Survival

This is the ability to cope with the challenges of harsh environments: shelter, navigating to civilization, foraging for food and water, hunting and so on. It includes knowledge of the common threats posed by a particular sort of wilderness, such as forest or swamp. Stealth rolls in wilderness cannot include more dice from stealth than the character has dots in survival.

  • Possessed by: Nomads Refugee Cogs, Huntsman
  • Specialties: Coasts and Shallows, Deep Sea, Deserts, Foraging, Forests, Hunting, Marshes and Swamps, Mountains, Tracking, Trailblazing.

General Roll Results
  • Success: Your character finds enough resources to fulfill his needs for the day.
  • Exceptional Success: Your character manages to find enough resources to fulfill his needs so long as he wishes to stay in the area. Perhaps he finds a stream of clear water stocked with trout or happens on a hunter’s hut with a supply of fire wood and cured meats.
  • Failure: Your character fails to find the proper resources to fulfill his needs. All the available firewood is wet and the trout line he strings doesn’t catch anything.
  • Dramatic Failure: Your character has made a false set of assumptions about his environment that puts him in danger. The berries he picks are actually poisonous, the water is full of bacteria or the shelter he pitches is in a dry stream bed.

Foraging

Foraging for food and water is an extended action. Each roll represents an hour of diligent work. Five successes are required to gather enough food and water to sustain one person for a single day. One success still provides some amount of food and water, but fewer than five means that your character becomes progressively malnourished and vulnerable to deprivation and disease.

• Dice Pool: Wits + Survival + Equipment
• Action: Extended (five successes required; one roll represents one hour of searching)
• Suggested Equipment:Survival knife (+1), Ancient field survival guide (+2), field survival kit (+3)
• Possible Penalties: Arid locale (-2), frozen locale (-2), foreign environment (-1 to -3), lack of tools (-2)

General Roll Results
  • Success: Your character is on his way to gathering sufficient food to fulfill his needs for the day (apply successes to the total needed).
  • Exceptional Success: Your character finds a small windfall of food or water that fulfills his daily needs -- and even provides some sustenance for the following day.
  • Failure:Your character does not locate any sources of food or water in an hour of careful searching
  • Dramatic Failure:Your character makes an incorrect assumption regarding a food or water source, collecting plants or unclean water that makes him ill.