Life & the Art of Dying
DOMAIN OF ETERNAL DEATH
There are two ways of dying in Fracture – the death dream and True Death. The former leads to the latter by slow corruption if no greater deity intervenes. The masters of death singers pull the spirit of their champions from the death dream, avoiding True Death, and can do this many times until the soul of the death singer has become too corrupted.
LIFE RECOVERY ‡ RECEIVING DAMAGE ‡ SPECIAL DAMAGE SOURCES ‡ DEATH ‡ TRUE DEATH
Life [HP] points, are your health and represents how much damage you can take. If you lose all [HP], you die!
[HP] points = 9+(PHY/5) + [HP] Bonus
When recovering [HP] you’re regarded “fully healed” when reaching your initial [HP] points.
Life Recovery
Life generally recovers at a rate of about 1 [HP] per hour of rest, but that can change due to effects such as dark marks and blessings. Wound truths, however, remain until they’re treated, which can usually only be done with the Medicine skill or rituals.
Tip
Recovery Examples
- Sleeping
- Receiving first aid with the Survival skill
- Being treated with the Medicine skill
- Receiving aspect or truth buffs
- Drinking non-soiled blood or other healing consumables
Losing [HP] Examples
- Being attacked
- Getting hurt in a trap
- Drinking poison or unhealthy consumables
- Paying for aspect or truth requirements
- Taking it as a lovely bonus from the GM
Receiving Damage
Threshold
If a single wound makes you lose more [HP] than your threshold, the wound truth you suffer is permanent. That means it will stay with you until you die, and, if treated, it will be temporarily suppressed, at most. The GM is free to reactivate permanent wound truths at literally any moment, either waiting until it will hit you hardest when you most needed the wound gone, or constantly picking on you with small annoyances caused by it.
The Thief has gotten his leg severed in a recent conflict. His allies were kind enough to piece him together, but since the GM told him that the damage was beyond his ♥ threshold, the leg will never really recover. Months later, when chasing a necronaut over the rooftops in Babylon, the Thief botches a Jump roll – and the GM remembers his permanent wound. Skin is ripped apart as the leg tears loose and snaps off, causing him to tumble down the building and smash into the street, heavily wounded and once again legless.
To increase the level of your connection with your master you often must lower your thresholds. Note this sacrifice in the master notes, to keep track of why your threshold is lower than what it should be.
Damage and Wound Truths
When you take damage, the GM announces your wound truth, which you add to your character sheet, marking it with an asterisk if the GM says it is permanent. The actual [HP] loss is only suffered when you are able to realize how hurt you are, which is determined by the GM or by specific mechanics. When damage is taken within a conflict, the [HP] loss usually happens when the conflict ends.
This means you can be doomed to death for an entire conflict, charging at adversaries with your head chopped off or gutted like fish with your innards hanging around your feet. The GM is encouraged to exaggerate these moments, making them horrific, hilarious, and awesome!
Wound truths are determined by the GM according to what would best fit the situation, hopefully in a pretty gruesome way. They are handled as any kind of truth, usable by anyone and affecting gameplay as normal.
Since you have lost an arm, you need an extra [+] to succeed.
Since the god lost its legs, could I outrun him more easily?
Since the beast has a large hole through its chest, I want to grab its spine and snap it
All instances of [HP] loss are based on the tier. A damage tier is solely meant to guide the GM on how bad the wound truth must be, and can be as high as the [HP] loss the damage will inflict, going up to the Disintegrate X for losses equal to or greater than 10.
The GM reduces the damage you take with the armor value of your gear (whenever it makes sense to the narrative), as well as by any other reductions like protection or cover (more about this in chapter 15 - Conflict). If the damage is completely negated, you still receive a negative aspect, such as being imbalanced or emotionally shaken.
| damage tier | wound truth example | source example |
|---|---|---|
| Bruise I | “Black eye,” “broken fingernail“, “slight limp“ | Fistfight |
| Injure II | “Flesh wound,” “broken hand“, “strained muscle“ | Improvised weapon |
| Mutilate III | “Finger missing,” “trashed face“, “large wound“ | Fire |
| Cripple IV | “Huge flesh wound,” “massive bleeding,” “broken bones” | Gunshot |
| Gore V | “Deep gut wound,” “crushed face,” “punctured organs” | Heavy gunshot |
| Maim VI | Mangled limbs,” “crushed ribs,” “huge open wounds” | Explosive grenade |
| Sever VII | “Limbs flying,” “crushed skull,” “organs hanging out” | Infernal fire |
| Shatter VIII | Falling balkon | |
| Destroy IX | “Splattered body,” “shred to pieces,” “organs everywhere” | Rocket |
| Disintegrate X | “Blood mist,” “rupture,” “micro fragments of body parts” | Voice of a god |
Special Damage Sources
Falls and Impacts
The greater the height and the harder and sharper the surface you land on, the more damage you take from a fall. Impacts other than falls are treated the same – which is up to the GM to determine.
