There's no lore on this page. This page is an explanation of all the underlying mechanics for the setting.

Basics

Rolling

This is a d100 system. To successfully do a thing you must roll under your attribute’s value. So if your Combat is 53 and you roll anywhere from 1-52, you’ve succeeded. Should you roll doubles (11, 22, 33, so on) then that is a critical. If the critical is higher than your attribute, it’s a critical fail. If it’s lower than your attribute, it’s a critical success. Rolls of 1-5 are always a critical success, rolls of 95-100 are always a critical fail.

You won’t be asked to roll all the time. If a character would logically succeed at something, they just succeed at it. If there are no stakes to failure, they just succeed at it. Conversely, if an action is impossible then no role is necessary - the attempt just fails.

Skills

Skills increase the value of your character’s attributes. If you want to hit someone in melee and you have melee as an expert skill, then you increase your combat attribute’s value by 15 because expert skills provide a bonus of +15. While the use case for most skills are immediately obvious, you can use skills in unconventional ways. As long as you can justify how you are incorporating your character’s skill into the action, you may add the bonus to your attribute.

Health

When you take damage that isn’t ignored by your armor, it reduces your health. When health is reduced to 0, your character takes 1 wound and their health rolls back up to its usual maximum.

The wound will be determined in one of three ways. Either you will be told the nature of the injury, you’ll agree on what injury makes the most sense in context, or you just roll 1d10 on the wound table.

If your character reaches their maximum number of wounds, they are incapacitated. They remain incapacitated until someone goes to check on them, at which point you roll on the death table.

Stress

Medaevum incorporates a lot of horror into its setting. Your character will have encounters and experiences that stress them out. Every time they fail a roll, the character gains 1 stress. It may also happen that they just experience something stressful, or you may ask for (or be presented with) an opportunity for your character to really push themselves but in order to do so accumulate some amount of stress.

Stress is always reset to their minimum after they return to a safe place and take a prolonged break from any stressful activity. You may choose to keep your character’s stress high if you feel it wouldn’t make sense for your character to calm down.

In the course of an event, the characters may voluntarily choose to rest before carrying on if their stress is too high. In this circumstance, you would make a roll with the character’s worst save. If they fail the save, they gain 1 stress, 2 if they critically fail. If they succeed, they reduce their stress by the amount they succeeded by (so a roll of 20 if their worst save is 30 would reduce their stress by 10). On a critical success, all stress is wiped.

If they are engaging in some leisure activity, like drinking, prayer, or drug use, they gain advantage on the save.

Panic

Every now and then, all that stress that’s been building suddenly bursts. This can happen when an ally dies, when they encounter something particularly horrific, or whenever you as the player feel it’s appropriate for your character to panic.

Panic is rolled with a d20. If you roll higher than your character’s stress, nothing happens. If you roll at or below your character’s stress, consult the Panic table for what happens.