Spell Slots as Hit Point Abstractions

Spell slots are limited. This is primarily for game reasons; the wizard cannot cast fireball more than X times a day, because if they could, people with swords would cease to matter, and that's not good for the game. But let's pretend that isn't the main reason and come up with a narrative reason, and thus maybe a new mechanic, for why Spell Slots exist.

By Seb McKinnon.

The Force of Magic

What laymen call magic - that is, the casting of spells, the working of rituals, and other such supernatural powers - is a deeply personal thing. Not just on the mental level, but on the physical as well. To cast a spell is to turn one's body into a channel for something utterly paranormal; to let something leave you and rearrange the world before you. This is an idea that many have discussed in a philosophy called the River & the Rain. 

The River is the actual force flowing through the spellcaster. It is that eldritch momentum that ignites a fireball in a perfect vacuum or that polymorphs a griffon's body into a comatose mouse.

The Rain is the greater force that the spellcaster is calling on. It is a metaphysical concept, an energy that permeates everything, the stuff that keeps the universe expanding, the noosphere too, and that ideas generate when conjured forth.

Together, the River & the Rain make up the force of magic. The more of the rain you can call upon to flow into your river, the more force the river has, or in other words, the spell you are casting becomes all the more powerful. This is a tangible thing. It can and has been measured by cabals of arcane workers, by congregations of divine priests, by circles of druids hidden in the hill and mist. This is, mechanically, what a spell level is. Call it a Spell of the 1st Circle if you want, or a Miracle of the 1st Order, or whatever name you can conjure forth. It all means the same thing: spell level.

And if a spell's level is tangible to the amount of force that the spell produces, and if this force is a river flowing through the spellcaster, then it is only natural that there are many limitations to spells - as many as their are limitations of the physical form.

For example, a human's max recorded jump height is 63.5 inches - a little over 5 ft or 161 cm. It stands to reason that, with little variation, a human cannot possibly jump higher than that; their biology will not allow it. So then is it true that a human can only cast spells so strong due to their own biological limit. It is a limit that can be raised with training, yes, but it is a limit nonetheless. And just as a human cannot jump their max height an infinite number of times, neither can the spellcaster cast their spells an infinite number either. Thus, spell slots.

Let's first translate this to some more interesting narrative concepts, and then see what it leads too mechanically.

By Jakub Bazyluk. A spellcaster violently letting the River flow for a spell.

Magical Exhaustion

As the River flows so too does the spellcaster's body suffer wear and tear. Their neurons, during the casting of a spell, are firing on every possible cylinder. The complex network of bacteria, fungi, and cells that makes up a living being are all, for that moment, uniting their potential to one specific purpose. Such effort does not go unpunished. Eventually, a spell caster will expend all of their spell slots and be left with just their own, natural, mortal selves.

What does this look like? It is different, yet always the same. A feeling that one's heart is beating slower - that their blood is thinner than it was before - that their stomach cannot digest food or liquid. Thinking is done through a haze as memories are rebuilt and personality traits reestablished by the previously overloaded mind. It will feel like your nails are loose in their cuticles; like your bones are only barely attached to their joints.

In other words, it is not a pleasant feeling. Not like being exhausted, but similar, thus its simple term of being magically exhausted. No spellcaster likes it. Many avoid casting their last spell so that they can avoid this state. In games where they only get one or two spells a day at early levels, it is a state frequent. In exchange for being able to blow a door open or warp someone's perception of you, you just feel like abject shit.

Below, a d12 table. Roll on it when you spend your last spell slot. This effect is lost when you regain any spell slots. These effects are in addition to the above description.

1. Your eyes are weakened; you see low detail versions of everything around you.
2. You lose all sense of temperature except for a spreading, extreme heat inside of you.
3. You vomit immediately, and can keep no food or liquid down for long.
4. Memories of specific things, such as people's names, your favorite color, or the name of where you are disappear.
5. Your personality is eroded, leaving you bland, neutral, and unimpressed with things around you.
6. Natural instincts like fear, pain, and anger are gone, significantly mellowing your reactions.
7. When others look at you, they forget what you look like, sound like, or act like the moment they look away.
8. Your name is damaged; others can only remember and refer to you as either the first or last letter of your name.
9. Non-magical things that you touch sometimes slip through your fingers as if they were never there.
10. Your thoughts leak out of your head and into others around you.
11. A magical, aurora-glowing sweat drips off of you and rises as steam too. Whatever it touches - clothing, grass, other's skin - it steals away its color.
12. You continuously cry, though these tears you shed are more akin to blood than anything else.

