Heroic Tales SRD

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.

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.

What you get

• A5 formatted PDF
• A5 character sheet PDF
• PNG and SVG assets for all of the explanatory graphics in the SRD
• Markdown version of the SRD

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.

Heroic Tales System Reference Document copyright © 2022 by David Garrett. Licensed for use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.