Equipment in Fallen Empire is abstracted into an equipment bar. This represents the total amount of stuff that a character is travelling with. It is assumed that your character will prepare for adventures by exchanging, replacing, etc. items, and activities such as shopping for ordinary equipment are not played out.
Actual equipment is decided on-the-fly during the adventure, see below for Equipment On Hand.
This serves the purpose of speeding up gameplay and letting the game flow without interruptions for repetitive, ordinary activities. If characters wish to acquire special, unique or rare items, they can do so during the game or during downtime with the Downtime Activities > Acquire Asset activity.
At any time, your character can take a specific item out of his abstract equipment pile. Mark the item on the 2nd page of the character sheet. The total of equipment marked there can never exceed the number of boxes in the equipment bar you have. Once the total is reached, the equipment on hand selected represents your total equipment, for the time being.
Some rare or heavy items take up two equipment boxes.
Once selected, equipment on hand stays fixed until you use Downtime Activities > Restock or until the fiction dictates otherwise, such as when an item is destroyed as a consequence.
For the fiction it is assumed that your character has carefully selected the equipment beforehand. Abstracting equipment until the moment of use is a meta-abstraction to simplify and speed up gameplay - to get to the action instead of spending hours discussing what stuff to bring. We assume that the characters do have these discussions and spend time preparing, but that doesn't mean that the players have to do so.
This also means the character is assumed to have had this equipment with him all the time, or at least since the last reasonable opportunity to pick it up. As a consequence, the GM may not allow certain items if the fiction has already established that such items are not being carried, for example if the characters passed through guards and were searched for weapons.
A Stress > Flashback can be used to acquire a weapon past the guard checkpoint, for example by establishing that the character did an appropriate action in the past to prepare for this eventuality and hide a weapon somewhere.
In that case, the weapon can be marked as equipment on hand. Enough equipment boxes in the bar still must be available to do so.
The normal equipment bar shows how much stuff in total a character is travelling with.
When the adventure or a part of it is set in a location that the party can not at will exit to grab more stuff, such as a dungeon or when sneaking into the castle, etc. the GM will ask players to pick their load, representing the amount of stuff they will carry with them, with any remaining equipment being stashed in a safe place.
Mark this load with an X underneath the equipment bar. Also mark any already selected items on the Equipment On Hand list that are left behind. Note that if you have more items already selected than your chosen load, some items must be stashed.
For the duration that the party is away from their stash, the load marks the limit of Equipment On Hand that can be picked.
Your chosen load also determines your movement speed and conspicuousness:
A pack animal can carry 3 load. Count the total (including the animal) for conspicuousness, but do not count the load carried by the pack animal nor the animal itself for the purpose of movement speed.
Your character decides to go into the dungeon with a load of 4 plus his trusty mule. The animal adds one point to the load for the purpose of conspicuousness, making the total load 5 and the two looking clearly like an adventurer ready for a dungeon dive. However, for the purpose of movement speed, the mule doesn't count and neither do the 3 units it carries, so for movement the load is just 1 and the two can move quickly.
Coins are an abstract measure of money and valuables, such as a bag of amber, a handful of silver pieces, etc.
1 coin is enough to buy an ordinary item of equipment, a small bribe (about a week's wage for most ordinary folks), room & board for the entire party for one day or a day trip by coach or ferry.
Once spent, coins are gone for good.
Coins can be gained either using Downtime Activities > Work, or through loot and rewards from adventures. They can be spent in-game or to buy additional Downtime Activities.
The number of boxes on the character sheet are the amount of coins a character can easily carry around. If a character gains coins beyond this amount, he will have to stash them somewhere safe.
If a character spends coins to purchase an item, or acquires an item as loot, mark that item on the character sheet in a different way - it does not count towards the equipment limit. It does count towards load.
The character can keep these items with him until they are lost, given away, destroyed or otherwise removed from him. If damaged, they can be repaired using the Downtime Activities > Restock action.
When adventurers find valuables as loot, such as gems, jewelry, trinkets and other items not of use to them, the GM will often abstract these simply by their coin value. That doesn't mean the characters found actual coins, it simply abstracts away the details and the act of selling them after the adventure. For flavour and description, the GM will often describe what the valuables actually are, and then give their coins value.
In general, equipment follows common sense. If there is ever a question what an item can or cannot do, how large or heavy it is, etc. follow the most common sense answer. Here are some specific rules on specific equipment: