The Condition Track

The Condition Track measures a character's short-term physical state — how rattled, hurt, or impaired they are right now. It is the buffer between taking hits and taking Wounds. Every character has the same five-position track.

Normal → Winded → Injured → Impaired → Staggered [Wound]

Moving Down the Track

Taking damage moves a character down the track. How far depends on the source — weapons, environmental hazards, and other sources of harm define how many steps a hit moves you. (See Damage and Sample Weapons.)

Resetting After a Wound

When a character reaches Staggered, they take a Wound and the track resets to Impaired — not Normal. The character is immediately one step from Staggered again. Each successive Wound comes faster than the last unless someone actively intervenes.

Recovering on the Track

Recovery costs an Action and a roll. The Risk equals the character's current position on the track: Winded = Risk 1, Injured = Risk 2, Impaired = Risk 3. The worse your condition, the harder it is to pull yourself together.

Self-recovery: Roll Strength + Survival (powering through) or Will + Survival (refusing to quit). The player argues the approach, the GM has final say.

Ally recovery: Roll Intellect + Medicine. The ally spends their Action to help — field medicine, stabilization, talking them through it. Future abilities (feats, specializations) may allow medic characters to do this as a Minor Action.

A character at Normal cannot recover further. Recovery cannot exceed Normal.

Resetting the Track

The Condition Track resets to Normal at the end of a Structured Scene if the GM allows it. The characters catch their breath, adrenaline fades, and short-term impairment passes. If the GM determines the characters cannot rest or regroup, the track persists until the end of the current Act.

Wounds do not reset with the track. They persist until treated.

Stun and Lethal Damage

Stun and lethal damage share the same Condition Track. A character at Injured from gunfire who takes a stun hit moves further down the same track. The track does not care what put you there.

When a character is knocked unconscious by stun damage and brought back in, they return to their lethal position or Winded, whichever is worse. The stun wore off, but the bullet holes are still there.

Combat Stims

A combat stim is a single-use chemical injection that overrides your body's pain and stress responses. It does not heal you. It moves you up on the Condition Track by forcing your body to ignore what's wrong with it. The injuries are still there. The stim just convinces your nervous system to shut up about them.

Using a stim is a Minor Action. Each stim moves the character one step up on the Condition Track.

A character may use a maximum of 4 stims per scene. A 5th stim (or beyond) overwhelms the body. The character is immediately knocked unconscious and removed from the scene. This works like stun damage — no Wound, just unconsciousness.

The crash. At the end of the scene, the chemicals wear off and the body collects the debt. The character drops one step on the Condition Track for every stim used during the scene. This works like stun damage. If the crash pushes the character to Staggered, they are knocked unconscious, not Wounded.

Stabilizing a Dying Character

A character who has exceeded their Wound capacity is dying and will die at the end of the scene unless stabilized. Stabilizing a dying character requires:

• Two consecutive Actions spent on the dying character (across one turn or two).
• A successful Intellect + Medicine check. The GM sets the Risk based on the severity of the injuries and the conditions.
• 1 Momentum spent at the time of the Medicine check.

The medic must be at Point Blank with the dying character for the entire process. If the medic is interrupted between the two Actions (takes a Wound, is forced to move, loses consciousness), the process must start over.

A stabilized character is no longer dying but remains unconscious and out of the scene. They cannot be brought back into the scene with a Momentum spend. Their injuries are too severe. They will need proper medical attention between scenes or acts.

If the scene ends in the players' favor (via the full Momentum threshold or narrative resolution), dying characters are automatically stabilized unless the GM determines otherwise. If the scene ends against the players, the fate of dying characters is in the GM's hands. There is a real risk of death.

Environmental Hazards

The Condition Track handles environmental damage the same way it handles weapon damage. The GM sets how many steps a hazard moves a character per exposure or per round, based on severity.

These are guidelines, not rigid rules. A small fire is 1 step. A raging inferno is 3. Armor and EVA suits with the Sealed quality provide protection — how much is on the GM, based on the equipment and the hazard.

Environmental damage ignores Soak unless the armor is specifically designed to protect against that hazard — Sealed armor in vacuum, for example. Getting shot while wearing body armor is different from being on fire while wearing body armor.

