Freelance Traveller

Medic’s “Red Bag”

by Scott Diamond

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2019 issue

Author’s Comment: This is an item for players who are the designated medic of the group, or one can be sitting in the ubiquitous Ship’s Locker as part of mandatory safety gear required for carrying passengers. Or something like that.

Players playing medic characters should record what they put “in” the bag and mark off consumables. The bag gets more compact as TL increases, but while the tools might get more tech-y they still do the same job for game purposes and for marking off how many supply sets there are. The “average” Red Bag will be about the size of a small duffel or medium sized backpack.

Personal first aid or combat trauma kits can be treated as a single-use item that does the same things as a Red Bag’s aid set, but only once.

The kit has all the supplies needed to treat and stabilize wounded personnel. The kit contains scalpels, extra blades, suturing needles and assorted thread (wire and dissolving fiber), scissors, forceps, probes, and tweezers. There are bandages and dressing materials to supply the kit’s number of treatments. The kit also has an injection gun for administering medication.

The kit has a limited amount of consumable supplies for treating wounded characters. For every first aid attempt made on a character, a set of supplies is used whether the attempt is successful or not. Included in these sets of supplies are cleaning, dressing, bandaging, and medication materials. Once the kit is empty of these sets the medic cannot treat characters who are severely wounded (two attributes at zero), but may still treat others at a -1DM.

When a character is treated the medic will roll for success. Success results in some attribute points being restored and the character stabilized. While as many rolls can be made as supplies are available, success can only be effective once per combat situation as far as regaining points. It does still need to be made to achieve stabilizing the wounded character if additional wounding occurs that leads to zeroed attributes. In these cases, the character is stabilized and they will not degrade further from bleeding or shock. Recovery will require further, more advanced treatment.

Sets cost 300 Cr. each to replace. The typical “red bag” has ten to fifteen sets, depending on TL (TL10 and below have ten sets; TL11+ have a number of sets equal to TL). The cost of a fully-equipped new “red bag” is the cost of its sets plus Cr500.

The kit also has room for extra medications to be stored for used beyond the ones used in each aid set. The exact medications are up to the user, but generally consist of extra Medical Drug, Medical Slow, Fast, No-Shock, Anti-REM, and various painkillers. List those and their dosages on your record sheet.

All consumables should be kept track of by the user to ensure proper supplies are available and possibly for billing purposes. A sample record sheet appears to the left, but feel free to create your own.