Attributes & Characteristics

Your characteristics include everything recorded on your Hero Sheet—your aspects and ideals, what you wear and carry, and how you communicate. The four attributes—Awareness, Spirit, Strength, and Grace—are your hero’s foundational characteristics, reflecting their basic mental and physical qualities, as well as their current condition. They serve as defenses against hostile actions. And they’re resources you can “spend” to empower your actions and abilities—though doing so leaves you more vulnerable.

Jump to a subsection:

Attributes in Play

Awareness (AWA) is your vigilance and sensory acuity. Awareness helps you notice things or focus on your advanced abilities.
Spirit (SPI) is your willpower and self-confidence. You use spirit to invoke your ideals and resist soul-magic.
Strength (STR) is your physical might and constitution. The stronger you are, the more lethal damage you can withstand and inflict.
Grace (GRA) is your agility and poise. The more grace you have, the better you can dodge attacks or otherwise avoid getting hit.

Attributes are also components of your action dice, weight, and Life.

Action Dice

The size of each action die is the sum of its two component core attributes, rounded down. You can see the pattern by arranging the attributes and action dice like a compass rose. Having high Awareness, for example, yields larger Maneuver and Compel dice.

Weight

Your weight is usually the same as your core Strength. Some characters weigh a bit less or more; very large or dense creatures (like Shinarians) can weigh a lot more. Weight is measured in talents, with 1 talent roughly equal to 50 pounds or 23 kilograms; a weight of 3 is average.

Life

Your Life represents how much injury you can sustain. It’s determined by the following formula:
Life = Spirit + Strength + Weight

Your Hero explains how to choose and calculate these characteristics in more detail. It also covers your level and marks of experience you gain as you go on adventures.

Attributes in Play

Each attribute has two values: current and core. Your current attributes are dynamic—they’ll go down and back up during play, so be prepared to keep track of them. Your core attributes don’t change and serve as maximum values for your current attributes.

Current vs. Core. When rules refer to awareness, spirit, strength, or grace, lowercase, they refer to current attributes: “take -1 awareness.” If a rule deals with a core attribute, it will say the word “core” and capitalize the attribute: “core Strength.”

Quick & Slow Attributes

Awareness and Grace represent your moment-to-moment condition—your attention and your footing. You recover these attributes quickly, when you catch your breath for a few moments. Spirit and Strength represent longer-term reserves—your mental willpower and physical endurance. You recover these attributes slowly, when you rest for a few hours. Actions and abilities that expend strength or spirit are more powerful than those that expend grace or awareness.

Reducing Current Attributes

Many actions and abilities require you to “take -1” to a given attribute. You can’t reduce an attribute below 0 by intentionally expending it this way. Damage, on the other hand, is unintended attribute loss. Damage is explained more in the next section.

Reducing Max Attributes

Some abilities, items, and effects reduce a current attribute’s maximum value. For example, wearing a helmet reduces your max Awareness by 1. Reducing a max attribute doesn’t reduce the core attribute. It simply caps the highest value your current attribute can reach. Write a reduced max attribute alongside your core attribute—for example, 4/5.

Overflow

Some abilities and effects grant overflow for an attribute or for life. Overflow raises a current attribute or life above its maximum. Many abilities let you perform special endeavors during a rest that generate overflow attributes. For example, ✪Song of Heroes, an ability in the Song lore, lets you compose a song during a rest as an endeavor that you can perform with your allies to generate overflow spirit—if you perform well.

Overflow stacks from multiple abilities or effects.
But you can't have more than +5 overflow for any given attribute

The Recovery & Rest section has more information about resting and endeavors.

Damage & Deathmarks

Damage is a forced reduction to a character’s attributes or life. Attacks and many other actions inflict various kinds of damage.

Awareness damage represents being distracted, blinded, or deafened.
Spirit damage represents being shaken or mentally overwhelmed.
Strength damage represents exhaustion or illness.
Grace damage represents being staggered or knocked off balance.
Life damage represents potentially lethal wounds—serious cuts or bruises that can’t be shrugged off.

In most cases, actions say what kind and how much damage they inflict. For example, an Attack with a spear might inflict “–1 grace, –6 life.”

Double damage, such as from a Jump-Attack (YAAH!), multiplies before adding any extra damage from abilities.

