Source Player Core pg. 201
The cargo bay lights flicker. The hull groans under Rift-pressure. Your crewmate sprawls on the deck, blood pooling beneath torn armor, eyes glassy and unfocused. You have six seconds—maybe less—before they slip into the dying spiral. No time for the medical suite. No time for the autodoc. Just you, a half-empty medkit, and the desperate knowledge that doing nothing means losing them forever.
This is Administer First Aid in Starfall Galaxy.
It's not elegant surgery or precision diagnostics. It's jamming a coagulant patch into a wound while the ship shudders around you. It's forcing a stim-injector through cracked armor plating because you can't afford to waste time removing it. It's counting compressions while alarms scream and hoping the nanite foam you're using isn't expired.
Administer First Aid is the universal, untrained emergency response action in Pathfinder 2e—and in Starfall Galaxy, it represents the desperate, split-second interventions that keep crews alive when everything goes wrong. This two-action activity allows anyone, regardless of medical training, to attempt to stabilize a dying ally or stop life-threatening bleeding. It's the difference between a wounded comrade making it back to the ship and becoming another statistic in the void.
Unlike Treat Wounds (which takes 10 minutes and restores Hit Points) or Battle Medicine (which requires training and can't stabilize dying creatures), Administer First Aid is designed for the critical moments when someone's life hangs by a thread. It's fast, risky, and available to everyone—because in the harsh reality of Starfall Galaxy, you can't always wait for a trained medic.
Field medic performing emergency first aid in cramped Starfall cargo bay
Who Performs First Aid in Starfall?
In a galaxy where danger is constant and medical resources scarce, everyone learns the basics:
Scavenger Crews: Taught by veterans who've seen too many die from treatable wounds
Guild Trainees: Drilled in emergency protocols before their first Rift jump
Combat Veterans: Muscle memory from too many firefights and close calls
Street Survivors: Self-taught through necessity and countless near-misses
Rift Navigators: Trained to handle temporal bleeding and phase-locked injuries
Even Civilians: Commission public health broadcasts teach basic stabilization
The galaxy doesn't care about your qualifications. It cares whether you act.
Administer First Aid Untrained
Two Actions
Requirements You’re wearing or holding a medkit.
You perform first aid on an adjacent creature that is dying or bleeding. If a creature is both dying and bleeding, choose which ailment you're trying to treat before you roll. You can Administer First Aid again to attempt to remedy the other effect.
Stabilize Attempt a Medicine check on a creature that has 0 Hit Points and the dying condition. The DC is equal to 5 + that creature's recovery roll DC (typically 15 + its dying value).
Stop Bleeding Attempt a Medicine check on a creature that is taking persistent bleed damage (page 438). The DC is usually the DC of the effect that caused the bleed.
Success If you're trying to stabilize, the target loses the dying condition (but remains unconscious). If you're trying to stop bleeding, the target benefits from an assisted recovery (in the sidebar) with the lowered DC for particularly appropriate help.
Critical Failure If you were trying to stabilize, the target's dying value increases by 1. If you were trying to stop bleeding, the target immediately takes an amount of damage equal to its persistent bleed damage.
Non-Combat Applications and Narrative Uses
Administer First Aid isn't just for combat encounters—it creates dramatic tension in any high-stakes situation:
Scene Framing:
An NPC ally is dying while enemies close in—do you fight or save them?
Multiple crew members are bleeding out—who do you treat first?
Your medkit is nearly empty—do you use the last dose now or save it?
Forensic Evidence:
Failed first aid attempts leave telltale signs: scattered supplies, botched dressings, blood-soaked bandages
Successful stabilization bought time—but for who, and why?
The quality of medical supplies tells you about the victim's social status or guild connections
Training and Initiation:
Guild trials that simulate mass casualty events
Street gang initiations requiring new members to stabilize wounded comrades
Commission public health certifications (basic first aid for civilians)
Economic and Social Markers:
Quality medical supplies signal wealth or guild access
Black market first aid gear connects characters to criminal networks
Expired or counterfeit medical supplies drive desperate choices
Societal Impact in Starfall Galaxy
Universal Accessibility: The fact that anyone can attempt first aid reflects Starfall's brutal reality—waiting for trained help often means death. Commission public health initiatives teach basic stabilization, and even children on Frontier worlds learn to stop bleeding.
Guild Power Structures: While anyone can attempt first aid, success rates vary wildly. Guild-trained medics with proper equipment have far better odds than untrained civilians with expired supplies. This inequality shapes who lives and who dies.
Cultural Attitudes: Attempting first aid is culturally expected—failing to help a dying ally is grounds for social ostracism or worse. But botched attempts (critical failures) can haunt survivors, especially in tight-knit crews where everyone knows who made the fatal mistake.
Economic Pressure: Medical supplies are commodities. Healer's tools require maintenance and restocking. On struggling ships or impoverished stations, rationing medical supplies creates agonizing choices.
Rift Complications: Temporal anomalies, phase-shifted wounds, and Rift-taint make first aid unpredictable. Some injuries resist conventional treatment. Others respond to methods that shouldn't work. Medics learn to improvise—or watch patients die from "impossible" wounds.
Adventure Hooks
The Medkit Heist: A shipment of Commission-certified medical supplies is stuck in a customs lockdown, but your crew desperately needs them before the next job. Do you negotiate, bribe, or steal? And what happens when you discover half the supplies are counterfeit?
Triage Nightmare: A Rift breach floods a station with casualties—more wounded than your medical team can handle. PCs must make brutal decisions about who gets treatment first, knowing some will die waiting. NPC relationships and faction standings shift based on your choices.
The Cursed Medic: An NPC medic has an eerily perfect stabilization record—they've never lost a patient. Rumors swirl: Rift-touched luck, pact with cosmic entities, or stolen Chronologist tech? But when they ask the PCs for a dangerous favor, refusing might mean the next dying crew member doesn't survive.
Exam Under Fire: A guild certification exam requires candidates to stabilize multiple "dying" NPCs (actually actors with makeup) while hazards simulate combat conditions. But one actor isn't acting—they're genuinely hurt, and nobody else notices. Can the PCs spot the real emergency before time runs out?
The Black Market Doctor: A street doc offers to teach Advanced First Aid techniques in exchange for "a few small favors." The training is legitimate, but the favors connect PCs to a criminal network they can't easily escape. And when guild enforcers start asking questions, whose side do the PCs take?
The Weight of Six Seconds
Administer First Aid embodies the harsh calculus of survival. Six seconds to act. A single die roll between life and death. No guarantee of success, and failure can make things worse. But hesitation guarantees loss.
Whether you're a guild-certified medtech with cutting-edge temporal stabilizers or a scavenger with a half-empty medkit held together with duct tape, the choice is the same: act now, or carry the weight of inaction forever.
The galaxy doesn't forgive hesitation. But it remembers those who try.
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