Shift (PSR Supplement)

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During periods of long travel, it may be helpful to divide each day into six shifts: three for day and three for night.

Shift Activity

During each shift, the players broadly describe what they're doing with an activity. While it's safest for protags to work together during shifts, it's still possible to split up.

Activities are deliberately more open-ended than encounter actions. Often you and your narrator will improvise what your character does over a shift. Some straightforward activities include the following options.

• Attune. Establish attunement to an item, which is needed to gain the full benefits of some items.
• Camp. Settle down for a shift to rest up a little bit. Camping requires a day's worth of food and water per person, plus shelter. A ration and full waterskin are affordable food and water to bring. A tent or small cave is enough to provide shelter. When you finish camping, you recover from 1 degree of Exhaustion and your hit points are restored to their maximum.
• Hunt. Search for food, clean water, or shelter to camp. Each protag can only search for one of these per activity. Each requires an ability check to succeed, usually Knowledge (Wilderness) or Perception (Wilderness). In a field or lightly forested area, a check result of 10 or higher is a success. A success provides shelter for the entire party, clean water for the entire party to camp (plus as much as you can carry with you), or 1 day's worth of food for one person. If hunting for food a result of 20 instead provides 2 days' worth of food. A day's worth of food for you occupies 1 carry slot, and a day's worth of water for you also takes 1 carry slot. Other regions, such as a sparse desert or abundant rainforest, might require a higher or lower check result to succeed, as your narrator determines.
• Travel. Move up to 10 miles. If mapping out the region, it can be helpful to use 10-mile squares or hexes. Mounts and hauled vehicles provide comfort and storage but don't increase the rate of travel. If you travel two consecutive shifts, you must succeed on a mark 12 Grit save or suffer Exhaustion. This mark increases by 1 for each subsequent travel shift; mark 13 for 3 travel shifts, mark 14 for 4 travel shifts, and so on. If riding a mount or vehicle for most of the shift, you automatically succeed on this save.

There's 24 phases or 240 minutes in each shift, so almost any practical number of phase activities or encounters can occur without using up an entire shift.

Danger d6 (Optional)

When traveling through a region known to have monsters or bandits, at the end of each shift your narrator might roll a d6 on the chart below. This represents incoming and unpredictable dangers, giving consequences to how you spend your phases.

1. Spoil. For each item you carry that can "spoil," such as food or monster parts, roll a d6. On each 1, the item is destroyed.
2. Fatigue. At the start of next shift, each protag must camp or suffer Exhaustion. Any protag that already camped during this shift is safe.
3. Climate. In an extreme climate, each protag makes the relevant save. Otherwise the weather, terrain, or climate changes either with travel or due to a fluke of the area. If the area doesn't have a sensical change, there might be only environmental noise like wind, sounds, temperature changes, falling debris, fleeting illusions, or tiny critters.
4. Encounter. The protags encounter creatures native to this region, which are usually violent. If the party was camping this shift and didn't have someone keeping watch, the entire party is Surprised at the start of this encounter.
5. Clue. The protags locate clues to local, usually hostile creatures—such as a fresh corpse, or recently shed scales. If the protags don't move on from this vicinity, these creatures will be encountered at the end of the next shift (no roll).
6. Secret. The protags find a hint to an unknown area within 10 miles, or another secret in this vicinity. If navigating to a destination of unknown distance, the destination is reached (or progress is made; perhaps Secret must be rolled twice or thrice for a longer journey). If nothing applies, the protags are safe this phase.