Playing the game

The Core Mechanic

Whenever you take on a task that carries an element of risk, you use your character’s Aspects, core parts of your character’s self and then roll a d20. The GM will determine a target number and tell you the appropriate combination of two Aspects to use, then you roll your d20 and add the values of your Aspects to the result; this is referred to in the rules text as an aspect roll. If the result equals or exceeds the target number, you are Successful, getting what you want. If it exceeds the target number by 10 or more it is Critically Successful, getting what you wanted plus an extra something special. Your aspects are:

• Forceful: Throw your weight around, apply pressure, break what needs breaking. Forceful is not only used for physical force, but exerting your will and personality.

• Graceful: Be elegant and swift, never get surprised, always be first on the draw.

• Empathetic: Understand others, know what they need, open your heart to them and theirs to you.

• Astute: Be rational and knowledgeable, know the answer.

• Defiant: Stand your ground, hold your own, keep clinging on, protect yourself and others.

• Creative: Create something new, think outside the box, go against the grain, use your intuition.

• Ruthless: Do the harsh thing, get straight to the point, get your own way and get it done whatever the cost.

• Precise: Spot the small details, land your strike perfectly, fine-tune something.

• There is also Lucky, which is added to a roll when only one Aspect is relevant. Every Chapter, roll a d4 and that becomes your Lucky for the session.

These can be combined in any number of ways. Common combinations are:

• Forceful+Precise to make melee attacks

• Graceful+Precise to make ranged attacks

• Creative+Precise to build or disassemble something delicate and fine

• Ruthless+Empathetic to use leverage and blackmail to make someone do what you want

• Astute+Ruthless to find compromising information on someone or something, or to discover their weaknesses

• Astute+Precise to notice something important or useful

• Astute+Graceful to move quickly and quietly, aware of dangers

• Creative+Graceful to dazzle with a performance of dance or acrobatics

• Graceful+Defiant to use swiftness to avoid something dangerous

Mastery

All characters also have Mastery - a measure of their skill. It is this skill that determines the damage they deal, as well as their ability to accomplish certain deeds related to that area. There are three kinds of Mastery - Arcane, Martial and Skill. Masteries have 6 ranks, each of which has a type of die linked to it, ranging from d3 to d12.

Rank 1 - d3

Rank 2 - d4

Rank 3 - d6

Rank 4 - d8

Rank 5 - d10

Rank 6 - d12

These masteries are commonly used for dealing damage; you roll the appropriate mastery die, and deal damage equal to the results. When your talents and spells ask you to do this, they will ask you to ‘roll you [mastery] damage’. As a general rule of thumb, melee attacks will have you roll your Martial damage, ranged attacks your Skill damage and magical attacks will have you roll your Arcane damage.

Testing your Mastery

Some abilities require your character to test their mastery. When this happens, roll the dice for the type of mastery being tested. If the result is 2 or more, the test is successful. If, however, the result is a 1, that ability cannot be used for the rest of the Scene.

Particularly risky or difficult maneuvers may force a character to test their Mastery more than once. If that’s the case, roll the relevant Mastery dice that many times; if any of the dice result in 1 then you lose access to that ability for the remainder of the Scene, even if the other ones are successful.

Advantage and Disadvantage

Whenever you make a roll, if there is something that makes it harder or easier for you the roll may be made with Advantage or Disadvantage. When you roll with Advantage, you roll a d6 alongside your d20 and add that to the result. When you roll with Disadvantage, you roll a d6 with your d20 and subtract the result.

If you have multiple factors that grant Advantage or Disadvantage, you roll that many dice and pick the highest result from them. If you have effects that give a roll both Advantage and Disadvantage, these cancel each other out on a one-to-one basis, and you roll with whichever one you have left.

Pushing your luck and Hostility

When you fail a non-combat Aspect roll, you can choose to push it, treating the roll as if you got the minimum number needed to succeed on it. Doing so is not without cost, however; when you do this, your group as a whole gains an amount of Hostility equal to the difference between your roll result and the required minimum.

Hostility is explained in more detail in Chapter 6, but the more Hostility you face the more difficult things will be. Pushing your luck will get you exactly what you need when you need it, but make sure the price is not too steep.

After all, you cannot push a combat roll, and you will face much more powerful enemies when the Hostility goes up.

Time

In Into the Glowlands, stories are told through a Campaign. A campaign is a series of narratively-linked gameplay sessions where a story is told from start to finish; a campaign can conclude in a one-shot session, a few sessions of play or can even stretch over several years of collaborative play. The best way to think of a campaign is something like a serial TV drama; the characters and settings are recurring, but plots take several episodes to resolve and even if there is an overarching goal, smaller subplots can arise that are driven by the decisions and actions of the characters.

A Chapter is a smaller chunk of a campaign, and can be thought of as each episode of a series. Usually these can last between three and six hours, where all the players sit down to tell the story of an Into the Glowlands campaign together.

Each Chapter is split into Scenes. A Scene is a discrete storytelling moment within the session that has an obvious or intuitive narrative break with the previous moment. Scenes could be a fight, an intense bout of research, time spent exploring the region, negotiating with a merchant or something of a similar manner. Ending one Scene and starting a new one is the job of the GM, and this should generally happen at a point when it feels like a good time for the characters to move on.

Downtime and Catching Breath

Venturing into the Glowlands is difficult work, and a fatigued party is a vulnerable one. Taking time to rest, recover and resupply is vital for an expedition to succeed. When you are out on an expedition, when you are in a relatively safe area you can choose to either Catch Breath or have Downtime.

Catching Breath is when the group takes a short time, usually 15 minutes to half an hour, to rest and recover. Characters are usually able to catch their breath when they transition between one Scene to the next. When you catch breath, you do one of the following actions:

• Reduce your current Strain by d6

• Use a Catch Breath ability from your class or talents

Downtime is a longer period, usually several hours where characters can sleep, repair gear and generally rest. Downtime will typically be its own Scene, and will often only happen once or twice per chapter. When you Have Downtime, you can do any of the following:

• Clear all of your current Strain

• Remove 1 of your Injury Ranks