Water System news - Dead in Vinland

In Dead in Bermuda, water was just a simple counter: each character drank 1 water supply each day, so when the counter was below your number of alive characters, you were screwed. It was very basic, it was better than nothing, but mostly frustrating and not really realistic.

The interesting things when dealing with water in a survival situation, from our point of view, are:

• you can ration water between your companions when the stock is low, hoping that you find more later.
• you can sacrifice yourself and not drink for a day, to let other companions get your share.
• but you must take care: dehydration can cause death within a few days time.
• potable water management: you can find sources of water, but is it potable?
• containing water: the size of your water container is of importance.

Managing water is a bit different than food, because generally speaking you get a large amount at some point like when it’s raining or when you discover a source, you can assume it’s non perishable, but you must manage your reserves during a long time without resupply. That accentuated by the fact that no water means a much quicker death than no food.

So we think it’s quite interesting to have both systems running at the same time: they are similar, but different enough at the same time. And of course, they are interconnected in many ways, as we’ll see right now.

Water Pop Up – Work In Progress

So in Dead In Vinland, you’ll have to manage your water supplies like a true, critical resource that has many uses:

• You’ll have two containers: one for potable water, and one for non-potable water.
• You’ll be able to assign characters to this new Camp Structure, to send them fetch some non-potable water to a nearby river.
• You can also make water from other means, or just find some while exploring the island.
• You’ll be able to boil non-potable water into potable water, which will consume some of your prized Fire Intensity. But you can stock as much as you have room in your container.
• So any water found if your containers are full will be wasted.

The water you’ll stock will serve as other purposes than just hydrating your characters:

• You’ll need 1 water supply for each character that goes on exploring the island.
• You’ll need some water to cook some meals.
• And for some other activities, that we’ll talk in detail in another blog post.

Share the Drinks – Work In Progress

So each night, a “Share the Drinks” phase will be added to the cue of night events. A bit like the Share the Food phase, you’ll be able to ration potable water between your alive characters. It works like this:

• A character needs 1 ration of water supply to have his daily needs filled.
• You can give him/her more or less than 1 ration, but it has consequences:
  • If you give him less, he has a chance to get a level of Dehydration Trait. It’s part of our new Trait System, that I will disclose another time.
  • It’s not automatic: if you give him 1/2 ration, he has 50% to get a level of Dehydration.
• Reaching level 3 Dehydration, the character dies.
• You can also give a character more than he needs. With the same principle, if you give him double ration he will have 100% chances to lower 1 level of Dehydration.
• Of course, Dehydrated characters will get some passive maluses to its skills… It wouldn’t be fun otherwise
• You can only choose 1 share per night per character.

There are some more surprises left tied with the Water system that we didn’t talk about, making the whole thing all the more interesting and complex, but that’s for another blog post, so stay tuned!