Hazards

Explosions

"Can we make an explosion explode?"

Sometimes things blow up, and in the movies things blow up even more. Even when we step outside the action genre, it is a recognized fact that objects in general in any media - including cooperative horror storytelling - are substantially more explosive than they are in real life. Explosions physically expand in roughly spherical paths (barring the use of shaped charges), and thus in a general sort of way an explosion can be expected to become weaker as per the square of the distance from the point of origin. Except of course it's actually much more complicated than that, because there's gravity and air resistance, and shrapnel pieces that fly a lot more like bullets, and so on. More massive shrapnel flies farther as it loses less power to air resistance, and compression waves pass through denser media better than air. And so on. Game mechanically this is abstracted out into an explosion's Damage (which is how much damage targets in the first area have to soak), and the same explosion's Radius (which is how far that area extends). An explosion does damage to targets that are outside its Radius, but substantially less. A target that is farther away from the explosion than the Radius takes 2 less damage if they are within the Radius of the Radius. And this continues until the Damage reaches zero. In effect, the explosion is modeled in the game as an onion where each band has a thickness of the Radius and does 2 less damage than the band before it. In a nod to the truly epic destruction caused by explosives that are actually adjacent to the target, an explosion will inflict 2 extra damage if the explosive is actually touching the target when it goes off.

An Explosion isn't normally affected by net hits on an attack roll, and inflict precisely the same damage if they are thrown perfectly as if they are detonated when simply dropped and forgotten. An exception to that is if an explosion is specifically placed to cause maximum damage. A character's Logic + Rigging check can increase the damage bonus for a point blank explosion. Explosions are affected strongly by cover, and their damage ratings are reduced by the coverage and its toughness. Explosions do not necessarily inflict fire damage, even though they do act by burning. Unless otherwise noted, the primary damage is flying shrapnel and concussive force. Explosives can be wrapped in silver, wood chips, or steel in order to make that shrapnel into something that is especially effective against certain supernatural creatures.

Throwing Things

As soon as the first ape threw their first rock, primates started being a threat to leopards instead of just the other way around.

Characters will probably end up throwing a lot of stuff in an After Sundown campaign. Explosives, buckets of water, and even just plain chairs. It is well known that you can start a fight pretty much anywhere by throwing a chair in a crowd. When you're throwing something, you get bonuses to your attack roll if the thing is big. It is simply easier to connect with a target if you are throwing a whole car than if you are throwing a sharpened playing card. In general, a Small object (like a bottle or a hungamunga) provides +1 die, a medium object (like a tomahawk or a bucket of water) provides 2 extra dice, a large object (like a chair or a person) provides 4 extra dice, and a huge object (like a car or an altar) provides 6 extra dice. A character can throw things that they can lift but not effectively wield in melee because of their Strength being exceeded, but not very far. Such objects are only accurate out to Adjacent range and have a maximum range of Near. Items that the character can wield can be thrown out to Short Range

Damage inflicted by thrown weapons is usually pretty disappointing. Unless it's designed as a throwing weapon (or randomly shaped like something that is such as a bowling ball), the base damage of such thrown items are only going to be 0 or 1, depending upon hardness, sharpness, and density. Any object that is thrown into someone that is too heavy for them to use will knock them down however. And if it's too heavy for them to lift, they may become trapped under it. So when a character throws a molotov cocktail at an opponent, the damage from throwing the bottle into them is usually pretty inconsequential. The whole "catching on fire" thing is pretty keen though.

Damage Over Time

Are you still on fire? You should stop that eventually.

