More and more I began to see that desert warfare resembled war at sea. Men moved by compass. No position was static. There were few if any forts to be held. Each truck or tank was as individual as a destroyer, and each squadron of tanks or guns made great sweeps across the desert as a battle-squadron at sea will vanish over the horizon. One did not occupy the desert any more than one occupied the sea. One simply took up a position for a day or a week, and patrolled about it with Bren-gun carriers and light armoured vehicles. When you made contact with the enemy you maneuvered about him for a place to strike much as two fleets will steam into position for action. There were no trenches. There was no front line. We might patrol five hundred miles into Libya and call the country ours. The Italians might as easily have patrolled as far into the Egyptian desert without being seen. Actually these patrols in terms of territory conquered meant nothing. They were simply designed to obtain information from personal observation and the capture of prisoners. And they had a certain value in keeping the enemy nervous. But always the essential governing principle was that desert forces must be mobile: they were seeking not the conquest of territory or positions but combat with the enemy. We hunted men, not land, as a warship will hunt another warship, and care nothing for the sea on which the action is fought. And as a ship submits to the sea by the nature of its design and the way it sails, so these new mechanized soldiers were submitting to the desert. They found weaknesses in the ruthless hostility of the desert and ways to circumvent its worst moods. They used the desert. They never sought to control it. Always the desert offered colours in browns, yellows and greys. The army accordingly took these colours for its camouflage. There were practically no roads. The army shod its vehicles with huge balloon tyres and did without roads. Nothing except an occasional bird moved quickly in the desert. The army for ordinary purposes accepted a pace of five or six miles an hour. The desert gave water reluctantly, and often then it was brackish. The army cut its men- generals and privates- down to a gallon of water a day when they were in forward positions. There was no food in the desert. The soldier learned to exist almost entirely on tinned foods, and contrary to popular belief remained healthy on it. Mirages came that confused the gunner, and the gunner developed precision-firing to a finer art and learned new methods of establishing observation-posts close to targets. The sandstorm blew, and the tanks, profiting by it, went into action under the cover of the storm. We made no new roads. We built no houses. We did not try to make the desert liveable, nor did we seek to subdue it. We found the life of the desert primitive and nomadic, and primitively and nomadically the army lived and went to war.
Alan Moorehead, The March to Tunis: The North African War, 1940-1943
It took less than an hour for them to get lost. They had ridden north from Halfa’s tribe towards the Iron Vein he had been going on about for the last three days. No one wanted to go with him, partly because he was more irritating than a swarm of blister beetles and partly because he had a notorious sense of direction. Salama had finally been chosen to go with the boy because she was a stronger navigator than him. The fact that she wielded a makeshift carbine and that she actually still had bullets for the thing made the decision inevitable.
The grass, long and strong and sickly green, swayed in the breeze, and you could see the waves of wind dance in the blades. The sun had begun its descent, but the night would not fall for hours at the least. If Salama could see the stars, she could plot a course to the tribe, or a scrapper camp to the northwest. Until then, the ocean of blue overhead threatened to swallow both of the travelers up.
“I said a prayer to it.”
“What?”
“The Blade in the Vein, the… shiny thing. The expensive looking shiny thing, I said a prayer to it. I asked it to still be there when I got back. I left it an offering.”
Salama was silent, so Halfa continued.
“I offered it a ration. Like the way grandpa and the shaman do when they talk to the Purple Lady. I know she’s different, she talks and all, but maybe it’ll listen to me the same way the Purple Lady listens to grandpa.”
Salama gently pulls the reins and her horse slows down just enough for her to launch a kick from the saddle into the rear of Halfa’s horse: with a start, the horse rears up. Had Halfa been a better horseman, he might have been able to get a hold of the reins in time, but he wasn’t. He tumbled across the horse’s backside as it bolted into the long prairie. He hit the ground hard, harder than Salama expected him to, but not hard enough for her to regret it.
He struggled through an “ohh gods eyes” on the ground before Salama began.
“I am bound by oath and honor to the Obscured Goddess. You do not give worship to every rusted bit of metal someone scrounges out of the veins of this earth.”
A huge part of my system is consequences, and a large part of those consequences are scars. When you take direct damage to your Soul stat, you gain a scar. At first, the scars were very abstract. Oh, you lose a hand, or you go insane, roleplay that, have fun nerd. However, as I started getting things a little more concrete in my house rules, I realized that I had the opportunity to make a system that helps other DMs wean themselves off of the modern-day RPG bad habit of just letting players get what they want physically with no consequences. And trust me, I’m also someone who needs a spoonful of the sugar.
