Kartigan said: Splints and Bandages has the identical same effect lines as normal First Aid, there is no difference whatsoever. … Otherwise, the card is entirely useless since it doesn't do anything different from normal First Aid. I think you may have missed the triple-success line on Splints & Bandages. If you roll 0 to 2 successes, it's identical to the basic First Aid check effects. 2 successes = 2 wounds healed. If you roll 3 or more successes on S&B, it heals +2 more wounds than would be healed by a basic First Aid check with the identical number of successes. 3 successes = 5 wounds healed.

DurakBlackaxe said: what is a dragon mage? I don't know the answer to that question… but I did notice that the Dreadfleet POD included an NPC card for a High Elf with a trait called Dragon-Speaking which allows him to breathe fire once per encounter. It may be related.

AlephTau said: Btw I think it quite wothwhile to replace three cards with only one to socket. Well worth spending one advane on (esp. at epic level). Good point. Having now re-read the talents in question, I agree with you.

valvorik said: I would have had Graf von Kaufman point out that he has had more shipments than just blackpowder ones interfered with. Had their statements been in-character and directed to NPCs, that would have been a possibility. "Worst. Noun. Ever." is a Simpsons reference, not something one says in the Warhammer world. They didn't start saying it until well after they were alone on a carriage with Clothilde, anyway. Though they mostly held their tongues, they were still generally contemptuous and disrespectful of the Gravin, disregarded her instructions and made **** sure the bandits knew the carriage was guarded by a Bright Wizard. The most logical consequence of their actions should be no more jobs or contact from von Kaufman or von Alptraum… but that'd be pretty much the end of the campaign as-written, so a little creativity is in order. I'm on top of it.

A brief heads-up for those running the Clothilde's carriage sequence on day 6. The PCs may figure out on Day 4 that the gunpowder is the important thing that went missing. If so, this may color their opinions of von Alptraum and von Kaufman's plan for Day 6. At my table, for example, the Pistolier and the Battle-Scarred character both very quickly grokked to the missing gunpowder… it was on their radar the first time they went shopping, and later cemented by various clues (including one on a card). So when day 6 rolls around, and Clothilde wants to imperil herself by spreading word about the diamond on her finger and her carriage ride, they were very critical. My players immediately concluded this plan meant she and von Kaufman are both dumb-as-trolls. They repeatedly declared their belief that if she was going to be attacked, it would be by people with no connection to the Black Cowl or anything plot-related, and probably not anyone related to Red Arrow's previous troubles. A waste of their time, but they'd do it anyway for the money. "Worst. Plan. Ever." they said again and again. Our PCs now have barely-contained contempt for the major NPCs that they're supposed to be working for / trying to earn the favour of. Not such a great plot twist. Then, when the carriage was stopped by the roadblock, but NOT attacked while it sat there ('cause per the scenario it gets attacked after it starts up again), those cries swapped to "Worst. Bandits. Ever." It was definitely a low point in the campaign thus far. Consider yourselves warned.

Emirikol said: The main problem arises not in PURCHASE, but in the sale of the item. If the group discovers a 7.5g amulet in a tomb of thieves, for instance, they're bound to want to sell it just for the loot value (it's what I would do as a player). Well they're not going to get to sell it for much, honestly. Not at my table, anyway. A few years back, I worked in a used book store. The going rate was thus: most used books sold (from the store to customers) for 1/2 the retail price of a new book, so when buying in books they'd pay either 1/4 retail in store-credit, or 1/6 retail in cash. There were half a dozen other used book stores in town, and they all paid at that rate or worse. Even with that much competition out there, we were always swimming in excess inventory and so turned down (refused to buy) on average about 5 books for every 1 we purchased. If you frequently brought us the same books we'd rejected previously, we'd essentially blacklist you for wasting our time. It was pretty harsh. Pawn shop rates are similar. They pay out 10% to 40% of "fair market value" depending on the rarity and demand for the item, according to http://business.whatitcosts.com/pawn-shop.htm. They're also mostly set up to do loans, as opposed to straight-up purchases. And of course, in the Warhammer world, those options might not even be there. Warhammer cities are subject to Guild structures. You can't legally sell Amulets if you're not a dues-paying, card-carrying member of the Jeweler's Guild, for example. There's probably even Guilds for the Pawnbrokers and and Rag-and-Bone-Pickers. I have no personal experience with genuine fences, but I can't imagine they pay out terribly well, either. They're risking arrest on a daily basis, and I'm sure they're in it for the profit themselves. In short, players might have some luck selling something really specifically valuable and desirable from time-to-time for a fraction of the cost of a new item, but shouldn't expect to be able to just unload tons of "used and slightly bloody" equipment everytime they blow into town. YMMV. Anyhow, back on topic… RUNESMITHS… so are you saying that I should actually be charging the PC something on the order of 5 to 7.5 gold crowns for the superior amulet he needs in order to be able to use the Rune Talent he just bought with XP? That seems harsh.

Related question: There's some Epic talents that mention they replace two different non-Epic talents. Do you need 0, 1 or 2 of the narrower talents to qualify? From his answer I would guess you need both. That's kinda of a bummer. IIRC those talents aren't actually more potent in effect than the ones they replace, but simply allow you to get both effects via a single talent slot so you don't have to swap back and forth. (Could be wrong, haven't looked recently.) I'm running the game with the optional rule where each card can only be purchased by 1 PC. If you need both to qualify for the Epic version that could potentially cause trouble.

jackdays said: By the way - What creatures are presented there? And if you have energy - even better if you can list all the cards… All 10 Creatures are actually named ship Captains. They are a good mix of races, and most of them could with nothing more than a name-change be used for non-naval NPCs. There's a three humans, a high elf, a dwarf, a chaos dwarf, a skaven, and 3 undead. They've got high stats (the wizard from Araby has Int 7 +2 Fortune dice and 3 ranks of spellcraft), and would make good challenges for high-Rank parties. Each NPC Captain has a corresponding action card that fits their theme, and the actions tend to be quite potent as well. I wouldn't recommend letting PCs have access to them. The 6 locations are all parts of a ship - crow's nest, below decks, overboard etc. The Captain's Quarters has a healing effect that puts all the existing Shallya temples and hospital locations to shame.

