Gameplay#

Game Pieces#

Powers: The various great forces in the world, including Cities, Conspiracies, and Champions

Hex: One space on the main world map. Hexes have a terrain type (below), up to one town, and up to 6 features.

Towns: A center of economic activity, populated by a mortal race. Each City power is centered on one town, though they likely control others as well. Towns have a Wealth attribute, which measures how much coin they generate when Taxed or Tended, and a Population attribute, which measures the number of souls that call it home.

Features: A special property of a hex, such as an Industry in a town, a dungeon or stronghold in the wilderness, the secret outpost of a conspiracy, etc.

Wilderness: Hexes without towns. These hexes tend to be less important, though they can still contain unique features.

Armies: A large group of soldiers with a shared origin and loyalties, a small cadre of magical monsters, or an individual titanic being. The basic component of the mass combat system.

Time#

The overarching story of a group playing Powers is called an Epic. An Epic is built of Books which each can take years in the game world and months IRL. Each Book will see the rise and fall of major adversaries, serving as a complete narrative arc. Generally groups will take a hiatus between Books to recharge and think about where they want to go next in the game, if they do decide to continue their story. Note that powers grow in strength and complexity over time, and this system is not designed to support powers that have grown for more than about three books without a reset of some kind. For instance, a city might develop into a sprawling empire, at which point its player switches to piloting an unrelated Dragon and two new players come in to run rivalrous princes who each inherited half of its territory.

Mechanically, Gameplay is divided into seasons and months, divided into the following phases:
Phases Each Month: Planning > Resolution > Resistance > Battle
Phases Each Season: Tidings > [Month] > [Month] > Cleanup

Planning: On their own time, players discuss plans amongst themselves and privately submit a set of actions to the GM. The submissions include the set of assets used in the actions, creating a dice pool that the player rolls, deciding how many consequences to accept in order to build a count of successes.

Resolution: The GM takes in the submitted actions and processes them, determining who succeeds and who fails, and announces publicly visible events.

Resistances: Some actions allow a power to resist by spending a reaction ↩️. Resistances must be declared shortly following the resolution announcement (~24 hours). To prevent things from bogging down in this step, you must resist alone. You cannot receive assistance or assets from other powers.

Battle: If any hex contains opposed armies, they fight. A pair of armies is opposed if at least one of their leaders decides that they are. See Warfare.

Seasons last two or three months. After the final month, there are two additional steps:

Cleanup: Statuses tick down. Mana dissipates. Mustered armies return to their garrisons.

Tidings: The GM prepares and releases a short announcement of events for the next season, which might include mechanical effects. New Adversaries appear. Powers perform various maintenance in this step, such as spreading influence and supporting armies, and may begin drafting actions for the next planning phase as soon as they are done.

Hidden Information:#

This is a game about plotting, alliances, and intrigue. Powers often complete secret acts to secret ends. At the same time, shared information grounds the narrative and makes it a more interesting experience. We balance hidden and public information in the following ways.

It is the GMs role to take in and dole out hidden information. No information should be hidden from the GM.

Actions: During Resolution, the dice pools, consequences, and results of Public actions are all declared publicly. The dice pools, consequences, and results of Private actions are not declared this way. Only those who can see a private action see its results - usually the owner, targets of a resolved ↩️ action, and declared collaborators. If a power can ↩️ to an action, they always learn the size of the dice pool rolled against them, but they don’t know if any of the dice are assured or critical, and they don’t know how many consequences were taken. For private actions that permit a ↩️, this is a private message.

Ambitions: The name and fame scores of ambitions are revealed publicly, but their details are not. The details can change the meaning of an ambition; for instance, the ambition “rescue the princess Adelaine” could come with the followup “and induct her into our vampiric order.”

Assets and Perks: Each power’s assets are hidden information, with the exception of industries (see Features below). Agents are unusual in that they can be a contact for multiple powers; they are still private from any other powers until something reveals them. Perks are public.

Armies: Armies are too loud and clumsy to permit much secrecy. Scores and keywords of visible armies are default public (some armies, such as those with Stealthy or those which are currently dispersed, are nonvisible).

Features: The built features of towns, such as their industries, are public information. Other landscape features can be public or private.

Resources: A power’s non-asset resources such as coin, respect, fear, and mana are private.

Shared Assets:#

Some assets, such as agents and Industries, can be shared between multiple powers, though they usually have once per season limit. When a power tries to use an asset that has already been used up, they are informed during the resolution step. Any dice rolled from the asset are removed, along with any consequences taken to activate them. This often means that getting undercut on a central asset can have devastating effects.

On the rare occasion that an asset’s decisions matter outside of an action, the GM gives choice over the decision to the power that has treated them best, assuming they still view any power favorably.

Players should feel free to coordinate on who can use a shared asset. Players should feel free to backstab other players by breaking these agreements.

Faces:#

This is a role-playing game in addition to everything else. Every game piece made of one or more mortals has a face, a character that can be RPd with; this character is called a face. Many faces will start and remain implicit: they don’t need to be specified until a player tries to interact with one. When a player or GM specifies a face, they provide the character with a small depiction, a few descriptive adjectives, and a few example lines of dialogue.

Players control and RP as the faces for the highest ranks of their power (for champions, this is simply the champion themself, whereas for cities it is the mayors of towns and the city rulers), their emissaries, and any loyal faces in their periphery. The Periphery are characters and organizations that you largely control but aren’t immune to manipulation and negotiation from other powers. These include Agents, Generals of Armies, Foremen of Industries, etc. A player can specify the faces of their periphery at any time, though they only get to make decisions for their loyal members; the GM RPs for non-loyal members of the periphery.