it and you start again.

You cannot benefit from a Respite while Dying. Someone has to stabilise you first.

Ending a fight

Fights end when one side stops fighting, not when everyone is dead. Threats break, surrender, or flee. So can you — Fall Back exists for a reason, and running is frequently the correct tactical answer in a setting this lethal.

What you're fighting matters too. @Missing file explains why the same enemy is a deadly Adversary to one group and a rounding error to another — worth knowing before you decide a fight is winnable.