Welcome to RotS, a brand new tabletop RPG that does things differently and more efficiently.

Specifically created for those looking for an alternative experience to high fantasy, RotS offers its players a darker and realistic set of rules that ensure faster and more brutal combat where the defining factor of successfully defeating your opponents is not luck, but critical thinking and positioning in combat.

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The Basics and Features of RotS

RotS offers improvements both to the roleplaying and combat aspects of tabletop RPGs.

These segments are brought together by unique character sheets designed to allow players easier tracking of their statistics, items and resources.

All of this combined allows players to shift their focus from writing a bunch of numbers each time they get hit to that which truly matters; creating epic moments and stories!

Improved roleplaying

The special mechanics of Stress and Resting Activities allow for a unique interaction between combat and roleplaying. This unique interaction is further augmented with Destiny Tokens, a special resource granted for good roleplaying and usable during combat.

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Improved combat

The Phases of Combat and Wound Tokens ensure that you will never get lost in who did what and how much HP someone has left. The unique Ganging Up rule rewards players for smart positioning and makes the combat particularly realistic and deadly.

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Unique game components

Our unique Character Sheets, GM screen, usable cards and various tokens contain all the relevant information that a player might require, eliminating the need for having a guidebook next to you, and allowing players to focus on that which truly matters; playing the game.

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Better Roleplaying

Adventurers have a number of Sanity Points that represent their general state of mind. They are determined by an Adventurer’s Mental Abilities. While exploring ruins and dungeons infested with dark entities, facing deadly and frightening monsters and watching their allies fall in battle, Adventurers lose these Sanity Points.

Once an Adventurer losses all of his Sanity Points, he must make a Stress Test which will determine whether he becomes Heroic or Broken. The most reliable way of regaining lost Sanity Points is to partake in Resting Activities in the safety of civilization.

When an Adventurer loses all of his Sanity Points, he must roll a Stress Test to determine whether he overcomes his fears and steels his resolve, becoming Heroic, or if he succumbs to desperation and becomes Broken.

Making a Stress Test requires a simple d20 roll. Succeeding it, on the other hand, is not so simple. Rolling a 20 means the Adventurer becomes Heroic. Anything else; he becomes Broken. Certain Feats and Class Skills may improve the chance of one becoming Heroic when rolling a Stress Test.

While staying in villages and towns, Adventurers may attempt to partake in various Resting Activities, in hopes of restoring some of their fractured sanity.

Partaking in Resting Activities is an excellent opportunity for some quality roleplaying and a chance to earn a Destiny Token. Regardless of whether an adventurer is fulfilling some of his more carnal desires or ruminating upon his own actions in an attempt to restore his Sanity Points, every time an Adventurer partakes in a Resting Activity, there is a small chance that things will go badly and that a Strange Resting Event will occur.

Strange Resting Events are unique opportunities for further roleplay, and some may lead to particularly hilarious situations.

Improved Combat

Have you ever wondered why in some games your character has 10 Hit Points at his first level and almost a hundred by his tenth level? As if he had grown 3 extra layers of skin that make him more resistant to slashing, stabbing and other forms of damage? Instead of this high fantasy nonsense, RotS takes a completely different approach.

Hit Points represent a character’s physical conditioning and are directly determined by his Endurance; one of the 6 Abilities that a character has. As such, each character has precious few Hit Points, and does not increase them by gaining levels; they stay the same.

A Character’s survival in combat is instead primarily determined by his Miss, Defensive, Protection & Toughness Ratings, which are in turn determined by his Abilities and equipment worn.

RotS, being a realistic RPG, puts a great deal of importance on the positioning of characters during combat. Adventurers are not demigods that, after a certain point, will obliterate any and all foes they encounter. Rather, they are capable individuals that must still rely on each other and any allies they gathered in order to prevail in combat encounters.

Going into combat overly confident and expecting that you can take on all opponents alone will always result in a fast and brutal death. One of the key reasons for this are the Ganging Up and Wrestle rules. Whenever multiple characters surround an enemy or successfully wrestle him, they gain significant bonuses to their attacks and damage.

Because of this, Adventurers must constantly be wary of their enemy’s movements, anticipate their actions and protect each other. For in RotS, as stated already, you do not have hundreds of Hit Points, but rather a precious few. And they are lost mighty fast if careless.

Unique Game Components

RotS uses custom made Character Sheets that are, not only marvellous to look at, but extremely functional. A standard RotS Character Sheet consists of two parts: The Main and Side Part. The Main Part is roughly the size of an A4 paper while the Side Part is the size of an A5. The sheet’s unique design also makes everything easier to track, reducing the time that players spend searching for specific information.

The Main Segment of the sheet has a front and back side. The front side contains your character’s Abilities, inventory, basic equipment and attacks. The backside contains Class specific information as well as Background and Racial information.

The Side Part contains the basic information of your character and a designated area for your tokens. Because of this, it does not contain any information on the backside, as flipping this part of the sheet would mess up the position of your tokens and dice.

In order to speed up combat, reduce the wear and tear of the character sheet and because the effective rules of RotS allow it, we use tokens and simple dice as a primary means of keeping track of sustained damage, suffered conditions, number of destiny points etc.

In RotS, you will find Wound, Sanity, Hit Point, Destiny and Condition Tokens; each one of them fulfilling a specific purpose.

Various consumable items may be used to give your character an edge in combat. To be able to use them in combat, however, one must first equip these items in a belt with pouches. To easily track which of these items are currently equipped in your belt with pouches, RotS uses Consumable Item Cards.

These beautifully designed cards are simply placed next to your character sheet and once used discarded by the player and returned to the GM.