Editing Unwritten: System Reference Document/Aspects and Fate Points (section)

==Consequences==

A consequence is more permanent than a situation aspect, but not quite as permanent as a character aspect. They’re a special kind of aspect a character might take in order to avoid getting overwhelmed in a conflict, and they describe lasting injuries or problems that you take away from a conflict. Consequences stick around for a variable length of time, from a few scenes to a chapter or two, depending on how severe they are. Because of their negative phrasing, you’re likely to get compelled a lot when you have them, and anyone who can justifiably benefit from the consequence can invoke it or create an advantage on it.

Consequences come in three levels of severity—mild, moderate, and severe. Each one has a different shift value: two, four, and six, respectively. On your character sheet, you have a number of available consequence slots.

A character can receive a consequence as a result of one of the following situations:

* Being the target of an excelled Advantage action (see p. 135)
* Succeeding at a cost (see p. 143)
* Making a sacrifice

===Making a Sacrifice===

When you are out of fate points and want to make one final effort as a last resort, you can make a sacrifice. To make a sacrifice, you describe what you are doing to push yourself beyond your ordinary limits. Then, you place a consequence on yourself that fits the situation at hand— he GM gets a free invoke on the consequence. In exchange, you get a number of fate points. You can only take a consequence in an available slot (i.e. if you only have one Minor consequence slot, you cannot take another).

Consequence	Fate Points
{| class="wikitable"
|-
| Minor || 1
|-
| Moderate || 2
|-
| Severe || 3
|}

===Naming a Consequence===

Here are some guidelines for choosing what to name a consequence:

Mild consequences don’t require immediate medical attention. They hurt, and they may present an inconvenience, but they aren’t going to force you into a lot of bed rest. On the mental side, mild consequences express things like small social gaffes or changes in your surface emotions.

Examples: Black Eye, Bruised Hand, Winded, Flustered, Cranky, Temporarily Blinded.

Moderate consequences represent fairly serious impairments that require dedicated effort toward recovery (including medical attention). On the mental side, they express things like damage to your reputation or emotional problems that you can’t just shrug off with an apology and a good night’s sleep.

Examples: Deep Cut, First Degree Burn, Exhausted, Drunk, Terrified.

Severe consequences go straight to the emergency room (or whatever the equivalent is in your game)—they’re extremely nasty and prevent you from doing a lot of things, and will lay you out for a while. On the mental side, they express things like serious trauma or relationship-changing harm.

Examples: Second-Degree Burn, Compound Fracture, Gaping Wound, Crippling Shame, Trauma-Induced Phobia.

===Recovering from a Consequence===

In order to regain the use of a consequence slot, you have to recover from the consequence. That requires two things—succeeding at an action that allows you to justify recovery, and then waiting an appropriate amount of game time for that recovery to take place.

The action in question is an overcome action; the obstacle is the consequence that you took. If it’s a physical injury, then the action is some kind of medical treatment or first aid. For mental consequences, the action may involve therapy, counseling, or simply a night out with friends. For social consequences, you may need to do some ‘damage control’ to counteract the consequence.

The difficulty for this obstacle is based on the shift value of the consequence. Mild is Fair (+2), Moderate is Great (+4), and severe is Fantastic (+6). If you are trying to perform the recovery action on yourself, increase the difficulty by one.

Keep in mind that the circumstances have to be appropriately free of distraction and tension for you to make this roll in the first place—you’re not going to clean and bandage a nasty cut while an out-of-control fire rages around you. GMs, you have the final judgment call.

If you succeed at the recovery action, or someone else succeeds on a recovery action for you, you get to rename the consequence aspect to show that it’s in recovery. So, for example, Broken Leg could become Stuck in a Cast, Scandalized could become Social Damage Control, and so on. This doesn’t free up the consequence slot, but it serves as an indicator that you’re recovering, and it changes the ways the aspect can be used while it remains.

Whether you change the consequence’s name or not—and sometimes it might not make sense to do so—mark it in some way at the end of the current scene, so that everyone remembers that recovery has started. 

Then, you just have to wait the time.

* For a mild consequence, recovering consequences go away at the end of a scene.
* For a moderate consequence, recovering consequences go away at the end of a session.
* For a severe consequence, recovering consequences go away at the end of a chapter.

===Overwhelmed===

If a consequence is ever placed on you and you have no empty consequence slots, you are overwhelmed.