Legendsmiths

Yes. Encumbrance is handled differently than in H6E to be a little more realistic, but without adding complexity. My standard Hero heroic export is here (and has lift/enc) Narosia is here:

Sorry for the intrusion @Tywyll but if you are trying to use HD for Narosia be sure to use the Narosia templates, rules, prefabs, and export formats. The Narosia export formats have the essence stat as well as handle encumbrance. for non-Narosia, I made an export format that follows standard Hero encumbrance as well. They’re both posted on the HD export formats site.

Signature items are not independent. You get the points back into your attunement pool, even if the item is lost or destroyed. as for the time it takes to play cards, well that varies. Usually it’s a failed roll followed by a pause as the player looks at their cards, thinks, and then shares a sentence or two to justify the card play. 1-2 minutes. But that’s also not just during combat. Ideally it’s not some extraneous anecdote as well. Playing a card should be tied to the current storyline/adventure. I’ve run a lot of Narosia, including for people who’ve never played Hero before. The Ruins of Baradahm adventure in the book is a good example. There are 3 fights in there (possibly 4, but I always skip that one in convention play) and I can intro the world, the characters, the cards, and complete that adventure in 4 hours. I’ve run that adventure in DCC, Fate, and 3.5 D&D and it still takes 4 hours. While Hero combat is detailed I don’t consider it slow. Enhancing the combat with divine intrusion is fun and makes better stories. If your Hero combats are taking long, make sure they are interesting. Players don’t care as much if the combat is exciting and filled with fun choices. Card play is a storytelling mechanic that does enhance the story. If you eliminated the storytelling element and just made it a mechanical choice, it loses its purpose. Fate mechanics that have no usage requirements become just another mechanic in the game for players to tweak or min/max. By giving the fate points a narrative requirement players won’t always be able to spend a fate point. If you wanted to play without the narrative, I would suggest that you just ply with tokens and allow people to spend more than one if they want (still using the Divine Effects Table).

You can unattune to Signature Items and then those points go back into your attunement pool. p363 the cp cost for sig items is just to differentiate them from regular magic items. The text on the cards is meant to inspire how to use a particular aspect of that god. You should not use the text directly in your narrative of why the Enaros wants to help you. The villains do not benefit directly. I have played sessions where the GM gets cards (1 per player works) for the adventure. It changes the dynamic—it does reinforce the Enaros as not always being on the players’ side, but it can create conflict between players and GM as well as diminish the value of their cards. It certainly works and I considered including that guidance in the game but the approach and mechanic was already a lot for many players that hadn’t played with a fate mechanic, let alone one where they had to role play a god to justify the fate intrusion.

1 per 3. As for other powers, of course it's buried in a sidebar "HERODESIGNER Building a Spell or Orison in HERODesigner requires a Cost Multiplier of 0.2 to calculate the ESS or MAG correctly. The only exception is the Power Dispel; it has a Cost Multiplier of 0.33 since Narosia uses the BODY value on the dice instead of the total value." So, that 30 real cost would result in an "energy" of 6. With an energy of 6, the cost of attunement would then be 2. The reason the energy cost is needed is if you were to try and dispel that object, then you would need to generate 6 BODY when you rolled your Dispel dice. I spent a lot of time trying to build the system to assume the common abuses that can be made around character enhancements, especially with respect to Characteristic or Skill bumps. Be very mindful of that. The stock Hero rules end up making that way too cheap for the impact in a heroic game. For example, +4 SPD is only 40 active points and even with no limitations would be 8 energy (or EFF or MAG as a spell or orison). But, built with Aid, and Enchantment +2, that would cost 126 active points, and have a ESS of (using .2 mult) of 25 which is way beyond what wizards are capable of. Further, as an item (Boots of Speed let's say), this would also go beyond the maximum energy since 26 character points tops off the chart at 13 energy (meaning you could have boots that give +2 Speed, and that would be powerful--at the heroic level it certainly is). To say it another way, break the rules with care. For most of the common effects there is a spell or orison that replicates it or it's an Item Enhancement. Attunement Points Points allocated to one item can be used to attune to a different item later, but once points are committed to item Attunement they cannot be used for any other purpose. (p. 359) Of course, it's your game. We just found during our campaigns that this made sense and made players think about whether they wanted to attune to an item in the first place. Granting Skills p. 266. You assume a characteristic of 0, so 3 points gets you a 9- roll. Build it up from there. When building items, it's an Item Enhancement, so getting Riding 12- for a magical saddle is 3 points for base skill of 9-, 6 points for +3 = 12- at a total of 9 character points. On the Item Enhancement table that's 5 energy. Do I Need The Cards (Duke Bushido) Of course you do The good news is you can print, cut, and put them in sleeves for pretty cheap. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/140179/Narosia-Divine-Intervention-Cards Seriously though, no you don't. The intent of the cards is to get the gods involved in your game. The gods are a big deal in Narosia and that's one of the things that sets the setting apart from other settings is HOW we get the gods involved in play. You could do it just using tokens. If you spend a token, you get a 1 pip effect. If you tell a story of why a god is helping you in this situation and which of their aspects comes into play, you get 2 pips. Have a bag of about 50 tokens and use an additional 12 different colored tokens to represent Divine Favor. When someone draws that token treat it as a 3 pip token. Track Celestial Favor as a stat and when someone pulls a Divine Favor have them roll 1d6 plus 1d6 for each 3 full points of Celestial Favor: if any of these come up as 6s, they actually have a 4-pip Celestial Favor instead of a 3 pip. That should get about the same involvement (but you lose out on the card aspect of Enaros growing tired of watching one character and changing their focus). You can also just play it straight old school, with no fate mechanic. It's your game