A night's rest, a week's rest, whatever your rest is allows your body to heal, and thus the magical exhaustion ends.

Exhaustion serves as a way to note that you are growing stronger. Magical exhaustion is no different. Eventually, your ability to let flow greater rivers for longer duration will mean that magical exhaustion is harder and harder to come by. And just as muscles grow visibly larger, a spellcaster grows a greater presence the more powerful they become.

By Seb McKinnon.
Magical Exhaustion is similar to feeling as if you are fading away, mist in the sun.

Eldritch Presence

Eldritch Presence is the concept coined that shows how powerful a spellcaster is. It is an aura about them - a non-visible force that is felt in the minds of those close. The higher the spell level that the caster can cast, the more powerful their Eldritch Presence is.

It feels like looking at a sky where stormclouds are just creeping on the horizon. Like looking around and seeing a gentle wind pick at the trees and grass as the grey above grows ever darker. A gravity that does not pull you inwards,and a force that does not push you away but that threatens almost innocently. It sets your hairs on fire, waves of goosebumps racing from shoulder to hand. Cats will bristle if this force is malignant. Your hair will stick to your head, as if you are sweating. Glass fogs, blades become sharper, colors more vivid. Most noticeably of all, your thoughts will race. Faster and faster will you think as if something was empowering your mind in ways never before felt. Like an adderall drop, a hit of speed.

These effects are slight for neophytes. Even for those well-versed, able to cast magics entering into the third, fourth, fifth levels can they be written off by the ignorants who know not what Eldritch Presence is. But beyond that, it is tangible. It is a pressure. It makes the commons bow to the wizard, the king sit more rightly in their throne, the guards ever more guarded.

Hard it is to put a range on such an effect. The range is your sight. If you can see a powerful spellcaster, you can feel their Eldritch Presence. If they are close enough to you that you can hear their voice then you are close enough to feel their strength.

This is why dragons, demons, angels, and all other manner of superior creatures can confidently stare down a battalion of soldiers and not be harmed. So great is their Eldritch Presence that it halves the force of sword swings, makes arrows miss wide. Force field of Rain. Armor of Power.

And if this is how it feels to hold magic, and if magic protects you from certain death, then so too can magic be seen similar at hit points - abstraction of life as it is.

Guild Wars concept art.
Strong Eldritch Presence can even make others perceive you as something beyond mortal.

Spell Slots as HP

Spellcasting characters no longer have hit points. They instead have spell slots. If they are a half-caster (ranger, paladin) they are uniquely equipped, as now they have their starting hit points and their spell slots to protect them.

When a creature/character (hereafter referred too just as a creature) would suffer damage while having at least 1 unspent spell slot, they instead take no damage unless the damage die rolls either its max number or is above 6 + the amount of spell slots unspent, whichever is higher.

Example: if a 1d8 longsword attack is made against a wizard with 1 spell slot, the longsword needs a 7 (6 + 1) or 8 (max number) to hit. If the wizard has 2 spell slots, only an 8 will hit. If a 3, only a 9, thus requiring a modifier of some sort to deal damage.

If the damage meets one of these two criteria, the spell slot is lost.

If a creature is Magically Exhausted (no spell slots), any damage die rolled against it knocks the spellcaster out and either kills them or leaves them dying, depending on your exact ruleset. If they have hit points, then those instead are effected until the same situation occurs.

This makes magic-users more difficult to kill if they are completely fresh, but essentially makes them nothing better than dead meat if they are out of spell slots. Resource management is all the more difficult now, as you are spending hit points. It will become important for a spellcaster to find a way to regain spell slots more quickly, if not at least temporarily, in order to stave off death for just a while longer. But it also empowers spellcasters when fresh to take on big risks. They can match the great warrior in a duel so long as they allow the River to flow free and to flow hard.

By Seb McKinnon.
Even a little girl, enriched with magic, is mighty as the armored soldier.

Temporary Spell Slots

The following methods can be used to regain temporary spell slots; that is, spell slots that disappear when your normal spell slots are regained. You cannot have more temporary spell slots then you have maximum spell slots.

