Tracks

A track is a series of circles and boxes that are ‘marked’ or ‘burned’ to measure progress towards a noteworthy event, and ‘cleared’ to note progress away from that event. When the last box of a track is marked, the event happens.

Some tracks may be openly shared with the players, such as to represent how much time remains until daylight, or how badly injured a creature looks. Some might be hidden, whereby the players know the track exists, but not how many marks it has on it or needs to complete. Lastly, some tracks might be completely secret, allowing the GM to mark progress towards something without the players knowledge

Types of Tracks

• Projects
  • Project tracks manage progress towards a specific goal
    • Attempting to create a complex mechanism
    • Attempting to gain the support of several different factions.
• Timers
  • Countdowns towards a specific event, often marked after a certain amount of time passes, but also possibly marked after certain events have happened.
    • Countdown till dawn breaks
    • Countdown on the number of artifacts a cult needs to acquire to start their ritual
• Decision Points
  • Characters are always persuading each other towards and away from specific actions, intentionally or not. Decision Point tracks let a GM track how many things must happen before a character makes a specific decision, such as to:
    • Agree to join a crew
    • Run away from a fight
    • Lower the cost of a service
    • Investigate the racket behind behind the door
• Damage Tracks
  • Damage tracks represent how much harm something can take before it is no longer functional. A powerful monster may have various abilities, each with its own track. Fully marking one of those tracks may disable that ability, while fully marking all of the various tracks normally denotes the monster’s death.
  • Player Tracks
    Players should note the tracks beside each of their merits. These represent  a form of health that can be damaged as their characters face various adversities in-play.
    Merits with no empty boxes beside them are unavailable to the character until the marks are recovered. Perhaps a piece of gear is too damaged to work, a character’s too injured to perform specific tasks or abilities, or too frazzled to remember some of their trained skills. A character with all of their tracks marked is no longer functional, and possibly dead.
• Split Tracks
  • Any of the above tracks can be split into smaller components, representing variable outcomes. For example, a project track to build up a town’s defense may have 3 sections, with the completion of each section indicating a stronger defense. However, a separate timer track used to represent an attack on the town may finish before the defense track fully completes. In that case, the completed subsections indicate how much defense was completed in time. A non-zero-sum game.

Marking Tracks

A Mark on a track represents progress towards an event or an expenditure of a resource for that track. To mark a track, simply put a single slash through the box. Ultimately, there’s a large number of reasons a track can be marked:

• To denote harm taken to a character
• To denote the expenditure of a limited resource
• The completion of another track
• The passage of time
• The use of a resource
• Another event or advanced plotline.

Many merits have special abilities which require the player to mark the merit’s track to use. The phase “Mark to <blank>” means “mark this merit to do this effect.”

Some actions may mark multiple tracks, depending on the situation and the action’s effect level (below)

• Explosions and sweeping attacks may harm multiple enemies
• Badly injuring one creature may also mark a health track and another that represents when the creature’s allies will attempt a retreat.
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Burning Tracks

Sometimes an ability or event will cause a character to burn a track instead of simply marking it. To burn a track, put an X through a box. Burned tracks represent a form of severe harm which take a considerable effort to recover, and always requires coordination with a Game Master to do so. Most often, the pursuit to recover a burned track is its own form of quest, whereby the GMs have a separate track noted for its recovery.

Clearing Tracks

Tracks are not one directional; sometimes progress can be lost, a damaged piece of gear can be repaired, an injury healed, and some time waiting can reduce a guard’s suspicion. Some abilities can heal physical or mental injuries, and restorative actions can spend esoterics to recover boxes marked on abilities or to diminish injuries.

Creating Tracks

As briefly mentioned earlier, game masters may want to create a track for a variety of reasons. They will often want to alter how large to make the track and how they want to present that track to the players

• Open
  The player knows what the track represents and how many marks they need to succeed or avoid before the track completes.
  
  • An open damage track helps players understand how injured a creature looks. An open milestone track may indicate an understanding of progress towards a goal.
• Hidden
  A player knows that the track exists and what it is for, but not how many marks are needed to complete it.
  
  • A hidden decision track may represent at what point an NPC becomes willing to aid the players; something they are pursuing but are unsure of how difficult to sway the character is.
• Secret
  A player might not know that the track exists and doesn’t know what it is for or how long it is.
  • A secret timer track might be used to track how much noise a group makes before they are noticed by others.

When creating tracks, adjust their size per your experience with the players and the below guidelines. Rather than focusing on the size of a single track, consider the number of boxes across the boxes in an encounter, of how many boxes are needed to resolve that encounter. These boxes, set by the Limits below, can be split across multiple aspects into smaller tracks, such as to represent different creatures or aspects of a single creature. Note, creatures that are evasive and difficult to handle may last longer despite having shorter tracks if the players do not find a way around those challenges.

• 2-3 box Limit
  You want the event to occur quickly with minimal difficulty. It may be resolved with one or 2 actions of a single player.
• 4-7 box Limit
  A quick challenge which may be resolved within a single round of player actions given good luck and solid strategy.
• 7-12 box Limit
  A challenging puzzle or hazard that takes some additional effort and coordination to take down. As a challenge it can not only bear the brunt of a few attempts to remove it, but also have the time to cause serious trouble for the player characters.
• 13-20 box Limit
  A serious challenge which changes its actions and behavior overtime as its boxes slowly get marked.