Rounds are short. Recovery is not.

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The round, step by step.

Personal combat is cyclical. Everybody acts in turn in a regular cycle called a round, and the cycle repeats until the fight ends. Before the first round, the referee decides who has noticed whom — because being ready is worth more here than anything you can roll.

Read step 1 before you read anything else in this chapter. An automatic 12 is not a good roll, it is the best possible roll, handed out for free to everyone who saw the ambush coming — and initiative is not re-rolled, so that advantage lasts the whole fight rather than the first round of it. Surprise in this system is not a bonus on a check. It is the check, already won.

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The range bands, and the DM each applies.

Personal combat is divided into a series of range bands. You are never at a distance from someone; you are at a band from them, and the band is the only spatial fact the rules need. It decides how hard your weapon is to use against them, and nothing else.

The squares column is there for a table that wants to push miniatures around, at 1.5 metres to a square. You do not need it. One band per pair of combatants is the entire model, which is what makes this system playable in conversation: the referee says you are at Medium range from the shooter behind the crates, and that sentence contains everything the rules will ask for.

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How far apart a fight begins.

When a combat begins, the referee must decide the starting range that separates the groups of combatants. It is a judgement about the place the fight is happening in, not a roll, and the printed guidance is short enough to hold in your head.

The two darkness entries are limits rather than settings: they cap what the starting range may be, so a fight in total darkness on an open prairie starts at Short despite the terrain, and one in partial darkness starts no further out than Medium. That is the rule that decides whether a rifle was worth carrying, and it is decided before anyone rolls anything.

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Who acts first, and how it is thrown.

If the combatants are all unprepared for combat, then each rolls 2D6 and adds their Dexterity DM to determine starting Initiative. Initiative determines the order that characters act in, but it can also be spent to react to events — so it is a resource as well as a place in the queue.

Starting Initiative, unprepared

2D6 + Dexterity DM

Starting Initiative, prepared while others are not

12 + Dexterity DM

Notice what the third step gives you. Seeing a group that has not seen you is not only an initiative advantage — it is permission to leave. The rules make walking away an explicitly available option at exactly the moment it is worth taking, which is before anyone has spent an action.

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What a round is, and how long it lasts.

Each combat round lasts around six seconds of game time. In a combat round each character gets a minor action and a significant action. Actions are taken in descending order of Initiative, and when your turn comes you take all of your actions at once.

Initiative is not re-rolled between rounds. It is dynamic instead: the score you started with carries forward and is adjusted up and down by what you do — reacting drops it, hastening lifts it for one round, delaying resets it to where you actually acted. So the order is stable enough to plan around and mobile enough that spending it is a real decision.

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Changing your place in the order.

During the course of a round your Initiative score may be changed by reactions and hastening. Any change affects your Initiative for one round only — either the current round if you have yet to act, or the following round if you have acted already.

Hastening is a trade you make before you know whether it was worth it: you buy two points of order with a penalty on everything you do that round. It is worth it when acting first is the whole point — reaching cover, reaching a door, shooting someone who is about to shoot your friend — and it is a bad deal when the shot itself is the difficult part. You may only ever take it once.

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What one character may do in one round.

A round buys you one significant action and one minor action, and you may give up the significant action to take three minor actions instead. That is the whole budget, and every rule about what you can do in six seconds is a rule about how to spend it.

The exchange rate is worth stating plainly: a significant action is worth two minor ones. Take your minor action as well and that is the three you may have in a round — so the third minor action is the one you paid the significant action for, not a fourth thing you were given.

Three kinds of action sit outside that budget. Free actions are so fast they do not even qualify as a minor action — shouting a warning, pushing a button, checking your watch — and you may perform as many of them as you like in a turn, although if you perform several the referee may require you to spend a minor or even a significant action on your various tasks. Extended actions are skill checks that take longer than one round. And you may delay, acting later in the round than your Initiative says.

Delaying is the one action in the chapter that can permanently improve your place in the order rather than borrowing against it. The price is a whole round of actions — you spend six seconds doing nothing to buy a position one point above the fastest person in the fight, and you keep it, because Initiative is not re-rolled.