Places of Power, such as shrines, altars, magical lairs, old arcane battlefields, moonless nights with the right constellations, etc etc, can be meditated in for 10 minutes, regaining 1d4 spell slots. 

Rituals & Sacrifices if you are a divine/miracle caster can be done in the name of your Power/Divinity, allowing you to regain 1 temporary spell slot per miracle you know.

Eldritch Cannibalism can be done on a creature with Eldritch Presence. Drinking a dragon's blood or eating a captured pixie will give you 1 temporary spell slot per HD the creature has.

Contracts & Pacts & Deals can be made with a creature with Eldritch Presence. In exchange for a favor, they lose 1 spell slot and you gain 1 temporary spell slot. They cannot regain their spell slot until you lose your temporary one. Temporary spell slots gained this way are added on top of your maximum spell slots and do not disappear when you regain spell slots, instead only disappearing when the favor is completed or you die.

Various esoteries, like blue goldstones, opals with polished fire, or the tears of a heartbroken siren can be used similar to health potions, granting 1 temporary spell slot.

By Seb McKinnon.
The River can flow from one to another in pacts and rituals.

Cantrips & Other Outliers

In some games and traditions, spellcasters have access to cantrips - low level magicks that require little effort to use. If you can cast cantrips, you are using your Eldritch Presence to shape reality in a minor way around you. Even when Magically Exhausted does a spellcaster have at least a little presence, and thus can cast cantrips. Cantrips have no bearing on a spellcaster's hit point abstractions.

In some games and traditions, spellcasters eventually can learn to cast a low level spell as if it were a cantrip. This is a feat of great power. If you can only cast a single spell like this, treat it as if it were a cantrip. But, if you are, say, a demon with multiple at will spells, your Eldritch Presence is never truly diminished. The only thing that can kill you is a magical weapon of some sort or a spell being used to destroy you when your limited spell slots are spent. Mortal forces cannot.

By Seb McKinnon.
No steel nor arrow will kill that with Presence Eldritch as This.

COMMANDMENT: On the Depredations of Iron

Based off of Coins & Scrolls Iron Gates/Dark Souls project and this spin-off blogpost I did here.

Iron is, perhaps, the greatest poison the world has ever known. When mankind, or adamuh, first crawled out of the mud and grasped it, what flooded their minds was the brilliance of warcraft and the baseless joys of pillaging, of conquest, of new fangs chewing up predators of old.

When mankind touched bronze, however, something different flowed forth. Protection from the elements, from evils, from the gods themselves--mankind no longer needed to be slaves but could now be rulers themselves. Those that touched iron were killed, their tools thrown into the Great Green. Or maybe humanity simply left, content to flee the hell they'd created to reconnect with Earth herself.

Regardless of which history is true, iron has returned to the world. The Sea Peoples march across coasts and sail across the Great Green with naught but ruby-sanguine left behind them. They topple just to topple. They kill just to kill. The Depredations of Iron has overtaken them and brutality foams at the lip.

Mercy not Iron knows.

DEPREDATIONS OF IRON: AN EFFECT

First, there are Commandments to Iron, hidden away in the Denyen Isles. These Commandments state thus:

• All Iron is but blood, and thus Iron is reaping, Iron is slaying, Iron is culling.
• Thou whom holds Iron must deny not Bloods Flow, for to deny is invitation to death & everlasting sin.

So long as these Commandments remain writ in stone, so too will Iron persist, seducing those with secrets of its forging. But it is not malicious. These Commandments are naught if not true. Iron is forged by burning the world and reshaping it into a tool for one's gain. Whilst bronze involves no alchemy, iron does, and in the transformation it is ensured that whatever love the dust of Earth has for living creatures is stripped, leaving behind white-hot hatred that must be used. But it is not malicious; no more than the starving wolf's fangs or the mother bear's claws. All things are weapons. Know this too.

A brutal beauty inherit only to iron.

Iron tools provide a +2 bonus to any roll made with them (so attack rolls for weapons, for example). If it's armor, gain a +4 AC bonus. This is hefty, but Iron is rare. The armies of this Bronze World destroy Iron with alchemy and zodiac-born fires to keep it from seducing them. Battlefields can be seen from vast distances, glittering with silver, violet, emerald, and golden flames.

