Systems

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.

Combat

Turn Order

All characters that are part of the same team act simultaneously. They act in whatever order makes sense to them, as coordinated or uncoordinated as they like. Then the other side does the same, taking their turn.

Range

Characters are divided into relative zones, based on range.

• An adjacent character is within the reach of a melee weapon.
• A close character takes one movement to reach.
• A far character takes two movements to reach.
• A character at extreme range takes three movements to reach.

Actions

All characters have one action and one movement per turn. The movement may be used to move closer or further away. The action may be used to attack, use an ability, activate equipment, and so on. Something like drinking a potion or unsheathing a sword has a meaningful effect on combat, but does not count as an action for these purposes.

Healing

Restoring health in the middle of combat is impossible except by magical means. However, other actions may be taken in combat that require a healer’s touch. Stopping bleeding, for example, will kill a character without intervention and a failed check to heal it will make it worse. In combat, healing uses Combat.

Outside of combat, it uses Intellect. A healer may make a check to restore 1d10 hitpoints once per rest. A failed check damaged them by 1.

A wounded character must be tended to by a healer, at which point their wound may be removed after any amount of rest the player deems appropriate.

Armor

Characters ignore all damage less than their armor’s Armor Value (AV). However, if they ever take Damage greater than or equal to their AV in one hit, their armor’s AV is permanently reduced by 1 and they suffer any remaining damage. Weapons with anti-armor ignore armor and reduce its AP by 1 whenever they hit. Some armor may have Damage Reduction (DR) which always reduces incoming Damage by the amount stated (even if the armor is destroyed, or if the weapon has anti-armor). Damage reduction occurs first (before any armor).

Repairing armor can be simply done by paying 20 pence in any city per AV being repaired, back to the armor’s normal maximum. A character with Craft as a skill can do so at half cost.

Cover

The environment can provide protection called cover. It can be destroyed, just like armor, whenever it is dealt damage greater than or equal to its AP. Unlike armor, when Cover is pierced it is immediately destroyed. Cover typically only protects against ranged attacks, but in some situations may help block a melee attack. If you shoot while in cover, you are considered out of cover until your next turn.

Ranged attacks pierce in the order of Cover > Shields > Armor > Character.

EXAMPLE	AP
Shields, wooden furniture, a hostage, etc.	5
Trees, thin walls, particularly sturdy furniture, etc.	10
Brick walls, metal barriers, etc.	DR 5

Death Table

d10	Result
1-2	They're dead.
3-4	They’re comatose. Extreme intervention will be necesary to restore them to consciousness.
5-9	They are, or were, unconscious and dying. They will already be dead if they were not tended to within 1d4+1 rounds from the time they were incapacitated.	10	They’re unconscious and will wake up in 1d10 rounds. Their maximum health is permanently reduced by 1d4.