How does Fear carry between sessions (and how I track it)?

Campaign tables argue about last week’s Fear more than they argue about HP. The rules are short: Fear carries between sessions, and the pool has a cap. The habit is the hard part. If you do not record the number, you invent it next week and the cliff you built dies.

Rules in one breath

Fear stays in your pool from session to session up to the cap. You do not wipe to zero because the calendar flipped. Rest and Duality still feed it during play. The book owns the exact cap number, and this post is about the habit.

How I record and reopen

Session end, before snacks leave the table: I count Fear tokens, write the number on the campaign sticky, and photograph the pad if we are online. Session open: I place that many tokens before anyone rolls Duality. I say the number out loud once. No debate. If someone remembers differently, the sticky wins.

At a physical table I keep tokens in a dish and the number on the sticky. On a VTT I use a visible Fear counter in the shared frame and the same sticky in the campaign note. The habit is the same either way, and I do not spawn a second system.

Bank for the boss vs spend-down

Banking Fear into a climax is a choice, not a moral failing. I cover spend-down habits and adversarial spending in their own posts. Carryover is only the ledger. A Fear cliff at session end is its own craft. Here you only keep the number honest so that craft can work.

Campaign arc example

The prologue of our Motherboard campaign ran for three sessions, and we play it online, so the sticky is a Fear counter in the VTT plus a line in my campaign note. Night one closed on 4 Fear after a long opening of character introductions, and the note said 4. Night two opened on 4, gained more when the party took a short rest inside a scientist’s lab, spent hard when a huge bot smashed through the lab wall, and closed on 6. Night three opened on 6, and I spent it on remnants chasing the party through the streets of the city. Without the note, night three would have started soft and the chase would have lied.

Tonight

End with a number on paper. Open by placing tokens. Say the number once. Trust the sticky over memory.