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The small actions, and how many you get.

Minor actions are actions intended to move a distance or to manipulate or move an object. You can take up to three minor actions per round, at the loss of a significant action.

Aiming is the sharpest thing on that list and the hardest to actually use. Six minor actions is two whole rounds of doing nothing else — and the bonus evaporates if you move, dodge or get hit in the meantime. Against a target that is shooting back you will rarely bank more than one or two; against a sentry who has not seen you, +6 is available and it is enormous.

Movement is six metres a minor action, and the squares on the range table are 1.5 metres a side — so the average character crosses four squares on their turn. Difficult ground — rubble, mud, thick under-brush — halves that to three metres a minor action, and crouching halves it as well. The page states each reduction on its own and never combines them, so what a crouching character crosses over broken ground is the referee's call rather than a printed number.

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The one real thing you do.

Significant actions are intended to do something within about three seconds. You can perform a single significant action per round, or forego it to perform a total of three minor actions.

Trading down

one significant action = two minor actions

You may make a skill check or do something else as a significant action when the action requires your full attention, concentration, complicated physical actions or some combination of those. There is also a clean rule of thumb for anything the referee has not classified: any skill check with a time interval of 1–6 seconds is simply considered a significant action during combat.

That rule of thumb is what keeps the rest of the game usable inside a fight. Every skill in the book states the time its tasks take, so a check that resolves in seconds slots straight into a round as your one significant action, and anything slower becomes an extended action instead. Nobody has to decide what category picking a lock belongs to; the time interval already answered it.

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Acting on someone else's turn, and what it costs you.

Reactions are actions taken immediately in response to the action of another. The more time you spend reacting, the longer it will be until you act yourself — each reaction lowers your Initiative by 2 and applies a −1 DM to all your skill checks until the following round.

The cost of one reaction

Initiative −2, and a −1 DM to all skill checks until the following round

There is no limit to how many times you can react in a round, but you can only react once to each attack, and the penalties from reacting are cumulative. So the ceiling is not a rule, it is arithmetic: react four times and you are eight points down the order with a −4 on everything you do next round. And you can only react to attacks that you are aware of, which is the second reason an ambush is so bad.

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The check, its DMs, and what a hit means.

The most common significant action is an attack: trying to injure a foe with a melee attack or a ranged weapon. You declare your target, the foe may choose to react, and then you make a skill check — and if it succeeds, you deal damage.

Melee Attack

2D6 + appropriate melee combat skill + Strength or Dexterity DM (attacker's choice)

Shooting Attack

2D6 + appropriate gun combat skill + Dexterity DM

Thrown Attack

2D6 + Athletics + Dexterity DM

The difficulty of that check is not a referee’s judgement. It comes out of the table below, from the type of weapon in your hands and the range band you are at — so the same rifle is Average at Short, Average at Long and Very Difficult at Personal range, and the whole tactical shape of the fight is in that grid rather than in any modifier.

A dash is not a penalty, it is a wall: the weapon has no entry at that range and the attack is not available. Close Quarters and Extended Reach weapons run out past Close, a pistol runs out past Long, and only the rifle, the assault weapon and the rocket reach Distant at all. Read the row before you read the modifiers, because no amount of aiming makes a dash into a number.

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Attacking someone who cannot resist.

You can use a melee weapon to deliver a coup de grace to a helpless opponent that is within close range. You can also use a ranged weapon to do so, provided you are adjacent to the target. The attack automatically hits and the opponent dies.

There is no check, no damage roll and no armour. This is the one place in personal combat where the dice are skipped entirely, and it is deliberate: the rules will not make you roll to find out whether an unconscious person survives being executed. What the rule costs is the requirement to be there — within close range with a blade, adjacent with a gun — which is a real limit in a fight that is still going on.

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Cover, movement, aiming and the rest.

Beyond the basic attack, a set of named situations change how a fight works — cover you are behind, darkness you are shooting through, a burst you are spraying, a stance you have taken. Most are a modifier; several are full procedures with their own resolution.

