Locked doors are impassable without a key, picking the lock (which requires a Tinker skill roll and Specialist Tools), or breaking the door down. Breaking the door down requires the appropriate equipment (some sort of axe for a wooden door, a pick for stone, etc.) and takes 1 turn for wooden doors, 2 or more turns for doors made of other materials.
Many doors in dungeons and ruins are merely stuck. To open a standard stuck door (wood with iron banding), a character must successfully make an Open Doors roll (base 1 in a 6 chance), Strength modifiers apply to the roll’s chances, so having a Strength modifier of +1 means there is a 2 in 6 chance of opening the door. Use of a crowbar adds a further 1 to the chance, and each additional person helping adds another (although only two people can attempt to open a standard-sized door). Each attempt takes 1 turn.
Doors made of stronger or heavier materials may need a greater number to open (a giant stone door may have a –2 in 6 chance to be opened, requiring bonuses before there is even a chance to open it, for example), or be impossible to open.
A single man can excavate 3 cubic feet of earth per hour if he has proper equipment (Strength modifiers apply to the number of cubic feet). He can dig at half of this rate if he has improvised tools, and one quarter of this rate if he has no tools at all.
Characters may be able to find food and water during their journeys overland. To find food in the wilderness, the character must roll against his Bushcraft skill, with terrain modifying the skill as follows:
| Terrrain | Chance of Finding Food |
| Plains | +1 in 6 |
| Mountain | normal |
| Forest | +2 in 6 |
| Desert | -1 in 6 |
| Jungle | +2 in 6 |
| Swamp | normal |
Hunting takes time, and the distance traveled during a day where successful hunting occurs is lessened by 1d4 × 25%. Unsuccessful hunting takes all day. Success means that 1d4 days’ worth of meals for a single person has been acquired for the party.
1d10 units of ammunition are expended in the attempt. If a character does not have a proper missile weapon, the chance to find food is lowered by 1. If a character has no missile weapon at all, reduce the chance by one more. If it is winter, reduce the chances by another point unless in the desert, where this does not matter.
All food gained from foraging and hunting is considered to be the equivalent of “standard rations.”
Finding enough water to drink is easy in most environments, but in the desert water can only be found if a Bushcraft roll is successfully made on 1d12 rather than 1d6.
Characters can confidently follow trails, roads, and other well-known landmarks without fear of becoming lost. However, when traveling across the wilderness it is easy to lose direction. At the start of each day of travel, the Referee will roll 1d6, and on a 1 the party may go off course. The Referee should then make a secret roll against the highest Bushcraft skill among the characters in the traveling party. If this roll fails, the group is lost.
If the roll indicates that the party is lost, it likely will not realize it immediately. The party will continue on in its travels, its members not understanding that they are off course for days. The Referee will decide which direction the group is traveling, and how far off it is from its intended direction. One option is to pick a direction only slightly off course. For example, if the group intended to go south, it is actually headed southwest or southeast.
Dungeons and ruins frequently contain traps, including spear-throwers, covered pits, etc. The Referee will decide what is required to trigger a trap, and what happens when the trap is triggered. In general, there must be some way to avoid or reduce the effect of the trap being sprung. For instance, a save versus Paralyzation is often used to avoid falling into a covered pit, while spearthrowers, automated crossbows, and the like are sometimes treated as if they were monsters (attacking the victim’s Armor Class at a given Attack Bonus).
Any character can use the Search skill (base 1 in 6 chance) to determine if an area or object has any secret mechanism or function, including traps. A successful use of this skill does not tell what the function is (it may very well be something that the character should want to trigger!), but will let the character know that it is there and how it is triggered. The search takes one turn per 10' square searched.
Trap detection may not be allowed if the trap is purely magical in nature; on the other hand, in such cases Magic-Users, Elves, and/or Clerics may be able to detect magical traps at the given 1 in 6 chance, at the Referee’s discretion.
Damaged characters who have at least half of their Hit Points remaining recover 1 hp after a peaceful night’s rest. Taking a watch shift does not prevent this recovery unless something happens during the shift. Damaged characters who have at least half of their Hit Points remaining can also recover an additional 1d3 hp by resting a full day. To count as a full day of “rest,” a character cannot engage in any strenuous activity, including, but not limited to traveling, fighting, researching, running, searching, hunting, or foraging, and the character must have adequate food and water. Basically, the character can do no more than converse and walk around his immediate area.
Characters who have less than half of their Hit Points remaining are in worse shape. They recover nothing from a night’s rest, and recover only 1 hp by resting a full day.
A character at zero or fewer Hit Points will wake up after 1d6 hours. The character will not be able to carry any equipment or stand up, but can communicate and crawl at a movement rate of 10'.
If the character rests the entire day in a comfortable bed in a clean room, then an additional 1 hp is recovered.
Characters who have suffered temporary ability score loss recover at a rate of one point (for all affected ability scores) per day of rest. All affected ability scores regain an additional point at the end of a full week of rest.
Characters can make no recovery if resting in a dungeon or similarly hostile environment.
Healing restores Hit Points and ability scores only to their normal maximum, never more.
Underground, or other places with no light, require characters to carry light sources in order to see. Torches and lanterns emit light in a 30' radius. Candles emit light in a 10' radius. Lanterns use flasks of oil as fuel; a lantern can burn continuously on 1 flask of oil for 24 turns. Torches burn continuously for 6 turns before burning out. Candles will burn for 12 turns. Characters that carry a light source are unable to surprise opponents, because the light gives them away ahead of time.
The Referee’s judgment will determine how far characters can see in other situations.
Mapping a structure or underground complex requires one character in the party to have paper and ink and two free hands. The Referee is only obligated to give verbal descriptions of the area, and if asked by a player how his map compares to the real map, the Referee is only obligated to point out very obvious errors.
