Injury

If a player character gets injured, they lose one skill point and its related specialisation from a single skill tree until they can get repaired. The skill being taken away will be between a choice of two. In some cases, small sustained injuries or a few small injuries can result in an injury large enough to warrant permanent loss of a skill point. GMs will be cautious as to not take away particularly important skills to the player, and injury in this game is unlikely to come as a surprise.

Injuries to a Machine can be to either their Hardware or Software. Examples of Injuries to a Machine's Hardware might be broken gears, burned chips and leaking coolant. Examples of Injuries to a Machine's Software might be memory leaks, memory encryption and pop ups. These usually require different Skills and Items to fix: in particular Construction 2 is normally required to fix Hardware Injuries and Software Development 2 is normally required to fix Software Injuries.

Most Machines have no way of feeling pain, although the loss of functionality associated with Injury is usually distressing. Some Computer Viruses can cause pain or similar feeling of suffering even when a Machine was not designed to experience such sensations.

Injuries must be repaired turning downtime only, and are applied at the end of downtime.

Appropriately skilled characters with appropriate resources can repair 1 player per turn as an uptime or minor action, but can major action to repair more. When treated, the patient will have their skill restored to the level it was before injury. However, they cannot retake the specialisations lost through that injury or any previous injuries, and we encourage players to take specialisations that are as different as possible from the one they lost.

Characters with Construction 2 are capable of repairing physical damage, while Software Development 2 is capable of repairing software damage.

Alternatively, players can spend one major action to be transported by Valkyries to the Repair Centre - or, if the patient is too large for this to be achieved, they may instead be treated to a house call.¹⁾ This can happen in the case where no players have the appropriate repair skill, resources for repair or if the injured wishes to keep the repair a secret. However, during repair at the Repair Centre, players get little control over how they are repaired, the specialisation they gain from repair will be automatically assigned for them to reflect this.

Players are encouraged to find creative means of repair as due to the scarcity of parts, injured players are unlikely to find a replacement part that matches them perfectly and yet you must have some items or resources with which to repair yourself. These items do not need to amount to a Quirk's worth of Junk and can just be a couple parts or fluff items. However, the effectiveness of how they are used will determine how well they may function later. Players are encouraged to plan and devise creative and absurdist solutions to lost functions this way.

You will need to detail to the GMs how you wish to be repaired, what you will use and how that will contribute to the new specialisation you’re gaining from repair.

Alternatively, it is worth noting that players choosing to be repaired in the Repair Centre will receive a full write up that is more than just flavour text. After all, Valkyries and the bots within the Repair Centre are interactable NPCs.

These are pods of robots who fly above the entire island looking for broken bots. When they are summoned, they will airlift the broken bot who sent the distress signal to a repair plant located high above the city. It looks like an earthquake proof metal box standing on stilts of what used to be an entire building. Robots often go in broken, and often come out fixed, you think. Little is known about how this occurs. Within the repair centre are specialised DocBots that perform repairs.

All robots have a distress signal that is sent at a specialised frequency, calling upon Valkyries. Players have full autonomy to send this distress signal and this signal can theoretically be sent at any time during up or downtime. However if you are not injured, you will not be taken to the repair centre by Valkyries.

Valkyries resemble black orbs that float around with little propellers on their tops - appearing cute yet sleuthy. A small ring of light illuminates them from below. They are one example of robots who do not appear to have sentience. They respond with preloaded human voices, cannot pick up anything that is not a robot sending a distress signal, and do not seem capable of commuting between any location that does not include the repair centre. However, there may be one or two that have been seen having a conversation, splicing their prerecorded voice lines together to form unique sentences…

The following details what skills and actions players need to put into repair. In all cases, resources refer to various specialist parts or fluff items players would like to incorporate into the repair. They are required in order to the repair to look and function exactly how the player has turnsheeted. You cannot repair yourself

• Valkyries repair you: Spend a Major Action. Send a distress signal. You do not need skills or resources, but cannot choose your new specialisation, what the repair looks like or how it functions. However, you do get to see the inside of the repair centre and the DocBots who reside within it.

• Player repairs you: Both players Minor Action this. The repairing robot can only repair one robot this way per turn. Tell us what skills and resources you have between the two of you. The patient and repair bot agree on what the repair will look like. However, if they do not agree then the repair may not work as planned and its design will default to the repair bot's turnsheet. In all cases, the patient will get to pick the new specialisation.