Not my players, mind you, my mere presence inflicts harm upon the boys.
I think people struggle to inflict injuries or lasting consequences on the players because they don’t want to appear to be mean. You’re the DM, responsible for the entire world: with a snap of your fingers, rocks fall everyone dies. If you want an army to march over the hill and decimate these pesky player characters, you can. However, as the DM you want to represent a world that is real, and real worlds have consequences. Or maybe people struggle to inflict injuries or lasting consequences because they’ve had to deal with that guy, that one player who is way too invested in Gigachad Thundercock the Master of Magic and Getting Girls to Notice Him and any threat against him is a threat against the emotional and psychological well being of the player. In which case another solution may be required. Regardless, as I’m writing rules I’m thinking of how I can wean myself off feeling bad for inflicting tragedy and how to wean other DMs off it too.
I’ve got like ten different pages all with different tables for variant rules for Lingering Injuries. I’m still putting them together, but I’m mocking something up like this:
| Roll | Minor Injury | Major Injury | Description and Effect |
| 1 | Blurred Vision | Lose an Eye | Reduce your Maximum Dex, Con, or Str score. |
| 2 | Broken Finger/Hand | Lose a Finger/Hand | |
| 3 | Limp | Lose a Foot | |
| 4 | “Got the wind knocked out of you” | Punctured Lung | |
| 5 | Broken Rib | Internal Injury | |
| 6 | Ringing Ears | Lose an Ear |
This just includes physical maladies: Soul damage from magical effects or mind-breaking stuff I still need to write up. I can hear you now, “Oh, thanks, John Caravan of CaravanCrawl.com, a useless table. How so very usable at my own table.” Hey, man, I’m trying my best. One of the things this table informs is the kind of game I want my system to emulate. For example, in one of my favorite games Dark Heresy, characters have a Courption and an Insanity stat, one that continues to go up until the character is no longer playable. This mechanic informs something about the game, that while you are investigating monsters from beyond the stars, you are going to see things, and those things are going to screw you up to a point that you’re not going to be sane or innocent anymore. Likewise, my own Soul stat implies the opposite: you have one number always going down, and there reaches a point where you’re spent, there’s nothing left in the tank and you’re all scars and sad stories.
When your players take soul damage, roll on the table. In a low lethality game, a game where the retirement rules are highly encouraged, just stick to minor injuries. In a larger scope game, or perhaps a game that’s been running for a while, be a little more willing to use a major injury. Veins of the Earth and a lot of other LotFP games have tables where if you roll an entry a second time, you ignore it and remove it for future rolls (mostly having to do with searching the body). Maybe something like that here, where if you roll a broken hand two times, on the third you lose a hand. This allows for a lot of injuries to pile up across the party before things get serious. However, mechanically, it’s all very similar: you get a limiter on how high your stats can go until you heal up. No pumping all your stats into Str for this one hit if you’re suffering from a bunch of puncture wounds and broken bones.
I also want to build out conditions in my system more. I recently picked up the Torchbearer 2nd Edition books. I love the way that it does the downward spiral of adventuring, even though Luke Crane’s game design is just Burning Wheel carcinization. The question is how many times can he remake Burning Wheel. Having these conditions gives players a heads-up that things are turning for the worse, and gives them info to try and change that. Ultimately, that’s what I’m trying to avoid in my own house rules: making sure everyone knows that that rocks are falling, and they need to get out of the way.
I’m also thinking of writing up the rules for when you take soul damage from an obviously nonviolent force. Let’s say you’re beaten, you’re tired, you’ve slain the dragon and you come back to the Duke’s hall for your reward and he just starts straight up bullying you. Instead of dying, maybe you suffer a condition called Demoralized, where you have to take a break and figure out just what the hell you’re fighting for. I think Dogs in the Vineyard (one of my most favorite games of all time and boy could I say some shit about Vincent Baker but I am not) had a mechanic for this, where if you lose an argument you take a negative modifier and have to stew for a while.
I’ll try and work on getting a more fleshed-out table for injuries together in January. I’ve gotten through my second semester of graduate school, and I have a lot of family obligations over the holidays before the third semester starts. I’m trying to stay ahead of the reading I have to do, but I feel confident I’m still moving in the right direction. Like generally in life and more specifically in my personal rule system.