If the player characters are moving at “exploration” speed, then the Referee should give exact dimensions of hallways and areas—taking such measurements is one reason why the party’s progress is so slow.
Extremely irregular areas, such as natural caves, can best be left to rough descriptions, since accurate mapping without a full survey team is simply impossible.
Outdoor mapping is not as exacting a process. If using the hex map system of overland travel, the Referee simply informs the players what sort of terrain their that characters are moving into and the surrounding terrains as well (unless other terrain obstructs their vision).
It is assumed that every character knows how to swim. Characters move at half their normal movement when swimming. Characters that are encumbered have a likelihood of drowning, though this is at the Referee’s discretion. Heavily encumbered characters, wearing plate mail armor and/or carrying a large proportion of treasure, probably have a chance of 90% or more of drowning. Characters carrying less treasure or wearing lighter armor may have as little as a 10% chance of drowning.
Within the game, time passes as is convenient for play. If the characters are simply waiting for whatever reason, then the Referee can say, “Two days pass,” or whatever is needed. If nothing of importance happens, then players merely mark off their characters’ food supplies or upkeep costs as appropriate, and handle any other business that occurs during that time.
There are periods when keeping a strict record of time is important. Most measures of time are self-explanatory in the rules, as they match our real measurements of time. However, there are three units of time that have special meaning in the game.
The “Turn” is ten minutes long. This is often used as a measure of time for spell durations and underground exploring.
The “Round” is six seconds long. This is primarily used for time management during combat and for the duration of combat-oriented spells.
The “Segment” is one second long. During each round of combat, characters will act in different orders. The exact moment when a character’s action occurs is called the “Segment.”
Loss of ability scores only affects the character so much as their modifiers and bonuses will change. A character dropping from Strength 13 to Strength 12 will no longer have any Strength modifier, for example. This is most striking with Constitution, as any change in Constitution modifier is applied immediately to both current and maximum Hit Points. A character who falls to zero in any ability score dies.
Characters who grow old will lose their faculties and eventually die. The chart below gives the starting age that characters must make a saving throw versus Paralyzation, at what ages there are penalties to the modifier, and how often the saving throw must be made. A failed saving throw means that one randomly determined ability score will permanently decrease by one point.
If a character is aged by magical means, then all saving throws that would have needed to be made if the aging occurred naturally must be made immediately, with any ability score penalties also being applied immediately.
| No Mod | -2 | -4 | Interval | |
| Dwarf | 200 | 250 | 300 | 5 |
| Elf | Elves | do | not | age |
| Halfling | 70 | 80 | 100 | 1 |
| Human | 40 | 50 | 60 | 1 |
When a character (or creature) suffers damage, the amount of damage is deducted from the character’s current Hit Points. When his Hit Points reach 0, the character becomes unable to take any action, and in most cases falls completely unconscious. The character becomes mortally wounded at –3 Hit Points and will die in 1d10 minutes. No healing, magical or otherwise, can prevent death at this point. Death is instantaneous at –4 Hit Points.
Characters exploring in godforsaken ruins, ancient tombs, and trackless wilderness can become exposed to all sorts of plagues and illnesses. Natural, chronic illnesses will not normally be a part of the game as far as player characters are concerned. That said, the Referee is free to introduce an NPC stricken by cancer or some other illness.
Diseases are individual in nature, but all have the following characteristics: incubation period, infection time, interval, and effect.
When exposed to a disease, the Referee will make a save versus Poison on behalf of the character. If the save is failed, then the character has contracted the disease. The incubation period describes the length of time before the character is affected, and at that point the character must make another save, and then another save at every interval point for the duration of the infection time, or else suffer the effect for each failed save. Each save after the disease is contracted is made with a –2 penalty if the character is not at rest for the duration of the infection.
For example, the Green River Fever has an incubation period of one week, an interval of four hours,an infection time of three days, and the effect of lowering Intelligence. So beginning one week after a character has been infected, that character must make a saving throw versus Poison every four hours for three days (a total of 18 saving throws), or lose a point of Intelligence for each failed save.
Drugs & Alcohol Drugs are treated much as poison would be, but the effects of a failed saving throw (no save if intentionally using drugs) are usually much less severe than death. The Referee will determine the effects of specific drugs in his campaign.
Alcohol is far more pernicious, as it is quite common for most everyone to use it to excess, as beer and wine are often safer to drink than plain water. Teetotalers will be extremely rare. Drunk characters are –2 to Dexterity and all saving throws.
Characters suffer 1d6 points of damage per 10' that they fall, up to a maximum of 20d6 for a 200' fall.
There are a variety of ways that a character can become poisoned. When exposed to poison, the character must make a saving throw against Poison or suffer the effects. Typical effects of a poison are instant death, falling into a deep slumber, the loss of Hit Points, or perhaps the reduction in one or more ability scores. Only all-or-nothing effects are considered to be poison. Poisons that cause gradual or incremental effects are considered to be drugs for rules purposes.
A character must eat at least one full meal a day and drink water every day or suffer ill effects.
For every 24 hours that a character goes without food, the character must make a save versus Poison or one Constitution point is lost. For every 24 hours that a character goes without water, his Constitution drops by half unless he makes a save versus Poison. After three such failed saves against Poison due to a lack of water, the character will be dead. Constitution losses due to dehydration or starvation recover at twice the usual rate with rest and proper nourishment.
A character must sleep at least four hours per twenty- four hour period in order to function properly. If this is not the case, the character suffers a –1 penalty to all rolls (10% penalty for 1d00% rolls) until the situation is corrected. If the character continues on further without taking adequate sleep, there is a cumulative –1/10% penalty for each additional day that passes without proper rest being taken.