Krakoa would rather you talk than fight. When that fails, this is what a fight looks like.

Combat is turn‑based and run by a Storyteller. It is deliberately structured — there are rolls, wounds, and consequences — but roleplay comes first. Every round gives you room to describe what your character is doing, and nobody is dragged into a fight without a Storyteller present to run it.

Each round has two phases:

Actions. Everyone declares what they intend to do and writes the pose for it. Attacking is the usual choice, but the whole round can go to something else instead: a support power that mends or shields an ally, raising one of your own defensive tricks, drawing or swapping a weapon, reloading, or taking to the air.
Resolution. The system rolls everything out and the results are woven back into the scene — but not all at once. Actions land in order of speed, quickest first, and the Storyteller's characters always resolve last. That order matters: an enemy winding up a heavy blow can be put down before it connects, and a declared attack dies with the character who declared it.

Each phase runs on a generous timer, so you are never rushed and you always have time to write. Because the enemy commits before you do, you can see what is coming and coordinate your answer to it.

An attack rolls a single twenty‑sided die and adds everything that should help: your attribute, your skill, your weapon or power, and the situation. That total is set against a Difficulty Class (DC) — in a fight the DC is almost always the defender's Defense, though some attacks are turned aside by a saving throw instead, like Willpower against a psychic assault. Meet the DC or beat it and the blow lands. You do not do the maths — the system does.

The die decides the edges on its own. A natural 20 is a critical hit — it always lands and drives double damage through, and some powers or honed techniques widen that window so it comes up on more than the 20 alone.

A natural 1 is a fumble: an automatic miss, whatever your bonuses, and it costs you beyond the miss. If you are armed, the weapon leaves your hand and hits the ground, and you will have to pick it back up on a later turn; if you are unarmed, you overreach and are left open, easier to hit next round.

You have a standing Defense — how hard you simply are to land a hit on, built from how agile and how trained you are, plus whatever your power lends to it: teleporting a step aside, reading the blow before it lands, being too fast to track. There is no separate roll to dodge. A slippery target bends the attacker's odds against them; a clumsy or off‑balance one bends them the other way.

Some characters can do more than evade. Instead of attacking, you can spend your round raising a specific defence — phasing intangible, throwing up a barrier, blurring out of focus — that swallows the first attack to reach you that it is built to stop, either turning it aside completely or blunting it. These cost stamina or worse, run dry after a use or two per fight, and usually have gaps: a guard good against fists and gunfire may do nothing against a psychic assault or a blast that catches the whole group. A few can be thrown over a teammate instead of yourself.

Your health is layered. A pool of shock and fatigue, plus any temporary shields, sits over your true Vitality and takes the first of the punishment. Part of what you take is bruising you can recover from within the same fight; the rest is real, and stays until you heal it properly. Against anything human‑scale a hit is just a hit — only the very largest enemies, Sentinels and their kind, have limbs and joints you can single out with a called shot.

A single blow can carry more than one kind of damage — a burning blade cuts and scorches — and each kind is checked against your resistances on its own. The same strike that is lethal to one mutant is barely an inconvenience to another whose power shrugs that element off, so a mixed attack often gets partway through even when half of it does nothing.

Some people are simply hard to hurt. Dense armour, plating, or unyielding flesh sheds a flat amount off every hit before it touches Vitality — enough of it and a glancing strike does nothing at all. Attacks built to penetrate punch through part of that.

Weapons are real objects you carry. Wield one and its techniques become available to you — a katana adds its cuts, a pistol adds its shots — using the weapon's own skill and adding its damage. You have two hands; a two‑handed weapon takes both.

Ammunition counts. A firearm empties and must be reloaded, which costs you a round. Thrown weapons — knives, shuriken — are gone once thrown and cannot be reloaded mid‑fight; you get them back only when the fight is over. Fumble with a weapon in hand and it hits the dirt.

A character is on the ground or in the air. A grounded fighter cannot reach someone airborne with an ordinary melee swing — to touch a flyer you need a ranged attack, a leaping strike built to reach that high, or to be in the air yourself. Taking off or landing costs a round.

Reaching zero does not automatically mean death. Tougher and more determined characters roll to stay on their feet, while truly overwhelming force can put someone down for good in a single blow. The fight also records who actually landed the blows that dropped you.

And this is Krakoa: for most citizens, losing a fight is a hard setback and a trip to the resurrection queue, not the end of the story.

Every fight is set at an intensity before the first blow, and you will always know which one you are in:

• Training. No lasting harm. When it ends, everyone is patched up to full — bruises and bragging rights only.
• Serious. Injuries stick and do not clear on their own. You heal through rest, medbay, or a friend with the right power. A defeat here is a hard beating, not a death.
• Dangerous. The highest consequences on the table. A defeat can be an actual death — and from there, the resurrection queue. Enter with your eyes open.

When the fight ends the Storyteller gets a short summary — how long it ran, what each side lost, who went down, anything left on the ground, and who is bound for the queue.

Wounds, fatigue, and strain recover on their own as the days pass (instantly, in a Training bout). You do not need a healer standing by to get back into fighting shape — rest, and the island, will do most of the work.