Armor is a promise. Break the promise, and everything after it is honesty.
The Stagger window is the most marketable mechanic in TPK’s combat, and the heartbeat of every fight.
Break and Wound
Weapons carry two numbers (see 01 Weapons):
- Break — spends the target’s Wind, then Guard (its Fortitude). Overkill Break is lost.
- Wound — a fixed amount of Vitals damage. It never scales with overkill, and it normally only lands when a blow breaks through.
Break and Wound are fully decoupled. Breaking is not damage — it is access.
Breakthrough → Stagger
A hit breaks through when its Break equals or exceeds the target’s remaining Fortitude. A Breakthrough deals the weapon’s fixed Wound, and a target whose Fortitude hits zero is Staggered. (Some crits force a Breakthrough outright, Fortitude be damned.)
While Staggered, Fortitude is zero — so every hit breaks through. No special rule; the window is simply that the shield is gone. Until it closes, every Wound in the party’s arsenal is live.
The Window Closes at Rally
Stagger is not forever. At the start of its next activation, a Staggered combatant Rallies: it stands, clears the Stagger, and refills Wind only — never Guard. The wall you broke stays broken, but the window snaps shut.
So the window is exactly as wide as the time between now and the target’s next move — which the party can read right off the tempo track. What you do with that beat is the whole game.
Suppress (the load-bearing support action)
Suppress holds a Staggered target down: its next Rally simply doesn’t happen. Fortitude stays at zero, the window stays open, and the Suppress is spent by the Rally it denied. It only works on a Staggered target, and it has a short cooldown — you can’t chain-lock forever with one character.
One Suppress is worth several attacks’ worth of Break the party doesn’t have to redo. When the window is open, Suppress is the best action in the game. This is the architectural answer to “why support?” and it must be well-telegraphed in UX.
The Exceptions
- Piercing weapons spend one Boon before rolling to convert a hit into a direct Wound through a full shield — no Break spent, Fortitude untouched.
- The Footpad, while Hidden, does it for free.
- A Rally’s Wind refill is still denied by Poison, Fatigue, or Winded — a poisoned target stands up with nothing.
Action Refunds
Momentum is rewarded. Your action is refunded by:
- a kill,
- any hit on a Staggered target,
- an invalidated target (it died or fled before your blow landed), or
- a Refund crit.
A refunded action is stolen time — it advances the clock by nothing and costs no recovery. This is what makes a coordinated window feel like an avalanche. (Multi-swing abilities never refund per swing — the extra swings are the payoff.)