Skie said: Our party consists of a slayer, a warrior (tank) and a bright mage. The last one is really unhappy - he was supposed to be damage dealer, but his spells do at most (with all the boons, successes etc) about 13 damage, whereas the melee guys routinely deal 13 and as much as 19 dmg (with reckless cleave, troll-feller or way of the sword cards). The famous fireball deals lowly 6 dmg (average) in splash, wich usually means 1 net dmg point, and is difficult to cast. Is it supposed to be this way? Are there better spells in the on demand expansion? Are you sure you're calculating damage correctly on the spells? I'm looking through the Bright Order spells and can't find anything I'd categorize as a "famous fireball" but only does 6 damage on average. Looks like about double that on average to my eyes. Rank 5 "Fireball Barrage" has a _minimum_ damage of 5 + Intelligence. So that's realistically a minimum of 10, and probably much higher due to the ridiculous dice pools late game characters can have. 5 or 6 red/green/blue dice, 3 yellow and 10 white (which would be below-average for a Rank 5 wizard) can hit the 5-success line about 50% of the time even if you aim the spell at 4 targets and thus have 5 purple to roll. So that's a 50-50 shot at around 18 damage per target. 2 boons or 1 chaos-star will pretty well clear the floor of henchmen in medium range regardless of targeting, so you often don't want to officially aim at all the targets. Do you have the Errata'd version of the Bright Order talent? It lets you spend extra power to increase the damage output on spells, at 1:1 ratio, and that's huge on a multi-target spell. Even on something less grandiose, it can make a big difference, such bumping up a Rank 1 Flameblast by 3 or 4 damage. My group is experiencing some of the same tension yours is, by the way, but it goes both ways. Our Bright Wizard and our big melee hitter both continually gripe about how the other one out performs them in combat. The wizard's damage is lower so he's upset, but the dwarf has to run into melee so he complains about the fatigue and taking a lot of hits that the wizard is able to avoid. I keep trying to tell them that since they're both on the same team it doesn't matter who does more damage, but they don't want to hear it. It's funny, sad, and frustrating.

The rules for Runesmithing in the Black Fire Pass / Book of Grudges supplement say you can only strike a rune on an item of Superior Quality. They then dive into some fairly intricate levels of detail on how a PC can go about making their own Superior items to save them the cost of buying them. Basically spending time and making a die roll to save a lot of money. Problem is, the rules all hinge upon percentages of the cost of a purchased item. Raw materials cost 1/4 that of the finished item. That's fine when you're making a Rune Axe or a Rune Platemail (since they have prices in the book), but it's rather trickier in the case of a Runic Amulet. I could see a case for the amulet costing less than a superior hand weapon. The hand weapon at least does something before you stick a rune on it, and the superior quality means a bonus fortune die on attack rolls. In contrast to that, the amulet is mechanically nothing but window-dressing till you stick a rune on it. From a gaming perspective, it seems odd to charge the PC a premium for a thing that is useless till they spend further XP, time and money striking a Rune on it. On the other hand, I can see a case for the amulet costing more than a superior hand weapon. A superior quality weapon may just be well-balanced and stoutly made. It's not necessariy covered with gold filligree or precious gems. A superior-quality amulet seems rather more likely to have such ostentatious bling on it, raising the price. So from a setting perspective, I could see such an item having a really high price tag. In TEW, there's a necklace in a treasure horde that's worth 50 silvers. That's the amount the PCs can get for it at a pawn shop or fence, so probably only a fraction of its original sale price. We're also not told whether that's a superior-quality item or not. Any suggestions on pricing and availability would be welcome. My first stab at it was 1 Gold. In game terms that seems a little too expensive, but from a setting perspective it seems way too cheap. I'm really torn on this. TL;DR version: How much do you think a superior amulet should cost the PC?

Emirikol said: Why is it $9.95 when the others are 6.95? It has more cards than the others. Most of the PODs come with 15 actions and 2 items. At $6.95, that's about 41 cents per usable card. Dreadfleet has 10 creatures, 10 actions, 6 locations, and 10 folding character standups. At $9.95 that's 38 cents per usable card -- and a mere 28 cents per card if you count the standups as usable cards, which I wouldn't.

I made a location card for the Tanneries using two different Strange Eons plug-ins and a hundred-year-old photo I found online. Tanneries are a very foul and nasty place to visit, especially in the pre-modern era. First you've got your freshly butchered hides and skins. These need to be chemically treated in a variety of ways, such as by brining, as well as by soaking in acid. One of the more popular acids for this process, at least in the middle ages, was uric acid. The inside of a typical tannery of the era includes several large tubs or vats of stale urine. In addition, you might find solutions of feces and water, and/or brains and water. Honestly. Then there's the quicklime. It's a nasty caustic chemical that burns and dissolves flesh. It's highly reactive to water, but that's kinda the point. So there'll be a dry area for storing it, and quite possibly a vat full of fat-burning nastiness sitting in solution. And lastly, there's the dyes to color the leather, and whatever solvents are needed to keep those dyes in liquid state. The butchered hides are soaked in these disgusting solutions for days on end, in particular sequences based on the desired qualities of the leather. These various stinky solutions are often stored in pits or ground-level tubs, because one part of the process involved stirring them up and beating them a bit, which was sometimes done by having your young apprentices climb into the poo-tank and stomp on them bare-footed. I am not making this stuff up, I swear. So a large part of the building is a maze or grid of narrow little walkways over and between pits full of stuff you really don't want to land in. Between soakings, the hides may hang to dry, or sit in piles on the ground. They may be dusted with, or packed in, salt. Some forms of leather required smoking, so you may have a large firepit on the premises. If so, there's probably a large supply of "punky" (which is to say "rotting") wood on hand as well, because the best leather-curing smoke comes from slowly burning rotted wood. All that nastiness is standard for a tannery that sees regular use. The one in TEW has been sitting "empty" and probably sealed up for a couple of weeks, just stewing. Also, if anyone's interested, I used the following text to throw together a Rambrecht Delfholt flyer about the Skaven. Held it back till the PCs had already encountered them, of course. It's absolutely nutty, but matches what the scenario notes say Delfholt believes to be true about the ratmen. Laid it out and printed it off just like Valvorik's excellent Delfholt handbills. "Our Double-Edged Swords Every commoner looks to the armies of the Empire for protection from the rampaging hordes of foreigners and worse always pressing at our borders. Those armies should rightly be at the edges of the wilderness, defending us from the enemy without, but if those armies were stationed only on the frontiers, what unfortunate patriots would do the dirty work when a nobleman wanted to evict a loyal pauper, or put down a popular movement by way of bloody violence? Troops on the frontiers protect, but troops closer keep we brassy serfs downtrodden. Oppression, Lies, and Taxation To justify those local armies, the barons and their captains have invented a most terrifying boogieman. The rat with human hands, which lurks beneath our cities and can strike from our own sewers and catacombs. They pretend to hush and deny these very rodential rumours they have themselves started. They doth protest too much! These denials are but a show piece to sell the illusion that we are in constant peril and must be surrounded with jackbooted mercenaries. To pay for the armies of our oppression, they tax us into submission! A Tragedy of Taxidermy We are told of the tragedy of Nuln, the city that was supposedly beset by ratmen in 2499. Those who have seen the stuffed corpse of the so-called Ratman of Nuln can attest to it’s obvious fakery. A man-made monster composed by stitching the head of a giant rat on the body of a mundane beastman. The Guild of Taxidermists has a Guild-Hall in Nuln, and another in Altdorf. From whence didst The Horned Rat come? Not the sewers of Nuln, but the Imperial Court itself!"

