Danger
Like difficulty, danger arises in response to the things you describe your character doing when other players invoke a ritual phrase: “That sounds dangerous…”
- Ritual Phrase
- That sounds dangerous…
- Use
- Introduces danger.
- Available
- After a player describes her character doing something.
When you do something dangerous, decide how much you’ll put at risk: bruises, cuts, wounds, or life and limb. (If you’ve already suffered bruises, cuts, or wounds, you can’t risk them again.) Then roll the die.
On a 4, 5, or 6, you succeed! You clear the danger without any problem. On a 1, 2, or 3, you have to make a choice: you can suffer the harm you wagered, or roll again, either by spending a moment of awareness or risking even more (cuts instead of bruises, wounds instead of cuts, or life and limb instead of wounds).
Your injuries add to the things we know about your character, and since we always begin and end with the story, they should inform what we label as difficult or dangerous. Something that didn’t seem difficult before might become so after you take some bruises, for example.
In moments of great danger, another player might reflect that by responding to “That sounds dangerous…” with another ritual phrase: “…very dangerous.”
- Ritual Phrase
- …very dangerous.
- Use
- Intensifies danger.
- Available
- After another player uses the ritual phrase, 'That sounds dangerous…'
When facing something very dangerous, you have to risk life and limb, or else back down from what you wanted to do and find some other way.
#Wounds & First Aid
When you suffer a wound, you’ll need first aid, or you’ll die. You should normally consider rendering first aid very difficult, unless done by someone who’s trained quite a bit for such situations, which could make it just difficult.
When you play the place, you might decide whether or not the wound becomes infected. If you want to leave that decision up to the die, you might infect if you roll a 1, or more often than that if things like disease or infection deeply inform the spirit of the place.
#Risking Life and Limb
When you risk life and limb and fail, the number you rolled will determine your fate.
| Roll | Injury |
| 3 | You lose a hand or a foot. |
| 2 | You lose an arm or a leg. |
| 1 | You die. |
Losing a hand, foot, arm, or leg works counts as a wound, in addition to losing the appendage. Learning to live normally after losing a hand, foot, arm, or leg would make for an excellent looming question.
#Combat
The Fifth World has far less violence than ours, but violence hasn’t disappeared altogether. You won’t find any professional class dedicated to meting out violence in the Fifth World — this has quite a bit to do with why they have so much less violence than we do, but it also means that when violence does become unavoidable, it falls on ordinary people to dole it out.
First, one combatant specifies what hen will risk: bruises, cuts, wounds, or life and limb. Then the other bids. If the first wants to increase hens bid in response, hen can, and they may go back and forth until both settle on their wagers. If one wagered more than the other, that combatant gets to roll twice and take the higher result. Each combatant can spend as many moments of awareness as they like to re-roll the die. Each moment of awareness you spend allows you to re-roll the die one more time. You can keep spending awareness to re-roll for as long as you have moments of awareness to spend.
If one rolls higher than the other, that combatant wins. In a tie, the fight has no clear winner.
Anyone who doesn’t win the fight suffers whatever injury hen risked. If you won the fight, you still faced danger to do so, and should treat your victory as you would any other danger.