Song of Heroic Lands is a classless, skill-based fantasy roleplaying game. There are no levels and no archetypes to pick between: a character is described by the capacities they were born with, the skills they have trained, the people who will vouch for them, and the marks the world has left on them. What follows is the whole of how that character is described, and how the dice answer for them when the outcome of something is genuinely in doubt.
What these rules cover
Everything needed to run a game: how an uncertain act is resolved, what a character is made of, how a fight goes and what it costs, how wounds and sickness and fear run their course, and how the supernatural is carried and performed. They are deliberately compact — one small set of procedures answers every question in the game, and the chapters that follow are almost all applications of it.
Two things are deliberately absent. Setting is not here: no gods, religions, guilds, schools or histories, because those belong to a particular world and none is assumed. And the finer procedures of a long campaign — trekking, weather, trade — are left to the setting material and to the group. Setting modules supply what a world needs; the rules supply the machinery it runs on.
The rules and the table they are played at
These rules describe the game, not any particular way of playing it. They are written as though the whole of it were happening around a table with dice and paper, because at bottom it is.
Song of Heroic Lands also ships as an implementation of these rules for Foundry Virtual Tabletop, which keeps the books for you: it holds the character, tracks the wounds and the calendar, works out the modifiers, and offers you the tests these pages call for. How that implementation is operated — what it shows you, what it asks you, and what it keeps track of on your behalf — is described in the User Guide, and nowhere in these pages. Where the two ever differ, the rules are what the game is and the implementation is what needs fixing.
How to read this
Read the chapters in the order below. Each is written on the terms the ones before it defined, so read the first one properly even if you skim the rest.
- Resolution — the small set of procedures that answers every uncertain act in the game: Mastery Level, the d100 Success Test and its success levels, Opposed Tests, Success Value Tests, Secondary Mastery, and Fate. Every later chapter is written on top of the terms defined here, so read it first.
- Attributes — the innate capacities a character is born with, and the raw material every skill is built from.
- Skills — trained ability at some activity: which skills exist, what each is for, and how they attach to a character.
- Affiliations — standing with a body of people, and the credential that says not what a character can do but what they are entitled to do.
- Characters — the character as a physical body: its anatomy, where a blow lands on it, the health it carries, and what it is carrying.
- Gear — the catalogue: weapons, armour, containers, and the ordinary equipment of a life.
- Crafting — how the articles in that catalogue are made: the one routine every trade follows, and what a fine hand adds to it.
- Combat — the most rules-dense part of play, and the one with the most at stake. An exchange is a single contest between attacker and defender; everything else hangs off that comparison.
- Trauma — what a blow leaves behind, and everything else that harms a character: injury, bleeding, shock, sickness, fear, and the slow business of recovering from any of them.
- Esoterica — the supernatural, in two parts: the standing conditions a character is subject to (Mysteries), and the acts a character performs (Mystical Abilities).
- Bestiary — the creatures of the world, from animals to the undead.
The Glossary indexes every term these chapters define, and is meant to be jumped into rather than read: when a chapter uses a word as though you already know it, look it up there.
A note on compatibility
Song of Heroic Lands is an original work. It is intentionally compatible with HârnMaster: Roleplaying in the World of Kèthîra (HMK), published by Kelestia Productions Ltd., so that a group may play using those rules with this game — but no HMK content appears here, and everything in these pages is unique to SoHL. A group wanting the fuller procedures these rules leave out, trekking among them, will find them in HMK, available from kelestia.com. SoHL is not endorsed by, affiliated with, or licensed by Kelestia Productions Ltd.