Answering above questions: 1. yes, the cost of prerequisites to be a Hierophant are the justification for reduced cost (relative to normal Hero rules). 2. Regular magic items have an attunement cost of 1-4 CP based o. The energy of the item (p 359) 3. You can unattune to a signature item. 4. Skill bonus: basically a +1 to skill is 1 Energy (see blade of the acrobat p 362). I tried to make common effects like that line up smartly with the way Energy is calculated (and EFF and MAG). Skill bonus is facilitated by Aid with the Enchantment +2 advantage. Which basically works out to 1 energy per +1 skill

With respect to Heroic Abilities, sidebar at the start of that section (p. 134): So they are built properly, we just apply a cost divisor to give it a sensible cost for heroic level games. You have to be a Hierophant to get these abilities in the first place, which is already a significant cost. This cost multiplier optional rule (which is a Hero invention, not mine) is used extensively where appropriate to keep things at a manageable point level for heroic level characters. Magic items, signature items, and more. The only major errata I'm aware of is the Starting Wealth table on p.193 and you'd only run into it if you started as a Guild Member. There is a column missing. It should be: LEVEL MONEY SOCIAL GUILD 1 +75s +100s +50s 2 +150s +200s +100s 3 +300s +300s +150s 4 +600s +400s +200s 5 +1,250s +500s +250s 6 +2,500s +1,000s +500s 7 +5,000s +2,000s -- 8 +7,500s +3,000s -- 9 +10,000s +4,000s -- 10 +12,500s +5,000s -- You can pick up the HeroDesigner files here in the Hero Store. Every power, equipment, spell, orison and so on is included.

Thank you. I’m glad you liked it. They reach those costs by design but not by fiat. You can see all the glorious details in the HeroDesigner files. As for errata, I’ve got a couple of notes but other than the guild status perk table I don’t recall reports of anything significant. One of my objectives with Narosia was to simplify the presentation of Fantasy Hero by reducing a lot of repetitive power modifiers and such. I had to balance that with clarity with respect to how Hero is communicated. That’s why it might appear different than other Hero books but hopefully it’s not too off-putting or confusing, especially since that’s the opposite of my intent.

Thank you very much. One of the things I am very happy with is the equipment section, and that is very portable. I spent a lot of time (and spreadsheets) on balancing weapons and armor in a way that would be familiar to Hero gamers but tired to ensure that every weapon was unique and had purpose. That armor worked piecemeal for unique combinations. The equipment stuff is very portable to any setting, as are things like our approach to the cost of magic items, a different way to cost spells, critical hits, and stuff like that. It is still very much a toolkit so I'm glad you were able to find uses for the content for your own work.

I think something on the level of Living Arcanis might be feasible (for Champions). They are large enough to be at regional cons (they are at U-Con in Ann Arbor every year), and they are always busy, but not at the PFS or AL level. I think that is a reasonable expectation for size of an organized play system, something that I think would be key to the success of the efforts described above. However, what surprises me is that we haven't seen something like this for Mutants and Masterminds, a supers game that objectively gets played more than Champions. None the less, if the numbers from Living Arcanis come in at say 4 authors, 6 regional managers, 2 web support staff, and then the need to draw about 50 players per regional con, plus an expectation of at least monthly games in 50 cities nationwide we might be able to get something going.

@Christopher R Taylor I couldn’t agree more. That does require us to agree on a setting and I think that’s been the biggest challenge. We all have different ideas on what magic should be like, monsters, metaplot, etc that I don’t know if it’s possible to do that from a fantasy perspective or even a Champions perspective. There is a critical mass required to make that happen and I don’t know as achieving that mass is realistic.

