Tronsoft Games · Tutorial
The Ninefold Wound
Six adventurers, nine seals, and wounds that do not heal on their own.
Open the game and you are on the title screen. There are two ways in.
If a save exists, the title screen offers Resume instead, with the day and the number of seals recovered so far.
Your company starts in Greybell with some crowns, rations and torches. Before you leave, visit the outfitter: put the best armour on slots one and two, give slots five and six a bow or leave them to their spells, and buy more rations and torches than feel necessary.
The one rule to understand first. A heavy blow leaves a lasting wound in one of nine named places on the body. Sleeping at an inn restores hit points and does nothing at all to a wound. Only a temple surgeon, a field salve, or the Bind grace closes one. Everything else in the game follows from that.
Everything can be done with a mouse, a trackpad or a touch screen. The keyboard is faster.
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| ← ↑ ↓ → | Travel. The number pad and h j k l y u b n give all eight directions, as does the on-screen compass. |
| E | Enter the town or site you are standing on, or take whatever is on the floor here. |
| C | Make camp. |
| F | Field care: graces, salves, draughts, tourniquets. |
| L | Scrolls, and the order of the wounds as you have it. |
| 1–6 | Open that adventurer’s sheet, with the full wound chart. |
| D / U | Take a stair down, or back up. |
| Enter | Resolve the combat round. |
| A | Let the sergeants fill in this round’s orders. |
| X | Fight the whole battle out without further input. |
| T | Buy a round in the tavern. |
| Esc | Close a panel; on a town screen, take the road. |
Outside a battle there are no turns, only steps. Each step of travel advances the clock; twenty-four steps make a day; a day eats rations.
Inside a battle a round runs like this:
On the map, the company is the red mark at the centre and the small inset in the corner is the whole country. Ground costs different numbers of steps: a road is quick, forest and hills are slower, fen is slowest, and mountains and open water cannot be walked at all. A skiff is sold in exactly one harbour and lets you cross water.
Rougher ground is also more dangerous, so the road is worth the detour. Legs that have been written up slow everybody, because the company travels at the pace of its worst pair of knees.
Below ground you see only what the torchlight has shown you. The marks on the floor are listed beside the map: scrolls, chests, relics, the seal and its guardian, the altar, and the stairs. Walk onto a mark and press E.
Your six stand in three ranks of two: slots 1–2 in front, 3–4 in the middle, 5–6 at the back. The enemy arrives in groups, each at a rank of its own. Rank decides reach.
| What you are holding | What it can reach |
|---|---|
| A hand weapon | Only from the front rank, and only the enemy front rank |
| A polearm | From the front or the middle rank |
| A bow or a sling | From any rank, at any enemy rank |
| A spell | From any rank, at any enemy rank |
The order list tells you when a target is out of reach rather than letting you waste the round on it. Each adventurer gets one order:
Any blow that takes roughly a fifth of an adventurer at once may leave a wound. Watch the little body chart on each roster row: brass means grazed, ochre means worse. Add up the grades — at six or more that adventurer is broken and can no longer be given an order at all. They are still alive, still walking, and still eating rations.
At zero hit points an adventurer goes down and takes a wound for it. A mending brings them straight back up; winning or escaping brings them round at one hit point. A blow struck at somebody already on the floor kills them, which is why enemy area magic is far more dangerous than it looks once half your company is down.
Two endings count as finishing.
Finding the order. Nine of the twenty-four scrolls hidden in the sites record it. A mystic will read out the next line you are missing, at a price that rises every time you ask. Press L at any time to see the order as you currently have it: unread wounds show as a question mark.
Laying one out of turn. That wound shuts permanently, the seal is spent, and the barrow takes its price out of the company in blood. The sequence then carries on from where it stood, so you are never stuck — but you can be wrong eight times and have very little company left to finish with. Read the scrolls.
Losing a battle is not losing the campaign. If nobody is left standing, what remains of the company is carried to the nearest town, three days pass, a fee comes out of the purse, and the survivors are patched up and bleeding stopped. You go again.
The campaign is only lost when every member of the company is dead with nobody left to carry anyone back. Getting there takes real neglect: running out of rations a long way from a town, or pressing a broken company into one more barrow.
The dead can be called back at a temple for a great deal of money and a permanent point of constitution. Sometimes enrolling somebody new is the colder, cheaper answer.
The game keeps one save in this browser and writes it automatically whenever the company reaches somewhere safe: a town, a stair, the end of a battle. The Save button in the header writes it on demand. Reopen the game and the title screen offers to resume.
A save taken during a battle restores to standing ground rather than mid-round, so no campaign resumes into a half-resolved fight. The country itself is not stored: it is regenerated from the campaign seed, so a restored campaign is exactly the campaign you left, down to the last tile.
To start over, finish or abandon the campaign and choose Take another company out on the ending screen, which clears the save. Clearing this browser’s storage for the page also destroys the save; nothing else does.
The full rulebook is at docs/manual.pdf. Every table in it — peoples, callings, the nine places, weapons, armour, spells, creatures, terrain, towns, sites, seals and all twenty-four scrolls — is generated from the game’s own data files, so it cannot disagree with what the game does.