Session 4 Campaign Notes and Actual Play Report SPOILER ALERT: This is the campaign log for the new The Enemy Within for Warhammer 3rd Ed. These events are from our fourth session, which started on Day 3 of the investigation. However, my players made some good headway on the mystery and revealed something that probably wouldn't become known until Day 9 in most play-throughs of the campaign. Here be MAJOR SPOILERS. PC List/Reminder: • Burgolt the Nobleman Pistolier • Hrulgar the Dwarven Runesmith • Ninewise the Initiate of Ranald • Lina the Bright Wizard When last we saw our heroes, they were about to head inside the Tannery. Tanneries are a very foul and nasty place to visit, especially in the pre-modern era. First you've got your freshly butchered hides and skins. These need to be chemically treated in a variety of ways, such as by brining, as well as by soaking in acid. One of the more popular acids for this process, at least in the middle ages, was uric acid. The inside of a typical tannery of the era includes several large tubs or vats of stale urine. In addition, you might find solutions of feces and water, and/or brains and water. Honestly. Then there's the quicklime. It's a nasty caustic chemical that burns and dissolves flesh. It's highly reactive to water, but that's kinda the point. So there'll be a dry area for storing it, and quite possibly a vat full of fat-burning nastiness sitting in solution. And lastly, there's the dyes to color the leather, and whatever solvents are needed to keep those dyes in liquid state. The butchered hides are soaked in these disgusting solutions for days on end, in particular sequences based on the desired qualities of the leather. These various stinky solutions are often stored in pits or ground-level tubs, because one part of the process involved stirring them up and beating them a bit, which was sometimes done by having your young apprentices climb into the ****-tank and stomp on there bare-footed. I am not making this stuff up, I swear. So a large part of the building is a maze or grid of narrow little walkways over and between pits full of stuff you really don't want to land in. Between soakings, the hides may hang to dry, or sit in piles on the ground. They may be dusted with, or packed in, salt. Some forms of leather required smoking, so you may have a large firepit on the premises. If so, there's probably a large supply of "punky" (which is to say "rotting") wood on hand as well, because the best leather-curing smoke comes from slowly burning rotted wood. Of course, the tannery in The Enemy Within has been temporarily closed due to the river over-running its banks and the retaining wall failing to contain it. So there's a sluice drain overflowing with all the run-off, and since the place was shut down mid-process (and the Tanners paid well for closing their doors), everything's been just sitting there stewing. Those scents and flavors are dreadful in the first place, but give them a week or two with the doors and windows all sealed up and it's a whole new level of funk. Having been emptied of humans for more than a week, it's probably also over-run with rats and other vermin. This seemed noteworthy enough that I made a Location card for it. The PCs open the door to the worst stench of their lives. Burgolt, being a nobleman, cannot control himself, he just has to turn away and wince. In doing so, he notices that he is being observed by someone a few doors down. Sitting at the window of a guest room on the top floor of the White Horse Inn, is the same female Witch-hunter he saw several hours ago in a far-less-smelly part of town. I mention the possibility that she is staking the place out. The PCs head into the tannery piecemeal, with some of them going in deep while others more cautiously hang back at the entrance. Ninewise is driven by her desire to find Ute's shoe, which had been the target of a "X marks the Spot" blessing that scored a chaos star. Hrulgar follows right behind her. He has Tradecraft trained, so he's barely put off by the scent and can identify which chemicals are truly unsafe (as opposed to merely odious). SPOILER ALERT: I mentioned it before, but it's worth repeating. Seriously, if you're ever planning to be a player someone else's run of The Enemy Within, you really should turn back now. While we're still on Day 3 of the narrative, there's some stuff here that won't typically get discussed till Day 9 or possibly later, so you can't even assume that it's safe just 'cause you've played a little further then us. Ninewise's blessing took her deep into the room, until she was standing over a murky pit full of chemicals. Hrulgar cautions her, there's several half-empty bags of quicklime on the ledge above the pit, and the warmth exuding from it suggests they were poured in at most a few hours ago. Such a brew will no doubt burn any flesh immersed in it. Ninewise brought with her the boat-hook she bought a few days ago, and they start poking around in the opaque sludge in the pit. They hit a body almost immediately, and start pulling it up. Much to their surprise, it's not Ute. The body is too big, and probably a man. The chemicals have burned and damaged the flesh and clothing, making identification unlikely. Whoever he is, he's been done poorly. His chest is broken open. While no one here is a barber-surgeon, those who've seen a man die before can attest that there's usually rather more organs inside. They dig around in the depths for additional bodies with the boat hook, making a bit of noise in the process. Lina the wizard steps into the room a bit further, and uses magical sight. The witchsight confirms that this body was killed by the same sort of cursed weapon that took the life of racketeers Klaus Keller and Herman Halheimer. While providing the colorful description of the tannery, I called for a few Observation and Tradecraft checks from the players. I played this off as if it were about sussing out the body locations or the chemical details, but mostly it was to determine whether or not the PCs realized there'd been Skaven watching them from one of the pits. AMUSING TYPO ALERT: Spell-check really, really wants to replace "skaven" with "shaven". Capitalizing "Skaven" seems to help hold auto-correct back a bit, but I'm sure the shaven will slip through my fingers at some point. Now doubt the same sentence will also feature "clanrat" being auto-corrected into "claret", leaving you with the impression that the PCs are being attacked by bloody naked mole-rats. I probably owe you an apology for that mental image. It's about that time that the Skaven attacked. More than a dozen of them burst up out of the water of the sluice-trench running down the middle of the room. The ambush consisted of 3 groups of 4 clanrat henchmen each, plus a single gutter-runner to lead the assault. Certain other Skaven were off-camera in the tunnels below, available should they be needed. I used the Clan Eshin Assassins sheet. Not that the PCs knew those details, I merely described the blur of splashing water and furry limbs and through a bunch of Skaven stand-ups on the table. Roll for initiative. When each PC took their first action of the fight, I gave them a Stress token to represent the distress of realizing that the mythical rat-men of folklore are actually true. If they exist, what other boogeymen and nightmares might also be real? It was an effective and elegant way to reinforce the flavor, but it kinda cheated on the default mechanics for stress-assignment. If I had to do it over again, I'd probably call for a Fear 2 test instead, just for the sake of mechanical consistency. The way the initiative dice hit the table resulted in only 1 PC action before the Skaven would get to attack, then the rest of the PCs at the end of the round. I put a misfortune die on the PCs initiative checks since the Skaven were ambushing, plus the rat men had a talent in their Clan Eshin Assassins sheet that boosted their initiative a bit. However, I also forgot to roll Stance dice for the Skaven, since NPCs/Monsters are always in-stance (unlike PCs). Nemesis-Sheet Sidebar: Gotta say, I found the Clan Eshin Assassins sheet to be a little underwhelming. The talent slots are nice, but the two progress trackers are way too long to be effective. Despite the earlier Observation tests advancing the tracks before the fight even started, I was only able to get to 2 dice bonus on a single action. A session or two later, I came to a similar conclusion about one of the other Monster or Nemesis sheets. Most fights in this system last 2 to 4 turns, but most of the trackers seem set up for 6 to 8 turn epic slugfests. In order for a battle to last anywhere near that long, you sure would need a large supply of mooks. There's a number of easy fixes to this (double the advancement rate on the cards would be the easiest), but as written they're just not likely to fire off. It's basically one bonus yellow die on one Skaven die roll once every four rounds, or one white die every other round, either of which is small potatoes in a system where fights usually wrap-up in round 2 or 3. A lot of tracking for not much pay-off. Hrulgar went first, drawing his rune-axe and plowing into their ranks. He wanted to engage as many as possible to make it harder for them to get at the squishier PCs. I decided that since the Skaven all came through the drain, they were probably all effectively a single engagement. I honestly thought I was doing the PC a favor there… but as we quickly found out, huge engagements like this really play to the Skaven's strengths. Hrulgar gets a good attack roll, and drops an entire group of 4 henchmen, so for a few seconds things look very bright for the players. Then I unleash The Overwhelming Horde. It's the only non-basic attack for the clanrats, so it makes sense that they'd open with it. They score 2 successes, which drops a fatigue on the dwarf for every Skaven in the engagement. Oh, my, that would be 9 fatigue, even after adjusting for his kills! First enemy action of the first real fight of the campaign, and I've already KO'd the best melee character in the party. Worried that I may have made this fight too tough, I neglect to have the second group of clan-rats actually attack. One player down is an interesting dramatic turn and an opportunity for a rescue, but 2 players down in the first round, especially with that rather nasty Location card in play seemed too likely to TPK. As it turns out, I probably could have had them attack, and it would have worked out just fine. The rats may have gotten lucky early on, but that luck wouldn't hold out. Lina and Burgoldt made ranged attacks that killed a couple henchrats a piece. The gutter-runner hurled some throwing weapons at the PCs, scoring only minor damage. Ninewise moved forward to cast a blessing on Hrulgar. This allowed the dwarf to recover from enough fatigue to actually wake up, but she also scored a chaos-star and ended up in the Filthy muck. Top of the round. Several more henchmen go down, leaving just two total, plus the gutter-runner. The tide of battle changes fast in this game. The remaining clan-rats take their obligatory "Cheap Shots" and then flee through the trench and drain. There's a brief exchange of ranged attacks, and then the Gutter-Runner flees as well. Lina wants to blast them, but they're under water and around a corner. Free escape, unless the PCs are willing to go swimming. Rather than ending the fight there, I pull a Rally Step. I happen to know there's a Skaven nearby with more interesting options, but I didn't want to risk him going down before he's filled his part of the plot. He casts a spell off-camera, and suddenly a horde of mundane sewer-rats (but with glowing red eyes courtesy of the spell) come pouring up out of the drain. Like the Skaven fight, the battle with the rats lasts just a couple rounds. Rat swarms actually have a lot of staying power and some interesting actions, but don't do big damage. Lots of narration of magically-frenzied rats climbing all over everything and biting at exposed flesh, with Fear checks and conditions for everyone, but ultimately no major injuries for the PCs. Mainly this conflict allowed me to get a feel for Skaven and rat combat stats, which I suspect will prove useful later in the campaign. Swarm sheet sidebar: Like the Clan Eshin Assassins group sheet, the Swarm sheet has a tracker with 8 or 9 steps on it. It's not as ridiculous as the Eshin sheet, as the tracker moves with every successful