Introduction

Heroic Tales is a genre-neutral role-playing system of heroic problem solving. It has a small, focused set of rules that is easy to pick up and learn, along with a modular set of subsystems that easily integrate to support many flavors of storytelling. What distinguishes it from other systems?

First, Heroic Tales is narrative — its mechanics are focused on the flow of the story rather than the tactical decisions of the characters. It has a universal conflict resolution mechanic so that the rules for resolving social interactions, combat, espionage, and any other type of challenge all work exactly the same way.

Heroic Tales manages character actions at the level of a scene or challenge rather than at the task or individual action level. This allows greater flexibility in how a player approaches a challenge and reduces the number of dice rolls needed to resolve a conflict.

Heroic Tales also supports both solo and team games. The conflict resolution mechanic scales from one player to six without any special adaptations.

Finally, Heroic Tales uses a dice pool, because rolling lots of dice is fun. In this system, players roll a set of six-sided dice (d6) in order to determine the results of their choices.

System reference document

This system reference document (abbreviated SRD) contains all of the available mechanics for the Heroic Tales system as well as guidance on how to use them to create your own game. It is intended primarily for game designers and homebrewers — not directly for players.

This entire SRD is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, which gives you the right to use as many or as few of the concepts and words as you’d like in your own games, settings, adventures, and other content, as long as you make a clear statement that your material is based on these rules.

To do so, add the following text wherever you put your own copyright statement:

This work is based on Heroic Tales (https://heroictalesrpg.com), designed and authored by David Garrett and licensed for use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) license.

If you’re publishing your work digitally, you can omit the printed URLs. As long as you adhere to these guidelines, you are also free to use the Heroic Tales icons to indicate compatibility with the Heroic Tales system.

Using this document

Much of the text in the SRD is intentionally written in second person so that you can simply copy and paste it into your own game document, should you so choose.

Designer comments are set apart from the rule text so that I can provide guidance and suggestions that you wouldn’t want to copy and paste.

Keywords are set in monospaced font in order to indicate that they have special meaning within the context of this game.