Leave a Mark

5E taught a generation that dying is an interruption. You drop. Someone spends a slot. You stand up and the scene continues as if the spear had been rude rather than final. The body is a resource bar. The world does not keep the scar.

ACKS is ruder than that.

When a character goes down, the game does not assume a tidy fade to black. Mortal wounds are a table, not a speech. You might live. You might live wrong. You might lose an eye, a hand, a week, a name for courage. Recovery costs time and money you were going to spend on the next expedition. The party has to decide whether this fool is worth the cart ride back to town.

That is not cruelty for its own sake. It is how a campaign gets a past. A fighter who walks with a limp is not flavor you wrote on session zero. He earned it in a room that still exists on the map. A mage who fears a second critical is not “roleplay.” He has data.

The average games I bounced through wanted cinematic damage and cinematic recovery. Nobody is changed. Nobody is expensive to save. Nobody becomes a warning. ACKS lets the dice write a medical history, then asks whether you still want this person in the front rank.

You can play around the table. House-rule it softer. Plenty of Judges do.

Just know what you are throwing away. A world where wounds leave marks is a world where gold, henchmen, and next week’s plan suddenly have a job. The scar is not decoration. It is the receipt.