I'm sorry to hear that. The intent was very much to make a stand-alone product that used the Hero System as its engine but did not require the core books to play. Part of that was to attempt to create a magic system that didn't feel like super powers. I had also hoped that the structure of the book was instructive to non-Hero players (but maybe because of that it was confusing to Hero vets). I've got 2 Narosia adventures mapped and tested (and linked together), with one of them sitting at 60K words. As we've been exploring the market and what gamers in general are looking for, it hasn't been clear what our development path looked like. Narosia was a lot of work to build a stand alone engagement point for fantasy gamers, not unlike Jolrhos, Kamarathin, and even FHC. It was also an experiment to see how we could approach that challenge. Originally our pitch was to do something built only on Basic, but that quickly became impractical as the setting evolved. I ended up developing a Fantasy Hero Quickstart back in the Legion of Heroes days for convention play/teaching. It is a generic version of the Quick Start rules in Narosia and would enable me to have a table of 6 players build a unique fantasy character and then we'd do a short adventure, finishing in 4 hours. I had a ton of fun running that, and the players enjoyed it. I think I even have a podcast video recording of an online demo of it. I focused on trying to make something that was core Hero (unlike Narosia's magic) but simple and flavorful (like arcane magic and divine magic are different). I'm looking at the PDF now and wish I had finalized it (I still may). But here's the challenge--everyone's fantasy is different. Narosia is a perfect example--that's the style of fantasy that I and my group like to play. But we like D&D too, and part of this hobby is the shared experience. Who hasn't shared stories of their first run through a classic module in D&D, or Champions? Establishing a catalyst for shared experience is hard. I believe that why we keep coming back to D&D style play--people know it and, in general, like it. Selling someone on a different kind of fantasy is really, really hard and usually requires a hook: like a setting. Then that means you have to get them to engage in the setting independent of the rules, so now we're kind of stuck. If we work to create a FH product (or any genre for that matter) that is engaging, what's the hook? How fun the game is to play once you have mastered the rules? Unfortunately, that's the Hero System default and that's a barrier to entry. Is the hook then a unique take on non-D&D fantasy? Well, that's a different challenge--and we'd all like to create the next Numenara. Some of us try to strike a balance, like I did in Narosia (new, yet familiar; streamlined, yet detailed), but it's hard to succeed that way. I don't know what the answer is, and I know I'm not the only one that has tried it. There are amazing creators in this community, that have contributed a lot over the years to bringing new people into the fold in concert with all of the efforts of the Hero System Team. I know we have looked at this from multiple angles and executed on those strategies. My take on the state of things is Hero is a hobby game. When you play it, you invest in it. You tweak it. You have homework between games, building new powers and developing your character. That's time in addition to time at the table. The state of the industry today is players want to show up to play, start playing quickly (no 2 hour character design effort), play hard, and then walk away to do something else. They are as gamer as gamers ever were, but they want to play all the things which means they don't have time to be hobby gamers in the same sense that many of us Hero Grognardians have been. Selling Hero to them is a hard sell because its a different mode of play that what they are used to and many of those games that give them their current gaming experiences are good. D&D 5E is an amazing evolution of that game, but it is just enough of an evolution to be more engaging. Could Hero evolve in the same way? I don't know. If it could it would have to be a focused, company-driven effort.

This subject is near and dear to my heart, and I tried to build my solution into Narosia. 1. All or Nothing Per-Wound Healing. This means you track BODY damage per wound and you must generate enough BODY, all at once, to heal the wound. Multiple attempts are allowed, but will likely cost you resources you don't necessarily want to use. 2. Can Heal Disabling Effect (+1/4). I got rid of the Can Heal Limbs adder and made it a +1/4 advantage. This is important when combined with #1 above. 3. Require a Skill Roll (Only to Heal Disabling Wounds, -1/4). This means that relatively minor injuries, even impairing wounds, can be healed with magic, but Disabling wounds require a little more skill and care. Failing will result in the need for a Trasnform to fix it. 4. Scale the magic system within the scope of the campaign. Spells are acquired in a very specific way within the system. It is not possible to be capable of healing grievous injuries without a significant point investment. There is no 50 point healer out there that can treat your shattered arm. In the context of the setting this is significant because serious injuries require drastic action, not just a trip to the local Hospice.

I agree with the thread. FH6 if you are already set with 6E. I really like Valdorian Age as a setting. It's light on content (in a good way) and easy to get a handle on. Turakian Age and Narosia require a bit of a investment of time to get into the world — Narosia hopefully a little bit less so If you are rolling your own, I like FH6 with the Azgandian Magic system for a good blend of Hero to D&D style. I think Magic will be your biggest challenge as there isn't a real unified approach to magic in Hero. The Grimoire is pretty well structured, but isn't really grounded in a specific world or framework and so sometimes doesn't feel as balanced as you might like. It is a great resource and with some solid campaign guidelines your players will be able to mine it and rebuild spells to fit your game. As DreadDomain mentioned, Narosia makes all of the decisions for building a campaign and establishing magic systems. The plus side of that is you can communicate the campaign constraints clearly. The down side of that is it is less flexible (in a classic Hero sense), but really only for the players (you gotta keep those grubby little dice throwers in line, I tell you what). Adversaries in Narosia basically just have to follow standard Hero rules and only have to conform to the magic subsystems if they are actually using those systems (i.e., demons can just have powers and don't need to be rebuilt using the Essence Shaping rules). I have used FH6 to run a Wilderlands of High Fantasy (City State of the Invincible Overloard) using a D&D-esque magic system, ran a Pathfinder Society Campaign (shortlived), and am now putting the finishing touches on converting Xcrawl. All of the tough campaign decisions around magic and fantasy elements were mined from FH6 (and FH5 as well). It is a fantastic resource.