Whenever you fall, you may roll a relevant skill check to reduce the damage you will take – or maybe even prevent yourself from falling at all. The damage is based on the fall height, increased or decreased according to the surface you land on and on whether your check was successful or not.
| height | damage |
|---|---|
| City V | Destroy IX |
| Palace IV | Sever VII |
| Hall III | Gore V |
| Room II | Mutilate III |
| Intimate I | Bruise I |
Tick Damage
Fire, acid, poison and so on
Anything that causes ongoing damage and is repeated periodically, until you die or remove it in some way. Removing tick damage can be done with a successful skill check, representing anything between rolling around on the ground to put a fire out or researching for days to find the cure to a poison.
Although tick sources usually deplete [HP], there are also tick sources that deplete [SAN] and [AUR].
At the initial tick damage, you get a wound truth from it as normal. On following ticks of damage, the GM announces an adjustment to the initial wound truth in order to make it match the total damage taken, worsening the wound. Souls don’t heal normally while gaining tick damage.
| EXAMPLE TICK SOURCES | |
|---|---|
| Fire | -1[HP] every verse |
| Raging Napalm | -3[HP] every verse |
| Acid | -1[HP] every verse |
| Submerged in Acid | -3[HP] every verse |
| Mundane Poison | -1[HP] every day |
| Legendary Poison | -3[HP] every verse |
Hostile Environments
Simply staying in inhospitable places without proper protection may cause tick damage depending on your form. Being one of the most common environments in Astro Inferno, below is how this works in outer space – the GM could, and should, use these as a base for coming up with rules for similar places.
Even though Liliths are unlife beings, the damage they take for being in inhospitable places varies depending on what kind of host they inhabit.
Tip
Outer Space
LIFE (undying)
- -1[HP] every verse
The lack of heat, pressure, and oxygen in space makes short work of life beings, both suffocating and freeze-drying them in less than a minute unless they are wearing a spacesuit of some kind.HALF-LIFE (dark souls, nanosuits, satanic entities)
- -1[HP] every hour
The lack of heat in space makes it unpleasant for half-life beings, but the fact they don’t need to breathe and the different way their innards function allow them to bear it for some time before their bodies freeze up and die.UNLIFE (genesis soul)
- no damage
As they’re not made of organic or living matter, unlife beings can last indefinitely in space. They may still have stiff joints or even freeze up after a long enough exposure, but as soon as they spend some time in normal temperatures, they’ll be fine again.
Even though non-playable characters do not have [HP], they will still suffer accordingly when exposed to harsh conditions. For all purposes, spark beings are considered life – unlight spark and unlight souls in general are considered half-life beings – while dead gods and True Unlight are unlife beings.
death
Life depletion
When all [HP] is gone, you get a last opportunity before experiencing the death dream. This can be anything from one last word to one last action – to push that button, pull the pin of that grenade, or kill that adversary in one action. This moment between life and death can also be used by your friends to save you. Maybe they shuffle some organs back into your body with the Emergency Aid skill, force a magical potion down your throat, or just whisper words of encouragement and hope the GM considers that to be compelling enough to keep your spirit from floating into the Deep.
The Death Dream
It starts with a vision, often including dream-like episodes of your human life or afterlife. This vision can be played like a scene and may be interwoven into the story. The dream ends with a moment of horrific clarity, where Eternal Death, the being who brings True Death to souls, emerges from its lair and reaches out to collect you.
Liliths do not experience the death dream, instead wander in the Deep until their master intervenes or they decide to dress up in their pre-prepared, fresh flesh suit.
death check
Right when your soul is about to be collected, your master intervenes, allowing you a death check. The death check’s goal is your SPR plus your master connection level. The results are resolved as follows:
Tip
SUCCESS
- remove all wound truths
- recover all [HP]
- lose 1D10 [AUR]
- any [+] can be kept as extra [+] in the audience check\
The vision abruptly ends in a pull, where your soul gets reattached to your spirit and is dragged hastily through the astral world of the Deep. You awaken in the temple of your master, and depending on how things go there, you may get a blessing from them. Your body is re-formed, and you are sent into Fracture again, usually somewhere safe or close to your place of death.
FAILURE
- do not remove any wounds
- recover half your [HP]
- lose 3D6 [AUR]
The vision abruptly ends, as your soul is reattached to your spirit and dragged through Creation, slowly dressed in the tormented flesh of the past as you claw with bleeding fingers at reality passing you by. Your master is not satisfied with your performance, and connects you with a version of your old wounded body as a punishment. You awaken at a random place in Fracture, naked, bleeding, and torn apart.
BOTCH
- do not remove any wounds
- recover no [HP]
- lose 20 [AUR]
The vision abruptly ends and you fall through reality as if it were a paper floor. Visions of horror pass by as your soul tumbles down into nothingness, down below the very primordial foundations of everything, below the truths, lies, and concepts. You are now boiling flesh in front of one of the Worm Gods. Are you doomed, or is salvation coming? The GM decides.
Express Dreams
When you die, the death dream can be resolved any time after the moment of death – the duration between your death and the return to Fracture is undefined. It could be minutes, hours, weeks, even years. Your master seldom has your best interests in mind when determining the length or timing of the audience, so if you die in the middle of a conflict, keep in mind that the death dream will most likely be resolved later.
