Healing and Heroic Surges

After taking damage, you can recover hit points through natural healing or through your own heroic resiliency. In any case, you can’t regain hit points past your maximum hit point total.

Natural Healing

With a night’s rest (six hours of sleep or more), you recover all hit points and regain all heroic surges.

Heroic Surge

Heroic surges represent your resiliency, toughness, and willpower. Since hit point damage has no effect on characters until they reach 0, most effects that damage characters cause no more than superficial bleeding, minor scrapes, and bruises.

While these injuries can prove life threatening if many of them are sustained in a short period, characters can rally their strength quickly, given time to rest. Heroic surges represent your capacity to recharge your energy and shrug off the effects of minor injuries.

You have a number of heroic surges determined by your starting character class. Between encounters, you can take a brief rest of five minutes to recover and refresh yourself. During these minutes, you catch your breath, the pain from a twisted ankle fades, or a cut stops bleeding and slowly starts to heal.

When you spend a heroic surge, your character regains a number of hp equal to one quarter (1/4) his maximum total hp.

Using Heroic Surges

Heroic surges can be used in a couple of ways.

• First, all PCs (and some NPCs) have a Second Wind ability. Certain actions by other characters can also activate a second wind (notably the Treat Injury skill).
  • Second Wind: Once per encounter, a character can use a second wind. Normally, this is a standard action. Using a second wind allows the character to spend a heroic surge; additionally, the character gains a +2 bonus to all defenses.
• Second, a character may spend any number of heroic surges after a brief rest of five minutes or so.
• Third, INSERT TEXT

Regaining Heroic Surges

You only regain heroic surges from a night's rest or surgery (see the Treat Injury skill).

Constitution Changes

If your Constitution score goes up or down, your hit points and heroic surges, as well as your surge value, go up or down as appropriate.

GM Notes:

Heroic Surges In The Game

Heroic surges make it possible for characters to soak up a fair amount of damage in combat without worrying about healing. Surges are limited, however, so a character's maximum hit points are still very important. However, once a fight ends, injured characters can quickly restore themselves to maximum hit points.

Even with this healing, a series of tough encounters can prove deadly. As a character’s reserves are consumed, he loses the ability to boost his hit points between or during fights and will eventually succumb to his foes or take a rest from the action.

Players must pay careful attention to their heroic surges to avoid spending their strength before an important battle.

Who Has Heroic Surges?

Obviously the heroes have heroic surges. However, all characters have at least one heroic surge (though most can only use them after a brief rest or medical attention). Consult the following table to determine the appropriate number of heroic surges for a Non-Player Character.

As always, a GM is free to change these guidelines but this should be done very rarely.

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