Communications are the first special consideration and the least obviously mechanical. If you are not in communication with the rest of your unit and your commander, you cannot benefit from Tactics or Leadership at all — and if you benefited from Tactics at the start of combat and are later cut off, your Initiative is lowered by the same amount it was boosted. Unlike every other Initiative modification, that one lasts until combat ends or communication is re-established.

Blind firing is what you do when you cannot see the target. It works exactly like any other form of firing, including automatic, but it always treats you as having Level 0 in that weapon’s relative skill. An extra die is thrown when firing, and before any calculations are made the highest die — or one of the highest, in case of a tie — is removed completely. Any successful attack then needs a die rolled to randomly choose which eligible target in the firing line is hit, whether friend or foe.

Burst fire is a choice you make before you roll. Weapons that fire a burst of 2, 3, 4, 10, 20 or 100 rounds may improve your odds of either hitting a target or inflicting additional damage, and you must decide which: spray the target and increase the chance of scoring a hit, or fire a precise, grouped burst in the hope of inflicting greater damage. Either sort of burst fire is a significant action.

Cover is the single largest modifier available to a defender, and it is free. Any sort of low wall, undergrowth, convenient rocks or other objects can serve. Attacks made on characters who are behind cover suffer the negative cover DM below, and crouching or prone targets can claim cover one step higher on the table. If a character in full cover is crouching or prone they are impossible to hit, but cannot return fire.

The source names five kinds of target that cannot be suppressed, because nothing about incoming fire near them changes what they were going to do: vehicles or targets fully enclosed in vehicles, zealots, mechanical or android targets, targets wearing full Battle Dress, and suicidal targets. Suppression is a rule about fear, so it has no purchase on anyone who is not afraid.

Two skills reach across the whole fight rather than into one attack. Tactics gives an Initiative bonus to a whole unit at the start of combat: the unit commander makes a Tactics check, and everyone in the unit may increase their Initiative by the Effect of it. Leadership does the same for one person at a time — the character with Leadership makes a check, and the target character’s Initiative is increased by the Effect. Making a Leadership skill check is a significant action.

The difference between them is when they are paid for. Tactics is thrown once, at the start of combat, and everybody who can hear the commander benefits for the whole fight. Leadership costs a significant action every time — a round you did not spend shooting — and moves one ally. And both of them stop working the moment communication is cut, which is what makes the comms rules above a combat rule rather than flavour.

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Rolling damage, and which characteristic it takes.

Each weapon lists the damage it inflicts as a number of D6, and you add the Effect of the attack roll to it. There are no hit points: the damage comes off your physical characteristics themselves, which is why being shot makes you worse at everything until it heals.

Damage dealt

the weapon's damage dice + the Effect of the attack roll

Two things follow from damage landing on characteristics rather than on a pool. The first is that every point you lose is a point off the DM those characteristics give you, so an injured character rolls worse at everything they were good at. The second is that after the first hit you choose where the damage goes — which is a genuine tactical decision, because the difference between spreading it and stacking it is the difference between being seriously wounded and being unconscious.

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Subtracting protection from damage.

Armor reduces damage by the value of the armor. A hit with Effect 6+ always inflicts at least one point of damage, regardless of the target’s armor.

Damage taken

damage dealt − the armour’s value, but at least 1 if the attack’s Effect was 6+

Two sentences, and the second one is what stops armour from being invulnerability. Because damage is dice plus Effect and armour is a flat subtraction, a high enough armour value simply erases most attacks — and would erase all of them without the Effect 6+ floor. An Exceptional Success gets a point through anything, which means a skilled attacker with a poor weapon is never quite wasting their time.

It also cuts the other way, and this is the sharper edge of the same rule: the Effect that got you through the armour was already added to your damage. A great attack roll is worth twice — once as extra damage, once as the guarantee that at least some of it lands.

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Exhaustion, and the penalty it applies.

