Stats, Circle Ratings, Ranges, Intimacy, and more

Character Stats
These stats describe your character, but not in the way you might expect. Rather than focusing on how tough or fast your character is in absolute terms, your character's stats describe broad strengths and weaknesses.

• Blood is the measure of your character's toughness, instinct, and physical ability. It tells us how quickly your character acts in a dangerous situation and how well they can weather violence.
• Heart is the sum of your character's passion, charm, and charisma. It tells us how proficient your character is at getting what they want through negotiation and discussion.
• Mind is a reflection of your character's intellect, trickery, and perception. It tells us how observant your character is and how good they are at manipulating others through deceit.
• Spirit is the level of your character's magical aptitude, inner strength, and willpower. It tells us how focused and determined your character is under pressure, and how potent their supernatural powers might be.

Before you finalize your character stats, look over the basic moves and your character's playbook's moves so you're familiar with which stats are important to your character and their abilities. Each playbook has moves that rely on specific stats that make sense for their abilities and story, stats that you're likely to use more often during play.

Circle Ratings
A character with a high rating in a Circle has contacts and connections, easily navigating that Circle and its politics. A character with a low rating in a Circle doesn't understand how that Circle works or who the players are within that community.

• Mortalis: Humans who cross the boundary between the mundane and supernatural worlds to protect humanity… or steal power from monsters. Hunters, artifact dealers, and faith healers all belong to Mortalis.
• Night: People who have been irrevocably changed into creatures of darkness and monsters of the shadows, obsessed with territory, blood, sex, and money. Vampires, werewolves, and ghosts all belong to Night.
• Power: Individuals who have obtained supernatural power or gifts through training, blessing, or curse, now set on charting a course for the city's future. Wizards, oracles, and immortals all belong to Power.
• Wild: Strange beings who hail from outside our world, staking out a new home —or temporary respite— in this mortal realm. Faeries, demons, and other creatures bizarre and strange all belong to Wild.

During Character Creation
Each playbook comes with a set of predetermined Character Stats and Circle Ratings. Add +1 to one Stat and one Rating of you choice.

Number Ranges
Your character's Stats and Ratings can never fall below -3, and only in rare cases will one ever exceed +3. It's possible to get incidental, small bonuses (+1) to your rolls during play, but your main stats are the biggest influence on most of your dice rolls.

Dice Cap
You never roll with more than a +4 or less than a -3, no matter what bonuses or penalties you have.

Circle Status
While Circle ratings (page 42) indicate your character's familiarity with a Circle's politics, important figures, and traditions, Circle Status reflects your character's influence and reach within a particular Circle. Only relatively major players in the supernatural world warrant Circle Status: most of the minions and goons that serve the powers-that-be in the city have Status-0, and ordinary mortals don't have any Status at all (not even Status-0).

Intimacy
When you share a moment of intimacy —physical or emotional— with another person, you create a primal bond with them until time passes; you both always know where to find each other and when the other is in trouble.

Corruption
Corruption is an advancement system, albeit one that emphasizes personal power and self-driven motives. When you're told to mark corruption, check off a box in the corruption track; when you've checked off all five boxes, you unlock a corruption advance and clear your corruption track to start anew. Corruption advances, like standard advances, offer your character new abilities, but they usually come at a high price: more corruption.

Corruption is more than just darkness or evil. It represents your character slipping toward the worst parts of their nature, becoming that which should be feared instead of respected, hated instead of loved. Yet, as your corruption mounts, your powers only grow…

Tracking Harm
When your character suffers injury or trauma, you take harm. If you take too much harm, you die.

The harm track consists of five boxes moving through three tiers: one Faint, two Serious, and two Critical. When your character suffers harm, check off a number of boxes on your harm track equal to the harm suffered. A weapon like a gun usually does 2-harm, so getting shot usually requires you to check off roughly two boxes.

You always begin by marking harm in the faint tier and moving down the track into serious and then critical. When you mark a box of harm in a new tier, write a short description of the injury on your sheet in the space beside the boxes to remind yourself what harm your character has suffered (and how best it might be treated later). If you ever need to mark harm and can't —because all your other boxes are full— you die. Death usually triggers your end move (page 50)!

Sidebar: Examples of Harm
1-harm is rough but blunt trauma: fists and baseball bats, punches thrown at a rock concert, the kind of thing people sleep off after a bad night.

2-harm is painful and obvious: a gunshot wound, a bad car wreck, wounds impossible to hide without bandages and slings.

3-harm is worse than all that: a bullet at point-blank range, a sword cleaving tendon and bone, a beating that leaves you unrecognizable for a week.

4-harm means instant death to a mortal human: a grenade blast at close range, losing a limb or internal organ, falling off the top of a ten-story building.

