Tracking Your Stats

Your hero sheet has statistics for various aspects of your character. Some of these numbers, like attributes, don't really change. Others are more volatile, reflecting your hero's changing condition at a given point in time. These stats can change quite a bit, especially during battle:

• Your four defenses: Guard Stamina, Spirit, and Awareness

• Your life

• Your magic, if you're a Messenger, Sorcerer, or Arbiter. 

This section covers the rules for these statistics, how you lose them, and how you regain them by catching your breath or resting. 

Each defense serves two purposes: a ward against a foe’s actions, and a resource you can expend to power your own actions and abilities. The defenses differ in how they’re used, and how fast you regain them.

Many powerful abilities and techniques also consume your defenses. For example, the Champion’s ✪Mighty Blow ability takes -1 stamina. Abilities that consume stamina and spirit are generally more powerful than those that consume guard or awareness.

Regaining Defenses

Guard and awareness are quick to recover. You regain +1 guard or +1 awareness if you forego an action. When a situation defuses enough so turns no longer matter—for example, after all the foes flee, or all the heroes Hide successfully—you catch your breath and can simply regain all of these two defenses without having to track point-by-point.

Stamina and Spirit are slower to recover. You regain all of both defenses only after resting in a safe place for about an hour. (Rest is detailed in the next section.)

Defense Overflow

Some abilities can increase a defense over its maximum, creating overflow. For example, the Stand Fast brace can boost your Guard over your maximum, but only by an amount equal to your Strength. The ✪Tell the Tale ability (from the Song lore) can boost your party’s Spirit by 1 point over maximum. 

Multiple overflows don’t stack. If you’re already benefiting from a defense overflow and you use an ability that grants the same kind of overflow, you must first “reset” the defense to its maximum before you apply the new effect.  

For example, if you already have +1 overflow Guard and you Stand Fast to gain +2 overflow Guard, you end up with +2 overflow Guard, not +3. Likewise, you already have +1 overflow Spirit, ✪Tell the Tale normally just grants what you already have: +1 overflow Spirit. 

When you lose all of your life points, you fall unconscious. Your guard and awareness drop to zero. Your stamina and spirit remain, however. 

On your next turn, you must take a challenge action: Survive, a brace. If you succeed, you stabilize and are unconscious until you rest and recover at least 1 life, or are otherwise healed. 

If you fail, you suffer body death, and your soul begins drifting away. On your next turn, you must take another challenge action: Return.

If your soul fails to return to your body, it dissolves into the undifferentiated flow of the Rephaim, and you suffer soul death—unless, perhaps, there’s another place for your soul to go.

You can recover your Life during a rest.

During a rest, you regain all your stamina and spirit. Rest requires time: at least an hour or so in a safe, sheltered place. Finding such a place on a hostile island is not easy. Certain abilities, like ✪Haven (from the Insurgency lore), make it easier to find safe shelter for rest. 

Recovering Life

You can recover Life during a rest by sacrificing your maximum Stamina or retaining an injury. You can use either or both methods multiple times during a rest.

Sacrificing Stamina yields +2 Life and reduces your maximum Stamina by 1. This reduction lasts until you convalesce during downtime (see below). 

Retaining an injury yields +1 Life and inflicts a -1 penalty to a random action. Roll a d4 to determine which action is afflicted: 1 for Attack, 2 for Brace, 3 for Compel, and 4 for Maneuver. Such penalties last until you convalesce during Downtime. 

If you accumulate a penalty that equals the size of its action die—for example, a -6 penalty on a d6 Maneuver—you are grievously injured and can no longer recover Life with this method.

Rest Activities

Some abilities and items enable you to perform special rest activities. These activities typically work like challenge actions, except they take place over an hour instead of a single turn. Unless an ability says otherwise, you can only perform one such activity per rest. 

Taking a rest activity doesn’t prevent you from recovering life simultaneously. However, you need to be conscious to perform the rest activity—which means you can’t take a rest activity if you start the rest with 0 life. 

You can invoke an ideal to gain advantage on a rest activity, just like an action. But you don't recover the point of spirit you spent to invoke it by resting.

The Messenger, Arbiter, and Sorcerer callings wield the magic of the Rephaim to cast spells. Each calling’s magic works differently, generating and consuming a resource unique to the calling. These resources are represented with different icons.  

• Messengers call wind to generate a vortex of ༄wind. They can then cast spells by consuming this wind. 

• Sorcerers focus ⧨dark or ◮light magical energy. They cast spells by releasing this energy.

• Arbiters soulgaze to gain 𐎺soulsight over a soul’s shape and flow. They cast spells by consuming this soulsight.

Each spell “costs” a certain amount of wind, dark focus, light focus, or soulsight, respectively. The cost is noted alongside the spell name. 

Beyond these basic rules, each type of magic works quite differently. Certain types of lore offer additional ways to generate and use magic. And some heroes may not have a way to use magic at all. See the Messenger, Sorcerer, and Arbiter sections for more information on each type of magic.