Field Trauma Card (Rock Lavey) Draft
A GURPS 4e no-lookup medical card, TL11. Practised by Rock Lavey. The direct analogue to Six’s Freefighting card: where Six’s signature is closing the distance and ending a fight, Rock’s is keeping a body going after everyone else has run out of ideas.
In one line: the best pair of hands on the station, minus the licence to use them, running elite trauma medicine off a kept kit and the refusal to lose one more.
What it is
Rock does not win firefights. He wins the ten minutes after the firefight, the stretch where a man is bleeding out on a deck plate and the difference between a scar and a corpse is whether someone who knows exactly what they are doing gets there in time. That is the whole of his combat value and it is enormous. He reaches cover, he sets the heavy case down, and he goes to work.
The engine under every number below is Healer 2 (B90), baked into all six of his medical skills, which turns a merely clever IQ-14 doctor into an elite one. On top of that sit three multipliers a GM should keep at the front of mind: Higher Purpose 1 (B59), +1 to any roll actively trying to save a life; Single-Minded (B85), +3 on a long focused task like a real surgery he can give himself over to; and his gear, the Crash Kit at +2 to First Aid and the First Aid Kit at +1. These stack in the situations that matter most.
The card — no lookup at the table
Every number here already includes Healer +2. Read the number, make the 3d6 roll-under, do not do arithmetic while someone is bleeding.
| Do this | Skill | Rolls at | With the stack | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop the bleed / restart him | First Aid/TL11 | 17 | 19 Crash Kit · +1 more if life-or-death (Higher Purpose) | The core action. Stabilise a dying patient, restore lost HP over time (B424). This, not a punch, is what he is for. |
| Read what’s actually wrong | Diagnosis/TL11 | 15 | + Intuition as a separate hunch (roll vs IQ 14) | Name the injury or illness before treating it (B424). Intuition (B63) is the diagnostician’s gut made mechanical. |
| Keep him alive long-term | Physician/TL11 | 15 | +3 if he can focus (Single-Minded) | Ongoing care, drugs, the not-dying-overnight roll (B424). |
| Right drug, right dose | Pharmacy/TL11 | 15 | — | Identify, compound, and correctly dose synthetic pharma (B411). |
| Where the body will break | Physiology/TL11 | 15 | — | Knows human anatomy cold. Also underwrites called-shot medicine and interrogation-by-anatomy if it ever comes to that. |
| Cut, on purpose | Surgery/TL11 | 14 | +3 focused; −5 improvising off a Crash Kit alone | The real thing, needs the surgical case (B223). Long, focused work is where Single-Minded shines. |
| Feel it coming | Danger Sense / Intuition | 12 | Detect Lies 12 · Body Language 13 | Often lets him get the crew clear before initiative is rolled. The clinician who notices the wrong vital notices the wrong room. |
Numbers use Rock’s current sheet (First Aid 17, Diagnosis/Physician/Pharmacy/Physiology 15, Surgery 14, all with Healer 2 in). If IQ ever rises to 15, every medical number here rises with it at once, which makes IQ his single highest-value buy exactly the way DX is Six’s.
The two things that make him more than a medkit
Photographic Memory (B51). Perfect recall of charts, faces, and doses, roll vs IQ 14. He does not forget a patient, a poison, or the man who was standing wrong at the back of the bar three days ago. Pair it with his people-reading (Detect Lies, Body Language, Lip Reading) and the “sharp eye” the crew relies on is a real, mechanical thing, not a personality note.
The Vow and the Higher Purpose, together. He cannot refuse a hurt person (Vow, Minor), and he gets +1 to every roll made trying to save a life (Higher Purpose 1). Read side by side, those two traits are the whole man: the compulsion that drags the crew into trouble is the same wiring that makes him brilliant once the trouble arrives. A GM can lean on either end.
The hard limits (so the table plays him honest)
- He owns no gun and fights at skill 10. Brawling 10, Guns 10, no carried firearm (sheet). He buys distance with Dodge 8 (11 retreating) and puts a bulkhead between himself and the threat. He does not trade blows and he does not win by fighting.
- HP 10, DR 0. He is as fragile as the people he saves. Cover and the crew’s guns keep him upright, nothing on his own body does.
- Noisy −2 and the heavy case. The full surgical kit is ~33 lb, which is Light encumbrance just to carry, so he sets it down to work or to move under fire. And he is loud on his feet, a real penalty to going unheard.
Advancement
Current call: bank earned XP toward IQ 14 → 15 [20]. It is the single highest-value buy on the sheet, +1 to every medical skill, every perception roll, and Will at once. Roughly four sessions of XP at +5 a session, and it lifts the entire card above in one purchase. Do not dribble it into single skills before then.
After IQ 15, the priorities in order of how much they change a bad night:
- Surgery to 15+ [2/level] — the one skill still sitting at IQ+0 is the one you least want to fail. Buying it clear of the improvisation penalty makes real cutting reliable instead of a gamble.
- Esoteric Medicine or Physician up as the campaign’s injuries dictate.
- A second point of Higher Purpose or Healer 3 if Tim allows it, though both are pricey and the returns taper.
All of the above is post-approval advancement. The base build is Jay’s, transcribed from his GCA sheet, and awaits Tim’s ruling (see the open rulings).
See also
- Rock Lavey — the character sheet (Skills, Advantages, Combat Action Chains)
- Freefighting (Spacer Kung-Fu) — Six’s equivalent card, the model for this one
- Wu Medical Board - Notice of Erasure (Lavey) — the licence this skill outlived
- Six — the wordless debt: the one patient Rock chose to save by saying nothing