Last Night, I Severed A Player's Toe🗡️🩸

The Dragonbane 'Severe Injury' table is no joke. The combat is harsh, and the optional rule for being seriously injured when hitting 0 HP has some rough consequences.

Kerr falls to the ground as the cultist’s battleaxe digs into his leg. The wolfkin whimpers as he lies bleeding out on the altar, his lifeblood filling and flowing through the furrows of the pentagram etched into its surface.

Above him, a moment too late, his companion Urk’s warhammer crushes the cultist, ending the conflict. The party’s mage, Strek, rushes toward the wolfkin, bandage in hand, to get his friend back on his feet.

He moves the battleaxe that caused the injury, but his weak hands fumble as he does so, causing the blade to slice through Kerr’s flesh once more, this time permanently separating him from what his mother once called “the little wolfie that went woof woof woof all the way home.”

This is what happened in my Dragonbane game last night as the party made their way through the Temple of the Purple Flame.

OSR games are known for being pretty unforgiving. Free League’s Dragonbane is OSR-adjacent, and its combat is brutal, fast, and fun. Characters and NPCs have a pretty low and static amount of HP, usually between 10 and 20, while even daggers do D8 damage.

There’s an optional rule for severe injuries that happen when a character reaches 0 HP. They have to make a CON roll to see if they are severely injured. The wolfkin hit the ground and passed his CON roll.

As combat ended, the mage went to bring him back to life, making a Healing roll using a bandage. He rolled a Nat 20 (which in Dragonbane is a critical failure and called “rolling a demon“).

Now, there’s no rule in the book about what happens if you get a demon on a Healing roll to revive someone. But the game has a lot of mishap tables for failures of this sort, so I made the call that he bumbled the healing attempt so badly that the wolfkin needed to roll on the severe injury table.

He rolled a 15, which is “Severed Toe: Movement rate is permanently reduced by 2 (to a minimum of 4).” The pair of them decided it made sense that the ancient elf would bumble around trying to move the battleaxe the cultist dropped, which resulted in it accidentally slicing off the wolfkin’s toe.

It was hilarious and right in line with the mechanics of the game itself. Dragonbane isn’t what I’d call rules-lite. Rather, it’s rules-medium. There are a lot of things spelled out, but there are a lot that aren’t.

What’s great about that, though, is there is generally an example or precedent in the rules somewhere for the GM to make a call that fits both narratively and mechanically. That’s what I love about the game.

For me, this felt like the kind of collaborative storytelling that makes TTRPGs so great. It was certainly roleplayed based on the situation and characters, but it was fully instigated by the dice roll. Which I feel is the best of all possible worlds.

Poor Kerr the wolfkin and his little toesie-woesie might disagree, though.

What would you have done in this situation? Would you have given a mishap roll when the player crit-failed on a healing attempt?