In some cases, however, the master can have an agenda or even a stake in what you are currently doing, and needs their chess piece back in the game as soon as possible. It can also happen that your master doesn’t care about what you were doing, but they care so much for you that they might even consider helping you out if you beg enough. In such situations, your master can bend time and the audience can be resolved swiftly so that you resurrect into Fracture in the very next verse. This can be an epic moment where you are re-formed in plain view, with your flesh, blood, and structural elements merging with your skeleton or frame as the divine powers of your master manifest.
Corpses
Your empty corpse and all your possessions stay right where you die. Death singers always plunder their friends’ corpses, so that no one else does so. The corpse, on the other hand, is always left behind. It keeps some of the energy of the death and may be used to reinforce the equipment of the death singer it belongs to (further explained in chapter 17 - Items).
The corpses of souls without a master are particularly vulnerable in two ways. First, the rate at which their soul corrupts depends on where their remains are located and how they are handled. If their remains were buried in holy ground and venerated in prayer, the soul could remain in the death dream for centuries. Conversely, if their remains were defiled in rituals or scattered in a creature’s lair, the soul would corrupt in a matter of days. Second, a corpse lying around could easily be collected by the Satanic Court and used for the most heinous things, accelerating the corruption of the soul in the worst ways imaginable, as it is still connected to the body. Satanic factories, for instance, often rely on resurrecting, torturing, and killing souls over and over.
Even though it doesn’t happen in the same way as with death singers, who may return with their body fully re-formed, any soul can end up being resurrected by higher powers if they’re lucky – or unlucky – enough.
If an entity attempts to resurrect a soulless corpse (such as those of death singers after a successful death check), it will become what is known as a hollow soul – although, technically, it is more like a hollow body. These are zombie-like husks which, at most, carry on some glitched memories and habits from the souls which inhabited them, although only to a reflex-like extent.
True Death
When you are in your last song, you will get no death check after your death dream, instead experiencing True Death. Your soul is now too corrupt for your master to access, or at least too much for them to bother stitching together again. Your last song is normally triggered by your tenth corruption, but this may vary depending on blessings and dark marks.
True Death can also emerge regardless of your corruptions when you become affected by a sigil of True Death, or when you get your spirit trapped by some dark entity’s effects that keep your master from being able to reach your soul. The GM should always give notice that True Death is a possibility to heighten suspense and give you the chance to escape such situations.
You feel Eternal Death’s presence through the noises of its grinding teeth, and you now come to realize that something is very wrong. Your master won’t be able to save you if you perish here.
When experiencing True Death, your soul detaches from your spirit, but this time it is for good. As you float free in a final death dream, Eternal Death emerges from its lair and slithers towards you. Some say it is a pitch black elephant bull with red eyes, his movement erratic like hope, his tusks the weave of time, his feet dark red with grime. Your existence ends between its soft, black teeth.
Your corrupted soul, now permanently disconnected from the spirit, lashes back into your corpse or whatever is nearby, unbirthing as a wandering monster – a creature of unlight – a pure evil being, with all your memories and whatever gear was left with it, stalking its former friends as a horrific doppelganger.
The unbirthing of souls is the favorite pastime of the Satanic Court, commonly accompanied by fancy guests and dinner or more conservative rituals during masses and cermonies in church.
Escaping True Death
There are several ways of escaping True Death. Most of them are related to postponing the last song using powerful features or blessings that let you carry more corruptions. Some escape attempts, however, go a step further.
Liliths do not have a soul, which means they attach their spirit directly to a human host in some way only they know. This makes it possible for them to abandon the host when it gets too corrupted and dive into a fresh uncorrupted body. They usually have at least one infant child of their own blood in a secure location they can enter whenever their current body gives up, meaning they start anew with qualities and Master.
Deep within Fracture, on top of a mountainous island in the middle of the River Lethe, stands the mythical Soul Loom. Souls facing their last song are enticed to make a pilgrimage to the soul loom with the promise of an ember soul – a clean slate – in exchange for a fair tribute. Few know that the pilgrimage itself is very hard, and even fewer that the tributes demanded by the guardians of the loom are often unspeakable or of impossible stakes.
Of course, you can simply be diligent and stubborn enough to manage to prevent your [HP] from fully depleting ever again. The Satanic Court, all the gods, and even Eternal Death itself will likely be astonished and possibly even a bit pissed, and who knows what the GM will think of it. But you can surely try!
True Death of Gods
Apart from Eternals and Worm Gods, all other kinds of entities can also experience True Death. Serpents have a somewhat immortal aspect, but have been killed on several occasions, although often just returning in new and changed forms.
Since their inner mechanics are much different than those of regular souls – for instance, most don’t even have a soul – immortal beings can reach a state where they die eternally. This is highly unusual, but due to their status and often narcissistic personalities, most higher entities are completely terrified of dying anyway.
Seals of True Death, and other such alchemical or ancient effects, seldom work as they should on these entities, but can maybe increase the corruption the entity suffers, if the GM thinks it appropriate. Overly corrupted gods and entities do not turn into creatures of unlight like souls do, turning instead into other far more disturbing things not covered within these pages