Alternate Wound Penalties Chart

This comes up occasionally on various socials, and I've been wanting to make a handy blog post to point to, for my own personal houserules about the matter.

Wound Penalties and how I handle them.

So, we all know the original chart for numerical penalties to actions performed by PCs on the basis of physical injuries they previously sustained, from page 124 of the K:DL Corebook.

I use those pretty much rules-as-written, but modified the numbers a little bit. This caused me to make an alternative version of the chart itself, in order to easily present the slight increase in granularity... and vehemence.

You can see it here:

So your first Serious Wound gives you a -1 modifier to any rolls, ongoing until the wound has been stabilized or healed.

The second Serious Wound you suffer will increase this penalty to -2, with the same conditions as above.

(Wounds that have been stabilized - even if not healed - do not count for this consideration of "Is it two or more Wounds?", only non-stabilized ones do. Naturally though, stabilized Wounds can always reopen, especially when engaging in hurried and/or rowdy physical action, and, say, rolling a (-9) for something wild or risky... And when the stitches tear and your bandages start soaking red, or when that improvised splint breaks and your bone starts cracking again... Well then the Wound very much counts once more!)

The same would happen if you got a Critical Wound right away: -2 to any actions for which it makes sense that the injury could hinder you in your performance. And since this category of Wounds has such lovely examples given for it in the corebook such as: punctured lung, severed aorta, ruptured eyeball, or spinal cord damage, amongst others - well, let's just say it may be most rolls that could reasonably be affected...

Here I am already being a little more harsh than the corebook is with its -1 for a Critical.

The final step, then, aggravates it to -3, when you have both Serious and Critical Wounds. I feel this reasonable for such a messed up state of physical health. Also, perhaps I just like my players to suffer and despair. But what can I say? The game - and especially all sorts of combat and violence in it - is supposed to be harsh and brutal, after all.

 

A note on crunch - If you're wondering about the level of severity this adds, and whether you'd want it in your game, here's some maths if it helps:

So, I wanted to know what a +1 modifier would do in K:DL's 2d10 system, in percentages, so I crunched the numbers (which is rather easy, since for a roll of 2d10 there's exactly 100 possible outcomes. So that maps to percentages very nicely. And it turns out that a +1 bonus (or penalty) will affect the rolled result in exactly 15% of all possible rolls. 

By "affect the result" I mean that this single modifier makes the difference between either a full success and a partial, or a partial and a miss. In other words, the question was "How often does a +1 penalty end up turning my 9 into a 10, or my 14 into a 15?"

And the answer is, 15% of the time. 

(This remains true also when you factor in Attribute bonuses, it only becomes slightly less at extreme values, such as at a +4 Attribute, another +1 bonus will increase your result only around 13% of the time. Attributes of -3 or lower are likewise affected. But for our purposes here, that is largely negligible. Let's just operate on the assumption of "+/-15% for every +/-1 bonus/penalty".)

So a -3 penalty adds up to 45%. That's how often your combined Serious and Critical Wounds will reduce your 10 to a 7, your 11 to an 8, your 12 to a 9, your 15 to a 12, your 16 to a 13, or your 17 to a 14.

So the question one can ask themselves when pondering whether to use the original chart or the above depicted one, is basically this: Do I feel that "Oh man, 15% are plenty and 30% is properly hurtful?" 

Or can I get on board with "Yes, a really badly mangled person should when acting under duress be performing less well than normally around half the time they try to do something ambitious, complicated, or dangerous?

My game, my table? Solidly in the latter camp. Your table? Your call!

She says she wants to playtest her new homebrew damage rules.
What do you do?

 

A bit later, after a couple games with the above table, I had another idea, and wanted to see if it could be incorporated into it.

I made a second version of my chart from above, which features a little extra twist I came up with:

 

Numerically, this is the exact same as the one shown above - except for the addition of the new modifier to See Through The Illusion. 