attack on the swarm, not every turn. So that's 3 or 4 times the speed of the Eshin tracker with a typical-sized party, and thus a lot more likely to reach its end during a fight scene. This one works pretty well, and, in the context of the full swarm rules, does a good job of representing a horde of vermin. It's worth noting though that the complete swarm rules are not on the Swarm sheet, nor are they on the Rat Swarm monster card either. One of the great things about Warhammer is that having the appropriate cards in front of you means you rarely have to reference a rulebook mid-game. But when critical yet rarely-referenced rules are inexplicably left off of the relevant card (especially one like the Swarm sheet that has a ton of empty space on the front and two tons of fluffy flavor text on the back), that slides from "great" to "frustrating". Man, I wish FFG spent more time on playtesting and editing. After the fight, the PCs sent for the city guard, and withdrew outside the Tannery to catch their breath and patch up the bleeders. We made some Disease checks for anyone who took damage from the filthy rats, but the tests were all passed without incident. Ninewise, having been dunked in the pits during the fighting, went for a bath in the river. A crowd of brass-tier folks came to gawk at the source of the gunfire and cries of "monster!" and "Skaven!", but quickly concluded it was just a lot of hubbub and commotion over a few score rats. The magical tattoos on the Skaven bodies destroyed most of the evidence. There was a severed limb left over from a critical hit the PCs scored, and since it was no longer connected to the warpstone tattoos, it didn't dissolve. Confronted with NPCs skepticism over the mythical rat-men, my players asked what exactly their characters would know about the shaven bastards. I was ready for that question. During character creation (as part of the Gently-Born background card) Burgoldt pawned his family heirloom pistol to Mathilda Durbein, and local fence/antiques-dealer. In the first session I casually mentioned the contract was written on the back of some nonsense handbill printed by Rambrecht Delfholt the Agitator. That lunatic handbill mentioned Skaven, and I immediately pulled out a prop I'd typed up to represent it. Here's the text: "Our Double-Edged Swords Every commoner looks to the armies of the Empire for protection from the rampaging hordes of foreigners and worse always pressing at our borders. Those armies should rightly be at the edges of the wilderness, defending us from the enemy without, but if those armies were stationed only on the frontiers, what unfortunate patriots would do the dirty work when a nobleman wanted to evict a loyal pauper, or put down a popular movement by way of bloody violence? Troops on the frontiers protect, but troops closer keep we brassy serfs downtrodden. Oppression, Lies, and Taxation To justify those local armies, the barons and their captains have invented a most terrifying boogieman. The rat with human hands, which lurks beneath our cities and can strike from our own sewers and catacombs. They pretend to hush and deny these very rodential rumours they have themselves started. They doth protest too much! These denials are but a show piece to sell the illusion that we are in constant peril and must be surrounded with jackbooted mercenaries. To pay for the armies of our oppression, they tax us into submission! A Tragedy of Taxidermy We are told of the tragedy of Nuln, the city that was supposedly beset by ratmen in 2499. Those who have seen the stuffed corpse of the so-called Ratman of Nuln can attest to it’s obvious fakery. A man-made monster composed by stitching the head of a giant rat on the body of a mundane beastman. The Guild of Taxidermists has a Guild-Hall in Nuln, and another in Altdorf. From whence didst The Horned Rat come? Not the sewers of Nuln, but the Imperial Court itself!" It's nutty, I know, and totally lifted from Brotherhood of the Wolf… but it's also pretty much exactly the rabid conspiracy theories that the adventure itself presents as being Rambrecht's beliefs. (Except for calling beastmen "mundane", IIRC that was my own little embellishment for irony's sake.) I didn't want to have to try to memorize or improvise that kind of nonsense should it ever come up, so I took the liberty of laying it out as a prop. (And in case I haven't mentioned it previously, I've been using Valvorik's excellent TEW handbills as props, giving out one to the PCs basically every day of the campaign if the PCs get anywhere near Rambrecht. The conspiracy theory above was written and laid out so as to match his style as best I could manage whilst still conveying the madness of the conskavenspiracy.) The sidebar for splitting shaven hairs: I'm not sure where the whole concept of Skaven denialism came from exactly, and why it's so prevalent in the setting despite 2 out of every 3 published adventures having Skaven as the villains. Daily life in the Empire involves worship of a pantheon of actual miracle-granting gods, a color-coded system of everyday magic, ongoing war against a bestiary of terrifying fantasy monsters, and strict policing by roaming witch-hunters empowered to put heretics and mutants to the torch on the slightest suspicion lest the named and known daemons of chaos tear down the walls of reality. Given that context, ingrained cultural skepticism about one particular species of boogeyman seems a little spurious to me. It's one part of the setting I just don't grok, but I can at least pay lip service to it in-character like a good little fanboy should. If shaven denialism is what the adventure calls for, then shaven denialism is what they'll get. The city watch arrives in force. The squad is reinforced, and led by a different officer than the one they saw yesterday. This new, fresh-faced fellow doesn't really know what to do about reports of mythic monsters, and he's not about to stick his nose in the stinky tannery himself if he can avoid it. He's not willing to commit to anything controversial, either. When questioned about that, he reveals that just last night an angry mob of dock-workers bearing fish tattoos stormed the guard house and demanded the release of an arsonist. Confronted with nearly 3 dozen drunken witnesses to the man's innocence, the previous Lt decided to release the captive rather than risk a riot. As a result, he was relieved of his command and transferred out of the district by a very irate Captain Baerfaust about an hour ago. So he assigns a couple guards to the tannery doors, takes statements from the PCs, and goes off to compose a CYA report (Cover Your… Averlander). Mechanical note: With the revelation that Bischoff paid a bunch of Fish gangers to force the City Watch to release the arsonist, the Agenda of the Criminal Empire moves from 5 to 6. The Black Cowl's organization is getting pretty ballsy. Reinforced by guards, the PCs carefully return to the tannery to finish fishing for bodies. They scoop up a total of 8, representing both genders. They were expecting the body of Ute, and wouldn't have been shocked if Jurgen, Rolf, and even Ingo were here as well, but there's at least 4 more unknown victims. The skins are chemically burned, faces mutilated, and organs ritually removed. Something very bad is afoot here. The Initiates of Morr (holy morticians) eventually show up to collect the bodies for proper burial, but so does Luminary Mauer and he has other plans. Mauer had been investigating the Halheimer murder earlier this morning. He confers with Lina, and agrees with her opinion that the same weapon also killed the bodies here. He's unclear to him why Keller and Halheimer would be separated out and dumped publicly, and exactly what the relationship is between the killer and the Skaven that were on-site. The players have a better picture of at least parts of it, and fill him in a bit on Bischoff and the Black Cowl. Imaginary Romantic Entanglements Sidebar: In the conversation of the previous session, Mauer had gotten the mistaken impression that the reason Lina had been absent from the dorms was due to some romantic entanglement. This was a convenient-enough fiction before they'd decided to bring Mauer into their confidence about the Black Cowl, but even now they haven't really disabused him of it. If anything, they actually gave the Luminary the distinct impression that Lina and Burgolt are dating. Couldn't be further from the truth. Though somewhat confused on certain topics, Mauer does at least seem to be an expert on the Skaven. He claims to know a good deal about their cursed magic, and says the murder weapon is likely a warpstone blade. He also speculates a bit about what they might be using the rituals for, and notes that they'll most likely kill 13 all told, as 13 is a number of ritual significance to the rat-men and often invoked in their magics. There's a fun moment as the players do a head count. 8 dead NPCs + 1 NPC Skaven expert who's no doubt a threat to the villains + 4 PCs would equal 13, wouldn't it? The GM smiles. All this dark magic is a real danger to the public safety. Mauer talks Lina into incinerating the corpses, which really makes the Initiates of Morr unhappy. They leave in a huff, riled up about the wizard's collective disrespect for the souls and bodies of the departed. Corrupted Memory Sidebar: Somewhere in these scenes Lina scored a point of Corruption. It's been more than a month since the session, but I still feel a little bad that I can't remember now how it happened. It may have been the result of a Chaos Star on an attack spell vs the Skaven (as some of the Miscast cards can do that to you), or if she picked it up via a standard Corruption test for poking around in the ritually-slain bodies. Either would be a fine source, but it's a shame can't recall which it was. Likewise, I also don't remember what moved Party Tension from 5 to 6 during this session - it may have been lingering impatience from Ninewise due to her "X marks the spot" spell, or it could just as easily been over the burning of the bodies right in front of the Initiates. Things tidied up or burnt to a cinder, the PCs can take their leave. Mauer exits as well. The city watch stays posted at the doors to the tannery for now. In the real world, it's almost quitting time. The fight was only about 4 or 5 rounds, but since it was our first major battle in the system, it wasn't exactly fast. Investigating the scene and chatting with the NPCs ate up some hours as well. But I have one little mini-scene to throw at the PCs before we call it a day. Her name is Beatrice Knox. Two nights ago, the PC saw her gambling at the same table as Bischoff and Grosz, and then she seemed to be winning. Now, she's standing in an alleyway, sobbing. The PCs don't really have a link to her, and the Warhammer world is a cold grim place, so they nearly disregard it. Lina has a good heart (or perhaps just a good plot-detector), and decides to ask what the problem is. Which means everyone else has to follow her into the alley just to make sure it's not some sort of Bischoff-orchestrated ambush. Beatrice gives them a sob story about money owed to bad people, and how her children are hungry and have no where to go if anything happens to her, and could you please spare a large sum of silver? At best she's a foolish addict in over her head and destined for trouble, at worst she's a con artist. The PCs just aren't willing to go all in for someone who's going to turn around and give the money to their enemy. I can't fault their logic on that. When they say no to "charity for villains" she makes one desperate last attempt to part the nobleman from his coinpurse. Sorry Beatrice, Burgolt only sleeps with high-class call girls. As a scene, it felt kinda forced and almost artificial… but that also pretty well describes Beatrice's self-wrought dilemma. She's not the most sympathetic character in the scenario, and my putting her at Bischoff's table a few sessions prior didn't help her cause, either. I could still imagine some character parties pooling their money for her, but not this party at this point in the story. She's also not actually written up as a skilled-enough panhandler or con artist to really justify breaking out the Social Encounter rules in the last 10 minutes of the session, so I let it go. End of Session 4 and Day 3. Party Tension: 6. Criminal Empire Agenda: 6 & Stability: 7. Lina has 1 Corruption Token. Several of the PCs have a small number of minor wounds.

