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Combat
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Recovery and Medical Treatment
Note that all medical treatment, apart from Staunch Bleeding, requires either the Medic or Surgeon ability. Characters can recover by themselves, given time, and are (usually) perfectly capable of bandaging their own wounds. Anything more complicated than a shoddy suturing job requires one or both of the above abilities.
However, regardless of who is attempting the healing, the appropriate equipment must always be present, or the probability of success will be greatly reduced. Using a stapler and elastic bands to hold a wound closed may work, but it’s not that likely.
Should the GM allow a character without any medical training attempt actions that would normally require it, the chances of success should be minimal, if success is possible at all, and all negative consequences resulting from either success or failure will be doubled.
Staunch Bleeding (Any character)
Any character can spend actions attempting to staunch bleeding injuries on either himself or another character. Bandages can be either pre-bought or improvised using whatever is at hand (usually torn strips of clothing). Canisters or patches of syn-flesh can be used to the same effect. Wounds bandaged with non-sterile dressings may become septic.
To successfully staunch bleeding, the character must pass a Toughness test. For every 10 points or part thereof of the margin of success, a single D3 of bleeding to the location being treated is halted. For example, if the test had a 12 point margin of success, up to two bleeding results on that location would be healed. Surplus bleeding would continue, although further actions may be spent attempting to staunch this bleeding.
Only a single location can be treated in an action.
Heal Injury (Medic ability required)
A character with the Medic ability may spend actions healing injuries on himself or other characters.
The healing character must specify the location he is attempting to heal, and then make a Sagacity test. If the test is successful, the character being healed recovers one hit point for every ten points, or part, of the margin of success.
Additional hit points may be healed during the same injury action if the character applies morphine or some other form of painkiller. A single dose of painkiller restores an additional D6 hit points, provided the Heal Injury procedure was successful.
Regardless of how many hit points are restored, a matched success heals one level of location injury on the location being treated.
If the Sagacity test is a matched failure, the location being treated begins to bleed for D3 damage per round.
A character can only perform a single successful Heal Injury procedure on each location in a single day. The human body simply does not heal any faster than this. The location can be treated again the following day.
Treat Infection Or Poison (Medic ability required)
If someone has an infected wound, is suffering from sepsis, has a disease, or is under the effects of poison, a character with the Medic ability can spend a round trying to heal this. The medic makes a Sagacity test.
If the test is passed, the malady is healed, and the penalties it caused will gradually subside.
Note that the medic must have the appropriate equipment and/or medicine in order to treat the malady.
Stabilise Crippling Injury (Medic ability required)
A character with the Medic ability may attempt to heal crippling injuries on himself (assuming he is still capable of doing so) or other characters.
The healing character must specify the crippling injury he is attempting to heal, and then make a Sagacity test. If the test is successful, the character being healed halts any bleeding and the ‘Until medical attention’ effects of the crippling injury are negated.
It takes D6 rounds to perform a Stabilise Crippling Injury action, although a successful action halts any bleeding during the first round, before it causes any damage.
During the course of a Stabilise Crippling Injury action, any automatic death countdown (where the Crippling Injury table specified that the character would die in a certain number of rounds) is halted. If the Sagacity test is failed, the countdown continues. If the Sagacity test is a matched failure, the character dies immediately as something goes very wrong with the treatment.
Just because a crippling injury has been stabilised does not mean that it has been healed. Surgery is required to heal a crippling injury. See below for more details.
Recovering From Crippling Injuries
Some form of surgery is always required for the injury to be completely healed, unless the GM rules otherwise.
Should a character fail to receive successful surgery for a crippling injury, there is a 50% chance, checked once per hour, that the wound re-opens and the character suffers the Immediate and Until Medical Attention effects of the crippling injury again. Note that no additional Insanity points (see Psychological Disorders) are gained for these recurring injuries.
Surgery (Surgeon ability required)
As explained in the Injuries section, a character suffering from a crippling injury, or who has a projectile lodged inside his body, requires surgery.
Surgery requires a Sagacity test to be successful, and may take quite some time to perform. It may also prove expensive, both in terms of equipment and hiring the surgeon. (Only the most culturally advanced planets in the Imperium have anything resembling a National Health Service.)
