3 | Energy

Both materially and metaphorically, Energy is your Free Rad’s vital essence. It determines your character’s ability to push themselves to overcome the odds, perform miracles, and shrug off pain, strain and injury.

You start each mission with 24 Energy. You can choose to spend Energy to do something good or avert something bad, or be forced to lose Energy when your character experiences physical or mental stress and harm. You can’t spend Energy when doing so would take your Energy score below 0, but you could be taken below 0 Energy involuntarily.

Spending Energy

You can spend Energy in the following ways:

• Rerolling a failed approach test: When you fail an approach test while in scenic time, you can spend 3 Energy and explain how your character avoids disaster in the moment to reroll, potentially avoiding failure. If the second roll also fails, you can’t try again.
• Using your Powers: Each gift has a unique way of determining the cost of using your Powers.
• taking the lead on a group approach test costs 2 Energy
• prematurely ending an effect from your Powers costs 1 Energy
• using a tactical move in combat time costs 1 Energy

Losing Energy

You can lose Energy in the following ways:

• While in scenic time, you might lose Energy when you fail an approach test that puts your character in physical or psychological danger.
• During combat time, you lose Energy when you fail your defence roll.

If losing Energy would take your Energy score below 0, you drop to -1 Energy.

Negative Energy

While you have a negative Energy score, you can’t spend Energy. You subtract your negative Energy score from the result of every dice roll you make and from your movement.

If you would lose an amount of Energy for any reason while at 0 Energy or lower, you lose 1 Energy instead of what you would usually lose. If your Energy ever reaches -6, you die. Once you are dead, there is no coming back.

Restoring Energy

At the start of each scene, you regain 1d6 Energy if your Energy score is 0 or higher, up to your maximum (usually 24). Characters with negative Energy remain at their current Energy score.

When another Free Rad has negative Energy, you can spend ten minutes during scenic time to attempt to restore their Energy. Make an approach test against a target number of 8, plus the value of their negative Energy total (so if they have -4 Energy, the target number is 12). You can test any approach, provided you can give justify how your attempt helps them regain their strength and spirit. On a success, their Energy score is set to 0 and they gain 2d6+6 Energy. On a failure, they lose 1 Energy and cannot regain Energy this scene.

Healing Extras

You can heal an Extra character once per scene with an approach test that takes 10 minutes, restoring 1d6 Energy on a success and causing them to lose 1 Energy on a failure.