Rapiers and Spears both have the "Fast" trait. Seems likely the revised Fast rules were pulled out of thin air in a hurry when FFG was confronted with the error in the book (as printed it did nothing). I kinda doubt the errata got any playtest before being thrown at us. I'd look at revising Fast before making any more complicated changes to the weapon lists or other game elements. Here's three possible alternate versions for Fast: "Attacks made with weapons with the fast quality gain: Boon Boon: Place one fewer recharge token on this action" (Costs 2 boons instead of just 1, so it's less frequent and more likely to conflict with your other boon effects) or "Attacks made with weapons with the fast quality gain: Boon: -1 damage. Place one fewer recharge token on this action" (Still costs just 1 boon so it's still very reliable and frequent, but it reduces damage by 1 when activated so there's a bit of a trade-off.) or "Attacks made with weapons with the fast quality gain: Comet: +1 Critical. Place one fewer recharge token on this action" (Costs a comet instead of just a boon so it'll happen a lot less. Added the bonus critical to keep it competitive with other comet effects.)

Mutants instead of skaven is a great change. I'm sure it will have some ripple effects in later Books, but it should be awesome. And given how you played up Mauer's belief in the Skaven, it's a nice bit of bait and switch. Even better that your players came up with the idea, and you rolled with it to meet them. Well done. Bummer about 2 of your players moving away. I hate when real-world stuff blindsides the narrative. I'm always waving my tiny fist in the air and shouting "We're crafting ART here, why can't you people warp your lives around it like I do?"