Social Structured Scenes

The core rules run social Structured Scenes on pure Momentum — swings, active contests, and narrative Costly Success carry the weight. That model works. Some tables want more: round-by-round pressure, a visible track of someone losing their footing, feats that let characters weaponize composure the way a marine weaponizes a rifle.

This section lays the Condition Track over the social scene. Reach for it when a negotiation, interrogation, or confrontation deserves the same mechanical granularity as a firefight.

Mapping Combat Mechanics Onto Social Scenes

• Attacks become Influence checks. A "social attack" is an Influence roll — Persuasion, Deception, Intimidation, or Insight — targeting the opposing character.
• Damage moves the target on the Condition Track. A successful social attack moves the target one or more steps down the track, just like a weapon hit. The GM sets the step count by the weight of the blow — a sharp cut lands like a handgun, a devastating reveal lands like a rifle.
• The track represents composure, confidence, and resolve. At Winded, a character is rattled. At Injured, they are losing their footing. At Impaired, they are flustered, off-balance, and conceding things they should not. At Staggered, their position collapses — they fold, storm out, break down, or concede the exchange.
• Staggered inflicts no Wound. No bullet, no blade — the consequence is narrative. The track resets to Impaired as usual, and the character is one bad exchange from collapsing again.

Contesting a Social Attack

When a character contests an incoming social attack, they roll whatever Ability + Skill matches the approach. There is no fixed pairing. The fiction dictates what pushes back.

Common defenses in play:

• Seeing through a con. Someone is lying or running an angle. Roll Perception + Influence (Insight) — reading the tells, catching the inconsistency.
• Resisting raw pressure. Someone is pushing hard with intimidation, anger, or emotional leverage. Roll Will, often on its own — gritting through it. A character with Leadership training may roll Will + Leadership to plant their feet and push back with their own force of self.
• Domain expertise catches the bluff. Someone is trying to baffle, bully, or overwhelm the character with appeals to rules, jargon, or authority the character actually knows. Roll Intellect + Savvy in the relevant domain — a League officer catches a forged reg, a criminal sees the threat is theater, a corporate exec knows the contract clause doesn't say what the attacker claims.
• Hiding your own tells. Someone is reading the character with an Insight attack. Roll Presence + Influence (Deception) — keeping your face, burying the tell.

The player argues the approach. The GM has final say.

Players tend to want a quick answer to what do I roll. A future revision will include a lookup table for the most common pairings. For now, lean on the examples above and the fiction around them.

Recovering on the Social Track

Recovery on the social Condition Track follows the same action economy as combat recovery — 1 Action, a roll, Risk equal to the character's position on the track. What changes is the approach.

Self-recovery defaults to Will — the character plants their feet through sheer refusal to break. No skill is required. The player may argue that a specific skill applies to their approach:

• Rallying yourself with a pep talk or reasserting command presence — Will + Leadership.
• Stepping back and seeing the manipulation for what it is — Will + Influence (Insight).
• Leaning on hard-won experience to shrug off an appeal — Will + the relevant Savvy discipline.

Ally recovery defaults to Presence — the character pulls their ally back by force of personality. No skill is required. Common skill approaches:

• Talking them down, reframing the situation — Presence + Influence (Persuasion).
• Rallying them with command or camaraderie — Presence + Leadership.
• Walking them through the logic so the pressure deflates — Intellect + Influence (Insight).

The GM has final say on whether the argued skill fits. Default to the raw Ability when in doubt. The system works fine without the skill bolt-on.

Social Feats

Two feats plug directly into this overlay. Full mechanics live in the Feats section of Character Creation. In short:

• Demoralize lets a character move a target down the Condition Track through social pressure — a deliberate verbal strike.
• Inspiring Rhetoric lets a character move an ally up the Condition Track through words — steadying them, reminding them who they are.

Reset

The Condition Track resets to Normal at the end of a social Structured Scene. Social damage does not carry into combat, and combat damage does not bleed into social scenes — unless the GM rules otherwise. A character rattled in the boardroom is not still rattled in the firefight three scenes later. The pressure of the moment ends when the moment does.

Wounds, of course, persist. And if a social scene ends with a character on the edge — reputation in ashes, faction turned against them, a superior openly contemptuous — the GM may rule that the fallout follows them as a narrative consequence, not a mechanical one. The track is short-term. What the scene did to the character's life is a different question.