Rules for starvation

[Rogan Rubyeye]

Hiya there Lanah

Ok, first up I believe that there are some rules about starvation somewhere in the 1st edition books, most likely in the Earthdawn Survival Guide along with the dehydration and other ailment rules. I'll have to get out the old hardcopy and check through, but I'm pretty sure that it indicated that you couldn't recover "hunger strain/damage" with a character's daily Recovery Tests until they had eaten. I believe its the same for dehydration strain/damage recovery. Try and get back to you on this, but it'll take me a week or so, OK

As for the minimum daily nutritional intake requirements of Namegivers, well in my campaign I've allocated rations and other provisions (IE: Hunting, Fishing & Foraging Test results) into Units. A Unit of food is approximate to one meal's worth (rabbit or other small game animal/fish, bowl of porridge and small loaf of bread, etc), whereas a Unit of water is about a pint (20fl oz). To remain healthy, in an average active lifestyle, Dwarfs, Elves, Humans, Orks & T'skrang require 2 Units each of food and water per day. Trolls require 4 Units each per day due to their greater mass. Obsidimen and Windlings, by contrast only require 1 Unit each per day. Windlings because of their small size and Obsidimen because of their very slow metabolism - seeing as they can effectively shut-down their systems and hibernate, food consumption isn't all that of a demanding problem for them. Note that these are the minimum requirements and eating and drinking more will be recommended, especially if there's a lot of active adventuring. Resonably safe to double usual daily Units without gaining weight in this case.

Hope it helps. As for the PCs in the cave, hope they have some survival skills for foraging underground. Hmmmm, worms and beetles and mosses and shoe leather. Tastes better than dwarf mine rations eh?

[Kasbak]

Or dwarf for that matter.

[Lanah]

Thanks Rubyeye, I like that unit of food rule and the logic behind obsidiman food consumption requirements are easy to understand. I have browsed through my Survival Guide several times and found nothing that I really liked (rules for dehydration are ridiculous if you know what danger dehydration in real life means, as are the suffocation rules btw).
If you find anything at all I will honostly think about it, possibly modify it. So thanks in advance.
The lack for rules for hunger/dehydration/suffocation and so on only shows that Earthdawn didn't evolve much since its beginnings. The old Fasa company created a broad and rich fantasy world which you can only adore but the rules weren't always very polished, or logically or playtested enough (f.e. old Bone Shatter spell). Since then each new version of Earthdawn was in most cases a copy/paste job of the old texts, sadly. 3rd edition tried to fix some issues, more or less successful and methinks 4th edition will be just another copy/paste job with a few twerks here and there, well we will see.

[Rogan Rubyeye]

Wotcha there guys - Happy New Year!

OK, Lanah, I finally got around to digging out my old rulebooks - and promptly got into a bit of an OCD thing with working my way through them. Ho-hum. Anyhow, I knew there were some rules for starvation - hidden away under the rations in ED1: Goods and Services!

Basically it's 1 Strain point per day without food and you can only recover the damage with Recovery Tests once you've eaten. Bit basic I know - as GM, I'd whack in something about STR & TOU penalties to represent weakening, malnutrition and thus more prone to ailments/infections/diseases. If you hit the Unconsciousness Rating the character is too weak to move/feed themselves & most likely a bit delirious too.