Given infinite time and energy, I'd love to make similar sheets for Baerfaust, Mauer, and the von Alptraums at least. That way the PCs could better choose where they're putting their smoozing efforts and get more tangible rewards out of it. The benefits of patronage are kinda strong, so adding an opportunity cost (not getting to have some other NPC as a patron) would be a nice balance. It's a fair amount of effort to make one of these sheets, though, so I don't know if I'll get around to making ones for the other potential patrons. Brainstorming the patronage benefits was the easy part. Strange Eons didn't quite have the right layout and I had to chop it up and move stuff around in photoshop.

Please forgive this "thread necromancy", but I recently picked up the Player's Guide and found this on page 47: "It is possible, especially for Reiklander characters who can do so very cheaply, for a character to change careers at a very high rate. If this becomes a problem for a given group, the GM is encouraged to enforce a 'minimum stay' in a given career of 4 advances." That still doesn't completely solve the issues I was having, but it's official and certainly relevant to the topic. There are careers with 3 Fortune Advances, so Wizards side-stepping into Mystic just for the white dice really aren't slowed down by that 'minimum stay'. It's something though, and it got me thinking about the subject all over again. After a lot of thinking and debating here and elsewhere, the solution I've landed on instead is to limit the number of Fortune Dice associated with a Characteristic to the rating of the Characteristic. So if your Fellowship is 2, it can't have more than 2 Fortune Dice associated with it. This means no character will ever be able to have more than 6 Fortune Dice in any Characteristic, so the loophole of buying 7 to 12 Fortune Dice in a single rank by wildly career-hopping is effectively closed. All the worst exploits are covered, but the power-curve of less extreme characters is barely touched. As a nice little bonus, such a rule will subtly reward PCs who do end up spending all those extra XP on blue dice. Going from Intelligence 3 to 4 hardly seems worth 4 or 5 XP if the other option is to instead spend those same 4 XP to get 4 white dice. This makes the Characteristic advances just a little more important than they were, and I think that's a good thing.