Minor Surgery (including removing lodged projectiles)
It takes D6-3 hours to remove a lodged projectile (with times of zero hours or less being treated as D6x10 minutes). Success results in the removal of the projectile and the successful treatment of any infection or blood poisoning that may have resulted. The character takes a number of days to fully recover, equal to the number of hours (rounded up) that the operation took to perform. A matched success halves both the length of the operation and the recovery time.
This method can be used during other minor surgical procedures.
Major Surgery (including healing crippling injuries)
Surgery to treat crippling injuries takes a length of time equal to D6 hours, plus the number of the injury on the Crippling Injuries table. For instance, treating a missing eye (result 3 on the head Crippling Injuries table) would take D6+3 hours to complete. Recovery from surgery to Crippling Injuries usually takes D6 days. After this time, any recovery time specified in the Crippling Injury result will begin. A matched success halves both the length of the operation and the recovery time. A matched failure results in the patient bleeding to death on the operating table.
This method can be used during other major surgical procedures.
Failed Surgery
Failure to perform surgery results in the character losing one hit point for every point by which the test was failed. This damage is doubled if sufficient blood for transfusion is unavailable.
Failed surgery must be attempted again, or the patient will continue to suffer the consequences of not being treated.
Surgery Modifiers
Surgery should ideally take place in a well-lit, sterile environment, with a plentiful supply of equipment and several assistant doctors and nurses, but more often than not, surgeons in Imperium can be found treating amputees in waterlogged trenches, in the shaking light of a handheld battery torch, under artillery bombardment. Fairly heavy modifiers should be imposed to the Sagacity test if this is the case. Particularly advanced surgical equipment, on the other hand, should add positive modifiers.
Other modifiers include:
| Factor | Modifier |
| Time Since Injury | There is an
additional negative modifier to the Sagacity test, depending on how long
it took the patient to get into theatre.
For major surgery, this is the number of hours since the injury was inflicted, multiplied by 5. For example, a patient who took three hours to reach surgery would have a –15 modifier. For minor surgery, the penalty is the number of days since the injury was inflicted, multiplied by 5. |
| Multiple Injuries | Multiple crippling injuries to the same location can be treated simultaneously, although each injury above one adds D3 hours to the operation and imposes a –10 modifier to the Sagacity test. The most serious crippling injury is used to determine the base length of surgery. |
| Multiple Surgeons | Multiple surgeons
may work on different parts of a character’s body with no additional
penalties. Note that the consequences for multiple failed operations are
bound to be extremely heavy.
Alternatively, two or more surgeons may operate on the same injury, up to a maximum of four. This is handled slightly differently, since no single character’s Sagacity score is used. Instead, the Sagacities of all the surgeons are added together and then divided by the number of surgeons involved (i.e. a mean average score). Then a +10 modifier is added for every surgeon involved above one.
|
| Multiple Staff | Other assistants add +5 to the surgeon’s Sagacity, provided they a) have the Medic ability, or b) they pass a Sagacity test. |
| Other Penalties | The GM can impose further modifiers, depending on the level of technology and quality of equipment available. –40 is a reasonable penalty for trying to hack off a gangrenous limb in a the gloomy backroom of an underhive butcher’s shop, with only a candle for illumination, while a fully kitted out Adeptus Mechanicus surgery may grant a +20 bonus. |
Cosmetic Surgery (Cosmetic Surgeon ability required)
Disfigurement, such as scarring, damage to extremities and so on, can be treated in a series of operations. Alternatively, a character may wish to alter his appearance, for example, to escape from those hunting him. It is possible to ‘cure’ some mutations, normally by amputation or skin grafting, although the GM may always rule that this is either difficult or impossible. Chaos attributes aren’t as easily dealt with as natural mutations, since they have a tendency to grow back if deliberately removed (although generally not when lost as an injury – logic has little to do with Chaos).
It requires D6+1 operations to complete any programme of cosmetic surgery. Each operation lasts D3, D3+3, or D10 hours, depending on how extensive the GM judges the required surgery to be.