When a character is soaked in acid, freezing to death, on fire, or otherwise subjected to a damaging situation that is ongoing, we call this DOT or Damage Over Time. While it could be modeled as a series of tiny attacks that had a remote chance of doing damage each second, that is far fiddlier than the people actually playing the game need to deal with. DOT damage is added one wound box at a time. A DOT effect has a "delay" number, and that number determines how much time passes between filling in one wound box and the next. When a DOT is introduced to a character, they may make a Resistance Test against it, and the hits on that test are added to the Delay Number rather than subtracting from the actual damage done. Being covered in acid for long enough is liable to be a problem for anyone. DOT's will continue filling in a wound box on schedule until they end. For external sources of damage, that generally means removing the noxious stimulus, while something like an injected poison usually has an amount of time it will persist based on how much was injected (this time could be cut shorter with things like antidotes or diuretics).

Other Hazards

Don't touch that. Or that either.

Falling

Characters will fall from time to time. And falling substantial distances actually can take quite an amount of time. However, in a 12 second combat round a character could fall over 600 meters - so for practical purposes it's usually best to simply have characters hit the ground after having just one Simple Action to try to do something about their situation. It is also true that "The bigger they are, the harder they fall." That's not just a trite saying that He Man gives before tripping giant robots, it's physical reality. Larger creatures have more mass proportional to their surface area and accelerate at the same speed, truly mice and ants can survive being dropped from any height and elephants can't even jump without breaking their bones on the way down. Game mechanically this truth is handled by preventing characters from using Strength or Armor to soak falling damage, and by having larger creatures take additional damage from falls. Characters can soak damage from falls by performing Agility + Athletics stunts with a threshold of 1 (net hits soak damage, but the first hit does not). Magical benefits for soaking damage do apply (as they make the character tougher relative to their mass rather than adding additional mass), so a character gains the benefits of Fortitude.

If the character falls onto a hard or sharp surface, increase damage by 1 or more. If the falling creature is large, increase the damage by 1 or more. If the falling creature is small, reduce the damage by 1 or more.

Electrocution

Electricity damage is something of a paradox. Electricity flows through the path of least resistance, and it inflicts damage based on the resistance of the path it flows through. Thus, you can defend yourself from electricity by covering yourself in high resistance insulation (because it will redirect electricity away from your body to another path) or by covering yourself with low resistance conductive mesh (because it will create a preferred path through the mesh and away from your organs). From the standpoint of the game, a character who is protected by especially conductive or non-conductive material is immune to electrical shocks. Electricity is inherently unpredictable, whenever someone is electrocuted, roll a die - if it comes up a hit, increase the Damage by 1. Net hits on attacks with electrical outputs are not added to the damage of an electric shock.

Poison

Poison has a progressive effect that affects the target more as time goes on. Functionally this means that poison is much slower than bullets or chainsaws. The way this is handled is as a DOT. However, not all poisons inflict actual damage, many come with special effects in addition to or instead of filling in wound boxes. Poisons normally only accumulate effects for a certain amount of time based on the original dose. When a victim is exposed to additional doses before the first has run its course, use the current timer for how long the poison will last and reduce the Delay by 1 if the timer is less than half over, or leave the Delay number alone and reset the termination timer if it has run more than half of its course. Characters with Patience of the Mountains or Tongue of the Serpent are immune to poisons. If a character is given anti-venom or some similar treatment, the character gains additional resistance dice to increase the Delay and/or the termination counter is reduced in length (depending on whether it works by clearing the chemical from the victim's system or neutralizing the effects). Note that the dosages are all the "normal" dosages, which for "recreational" poisons (like street drugs) are actually very small. Poisons my be more or less effective if administered by another route (injecting pepper spray would be all kinds of fatal). The assumption is that street drugs are being snorted unless otherwise indicated. The secondary effects of a poison kick in as soon as one damage box is filled in (or would be filled in for non damaging poisons), and end when the Timer runs out. Damage, whether Normal or Lethal, remains until healed.

* This Poison doesn't actually do any damage, the damage level is just there so that secondary effects occur. At the MC's option, overdoses may still be fatal if the virtual damage level rises to Terminal.

Poisons in Quotes are the magical poisons available with Tongue of the Serpent. The damage level may at the character's option be increased by the character's Potency.

When a Poison has a secondary effect, that effect generally lasts for 10 minutes to an hour.