Iron serves as Experience as well. When a creature dies, the Iron in its blood is freed, lending its hatred to the warrior that freed it. For every HD a creature has, gain that x100 in Experience. Iron items are worth x100 their normal GP cost in Experience as well. Experience can either be used as it is traditionally in OSR games, or instead to buy things piecemeal. Look at the Iron Upgrades section near the bottom of this article.

When holding Iron, be it slivers, bars, weapons, armor, or trinkets, save vs Iron. On a failure, you must kill 1 living creature within the next week. When you do so, save vs Iron again. On a failure, you must kill 2 living creatures within 6 days. This cycle continues (increasing in victims and decreasing in days allowed) until a success is rolled, wherein the cycle resets back to 1 week. These cycles are called Depredations. If luck would have it and you fail 7 saving throws in a row, you become Barbarous.

Note that with each failure, physical characteristics can be seen. Consult the table below:

1. Your teeth turn yellow, your hair thin, your skin sallow.
2. Your muscles shrink but become paradoxically more defined.
3. Your canines elongate, as do your pupils.
4. Your skin takes on a grey tint.
5. Your bones creak loudly whenever you move, as if they were metal themselves.
6. Your eyes turn the color of blood, and glow as if they were alive with fire.

To be Barbarous is a fate the Sea Peoples in their entirety have fallen too. You lose that thing that made humanity strong when all they had was bronze and bone: limitation. Iron paves the way forward to things infinitely more complex. Once its secrets become common knowledge, humanity will leap forward, devouring itself again and again in order to reach whatever heavens lie above. This is not wholly bad; it is either ADVANCE BLOODILY or GO EXTINCT. The question thus becomes: is a Barbarous future worth it, or is death the kinder fate?

There are mechanical effects to being Barbarous. When you've reached this state, mark the following changes to your character sheet:

• Your Athletics (Constitution and Strength) scores become 18.
• You gain 3 HD to roll and add to your hit points.
• When you deal damage with an attack roll, you can make an additional attack roll. This happens once, and can happen at the end of other additional attacks you may have (such as from two weapon wielding).
• When not wearing armor, add +3 to your AC.
• For every day that passes where you don't cause harm to another creature, reduce your Savvy (Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma) by 1d6. At 0 for any of these ability scores, you forfeit your character who becomes a naked, iron-swinging God of Conquest. See the bottom of this article for more info on that.
• For every day that passes where you did cause harm to another creature, save vs Iron. On a failure, reduce your Savvy (Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma) by 1. Same effects as above applies.

A warrior gone Barbarous.

Great power comes with becoming Barbarous, but the price is horrid. But the power is great--an army wielding Iron can decimate any other. But to keep it going, there must be a way of warding off these ill effects. There is.

Bloodletting: Warding Away Barbarousness

Find a battlefield. There are many unattended in the world now. Gather up as many iron weapons that you can, and arrange them in tight, concentric circles around yourself. Then, with a stone or bone edge, slice your wrist. This is the ritual needed to ward away barbarousness.

The first bloodletting ceremony?

Understand this: there is Iron in our bodies. All things are weapons, remember? But this Iron is hateful of its imprisonment and wishes to cut the world. When we wield iron tools, the amount of Iron in our blood increases. Thus, by bloodletting, we free ourselves of the sentence Barbarism and retain our humanity.

When you perform Bloodletting, you reset your Depredations to the original 1 kill per week. Additionally, any points in your Savvy (Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma) scores lost are regained in full. In this way, the ritual is a great boon, allowing many of the Sea Peoples to retain enough sense to keep their Great Invasion going without destroying itself. This is compounded by the fact that you can perform Bloodletting at an Iron Circle as many times as you want. 

But there is another secret too: Iron is the secret of immortality. And this secret carries with it a great curse.

Endless Hordes: Death in COMMANDMENT

After you perform Bloodletting, your life is rooted to that spot. Your own iron, your own blood, surrounded by circles of weapons, has formed a cradle. When you die next, your body will turn to basic compounds and a new you will be born in the center of the Bloodletting circle. An iron weapon you gathered rusts and turns to dust at the same time. Thus, a counter: you can be reborn at one of these Iron Circles a number of times equal to the original number of iron weapons you presented at the time of Bloodletting. No more can be added afterwards; if you die and have added more weapons, you simply die.

The Abyss Watchers from Dark Souls 3 are 100% Barbarous now.

