Healing and Death

Good as new
...or not...

When characters are injured, there are two possibilities: they can either get better or not. Medically speaking, injured tissue can resolve into healed or regenerated tissue, it can resolve into a scar, or it can die. This is actually much farther in-depth than we care to go into. When a character is given time to heal, they reduce the number of boxes that are filled in with a type of damage by 2. However, if there is at least one box remaining with that kind of damage it is worsened to the next type (this doesn't happen for Aggravated Wounds, which are already the worst type). So for example, if a character has 3 boxes with Normal Wounds, after 20 minutes of healing, it would be one box with a Normal and Lethal slash in it. If a character is running around being the Action Man, they don't heal at all. Healing doesn't really happen until the character takes some time off from ninja flips and car chases. The exception is characters who have suffered incapacitating or terminal injuries, who start the cycle of healing and possible death right away.

Sample Healing

Starting: [/][/][/][/][/][/][/][/][ ][ ]

20 minutes later: [X][/][/][/][/][/][ ][ ][ ][ ]

40 minutes later: [X][X][/][/][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

60 minutes later: [X][X][][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

80 minutes later: [\][\][\][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

1 day later: [\][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

2 days later: [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

4 days later: [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

Incapacitating and Terminal Wounds

If a character's entire track is filled, the character's healing timeframe is increased by one category until they have at least one box that has no wounds in it. This means that a character whose track fills up with Normal Wounds, that they will be unconscious for an hour unless someone delivers first aid in the meantime.

If a character has a Terminal Wound, they are dead in 5 minutes unless they spend an Edge or they get 3 hits on a Healing Test, or someone successfully applies first aid. At 1 or 2 hits on a healing or first aid test, the timeframe of death from a Terminal Wound is increased (to 20 minutes, or 1 hour respectively), which may allow a character to get to a place where a better shot at a final Healing Test can be made (or medical personnel to get to them, giving their skill to the final Healing Test). Even though a character with a Terminal Wound is going to be dead before a sufficient timeframe would pass to provide a healing test, a character is always allowed one Healing Test just before they die.

A character who is incapacitated or terminally wounded can also have their death hastened with further injury. When the character's wound boxes are filled with Lethal damage, additional injuries accumulate towards a threshold of outright killing the target. An injury that would itself be incapacitating or terminal accumulates two towards this death threshold, and an injury that would be Serious or less accumulates only one. A character's Death Threshold is generally equal to their Willpower (characters with Lure of Destruction have a higher Death Threshold). And yes, this means that once someone is already on death's door, it takes quite a few extra bullets to push them through it - it's not like they are going to go into shock at that point.

The Healing Test

When a character is healing, they are entitled to a healing test to prevent lethal or aggravated damage from accumulating. The healing test is Edge + Survival, and is modified by the conditions the character is in while they are healing. If the character gets a hit, the round of healing goes by without generating any extra wounds. If another character is on hand to provide medical care, that character's Logic + Medicine test works together with the injured character's Edge + Survival test as a Teamwork test. Which counts as the main and which counts as the assistant depends on who has the bigger dice pool.

The healing test is especially important for characters who suffer Incapacitating Lethal or Aggravated injuries, because the first time normal wounds heal and generate a Lethal slash when the track is already full will push them into a terminal wound. Note that this really means that if an Extra takes an Incapacitating Wound from a knife or a bullet that they will always go Terminal in an hour unless medical personnel come and save them (they will also be able to crawl around at that point, perhaps able to give some dramatic piece of information before they die).

First Aid

When a character is trained in first aid, they can reduce the amount of damage on someone substantially. This is pretty much a one-time deal and has to be performed within the "golden hour" of the injury (and hour from when the patient was injured, not an hour from first medical contact). First aid is a Logic + Medicine test. Removing 2 Normal slashes is threshold 1, also removing 2 Lethal slashes is threshold 2, and further removing 2 Aggravated lines is threshold 3. Additional hits remove an additional 1 slash of each type. So a five hit First Aid test would remove 4 Normal, Lethal, and Aggravated lines from the victim's wound box.

If the victim has a Terminal Wound, it is instead Threshold 3 to stabilize them and reduce them to a normal Incapacitated state. Additional hits remove wounds from boxes as normal. But perhaps the biggest advantage of First Aid is the time it takes to make the first healing test during medical treatment - which is one time frame shorter than normal for the left-most injury type in the wound track (1 minute to rouse someone from Normal Damage, 5 minutes to treat Lethal Damage, etc.).

Being Dead

"Okay, now we go through the pockets looking for loose change."

Characters in horror die from time to time. Sometimes a character will end up dying several times, because After Sundown posits ghastly life after death and even has magical ways to restore life. When a character dies, all of their powers that cost Power Points to activate or which otherwise last for a scene end. In addition, anything they have going that could be dispelled is dispelled with their death. A character's Power Pool is also emptied at the moment the character actually dies. Very importantly, a character's power schedule (if any) does not change just because they are dead. A Strigoi can still be fed blood to regain Power Points and a Frankenstein can still be recharged while a corpse. This usually only matters if they have the Restoration Power, but there are other ways to raise the dead, and it might be important that they rise up with a power reserve on hand.

The dead may also come back as Ghosts, whether they are Luminaries or Extras. In After Sundown, no one becomes a Ghost until they've been dead for three settings of the sun. There are movies in which the spirit is left standing there as the body hits the floor, and there are movies in which the spirit wakes up having been dead and buried for a couple days. After Sundown's assumed setting is the latter.

Sometimes a player may want to continue their character as a Wraith rather than start a new character or have their character restored to life. This is a workable storyline, but it is fraught with peril because Wraiths are not normally considered playable (being constantly insubstantial while outside the Gloom). If the players agree, the character can be converted into a Wraith, with their powers traded out for the basic Wraith abilities, starting what is in essence a new Origin Story. Being a Wraith should not be a license to print superpowers, so the new powers that Wraiths get should replace some of the abilities they already had rather than piling on.