I found this enjoyable for two reasons: 

- it fits that Basic Move's trigger, when you suffer shock, injury, or distort your perception through drugs or rituals..., and thus is just too sweet of an opportunity to pass up for making move snowballs and mechanically funnel the fiction into driving towards my GMing Agenda: Tear back the Illusion to reveal the True Reality behind it.

- it mirrors the thing that happens from Stability at its lowest levels, so I feel that neatly ties together the Madness and Death aspects of these two mechanical subsystems. 

I've been using this one in my games ever since, but am sad to have to report that it hasn't yet triggered in an actual game. Hmmm, could it be because I'm still being too nice to my players... Perhaps I should punish them even harder... Yes, that must be it!

Excuse me while I go cook up some new depravities and mutilations for them to suffer through.

Be back to you soon with the next update!

The Expectant Bride

 

There is a monster, cursed with an impossible pregnancy, fated to die in agonizing pain - unless it can violate someone else to fulfill its needs, before its procreational doom impends.

Desperate to give birth, the gynachid (K:DL 302) has pried its way into Elysium and now wanders the nightly city streets in search of a suitable surrogate mother.

 

Sniffling and groaning under its breath, it is able to smell human women who are young and strong enough to carry its infant to term, and seeks them out when they're alone and vulnerable.
When it finds a suitable victim, it approaches her, sobbing and crying and gesturing for help.

In the Illusion the creature appears like a frail young woman clad in a white wedding dress, complete with veil, gloves, shoes etc, but worringly frayed and torn in places, and stained with mud and grime. She looks beautiful but also scared under her silky sheer veil, and is evidently highly pregnant. She speaks only in slurred words and animalistic groans. It may sound like the woman is intoxicated, mentally challenged, or in the grips of a deep shock. She is also clearly in pain, intermittently writhing and shivering with cramps, and indicates her own swollen belly as the cause.

When comforted or asked how she could be helped, The Expectant Bride will whimper and meekly point to the direction of a lonely alleyway, shadowy building entrance, or some badly lit underpass. She will also allow a would-be helper to take her into her car, or another secluded place nearby. If the victim seems hesitant, the gynachid may try to indicate fear of an unseen pursuer, begging with mewling pleas to be taken to some sort of safety. 

As soon as she is alone with the victim however, it hastens to initiate its grotesque and violating impregnation process. A perverse distortion of the consummation of marital vows, the necessity of which humankind itself has inflicted upon the creature, once upon Times Immemorial.

It is only when it pulls back its veil and takes off its dress to start doing this, that the creature's true appearance is revealed to the victim. Even if she is not shocked into a paralyzed stupor by this very sight, and manages to run from the monster, her chances of escape are minimal against the desperate, inhuman Bride.

Her chances of survival however, are in fact very high - both in the short and long term. The gynachid wants to avoid killing the future mother of its infant at almost any cost. And even in the future, once the impregnation has been successfully completed, it will follow her around unseen, watching from beyond the Illusion to ensure the surrogate mother's continued health.

Powerful Leaps: The creature can cross a considerable distance in a single instant. [Able to move from Distance: Room to Distance: Arm and can act before the PC has a chance to react or withdraw.]

Grab and hold someone [1] [Distance: Arm, victim must Act under Pressure to wrench loose]

Paralyzing terror [*] [Distance: Room, victim must Keep it Together or freeze up defenselessly for the remainder of the scene]

Long arms ending in broken claws [2] [Distance: Arm, when attacked or enraged the creature's vicious rakes are at -1 to Avoid Harm against]

Wounds: O O O O O X

(image is copyright Brahim Bensehoul @ ibralui-art, no infringements allowed nor intended)

Alternate Stability Chart for one-shots

Have you ever ran a one-shot scenario, fierce and intense, intended to deliver a fast escalation of horrors and swiftly dovetail into some hard and cruel resolutions towards the end?