You can become fatigued in numerous ways — staying awake too long, over-exerting yourself, or even using certain medications. A fatigued character suffers a −2 DM to all checks until he rests.

Rest needed to clear fatigue

3 − the character's Endurance DM hours

Fatigue does not stack into a second −2. If you suffer fatigue while already fatigued, you fall unconscious — so the state has exactly two rungs, tired and out cold, and there is no gradual slide between them. That makes a −2 on everything a thing to take seriously rather than a thing to push through.

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Going down, and coming round.

An unconscious character may make an Endurance check after every minute of unconsciousness. If it succeeds, he regains consciousness; if it fails he must wait another minute and can then try again, with a +1 DM on the check for every check previously failed.

Coming round

an Endurance check each minute, at +1 DM per check previously failed

The escalating bonus means you always wake up eventually, and never quickly. A minute is ten combat rounds, so being knocked out removes you from any fight that is still going on — by the time the earliest check comes round the fight has been decided by other people. What the rule governs is what happens afterwards.

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The threshold that changes what happens next.

Injured characters are either wounded or seriously wounded. You are seriously wounded if you have lost at least one point from all three of your physical characteristics — and as soon as one of them is restored, no matter how, you are no longer seriously wounded.

The threshold is about breadth, not depth. Losing nine points from Endurance alone is not a serious wound; losing one point from each of the three is. That is deliberate — it is a rule about being hurt all over rather than about how much damage has been added up — and it is why spreading damage across your characteristics has a real cost as well as a real benefit.

The way out is unusually generous and it is worth knowing before you need it. One point back in any one characteristic clears the whole condition, by any means at all — a night’s rest, a moment of first aid, anything. So a seriously wounded character is one successful medic check away from merely wounded, and that single point is worth more than the several points that come after it.

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Recovering without treatment, and how long it takes.

Wounded characters heal naturally, and can also benefit from medical care. When characteristic points return from healing, you choose which characteristic regains them, and you may split healing between characteristics if you wish.

The Endurance DM in those rows is your Endurance DM now, not the one you had before you were hurt — and damage comes off Endurance first. So the worse you are injured, the more slowly you recover from it. Characters with a low Endurance DM, quite possibly from the injury itself, may degrade and lose more characteristic points over time if they are unlucky or cannot, or will not, rest.

The seriously wounded row is the one that ends adventures. A seriously wounded character regains only their Endurance DM per day of rest — which means a character may never heal naturally at all, and will actually get worse if that DM is currently negative. There is no dice roll in that row to save you. Someone has to treat you.

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Being treated, and what a doctor changes.

Natural healing is not the only way to recover damage: you can also seek out medical treatment. There are three kinds, they are not interchangeable, and which one you need depends on how badly you are hurt and how long ago.

First aid within five minutes

twice the Effect of the Medic check

Medical care, per day

2 + the character's Endurance DM + the doctor's Medic skill

The five-minute window is the sharpest clock in the chapter. Treated inside it, first aid returns twice the Effect; treated inside the hour, it returns the Effect and no more — the same check, halved, for arriving late. That is what makes carrying a medic into a fight worth an action, and what makes “we’ll patch him up when we’re clear” an expensive sentence.

Surgery is the only treatment in the game that can make you worse: fail the check and the patient loses characteristic points equal to the Effect, which for an Exceptional Failure is a great deal. It is also the only route out of a serious wound that does not depend on your own Endurance DM. The three treatments are a sequence rather than a menu — first aid at the scene, surgery for the seriously wounded once first aid has been applied, and medical care for the long recovery afterwards.

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Recovering the characteristics a mind loses.

Other than Psionic Strength, you may also suffer damage to your Intelligence or even your Education. Unless otherwise specified, each mental characteristic heals at the rate of one point per day.

Mental healing

one point per day, per mental characteristic

This is a flat rate and it takes no notice of anything else. No Endurance DM, no dice, no rest requirement, no treatment to speed it up, and no penalty for continuing to work — a point a day, per characteristic, whatever you are doing. It is the simplest recovery rule in the chapter, and it is separate from the physical track rather than part of it.