So You've Got Nightmares (in Forbidden Lands)

Near the end of our second session playing Forbidden Lands, my character was hit with a fear attack that knocked their Wits (normally 2) to zero, meaning they were Broken. This meant a roll on the Critical Injuries – Horror table. I rolled Nightmares for (1d6) 4 days.

Make an INSIGHT roll every Quarter Day spent SLEEPING. Failure means that the SLEEP doesn’t count.

This was the first time failure to sleep seemed likely, so I reviewed the rules—emphasis below is mine.

You need to sleep for at least one Quarter Day of each day. After one day without sleep, you become SLEEPY. Being SLEEPY has several effects:

• You cannot recover Wits, except through magic. If your Wits are Broken while SLEEPY, you must sleep for at least one Quarter Day to get back up again.
• You suffer one point of damage to your Wits each day. If this damage breaks your Wits, you collapse and sleep for at least one Quarter Day.
• As soon as you have slept for at least a Quarter Day, you are no longer SLEEPY, and you can recover Wits normally.

On that second bullet, I’m assuming the collapse is in addition to rolling another Horror. The Insight skill is backed by Wits, so this sounded like a potential death-spiral, where I become re-broken and have to roll for yet more Horror, some of which are far worse than Nightmares.

Thankfully this PC had one skill point in Insight, but these odds are still pretty poor.

Thankfully this came near the end of the session, so we adjourned for the evening, giving me time to have the lowercase-_i_ insight that before the Sleepy condition hits, I should spend the quarter-day just after this injury Resting, to recover my 2 points in Wits before being forced to risk nightmarish sleep. That gave me three dice to roll on that sleep, a 42% chance of success.

At the start of our third session, I got lucky on that first sleep roll. Mid-way through the session I got lucky on my second night of sleep.

That day I foolishly pushed a Wits-backed skill roll late in the day and took a point of Wits damage, forgetting the impact on my later sleep attempt. I didn’t rest before sleeping and then accidentally rolled three dice and got a success, but we realized the error and I rerolled just 2 dice (32% chance of success), and came up short.

By my reading of the rules now, I think I should have taken an immediate point of Wits damage and been broken yet again, collapsing in Sleep (again not guaranteed to count) and rolling again on Critical Injuries – Horror. In the moment we all forgot about the one point of Sleepy Wits damage, so I just crashed at the Inn while the rest of the party went to see about getting us out of town.

This game is challenging!