When you are reborn, note the following:

• The Depredation cycle is set to 6 failures, so you must kill 7 living creatures within 24 hours or become Barbarous.
• You have all your equipment worn, and anything carried.
• You cannot perform Bloodletting again for 7 days time.
• You are reborn at the last Iron Circle you performed Bloodletting at. You can "reactivate" an Iron Circle by performing Bloodletting at it again.

These restrictions mean that if you try to abuse the death-and-rebirth powers of Iron, you are dancing closely with Barbarism. When reborn through Iron, you must kill 7 creatures that day or become Barbarous. This makes the Sea Peoples quite terrifying in knowing this secret.

Some mechanical comments: these mechanics make Iron into very, very powerful resources in the world of Commandment (or whatever world you could import this idea into). However, its a resource not to be abused--it can be very easy to go Barbarous and just lose your character within a single session of play if you don't treat Iron as something to be used sparingly as a player. But, for some, abusing Iron for a Hail Mary could be a great scene to get some great treasure, or achieve whatever goal your party is trying to achieve.

Iron Upgrades: Using Iron as Experience

Whenever you kill a creature, gain experience = # of HD * 100.

Whenever you destroy an Iron-forged item in a zodiac-born fire, gain experience = GP cost * 100.

You can use this experience to level up normally, or instead do things piecemeal (as is tradition in Dark Souls). Consult the list below for ways how. In order to spend this experience, you must return to one of the 5 cities and find a Sphinx. The Sphinx consumes from you the gathered freed-iron, and in turn uses it to open your mind to pathways it shares. How is this possible? Why do Sphinxes do this? They answer not, and no god knows.

A Sphinx awaiting you.

Iron Upgrades.

1. Increase attribute: Increase one attribute by +1. Costs experience = new Attribute number * 1000.
2. Increase saves: Increase all saves by -1. Costs experience = 400.
3. Gain HD: Gain +1 HD and add to HP. Costs experience = # Rolled on HD * 300.
4. Gain spell: Gain +1 spell of a level of which you can cast. Costs experience = Spell Level * 500.
5. Class improvement: Improve a class ability (such as casting higher level spells, increasing thief skill chances, as per your system). Costs experience = # of Total Iron Upgrades * 1000.

Note: this speeds up how quickly a character "levels up." Keep this in mind!

Gods of Conquest

A God of Conquest is a creature born from a Barbarous warrior who has utterly lost all sanity. Filling the mind's void now is bloodlust, hatred, and a need to conquer all. There are many, many, many Gods of Conquest within the Sea Peoples' army. They are kept chained and unleashed upon a city or army as shock troops.

Some look almost human. And others...maybe they never were.

Any monstrous statblock, from Medusae to Orcs to Hobgoblins to Dragons can be Gods of Conquest. They come in many different shapes and sizes, and never are two exactly the same. In this way, there may be only one Medusa in the world--a woman warrior of the Sea Peoples who fell to barbarism and became the thing she is now. Thus, all monsters in COMMANDMENT are of two types: DIVINITIES (of which there are many) or IRON GODS OF CONQUEST (of which there are also many). 

Gods of Conquest can be found across the world now. With so many wars being fought, and so much Iron being used, it is only natural that many of these Iron Gods escape their shackles and terrorize the world. The Bronze Age Collapse can thus serve as a violent Age of Heroes if desired; there are many Gods to kill.

Note that the appearance of all creatures should be either vaguley humanoid or somehow involve iron. A Medusa's snakes, for example, might be made of liquid metal and petrifying others turns them into iron statues. Or a Troll is just a big, ugly, half-mutated bastard covered in wounds and porcupine'd with iron blades.

Death is the Last Frontier

Characters dying at 0 hit points and disappearing is great for raising the stakes, having a grim world, and encouraging certain play styles.

It is not the only way to create an interesting adventure, be it OSR or not.

Let's look at a few video games and pieces of fiction where death is just the beginning of a greater adventure, or where constant death is a reality.

The Soul of Cinder, an amalgamation of undead champions in Dark Souls 3

Soulsborne Games - This is Demon's Souls, all three Dark Souls games, and Bloodborne. In these games, your character is essentially immortal; they die, respawn, and try again, losing a little bit more of themselves along the way. In world, you can see various would-be characters that don't have the same strength your character does. Hollows in Dark Souls, or Demons in Demon's Souls, or Beasts in Bloodborne. Essentially, the mechanic is, you can use death to make risky plays and to learn things and to keep moving forward up till a certain point, changing with every death.

