Health is the distance between a character and the floor. Stamina is everything else — it pays for every action they take, it decides how hard they can push, and when it runs low it quietly makes them worse at their whole job.
Swinging a weapon costs stamina. So does defending, using an item, holding a racial stance, and casting a spell — a cast costs stamina and mana together, not one or the other. There is no free action in a fight except one, and we will come to it.
The pool is fed by Vigor, Focus and Resolve together, which makes it the one number that rewards a character who is not built entirely into a single corner. Two characters with the same weapon and the same skill can still fight very differently if one of them can afford three hard rounds and the other cannot.
Most actions are not a fixed thing you either do or do not do. When you give an order you also choose how much you are putting into it — Strike, Exert, or Unleash — and the extra stamina buys extra dice on the roll.
The exchange is deliberately unkind at the top. The first step up is cheap; each one after that costs more stamina per die than the last, so an all-out attack is several times the price of an ordinary one and buys only a couple of extra dice. Going all out is a real decision, not the obvious default, and a party that Unleashes every round will be in trouble by the fourth.
Every order shows you what it will cost before you commit it. Nothing is spent until the round is confirmed.
This is the part that catches people out, because the game does not announce it.
Below half, a character loses a die from every roll they make. Not just attacks — every roll: defending, searching, casting, all of it. Below a quarter, they lose two. And at zero they cannot act at all, which in the middle of a fight means standing there while things happen to them.
There is no message when a character crosses one of those lines. The only place it is visible is the status bars themselves, which carry marks at exactly the half and quarter points — those marks are the ladder. A bar that has dropped past a notch is a character who is now measurably worse at everything, and the fight will not tell you so.
The penalty is worked out once at the start of a character's round and holds for that whole round, so spending yourself down mid-turn does not make your later rolls this round any worse. It will have caught up by the next one.
Stamina returns on its own, slowly, in both places it matters. Every round of a fight gives a little back, and every step through the dungeon does too — walking is recovery. A party that takes the long way around arrives in better shape than one that does not.
And there is Rest, the one order in the game that costs nothing at all. It gives up the character's turn and returns a meaningful chunk — roughly what one all-out attack would have cost — on top of the round's ordinary recovery.
Rest exists for a specific reason: because it is free, it is the only order a character at zero can still give. A character who has bottomed out cannot attack, cannot defend properly, cannot cast — but they can catch their breath, and then do it again, and after a few rounds they are back in the fight. It is the way out of the hole, and it is the only one.
What Rest does not do is heal. It touches stamina and nothing else: health below half needs real treatment, and mana does not come back by itself at all.
Stamina is not only a combat resource, and the dungeon knows it. Difficult ground — mud, water, rubble, anything the map marks as slow — takes stamina from every character who crosses it, the same amount from the strongest and the weakest alike. A hardy character feels it less only because their pool is bigger.
Worse, wading pays nothing back. The time spent crossing is time your torches burn and your spells decay, but nobody recovers a point while doing it. Wading is exertion, not a walk. You also cannot pitch camp in it, so it is not somewhere to stop and think.
All of which means the dungeon can decide how a fight goes before the fight starts. Something that jumps a fresh party is an encounter; the same thing jumping a party that just crossed a bog is a different problem entirely, and the dice will not be the reason.