Have you ever, in such an endeavor, found the Stability chart of K:DL as written just, well... 

...a bit too slow?

Here is an alternate version I made, designed to cater to just that kind of situations:

 

Description:

Compared to the default variant, this chart obviously features fewer boxes, and you will notice it does not include any mention of Disadvantages. Instead it frontlines Keep it Together as the move that gets penalized earliest, and hardest.

In addition, there is a penalty to "all other rolls" - which is of course intended to be read with "...at the GM's discretion" attached at the end. Naturally, if you ever deign that any given roll should not be penalized under the present circumstance in the fiction, you may freely ignore this modifier in that case. 

Finally, this chart gives a bit of a bump to the Illusion-tearing properties of low mental stability, doubling the bonus to See Through the IIllusion when down to your last couple boxes. 

Design Notes:

The fewer boxes are there simply for a faster progression towards the player characters' madness. The original Stability chart strongly feels like it was designed primarily with longer-running campaigns and multi-session scenarios in mind. It excels at providing a slow burn, a steepening decrease which increasingly spirals out of control over some time. 

But in a one-shot (or two-parter), how many scares and horrors can you feasibly throw at your players? Taking into account that they'll succeed on some of those Keep it Together rolls, or get (10-14) results which cost them only 1 Stability (if that)... you will often never manage to really whittle them down in time for the session to wrap up and any meaningful breakdowns have happened. (Which would make for good resolution fodder / epilogue material, however, and so are seen as highly desired in this hacked version.)

The focus on Keep it Together over Disadvantages is due to the fact that many oneshots and shoter scenarios don't even use Disadvantages. Certainly many of the published and fanmade ones don't include them; thinking of Oakwood Heights, The Driver, Divided We Run...
The mechanics of Disadvantages (meaning Holds, mainly, but also the frequency with which their triggers are designed to be fulfilled in the fiction) are more suitable to longer gameplay as well. And they perform admirably in that setup, but can often be a bit redundant for shorter, quicker, and more focussed affairs.

Of course, penalizing Keep it Together rolls earlier, and harder throughout, also increases the speed with with more Stability is lost during the session. This is what we want, here. We want to see them break. And if we don't get there now, we'll never see it happen.

The penalty to "any other rolls" is there simply to give the GM a mechanical angle to represent the general strain of stress and terror on the human capability to perform risky and dangerous actions.
It can be used or waived as seen fit, and is phrased briskly enough to not take up a lot of space on the chart - while also general enough to give the players (who will of course see and read it on their sheets before their PC ever descends to those levels of Stability) a bit of a scary anticipation of madness to come.

Finally, the bonus to See Through the Illusion has been upped for basically the same reason as the frontlining of Keep it Together and the reduction in number of boxes - we want to see this sort of stuff happen, and we only got one shot to get there! Consider that even in a very fast and furious, crazy and chaotic, madness and mayhem filled session, you'll be lucky to get maybe one or two rolls for this, per player, roughly...

Additionally, the game's very GMing Agenda (corebook, p.145) tell us to:
Tear back the Illusion to reveal the True Reality behind it.
...and also to let the PCs' actions make an impact [...], which totally ties into this as well.

So that sounds like hopefully this variant Stability chart might be keeping things firmly in the spirit of that, helping us GMs of Kult: Divinity Lost to make our one-shot games even better than ever before!

In fact, now that I made this thing, I can't wait to try it out in one of my own games! 

I'll keep y'all posted on any new insights I may or may not derive from any such attempts, sooner or later. Game design is an ongoing adventure of trial, playtesting, and error, after all.
In the meantime, your opinions and experiences are always welcome - did you use similar things or ideas in your your own games? Found different workarounds or hacks to achieve similar intents? Does this look like something you could see yourself using in the future? Are there any painfully obvious weaknesses to its design? 

Hit me up here in the comments or over on Discord, always excited to discuss hacks and houserules of any kind!