Excess Damage

Damage that would reduce an attribute below zero instead becomes another type of damage:

Spirit → Strength → Life
Awareness → Grace → Life

Excess damage “flows down” on your Hero Sheet’s layout.

Fall Damage

Fall damage is grace damage you suffer when you fall onto a surface from on high. It is the sad fate of heroes who Jump-Attack (YAAH!) a foe and miss. Some dark magic spells also inflict fall damage. Because excess grace damage converts to life damage, a fall can be very deadly indeed. The base amount of grace damage you suffer from a fall equals your weight—the bigger you are, the harder you fall! For example, if your weight is 3, your base fall damage is –3 grace. The Guide may determine that some falls are particularly hazardous and increase the damage by 5-point increments. For example:

A hard fall onto bare rock or jagged ruins (+5 damage)
A high fall from several stories above the ground (+5 damage)

For example, a high fall onto hard rocks would inflict grace damage equal to 10 + your weight—enough to reduce an average person’s life to zero. For extremely high falls, the Guide can increase the damage further.

For group efforts involving landing or disembarking from balloons or skyships, the margin of failure adds directly to fall damage.

Deathmarks

When you have zero life remaining, you can fight on—barely. However, any excess life damage you suffer becomes deathmarks. Some spells and certain nasty foes can inflict deathmarks directly. If your life is zero AND you have 1 or more deathmark:

You collapse and lose all remaining grace, awareness, and focus.
On your next turn, you must take the Survive action—Bracing yourself against the grasp of death!

The total number of deathmarks you’ve accumulated serves as the threshold you must beat to Survive. If you succeed, you regain 1 life and become conscious, able to act on your next turn—but you also gain 1 deathmark. If you fail, your soul detaches from your body, and you die—unless you invoke an ideal to try again, or an ally aids you with the Help action or an item that heals you. But if your ideals fail you and no ally comes to your aid, your soul dissolves into the undifferentiated flow of the Rephaim— unless, perhaps, there’s some other place for it to go.

Equipment & Items

The equipment you’re wearing and carrying are listed on your Hero Sheet. These are the objects that you can easily access during battle or storm. Other items, like keepsakes and resources, can be packed.

Carrying Items

Carried items must be assigned to one of five “slots.”

3 slung on your back (for large items)
1 hanging from your belt (for mid-sized items)
1 strapped to your leg (for small items)

Smaller items can be stowed in larger slots—for example, a dagger can be stowed on your leg, your belt, or your back. Some items can be grouped—for example, you can carry a bundle of 4 javelins in one back “slot.”

Items & Conveyances details how specific items work.

Wearing Items

You wear armor, jewelry-like accessories like amulets, talismans, and certain Mazrian implements—and, of course, your clothes. You can only wear one type of body armor and one type of helmet at a time. Other items, like charms, specify that they can’t be “stacked.”

Packed Items

Your pack can hold anything that could reasonably fit in a large bag. It can’t hold items that must be carried on your back. You have to take -1 grace at the start of your turn to access a packed item in battle.

The Prepare for Battle! section covers how your equipment helps you guard attacks—and how your armaments might be broken!

Language & Literacy

All heroes speak Kananite, also known as the Common language of Tel-Kanan. Your hero may speak other languages too, depending on their origin and lore:

Mazrian, the language of the Empire, is also spoken by many Kananite traders, politicians, and scholars.
Shinarian, the language of the lost kingdom, is the ancestor language of the Common tongue, and some Kananites still speak it.
Zordin, the language of the Chaos tribes, is rarely spoken outside the Zordin themselves, and has many dialects.
Antediluvian is the language said to be spoken by Yom, the dragon god of Chaos, along with the deity’s many “faces” and their spawn.
Chthonic is the language said to be spoken by Mot, the god of Death who lurks at the bottom of the Skysea, along with remnant souls—wraiths— who have not yet dissolved into the Rephaim.

While nearly everyone in Tel-Kanan can speak, very few can read or write. Three writing systems exist in the realm:

Glyphs, the writing of Mazr, is pictographic—little symbols represent words and ideas. Glyphs is usually written on papyrus scrolls.
Forms, the writing system of old Shinar, is also pictographic but uses more abstract wedge-shaped markings. Forms is usually written on clay tablets.
Oxhouse, a secret writing system developed by Kananites, uses a very small number of Glyphs to represent sounds in the Shinarian language.

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