The Heartlands, for a 5e player

What stays the same

• Roll a d20, add a modifier and your proficiency, and beat a target number.
• Advantage and disadvantage work exactly as they do in 5e.
• On your turn you get an action, a bonus action, a reaction and a move.
• Hit points, saving throws, death saves, short rests and long rests all carry over.
• A natural 20 on an attack is a crit and a natural 1 misses. On checks and saves they're just numbers.

Same idea, new name

Level

Tier. There are only four, and each one is a big step.

Proficiency bonus

Threshold. +2 at the first tier, then +3, +4 and +5.

DC

Difficulty Number (DN). Each one belongs to a tier: 8, 12, 15, 18 or 20.

Class

Archetype. There are six, and they don't lock you out of anything.

Race

Origin. Everyone is a person. Your Origin is the House that raised you, or the lack of one.

Spells

Techniques.

Spell slots

Aura Points. One pool pays for everything.

Casting stat

Aura. A seventh ability score.

Spell save DC

Aura DC. 8 + Threshold + Aura modifier.

XP

Tempering. You spend it like money.

Concentration

Sustain. You keep an effect going by paying points each turn, with no save to drop it.

Arcana

Attunement, the skill for reading Aura. History and Religion fold into Lore, and there are no gods.

No levels, four tiers

Between tiers you grow a little at a time. Everyone gets 3 Tempering a session, plus a point for each Belief you stuck to when it cost you something. You spend it on whatever you like, such as a stat point, a skill, a save, more hit points, or learning a technique someone has shown you. A new skill costs 6, so you'll buy something every session or two.

Going up a tier is a separate event called a breakthrough, and it needs three things:

• Density. It only fills when you use your Aura against something at or above your own tier. A hundred bandits beneath you are worth nothing, so you can't grind it.
• A Catalyst, a rare material matched to your Source, which you have to go out and find.
• A Crucible, either a place of power or a mentor who has already crossed.

The breakthrough itself is a Rite that eats your whole downtime. Afterwards everything moves at once: Threshold goes up, hit points and Aura Points jump, a new band of techniques opens, and you gain a new thing you can do.

Every breakthrough also brings a complication called a Reverberation. The Registry might open a file on you, someone might call in a debt, or your Aura might run loud for a while, though it never takes back anything you earned.

You stop rolling for small things

In 5e a level 15 fighter still rolls to force a stuck door.

Here every task has a tier, and you compare it with yours. This is the Gap Ladder, and it's the biggest change to how play feels. The left column is how far your tier sits above or below the task's.

Skills come in two kinds. Raw skills are body and nerve, like Athletics, Stealth and Persuasion, and the ladder always applies to them. Trained skills are knowledge, like Lore, Medicine and Sleight of Hand, and the ladder only helps if you're proficient. A Mastery duellist kicks a door in without rolling, then has to roll to pick a lock, because nobody ever taught her locks.

There are two catches. An automatic success gets you the result, and doing it quietly or cleanly is a separate roll. And people are never automatic, so when someone opposes you directly, you both roll.

Archetypes are price lists

Everything you can learn sits in one of three lanes: Martial, Covert or Channelling. Your archetype makes some lanes cheap and the rest cost double. Nothing is closed to you, so a Warhand can learn to throw fire if they'll pay the extra.

Each archetype gets one free Path ability at the start of every tier. Each also has a Bloodied ability that switches on at half hit points, so every character gets more dangerous as a fight goes on.

Where your power comes from

Your power comes through a connection to one of six Sources: Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Light or Darkness.

Techniques cost Aura Points by band, at 2, 4, 7 or 11, and at-will ones are free. Your pool grows at the same rate as the costs, so you get five or six big moves a fight at every tier, and what grows as you rise is the size of those moves.

In 5e you pick new spells when you level up.

Here you start with three techniques: Aura Sense, Windcut and one from your Source. Everything else has to be taught by someone, read from a text, gained at a rite or invented, and then you pay Tempering to learn it. Your House teaches its own secrets. Other people teach you once you've earned Standing with them, which makes hunting down teachers a real part of play.

You also write an Expression, one sentence about what your power looks like, such as "Fire remembers my name." It decides which checks you can roll with your Aura modifier in place of the usual ability. That costs nothing, but everyone around you can see it happen, and a practitioner caught using their power in a market town is news by evening.

Under all of that sit your Foundations, three innate abilities you can't remember learning. They're free and always on, and they still work at 0 Aura Points. You get one now, the second at Intent and the third at Mastery. Whether a House trained you or something broke you open on your own decides which set you get.

Rules 5e doesn't have

Overreach. You can push a technique or a task one band higher than you should. You pay in hit points, called Aura Burn. The first time costs 1d10 per tier, and it doubles and then triples if you do it again in the same scene. Burn only heals on a long rest.

Refusal, from Mastery. When a lower-tier technique targets you, you can pay Aura Points and it simply doesn't happen. It won't work on anything at your own tier or above, which is why people Overreach against you.

Ward. Damage reduction you can train, applied to every hit. It soaks a swarm of arrows well and does nothing against one committed blow at your tier.

Combat

Fights use a grid, as you're used to, and your speed is 30 ft. Ranges are still described in four bands: Engaged (melee), Near (about 30 ft), Far (about 120 ft) and Distant.

Every fight has three to five Features, things in the scene like a frozen river or a hanging lantern chain. You can use them and so can your enemies, so the GM's description of the room doubles as a list of your options.

At a quarter of your hit points you get one Defiance, which cancels whatever would have dropped you.

In 5e you fall unconscious at 0 hit points.

Here you're Guttering. You stay on your feet and keep acting, with one action a turn and a death save at the start of each turn. If you survive you carry a Mark, a lasting wound or debt that you clear in downtime. Death is possible, though it doesn't happen often.

Beliefs

You write two short Beliefs about what your character holds to be true, like "I do not leave people behind, even the ones I dislike." When acting on one costs you something, you earn a point of Tempering, once per Belief per session. Acting on it when it's easy earns nothing, so it plays a lot like Inspiration that feeds your advancement.

The Deepening

This is the one truly dark thing in the setting, and it's rare. Where it has pooled, the GM gets a pool of points to make things worse, and in a bright town that pool is zero.

Its worst effect is Glimmer Burn, which builds up on its own track and only clears through cleansing. If the track fills, you lose a tier for good. It's the only permanent loss in the game, and you'll see it coming a long way off.

Downtime

Between adventures you get three actions from a menu of eight, which includes training for Tempering, studying a technique, building Standing, hunting for a Catalyst, healing a Mark and performing your Rite. You'll always want more than three, and what you pick usually depends on what went wrong last time.

Making a character, quickly

1. Say who they are in one sentence before any numbers.
2. Pick an Origin: one of the five Houses, a minor house, or a Wanderer with none.
3. Pick an archetype.
4. Pick a background, and decide whether your awakening was trained by a House or wild.
5. Pick a Source and write your Expression.
6. Spread 15, 14, 13, 13, 12, 10 and 8 across your seven scores, Aura included. Most people give Aura the 15.
7. Choose two saves freely, and take your Foundation, your three starting techniques and two Beliefs.

You start at about 20 hit points with 10 or so Aura Points, which is a lot tougher than a first-level 5e character.