dungeonpunk: mortal wounds

Read it online or download the PDF below.

This is a hack for dungeonpunk by Ash McAllen, Sidney Icarus, and Melody Watson, a fiction-telling game about exploring a fantasy world and going on adventures.

Normally in dungeonpunk, damage is represented by Hit Points (HP). As you take damage, you lose HP, and when you have 0 HP or less remaining, you fall unconscious or die. This hack replaces that concept with Wounds and leans on the existing concept of Stress, an abstraction for physical and mental exhaustion.

Instead of HP, a creature has a maximum number of Wounds. When you take damage from sources that can be dodged, deflected, or otherwise avoided, you gain Stress, but when you are encumbered, you are too tired and weighed down to protect yourself and start taking Wounds instead.

In this way, Stress represents minor cuts and bruises as well as physical and mental exhaustion. They’re easy to heal, and after some rest, don’t interfere with your ability to fight, but if you’re too tired to protect yourself, you’re going to start taking real damage in the form of Wounds. Take too many of those and you’re likely to die.