Power Pools

One-pager. Magic, divine intervention, and mystic disciplines all draw on a power pool — but a pool isn't a counter you spend down, it's an exhaustion track exactly like fatigue. You don't tally points; you roll to gather power, and a track of exhaustion grows when you reach too hard. See Wounds & Recovery for the parent mechanism; this page is the magical sibling.

Gathering power

Every power source has a gather skill — Mana for magic, Piety for divine power, Spirit for mystic disciplines (see those chapters). Using a power means first gathering for it: a gather roll whose ease factor reflects how much you're asking for (a candle-flame is trivial; a firestorm is brutal). What you do with the power once gathered — the weaving — is a separate matter, governed by the relevant chapter.

The gather roll reads off its QR like any task:

• Solid success — the power comes, free and clear.
• Marginal success / failure — the power still comes, but you gain a level of power-pool exhaustion (you scraped the bottom of the barrel).
• Disastrous failure (QR10) — the power fizzles and you take a level of exhaustion. You reached hard and came up empty.

The GM may also rule that especially demanding effects cost a level of exhaustion automatically, no roll — some things simply can't be done without burning yourself.

Pushing it

A caster may volunteer to take one level of power-pool exhaustion for a one-off +4 modifier to a gather (or to the effect). This is reaching past your limit on purpose — reliable, but it stacks up fast and the bill comes due.

Power-pool exhaustion

Each source has its own exhaustion track (your Mana can be wrung dry while your Spirit is fresh). A track penalizes use of its own source at full value and everything else at half, and tracks stack with fatigue and each other (see Wounds & Recovery for the full rule and worked example). So gather rolls get harder the more spent you are — the death-spiral that stops a mage from trivially chaining world-shaking spells — and a drained wizard is also a worse swordsman and a duller conversationalist.

Recovery works just like fatigue (Wounds & Recovery): you clear one level at a time, per track, and deeper levels need more rest.

When several tracks are spent at once, a given rest shifts one level on one track — sort the rest out with more rest. (Some sources recover by other means than rest — Piety, for instance, is rebuilt through acts of devotion and sacrifice rather than sleep; see Religion.) As with fatigue, runaway power-pool exhaustion (four or more) risks converting into real wounds: magic burns the body that channels it.

Designer's Note: this keeps the two-step heart of the magic system — gather, then weave — intact and balanced, while throwing out the bookkeeping. The gather roll is the same roll that meters exhaustion, so there's no separate pool to track; and "spend a level for +4" gives desperate casters a real, costly lever instead of a hard wall.