Sekiro: Shadow's Die Twice - Made by the same company as the above, the difference here is that when your character in Sekiro dies, you have a limited number of times where you can respawn automatically. This allows you to take enemies by surprise and set up some very interesting ways to achieve your goals. If you exceed that number, you are returned to a shrine that you've prayed too.

Bleach - A manga made by Tite Kubo, here death allows for most mortals to achieve the greater powers and poetry of their souls, essentially becoming greater beings and refining themselves through what might as well be a poetic representation of reincarnation. Here, death serves as a gateway to getting strong, though dying again leads to actual death, making it a one time thing that isn't always beneficial either.

Death Parade - An anime where, after dying, the characters go to a bar and have to gamble for their soul in order to move on deeper into the afterlife. In this case, death serves as an entirely new adventure laden with all kinds of theme about sin vs virtue, dying with regrets, moving on past grief, etc. This set up is less game mechanic and more "what do when death has come for me."

Princess Mononoke - This is a strange one, where actual death doesn't become a thing until the very end in true. Throughout the movie, protagonist Prince Ashitaka is dying from a curse given to him by a dying demon-god. He ventures to a mythical forest where the Forest God there has power of life and death, and rebirths him--healing a fatal wound but not his injury. The god, when it dies later, baptizes him as thanks for returning to it a decapitated head. Here we have a situation where one thing in particular in killing the characters, but other things can/will not, leading them into a series of adventures to get rid of the actual death curse on them.

Undead Gunslinger by Kuciara.

All of the above say one thing to me: death is an avenue for adventure.

It can be used to:

1. Learn more about the world, it's challenges, and how to overcome them.
2. Be used as a tool to gain advantages.
3. Be a requirement to gaining power to achieve more difficult goals.
4. Serve as a compelling post-death adventure.
5. Be used to create an interesting, unique set-up for adventures.

Now then, translating this to game mechanics.

The system I've been working on for the past week or so has been building to this. These "death mechanics" and the themes/ideas surrounding them are exactly what I want my RPG to capture. I guess, in truth, what I'm writing isn't a true OSR adventure--it isn't designed in a way to achieve interesting dungeon crawls or as a full call back to older editions of the game. The point of the RPG is to introduce new ways to adventure/play games that are fantasy in nature. BUT, that being said, these death mechanics can and probably should be applied to OSR since death is so frequent. Imagine playing Frostbitten & Mutilated, dying, and then encountering an amazon tribe that exists only in this weird death-space, frozen and hateful?

Possibilities abound.

Let's start with a simple Dark Souls inspired death-mechanic.

Hit Dice as Treasure

You do not gain hit dice (HD) from leveling up in a class, or from rolling on a Class Advancement Table (CAT). Instead, you gain HD from discovering strange graves, hidden away corpses, killing monsters, or buried inside of obscure dungeons. When you discover a new HD, roll 1d12 and add the number rolled to your maximum and current hit points (HP).

When your hit points are reduced to 0, you die. You reincarnate with all your equipment, no wounds, and at your maximum HP within 1d10 miles of your place of death. When you reincarnate this way, half of your HD (rounded up) are left in place of your corpse. If you ever run out of HD upon death, you leave behind a corpse suspect to the whims of whoever or whatever killed you.

What does this do? HD are a form of treasure separate from magical items or coins that can and should be sought out if the players want to become powerful. Losing your HD sucks, but you have incentive to go and find them, creating an emerging story of revenge or retrieval. It has interesting world-building implications as well. What is an HD? Is it a Dark Souls-esque soul-flame? Are they vials of blood? Are they roses that must be made into tea and drank? Are they drugs that must be imbibed? This leads to things like kings hiring adventures to go bring them back hordes of HD, leading to new adventure dynamics, new enemy goals, etc.

In short, this small mechanical change completely changes how a game is played and adds a lot of unique spice to a game.

Bonfires from Dark Souls, or something similar, can be used instead of the 1d10 miles concept.

I'll be making a lot of death mechanics like this for the game I'm making, and they'll become a feature in the games I run as well. Death is the last frontier for living creatures--might as well explore it!