Environmental (sometimes Personal)
Description: The character might be stumbling through the desert with the sun beating down on him, or running through the steam tunnels surrounding an old boiler room. This Tilt can also be personal, the result of a debilitating fever that spikes his temperature far above the norm. Extreme heat is normally anything above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), whether internal or external.
Effect: When the temperature is far above normal, char- acters can’t heal bashing damage — the extreme temperature deals damage at the same rate normal characters heal it (a cut might heal, but it’s replaced by sunburn or sunstroke). Supernatural beings and characters who heal faster than normal instead halve their normal healing rate. For every hour that a character is continuously affected by this Tilt, he accrues a -1 penalty to all rolls. When that penalty hits -5, he instead suffers a point of lethal damage per hour.
Causing the Tilt: This Tilt is usually caused by environ- mental factors — being out at noon in the desert, or spend- ing too long in a sauna or forge. Even a fever is the result of an infection, rather than something that an opponent can force on a character. It’s possible to create this Tilt on a given character: securing someone to a chair right next to an old, inefficient boiler, or stranding them in the desert far from any shade.
Ending the Tilt: The key to ending this Tilt is simple: get out of the heat. In a desert or similar environment, finding shade is paramount. Elsewhere, the character needs to escape whatever is causing the abnormal temperatures.