During a recent battle on horseback, I noted a few things about horses in Warhammer FRP 3rd Ed. Horses in Warhammer 3rd are: Complicated. There's a lot of rules that aren't easily summarized, so you'll probably have to look them up every fight or chase. Not particularly fast. If a horse raced a PC with Toughness 4, the PC would win and/or the Horse would fall over dead. A serious liability. Unless really built to maximize the mandatory Ride check at the start of each fight, a mounted PC has a high chance of never getting to take an Action during the fight. If you fail the initial roll vs 2 Purple, you're completely screwed. These observed facts annoyed me. I'm really not keen on PCs making the same die roll repeatedly, nor on them losing their action turn after turn as a side-effect of spending money on a supposed beneficial item. So, I booted up Strange Eons and decided to make myself a simpler and less double-edged Riding Horse. What's changed: You only ever make 1 Ride check for control per encounter (unless some enemy has a Fear rating), instead of a bad roll on turn 1 resulting in all your actions in later turns being replaced by harder-and-harder Ride checks. A failed ride roll means the horse panics and carries you away to Medium range, spending 1 Wind. After that initial retreat, the only lingering penalty is a single misfortune die for the rest of the fight. The amount of movement per Wind point spent has been increased. 1 Wind = 2 Movement Manoeuvres now, so that slightly above-average humans are no longer faster sprinters than horses. A horse with no Wind just dies. Skip the die rolls entirely. All the rules are conveniently located on a card in front of you, so you don't have to crack open a book unless someone is using Perform a Stunt to unhorse a rider (or something). The movement thing in particular was kind of a big deal to me. PCs outracing horses just undermines my suspension of disbelief. In the real world, a horse's galloping speed is between 30 and 55 mph depending on the breed, whereas the world record for a human doing the 100m dash works out to about 23 mph. Warhammer's "Swift" rules had that kinda backwards. In the original rules, assuming you made your initial Ride check, you could at maximum make your Riding Horse move 7 Movement Manoeuvres without penalty (other than spending Wind). If they made an 8th Movement Manoeuvre in a turn, the horse has a 37% chance of dying on the spot. By comparison, a PC with 4 Toughness can make 5 Movement Manoeuvres per turn without penalty, up to 9 if they're willing to earn some temporary black dice, and at 10 they pass out. So a Reiklander on foot could literally race a horse to death and win. In my version, each Wind spent provides 2 Movement Manoeuvres, so the horse can theoretically go 12 Manoeuvres in a turn without dying… once. Astute readers will notice also that my card blurs the line between Wind and Obedience. I initially did this because it's a pain in the butt to make the Strange Eons card template say "Wind" instead of "Obedience" over the tracking triangles. The two mechanics are nearly identical anyway, with the only real difference being what happens when you run out of Wind/Obedience. With that in mind, I eliminated the die rolls for dying when your Wind is "Blown", and made death a sure thing. It sounds cruel (especially coming from a vegetarian) but the horse is effectively equipment in-game. In the real world, swords get blunted, bent or broken with repeated combat. I'm not interested in rules that cover sword-maintenance in excruciating detail, so I'm not interested in detailed horse-maintenance either. One of my design goals was to reduce bean-counting and repetitive die-rolling. Rolling to see if the horse lives or dies is admittedly an interesting mini-game that certainly has dramatic potential, but it's mostly going to come up during a fight scene when we're already busy with other more important things, such as whether-or-not the PC dies. Note that I am only talking about "equipment" horses here (and I am totally going to lose my vegetarian liscence if I keep saying that). If and when a PC takes a career (Outrider or Knight) that gives them a special horse, I'll revisit this and either re-institute die rolls for such a horse, or else just hand-wave it like the Ratcatcher's unkillable dog. Crossed Swords Clarification: The challenge icon on the card is meant as short hand for "if you fail the test". I was just trying to save space. Likewise, the crossed-swords and chaos-star line can be read as "If you fail the test and also roll a chaos star" which was what it took to fall off the saddle in the original rules. Neither of these failed test results actually require any challenge symbols (the crossed swords icon) to be rolled, they merely require a net result of 0 or fewer successes. Caveat: None of this has seen any real playtest yet. The rules to Warhammer are exceptionally opaque, so there could be unforseen ripple effects I'm not anticipating. It's possible the Ride test needs a higher difficulty, since the downside to failure is less drastic. It's possible the diceless Blown rules will be too harsh.I've found that if I hold off posting things till they're fully tested and vetted, I usually forget to post them at all.

Here's a card I made. It's a Family sheet (similar to those in the Edge of Night adventure) for use with the Von Kaufmans from The Enemy Within campaign. You can use the progress tracker on the bottom to chart the PCs relationship to Graf Friedrich von Kaufman, and it incorporates how much effort it takes to get invited to the Party. The benefits of patronage are also on the card, modeled off the patronage bonuses of similar cards for the von Holzenauer, von Saponatheim, and Aschaffenberg families in Edge of Night. For more information on how they work, see page 27 of that adventure. Note that the card presented here is a tiny bit stronger than the averages in Edge of Night. I adjusted the monetary stipend upwards (from 20 to 30 silver per month) to match the rates the Graf throws cash at the PCs in Book One of the campaign. Also, there's 2 skills instead of just 1 getting the specialization bonus, but the specific specializations are less useful than, for example, the Fencing specialization granted by the Von Holzenhauers, so I hope it balances out. And really, how often are PCs going to train (or use) Animal Handling? I may get around to making similar cards for the other factions and families in The Enemy Within, but von Kaufman seemed like the right place to start given the Templemann Exhibit party and the various employment opportunities via the Red Arrow offices. The easy parallel to the Edge of Night cards (which already had an invitation to a Ball and the Patronage model) made it a piece of cake. The Reputation slot will be filled (at my table) with the "Well-Traveled" Reputation (gives a bonus on Charm, Education and Folklore where exotic locales are involved). It seemed like a good fit for Graf von Kaufman given his Coaching business and funding of explorers. Alternately, "More Money Than Sense" would also be a good choice… and if von Kaufman is the Black Cowl in your campaign you might consider something more sinister I created these using the <a href="http://www.vendolis.org/forum/index.php">Hurlanc</a> and <a href="http://www.liberfanatica.net/Addenda.html">Liber Fanatica 7</a> extensions for <a href="http://cgjennings.ca/eons/download/update.html">Strange Eons</a>, plus a bit of Photoshop.

Re: the Serene talent One of the possible Rally step options is to make an Easy (1d) Discipline + Willpower check to recover from Stress equal to the successes rolled. Serene would definitely apply to that roll. In addition, at the end of every encounter, all characters recover Stress equal to their Willpower. (Same thing happens upon waking up after getting a good night's sleep.) This isn't technically a die roll, but it based on Willpower. If a player at my table had the Serene talent, I'd probably allow them to recover 1 extra at these times.

