Ch'i

One-pager. Ch'i is the essence of being and life. Every living thing has some; a few have a great deal, and fewer still can consciously direct the Ch'i within and around them. Where magic is a careful, generative craft, Ch'i is fast, physical and cinematic — the wire-work fantasy of Big Trouble in Little China and the Hong Kong films of the eighties and nineties.

Ch'i replaces magic; it does not join it. A setting can have one or the other, and a character operates in one framework, never both. Ch'i is so useful that it dominates any setting featuring it — that's by design, not an oversight, so a GM turning it on should mean it. (Its low cost is likewise deliberate: price it higher and players simply cripple themselves to buy it anyway.)

The skill and the two paths

Ch'i is a single skill, and every practitioner picks a path — a source of inner strength — when they take it. The choice is permanent.

BEF 4 · Limit 1 (2 if talented). Neither path is better; they differ in what comes easily, especially in controlled use — a Bright adept strikes at a distance, a Reflective one turns a blow aside for someone else.

Ported from 2004: the Reflective path was (EM + WP)/2. EM folded into PC in this edition, so it reads (PC + WP)/2 — see Creating Characters.

Spending Ch'i is exhaustion, not a pool

The original tracked a reserve of points equal to three times your Ch'i score. This edition doesn't track pools: Ch'i is an Exhaustion track, exactly as mana is. Effort meters itself.

• Reaching for Ch'i is a roll, and the size of what you're attempting is a modifier on that roll, not a separate accounting step.
• Push hard and you take an exhaustion level; push hard when you're already spent and it costs more. Levels penalise Ch'i work fully and everything else at half.
• The path sets your recovery rhythm: Bright recovers at sunrise, Reflective at moonrise. It's pure flavour that costs nothing mechanically, and it's worth keeping — a Reflective adept husbanding their strength through a long day is a character beat.

Three ways to use it

1 · Unconscious — you don't die easily. Ch'i keeps its bearer alive without being asked.

• Wounded: when a blow raises your wound level, roll Ch'i. On QR3 or better you recover that level as soon as you can rest for a few seconds. You can never profit from being wounded — at best you break even.
• Dying: when a blow would kill or incapacitate you, roll Ch'i at EF 4 for a respite — QR1 five minutes, QR2 one minute, QR3 thirty seconds, QR4 fifteen. During it you ignore (7 − QR) wound levels. Either way you get to whisper last words and crawl. One respite only; there is no second reprieve when it ends.
• Second chance: a failed roll the GM judges vital may be attempted again, the QR of the Ch'i roll setting the bonus. A failed Ch'i roll never grants one, and neither does a failed second chance — the game has to move.

2 · Focussed — Ch'i through a skill. For each level of Ch'i you take, choose a skill; you may choose the same skill twice.

• Chosen once (the inner way): before you roll that skill, spend effort for +1, or harder effort for +2.
• Chosen twice (the outer way): you can attempt that skill's extraordinary feat — rolled on the lower of your Ch'i and the skill. Failure spends the effort anyway; a fumble goes wrong, or at least publicly wrong.

This is the layer that produces the genre: Lightning Limbs (a ten-second spin, attacking at +2 DC and defending at +2), Feather Feet (100 m in three seconds, part of it up a wall or across water), Sky Somersaults, Water Bug, the Bright path's distant strike and the Reflective path's umbrella parry — a blow intercepted for someone standing metres away.

3 · Weaving — gather, form, project. The spectacular use, and a deliberate echo of magic's gather-then-weave.

Gathered energy is dangerous. Anyone — or anything unaccounted for — touching you mid-gather takes a discharge equal to what you've gathered so far. Lose control of unformed energy and you can try to disperse it safely; fail, and half goes into you and half into whatever's handy. The visuals are the point: coils of lightning crawling over your hands and feet, creeping to the torso and head when control slips, and gathering about the eyes, nose, mouth and ears when it's gone.

Path affinity: forming a structure your path favours is +2, and projecting or dispersing it +1.

Extraordinary feats

The outer way — what a skill taken twice unlocks. Roll on the lower of your Ch'i and the skill; failure spends the effort anyway, and a fumble goes wrong in public. Through is the modern skill or attribute the feat hangs off: several 2004 skills (Acrobatics, Climbing, Throwing, Unarmed Combat) are merged into broader ones here, and Stamina and Pain Resistance aren't skills at all, so those feats sit on WP, which now carries every exhaustion roll.

Orb structures

The vocabulary of the weave. E is the energy in the orb. Most structures also support a ball, a strike bolt, sometimes a barrier, and an infusion that puts the property into a person or object instead of throwing it.

Designer's note: the original disclaims its sources cheerfully — "a weird and unattributable smattering of Oriental mythology, personal reading, and whim, which should not under any circumstances be confused with research." That's the right register for it. Ch'i is not an ethnography; it's the physics of a genre.