As for ordinary surgery, a Sagacity test is required, with the modifiers noted above, except that it makes no difference how long the patient has had the deformity being corrected.
Each operation takes D6 days to recover from, after which the next operation in the programme may be attempted.
Failed cosmetic surgery results in damage to the patient (or his death, on a matched failure), as for normal surgery. However, since cosmetic surgery is normally voluntary and the patient should be in good health to begin with, with fewer negative modifiers, the risks of cosmetic surgery are considerably less serious.
The GM may rule that certain deformities cannot be treated cosmetically, depending on the local technological level.
Bionic Implantation (Surgeon and Engineer – Basic abilities required)
Bionic implantation of weapons, bionic limbs and organs, or other bionic devices, like MIUs or mechadendrites, requires surgery at the hands of either a character with the Surgeon and Engineer – Basic abilities or a team consisting of characters with at least one of either the Surgeon or Engineer – Basic abilities.
Bionic implantation is treated in exactly the same way cosmetic surgery, with the bionics only being installed and made functional during the final operation. However, if the implantation requires the amputation of a limb or removal of some other body part (lung, eye etc.), then this takes place during the first operation.
Alternatively, where this would be stupidly dangerous (e.g. removing a heart several days prior to installing a replacement), both operations may be performed in the same session, although the length of time the operation takes is doubled, and there is a –20 modifier to the surgeon(s)’s chances of success.
At the end of a successful programme of bionic implantation, the patient must pass a Willpower test or gain D3 Insanity points, as his sense of his own humanity slips away from him. There is a +20 Willpower bonus if the part was of advanced (or highly advanced) quality, or a –20 Willpower penalty if it was of crude quality.
Cards and Chips
The insertion of bionic brain implants or direct brain implants requires a single operation, and follows the rules for minor surgery, as described above. The Willpower test in this case has a +20 modifier, and failure only results in the gain of 1 Insanity point.
Rest And Recuperation
There are two ways that a character can recover hit points through rest and recuperation. Both methods assume that the character is kept comfortable, well fed and at a reasonable temperature – the GM should reduce the number of Injury points regained if this is not the case. This may actually result in the character not gaining any benefit from a night’s sleep, or even suffering hit points, but that’s a risk characters have to take if they insist on sleeping on a pebbled slope in the middle of a desert while they have a bullet in their guts.
Remember that a character’s hit points can never go above his or her Toughness.
A full day and night of rest
Characters that spend an entire day and night at rest can take a Toughness test to recover from injuries. If the test is passed, the character regains a number of hit points equal to the margin of success.
Additionally, if the test is a matched success, each location heals back by one level of location injury, and all effects caused by that level of injury are cancelled.
There are no negative effects for failing this Toughness test.
Crippling injury effects do not heal just because a location no longer counts as being Crippled. Only surgery can heal crippling injuries.
Active day, but still sleeping for at least 8 hours
If a character is unable to spend an entire day at rest, a good night’s sleep can be beneficial, if not quite as effective. If a character sleeps for eight or more hours in a single twenty-four hour period, he or she may take a Toughness test.
If the test is passed, the character regains a number of hit points equal to half of the margin of success.
There is no possibility of location injuries being healed in this way, since activity during the day aggravates the injury almost as much as the sleep heals it.
Restoring Lost Characteristic Points
When characteristic points are lost, the duration of this loss is usually specified – until medical attention or surgery is received, for the duration of a psychic power’s effects, or for a set length of time, and so on – but occasionally it isn’t.
During this period of time, the lost characteristic points cannot be healed (although they can be boosted by drugs, psychic powers etc. that are increasing the characteristic, rather than healing it), since the cause of their loss is still in effect.
Once this period has ended, or when characteristic loss comes from a duration-unspecific source, characteristic loss can be restored through rest and recuperation (either full day and night, or just nights), by testing on the characteristic once per night of rest.
If the test is passed, the character regains a number of points equal to the margin of success. If the test is failed, the character regains a number of points equal to the margin of failure, divided by four.
Note that characteristic loss described as being permanent can never be regained, except in exceptional circumstances (such as bionic replacement of a severed limb).
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