It's possible that the Gumshoe system has just spoiled me, but I'm dissatisfied with some of the difficulties on clue-finding Observation checks in TEW. This is intended as a heads-up for GMs that may follow me: certain very useful clues in the second half of Book One have been made arbitrarily hard for the PCs to get their hands on, and you may want to scale that difficulty back. Day 6, for example, has NPCs carrying specially-marked pistols that are basically a clue to the depth of how far the Black Cowl's reach extends. In case the PCs fail to kill or capture the NPCs, they provide a broken discarded pistol as a back-up clue. However, to find that back-up clue, you have to pass both a Hard (3d) and a Daunting (4d) difficulty Observation check. Once you find the discarded pistol, in order to grasp it's significance you must pass an Average (2d) Education check - and remember you're not allowed to roll Education unless you've Acquired it. This is at best ominous foreshadowing that the players can do nothing with/about. Finding it gives provides the rationale for why von Kaufman doesn't hire Averburg guards on Day 8, so you really want the PCs to find out about this. Why make them jump through so many hoops to get the clue? A character with Int 5, a fortune die or applicable specialization, and both skills trained, has about a 25% chance to succeed at all three rolls in succession. That seems a little silly. For my own campaign, I'm going to cut the difficulty on finding the camp, and make finding the pistol automatic if they get to the camp. There's a treasure box there, which as-written is an auto-find if you get to the camp. Since it's a monetary reward, not a plot-relevant clue, I may make that box be the hidden thing and have the 4-difficulty search check apply to it instead of the broken-pistol clue. Day 9+: When the PCs actively trying to find Skrabb, finding his tracks when looking at the mudflats is a Hard (3d) Observation check (and I should mention that technically it's also got 2 misfortune from Skrabb's "Leave No Trace" ability, though there's no reminder about that in the text so its easy to miss). I get that finding these tracks too early could derail part of the plot, but this difficulty is in the post-Day-8 section, and is amusingly followed by the subsection titled "PCs Stuck?" The PCs wouldn't be stuck here if the module weren't making them roll 3 purple (plus 2 black) dice in order to get to the next plot point. They're in the right place, doing the right thing, at the right time, and they've still got at best a 50-50 shot at getting the clue. At this point in the story you want the PCs to be forming a mental picture of what's been going on, not feeling confused and frustrated. I'd consider making success here automatic, or at least reducing difficulty to 1 purple + 2 black (rolling at all just to pay lip-service to Skrabbs anti-tracking power). IMHO, die rolls (especially high-difficulty rolls) should only be called for when the results of failure are interesting. In the cases sighted above, failure either slows the plot or goes entirely unnoticed, and there's no juicy chaos-star results to make it interesting or perilous. Therefore, the only point to rolling here is to make the player feel like their XP spends on Int + Observation were worth it… if they fail, you don't even get that.

Lots of good work and thought there. Compiling a list of social actions and their stats was really sharp. I wish FFG had published a Generic Basic Social Action card. Seems like that would have been easy enough for them to do. I realize that's a high degree of overlap with Perform A Stunt, but it sure would be nice to have a single standard for what a Charm/Leadership/Guile/Intimidate check to Influence the Target should look like. Given the disorganized nature of the action cards, it's hard for a starting GM to do that analysis themselves. I LOVE/HATE the Perform A Stunt card. It's great that there's a card to remind the players that if they get some cool idea they can give it a go even though they don't have an action that represents it. But it's so hard to come up with a fair difficulty for things. Make it too easy, and you'll invalidate some existing action(s). Make it too hard, and you've undermined the whole point of having Perform A Stunt in the deck in the first place. As to the "Can I use these actions outside of Combat?" and "What does recharge mean outside of an encounter?" questions, the official answer is squirreled away in the "Relative Timeframe & Scale" sidebar on page 16 of the Tome of Adventure. It's pretty easy to miss. In a nutshell, the rules intentionally do not define how long a "Round" represents. One of the examples there has each Day be a single round, and they encourage the GM to alter round length depending on the situation and needs of the story. I think it'd be fair to paraphrase it as "a round is whatever amount of time it takes for all involved parties to get an action". In my experience, that soft recharge gets used mainly for "Buff" actions. Inspiring Words, Fiery Passion, etc. If a PC wants to pop a Buff between encounters, then it only recharges when they make die rolls. That way it's pretty easy to have 1 or 2 buffs up and running at the start of any given encounter, but if you start trying to stack a bunch of them they'll wear off quickly as you roll repeatedly. Without these softer recharge times, I've found that actions like Big City Bravado have too high of opportunity costs to ever be worthwhile. (Simple success is usually easy, so you'd almost always rather make an Influence attempt yourself rather than spend your entire action just adding 1 die to someone else's Influence attempts for a couple turns.) With the softer recharge times allowing you to actually start the next encounter with a round or two left on such a buff, some of these actions are actually worth spending XP on.

Matchstickman said: Let me post the relevant passage from page 89 for clarity ---- To discourage this behavior and highlight the dangers of combat in your game, players should be mindful of the following general guideline for healing: each character may benefit from each specific source of healing once per day. Healing has its limits. For example, a character who is healed by a Shallyan priest’s Soothing Touch blessing cannot benefit from a second Soothing Touch blessing until the following day—though a different blessing such as Cure Wounds could still be applied. Likewise, only one application of the Splints & Bandages action, one successful First Aid check, one healing draught, and one good night’s rest can be applied toward an individual character’s recovery each day. ---- All emphasis copied from the book Awesome! Thank you for sharing that quote. Which book is that from? Page 89 of the core rulebook is "A Brief History of the Empire", so it's not from there. EDIT after reading your other post: The Player's Guide! (I thought FFG had said you didn't need it if you had the core set, so I never bought it.)

dvang said: 1) No. It isn't per action card. The restriction is per TYPE. For example, you are not able to receive a healing blessing from a priestess of Shallya and a healing blessing from the priest of Sigmar (or other priest that has a blessing that can heal). So, there are only about 5 'types' or healing. 1) First Aid/Medicine (i.e. non-magical), 2) Blessings, 3) Spells, 4) Potions/Draughts, 5) Rest Potentially there might be others, like an object that heals (but doesn't cast a Blessing or Spell), but the above would be the typical types. Is that in a rulebook somewhere? I like your interpretation. I think it would work pretty well in play. I could see myself using that version in the game… but I don't think it's what the rules actually say. The healing & recuperation section on pages 64 to 65 of the core rulebook limit First Aid to "once per act during an encounter" or per scene outside an encounter. The rules imply a similar limit for Medicine (somewhat more restricted than First Aid actually, since you're not allowed to use Medicine during a fight), but nowhere on those pages does it clearly and definitively state that if you are treated with First Aid you can't be treated with Medicine, or vise-versa. (For the record, I would interpret that part exactly the way you are/do, but it sure could have been clearer in the book.) Per page 65, Healing Draughts are specifically limited to once per DAY, not per Act or Scene. Those rules make no mention (that I've seen anyway) of healing limits for spells or blessings. The notion of there being 5 categories of healing that are each limited to once per Act doesn't appear in the text anywhere that I've seen. Which is a shame, because the rules as written make wound recovery super-easy once you've got a single healing spell or blessing, and ultimately only limited by the playgroup's patience for repetitive die-rolling.

I just looked at the card. As printed, it's a white/fortune die, not a black/misfortune die.