You have three pools that track pressure on your character:
- Body Pool — physical pressure: combat damage, exhaustion, injury, exposure
- Mind Pool — psychological pressure: fear, fatigue, social strain, intellectual overreach
- Spirit Pool — multiversal pressure: cosmic strangeness, Path-walking strain, supernatural attunement
Each pool's size depends on your Base Tier in the corresponding domain:
| Base Tier | Pool Size |
|---|---|
| Impaired | 1 |
| Untrained | 2 |
| Trained | 4 |
| Proficient | 6 |
| Expert | 8 |
Pools start empty. Stress fills them up. Stress comes from:
- External pressure — getting hit in combat, taking psychological damage, being exposed to cosmic strangeness
- Voluntary push (see Pushing Yourself) — every time you push yourself, you add Stress
What Stress Does
As Stress accumulates in a pool, your Effective Tier in that domain degrades:
| Stress in Pool | Effect |
|---|---|
| 0–2 | No effect (mild strain — narrative flavor only) |
| 3–4 | Effective Tier in that domain shifts down by 1 |
| 5+ | Effective Tier in that domain shifts down by 2 |
| Pool full | Broken in that domain |
Note: the same hit feels the same on every character. 3 Stress always means −1 tier — you don't have to do percentage math.
Broken
When a pool fills completely, you are Broken in that domain. You're now Impaired in that domain (5d6, keep lowest 2). You can still act — you're not unconscious — but most rolls in that domain will fail or catastrophically fail. You narrate how Broken looks for your character: a Broken-Body character might be on their knees, dragging themselves through the fight; a Broken-Mind character might be checked-out or babbling; a Broken-Spirit character might be deaf to the multiverse, suddenly alone.
If you take more Stress while already Broken, a Consequence triggers — the character is operating beyond their body's, mind's, or spirit's limits, and something gives. The GM picks or rolls from a consequence table for the relevant pool. Consequences are meaningful and lasting but not lethal by default. A character can only trigger one Consequence per pool per scene.