Weariness in RuneQuest

The RuneQuest core rules offer a pretty flexible “fatigue-lite” system based on encumbrance (ENC) for how much stuff an adventurer can carry. While writing a new RuneQuest adventure which occurs through most of a single night, I found I wanted an additional tool for describing an adventurer’s weariness. Artificially adding ENC based on how long an adventurer had been awake felt inelegant. Further, it also wouldn’t account for mental fatigue.

Thus, I muddled together the following tool.

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Sleep Deprivation

After being awake for 14 consecutive hours, an adventurer becomes weary and must make a successful CON roll each hour to avoid penalties when making ability or resistance rolls in stressful situations. These penalties need not apply during routine evening activities.

This CON roll begins at CON×5. Every 3 hours, the roll’s modifier is reduced by 1 to a minimum of CON×1. The sleep deprivation penalty is based on the number of failed CON rolls, as follows:

• First: –20% penalty
• Second: –30% penalty
• Third: –50% penalty
• Fourth: Adventurer falls asleep

Example: Vasana is keeping watch over the campsite. She has been awake for 16 hours, so the gamemaster rules she is experiencing fatigue. Vasana makes a CON×5 roll, and fails. Her Scan rolls will have a –20% penalty.

The next hour, Vasana must make a CON×4 roll. This also fails, so her penalty increases to –30%. Eyes drooping, Vasana decides to wake another adventurer.

Adrenaline surges the first time an adventurer loses hit points while sleep deprived. Their ability and resistance rolls are not penalized for the next 2 minutes.

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Jonstown Compendium Use

I grant royalty-free permission for anybody creating RuneQuest work for Chaosium’s “Jonstown Compendium” community content program to include the prior section (“Sleep Deprivation”) in their product. The text must by copied directly without edits to the language, and must be presented in a sidebar titled “Sleep Deprivation.” The user must include the text “Sleep Deprivation rules by Austin Conrad (akhelas.com), used with permission.” in the work’s credits.

This text may not be used for other D100-based games. If I create a variant based on BRUGE rather than RuneQuest, that variant will be available for use under the Open RPG Creative (ORC) license.

I’m not affiliated with Chaosium, I don’t own RuneQuest or Glorantha, and none of the prior text can be used in content not officially licensed by Chaosium.

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Interested in more rules options for RuneQuest? Check out Simon Phipp’s Book of Doom! It’s variety of gamemaster tools, spells, and subsystems offers lots of fun gameplay options. Phipp also provides a limited use license to Jonstown Compendium creators.

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Designer Commentary

I had two basic goals with this rule:

• Fairly easy to implement
• Feel similar to my experiences

Characteristic rolls are one of the BRP family’s more flexible tools. As a gamemaster, I find they’re easy to call for when it isn’t clear that a “skill” applies to a situation. The pattern of penalties is based on RuneQuest’s table for bonuses when rolling to augment one ability with another. This, I hope, helps the new spot rule intuitively feel integrated with the system. Together they ideally provide a familiar context to ease the rule’s use.

The advantage of a crunchy game like RuneQuest is that it’s relatively easy to integrate a new spot rule. I probably wouldn’t vary the tracking of hours in something like Dragonbane or Powered by the Apocalypse, but the “simulationist” leanings of Basic Roleplaying makes a little crunch feel appropriate to the ruleset.

The hours specified in the rule are based on my personal experiences. I worked overnight shifts for many years, and had a lot of experience dealing with sleep deprivation and insomnia. As most people have probably experienced, the standard “awake 16, sleep 8” cycle doesn’t mean you start getting sleepy at 16 hours. I went with 14 hours as the starting point to reflect when I start feeling a bit drowsy. I suspect this is doubly true for persons in agrarian societies, like Glorantha.

The 3-hour intervals are based on my experience that staying up 24 hours sucks, but is pretty achievable. I’m better at it than most people, because I have experience—effectively, I’d say I have a “Resist Weariness” skill. However, a spot rule definitely doesn’t need a new skill!

My goal is that, with the typical high characteristics of a RuneQuest adventurer, CON×5 or CON×4 rolls are fairly easy to achieve. Since the multiplier does not become more difficult the more times you fail, the rule is less likely to result in a downward spiral of more and more difficult rolls. After all, if you’re staying up late you don’t immediately become incompetent. Competence wanes over time. An adventurer is fairly likely to be able to stay up most of a night, but they won’t be terribly effective when dawn rises.

I found that, when I was frequently handling sleep deprivation, staying up about 30 hours was fairly doable (especially if I was rested the day before). This is reflected in the pattern with which the CON multipliers decrease. Even with my experience (and modern stimulants), pushing to 36 hours or beyond was very difficult.

These rules focus on consecutive hours of consciousness because my experience was that I could be fairly functional on 4 to 6 hours of sleep, if absolutely necessary. It wasn’t fun, but I was capable of acting appropriately in a fairly stressful job once I’d adapted.

(Don’t try this, by the way—it resulted in some pretty long-term deterioration of my overall health, even if I was able to handle it in the short term.)

The idea is that if the adventurers are keeping watch during the night, they aren’t really punished for trading shifts. This spot rule is best used when the adventurers are being active during the night.

That’s also why the penalty goes away when an adventurer takes damage. Adrenaline washes away fatigue temporarily—you pop alert and become ready to act. I chose 2 minutes for the duration because that’s the duration of a spirit magic spell. Reusing a common duration ought to help players be familiar with the rule. Another option I considered was a full turn (5 minutes), but that unit of time isn’t really that commonly used in the game. So I went with the more familiar unit instead.

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