Barony uses some bespoke morale rules, currently written up as follows:
PC Morale
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Separate from hireling and enemy morale, which should be rolled as normal.
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In the Dungeon, you gain 1 fear every time a hit does 3 or more HP damage. In the Underground, this goes up to d2. In Chaos, d3. If you are crit, these numbers are 2, d2+2, d3+3 instead. There are also specific monsters and attacks that will deal fear damage, as detailed in their stat blocks.
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If your fear damage ever equals your WIS, you must save WIS or CHAR, with a penalty equal to any fear damage over your WIS. If you fail, your morale breaks and you run, or drop your weapons, or scream, or cower. At minimum you lose your turn and then heal d6 fear.
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If this brings you back under your WIS you can act again as normal on your next turn. If it doesn’t, the same thing happens next turn, until your fear is brought below your WIS.
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If you decide to save WIS and you pass, you heal d6 fear damage without your morale breaking. You can consume a dose of sedatives to roll this save with advantage. In a fight you are swallowing it instead of smoking it - a free action, and unpleasant, but effective.
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If you decide to save CHAR and you pass, you don't heal the fear damage but you no longer need to check fear (and no longer take fear damage) for [CHAR-10] rounds. You can consume a dose of stimulants to roll this save with advantage. In a fight you are swallowing it instead of smoking it - a free action, and unpleasant, but effective.
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Resting for lunch heals d6 fear. Getting a good night's sleep heals 2d6.
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There are no systemic permanent insanities— that's what curses (and specific stuff on the monster’s stat block) are for.
I like PCs panicking and dithering, and I like the oppressive dread of the dungeon growing into a kind of madness. In my mind, PC adventurers are rough people, hardened and tempered, difficult to shake. But the wrongness at the centre of the earth gets to everyone. On the surface you are in command of your faculties, but the further in you go the more your mind starts to crack under the strain.
The rules above refer to The Dungeon, The Underworld, and Chaos, as three separate layers with increasingly serious effects on PC morale. Hirelings and most normal people would flatly refuse to enter the Underworld, let alone Chaos. This nice, formal breakdown comes from the three separate layers of the dungeon I'm slowly writing up for the Barony release, Magda's Needle (scroll to the end of this post). I realised this morning that the system can easily be made more generalist and broadly useable.
Instead of three apparently diegetic layers of horror, each dungeon layer has a an abstract depth associated with it. I would probably keep these between 1 (for most dungeons close to the surface) and 5 (for the churning chaos at the centre/hell/the nightmare plane/the endless oubliette/whatever your worst place is). This is an abstract measure of wrongness and terror, not an actual measuring of the physical depth from the surface, although the two very often go hand in hand.
I feel like I've buried the lead a little here. Fear damage is simply 1d[depth] for a hit over 2, and 1d[depth]+[depth] for a crit.
An adventurer will always feel it when they have descended down a depth level. It's something like your skin crawling, a premonition of physical vulnerability, and bad depression hitting you at the same time, and it gets really bad the further you push in. They all have names for it, and will usually joke about it together in an attempt to dispel its power. Seasoned adventurers know well the value of song, humour, trust, and kindness in the dark places of the earth.
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As Above So Below (actually a pretty good film for the first two thirds) |
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