Healing Harm
The different levels of harm reflect how badly your character is hurt, moving from minor injuries to wounds that require immediate medical attention:
• Faint harm is minor —getting stabbed in a non-vital area or getting into a fist fight that doesn't last too long. Most characters can shrug off faint wounds by getting some rest.
• Serious harm is dangerous stuff —getting shot in the shoulder or hit by a car. If you suffer serious harm, you need medical attention to keep things from getting worse, but you'll be (more or less) back on your feet in a few days.
• Critical harm means you're on the verge of dying, like getting shot in the stomach or beat in the head with a metal bat. If you don't get to a hospital —or find some magic to patch you up real quick— you're going to die.

Once you've gotten medical attention or magical assistance, healing happens slowly while you rest, removing one faint or serious harm every few days and one critical harm every week. Your MC tells you when you heal harm; mortals can't walk off a bullet wound in a day or two, but some supernatural creatures recover faster. Rest is key; too much activity negates any healing.

When you erase harm, begin with the harm in the critical tier and move up the track, removing the critical conditions before the serious and faint conditions —your worst injuries heal first while the less severe ones don't start healing until your body is stable. Of course, this means that any new harm you take can be lethal while you wait for the critical injuries to heal; your body is fragile when healing from such grievous wounds!

Armor
Characters wearing armor (a Kevlar vest, stab-vest, chainmail shirt, etc.) receive a layer of protection from most physical attacks. If they suffer harm from which their armor would protect them, they reduce the harm suffered by the rating of the armor.

Most armor is rated at 1-armor or 2-armor. Typically, 1-armor is lighter and less conspicuous —bulletproof vests, heavy leather jackets, etc. —whereas 2-armor is obvious to all— riot gear, plate mail, etc. —and bound to attract attention; anyone who sees someone walking around the city with riot gear armor is probably calling the cops.

Scars
When you suffer harm, you may always ignore that harm by marking a Scar. Scars represent your character pushing through the immediate situation at some permanent cost, ignoring harm suffered by immediately reducing one of your main stats. In other words, you get to decide when your character dies from massive trauma by choosing (or not choosing) to negate lethal injuries before they happen at a steep price.

Your character has four scars available to mark:
• Shattered (-1 Blood) means frightened, weakened, and overly cautious. Shattered characters hesitate when they should act.
• Crushed (-1 Heart) means traumatized, timid, and uncertain. Crushed characters bear the full weight of the wounds they've suffered.
• Fractured (-1 Mind) means confused, adrift, and disjointed. Fractured characters are unstable and unsure or unfocused and imprecise.
• Broken (-1 Spirit) means hopeless, forlorn, and cowardly. Broken characters have little capacity to push through obstacles and dangers.

Marking a scar does more than just soak the harm you almost took; it seizes the momentum for your character and puts you in a position to say what happens next. You may not emerge triumphant in the conflict at hand, but marking a scar is a notable moment in your character's story —you've weathered something impossible at the cost of something precious.

Some playbooks can heal scars through advancement, restoring the stat and erasing the scar, but many playbooks must live with the scars they've marked in play —the battles they've fought stay with them until they retire to safety, change playbooks, or meet their end. That said, healed scars may be marked a second time. Once you've reclaimed your fractured psyche, for example, you can fracture it all over again to survive new horrors.

Advancement
Marking Circles
To advance, you have to mark all four Circles. You don't need to mark the Circles in any particular order, but you can't mark a Circle again until you've marked all of them once; if you hit the streets with Mortalis while you've already marked Mortalis, you can't mark it again.

Here are all the ways in which you can mark a Circle:
• Make a Circle Move
 • Put a Face to a Name
 • Hit the Streets
 • Study a Place of Power
• Trigger an Intimacy Move
• Cash In a Debt
• Honor a Debt
• Make a Move that tells you to mark a Circle

When you make a Circle move, mark the Circle you rolled with while making the move. The outcome of your roll is irrelevant —you mark the Circle as you make the move, even if you roll a miss.

Similarly, when you get Intimate with someone or Cash In or Honor a Debt, you mark the Circle of the character with whom you're engaged; they mark your Circle as well.

Once you've marked all the Circles once, erase all your Circle marks and take your advancement. You're free to mark Circles again as soon as you advance.

Sidebar: Refusing Debts and Marking Circles
Successfully Refusing to Honor a Debt means you don't mark a Circle for that Debt. You have to actually be true to your word to mark a Circle for honoring your obligations. On the other hand, a PC Cashing in the Debt gets to mark a Circle even if their debtor refuses. After all, the person who asked for the Debt to be honored isn't the one flouting the social contract!

Sidebar: Descriptive Advancement
Remember that taking a given advance isn't the only way to make changes to your character; you might gain new moves, alter your stats, or even change playbooks as a result of what happens in the fiction. Advancement works prescriptively —you choose the advance and the fiction follows— but the events of the fiction can drive changes to your playbook as well. Work with your MC if you think something that happened during the story needs to be better reflected on your playbook!