Thank you, Ternaugh. I appreciate your review and it aligns with our intentions.

Actually, they can. Books will be available through IPR and retailers can order direct from CreateSpace. Will there be boxes of Narosia sitting at Alliance? That I don't know. We have some things to figure out there.

There is a simple answer and a far more complex one. Simple (for print) is either at HEROGames (after GenCon) or Legendsmiths.com For PDF should be this week (likely tomorrow) at HEROGames, IPR, and DriveThru. If I can figure out how to do a Kindle version, I will.

Cheeky monkey! I write what I know....

You will get emails. We are focused on print right now, to make it to GenCon. We have some little enhancements here and there for the PDF to make it as useful as possible, but both should essentially land next week.

For those not on social media: Narosia: Sea of Tears​ is ready for release at Gen Con​. After years of hard work and many bumps in the road we are ready. It is still going to be tight, but the book is finished. PDF will be available by GenCon and we should have books on site assuming nothing goes wrong with shipping (it is tight). I have to especially thank Craig Judd​, without whom this last push could not have been possible. Craig took over the layout and design of the project in the 11th hour and worked like a madman to make it happen with a skill and professionalism I look forward to engaging again in the future. Additionally, Matt Sturm​ stepped forged us some fantastic logos, imprints, and icons (for our iOS app). These past weeks have been a real push, and I am happy to finally be here. My family, with their love and support is also happy I am here. However, I can't ignore the journey and the many individuals that helped make this possible. First, the backers. As an avid Kickstarter​ supporter, I know how it feels when projects are delayed. There is never enough communication, and doubt creeps in. Throughout this process however I just remembered how I had faced so many trials before, and like that hike up a hill that never ends you get to the top in only one way — one foot in front of the other. Thank you, backers, for making this a reality and enabling us to lay the foundation for good things to come. Second, the team. Darren Watts​ took on the impossible task of wrangling this book out of my mind. He acted as guide, mentor, and editor — roles for which I am grateful. On the artistic side of things we had Universe-M​ providing the lion's share of the art, the cover, and the cards. We originally envisioned their art as the single source for the book, but our schedule made that ultimately impossible. Matthew Minor​ especially was key to the success of this project, working on the preview materials before and during the Kickstarter, and continuing to work with me even after Universe-M had moved on to other projects, finalizing the cards, and doing what needed to be done. Their style set the tone for the book which was then complemented by additional fantastic contributions by Victor P. Corbella Art​, Storn A. Cook​, Danilo Moretti​, Rossana Castellino Illustration​, and Craig Brasco. Third, all my playtesters. The list would be extremely long here, going back decades, and I thank them whenever I can. However, three individuals stepped up and helped contribute directly to development, editing, and finalization of the project: Alan Boberg, Shawn Dry, and Ryan O'Grady​. Ryan has also joined me in running Legendsmiths​ so that we can continue to produce great products. Fourth, my cartographers. The genesis of the world map happened over many years, ultimately formalized by Marc Tassin in a Campaign Cartographer​ map. That map evolved over the years, especially as the world grew, and was made into an old-school hex map by me (and available on our site). That hex map went to Keith Curtis​ to become the formal map of the world that is used and the book and on the site. Additionally, as a fan of old-school maps that I am, I worked with Matt Jackson (msjx.com) on the adventure map for the introductory adventure in the book. Finally, this project would never have happened without Marc Tassin​. Our collaboration on this project made the world live in a way that no other fantasy world has, at least for me. When we started crafting the world we had some key goals in mind, and I am happy to say this product achieves them all. The world is supposed to be both new and familiar at the same time and that the metaplot fits neatly in the GM and player's heads, especially the world history. This is especially important when players are expected to adopt the role of the gods and improvise a narrative that lines up with the current story and the history of the world. A 300 page "history book" doesn't get that done, and for all the discussions, arguments, debates, and hard work that went into it I hope we have achieved that goal. Marc's professionalism and writer's craft form the foundation of this book, and I am so thrilled to bring his creativity to light in this book. Thank you, Marc. See you all at GenCon.

Done, and done!. The book is finished and in proofing right now. Timeline shows we will have it by GenCon. See you there!