As well as the immediate impact of a wound on a character's body, a significant wound may also cause additional shock damage in the minutes and hours following, due to blood loss and systemic overload.
After the combat or situation in which the wound was received is resolved (e.g. typically an hour later), all characters who have received a wound that was initially more than a scratch, must make a dice roll using their WP+ Combat (including Toughness specialism). Failure in this dice roll results in the wound immediately increasing by one level due to shock damage (e.g. a Light wound becomes a Medium wound). If a Critical wound suffers Shock damage, it becomes fatal and the character dies. If a character has several wounds, he/she must make a dice roll for each wound (that is a Light wound or more serious) separately.
The basic difficulty of the dice roll depends on the severity of the wound (note that penalties for being injured apply to this dice roll):
| Wound severity | Difficulty |
| Light | 2 |
| Medium | 4 |
| Serious | 6 |
| Critical | 8 |
If the character receives medical attention (or applies it himself/herself) within an hour of being wounded, he/she will receive a bonus on the dice roll to avoid shock damage. Medical attention involves bandaging wounds, splinting broken bones, applying tourniquets, etc. The amount of bonus depends on how well the medic treated the wound. The medic must make a dice roll using his/her CO + Medicine (including First Aid specialism) at the difficulty based on the wound's severity (see above). If the medic succeeds in the dice roll, the wounded character will receive a bonus of +2 on his shock damage dice roll, plus a further bonus of +1 per two points by which the medic made his/her dice roll. NB success on this dice roll also prevents the wound from becoming infected.
See also: example of a wound