Beyond Destination

The character sheet is the record of your character. It holds:

• The tropes, with their ranks.
• Who they are — name, age, what kind of power they use, how strong they are, where they stand in the world.
• Their backstory — family, history, where they come from.
• What they can do — spells, abilities, a familiar if they have one.
• What they have — items, assets, or anything else that belongs to them.
• Hero Points, earned and spent.
• What they know and what they have lived through — the important things they have learned, and a record of what has happened to them in play. It can be written in character, as a journal.

The sheet is how you and the GM play together. Everything on it works in both directions. You present it to argue your case. The GM reads it when building challenges — so there is always something on it you can use, and something the GM can use too.

Minions get a smaller sheet of their own: one Core trope, and room to earn more Minor tropes as they can justify them.

Your character is yours. Whatever the GM contributes while you build it belongs to you once it is in.

A character is built from tropes: short phrases you write yourself that say who and what your character is. A new character starts with six.

Write your own. A ready-made phrase is only fine if it fits exactly.

A good trope is concrete. "Has never been caught in a lie" gives you more to work with than "good liar," and it is much harder to argue around. Choose every word on purpose, because every word is something you can point to later.

Rewriting is free until the game starts. After that, the wording is locked.

Once all six are written, you rank them by how important each is to your character. A new character has one Core, two Major and three Minor:

• Core — the centre of who and what they are.
• Major — important, but something else holds the centre.
• Minor — a part of them, just not the heart.

Rank is judged on three things: how central the trope is to the character, how much it matters to their story, and how useful it is toward what you want as a player.

When your character faces a challenge, you present a trope and argue why it fits what you are trying to do. If the GM agrees the action is possible, you roll.

Rolls are a d20. Your trope's rank gives you rerolls on that roll:

• Core — 3 rerolls
• Major — 2
• Minor — 1
• No trope that fits — you can still roll, but only once.

Roll one at a time and decide after each whether to spend another reroll. That matters because a 1 must always be taken. It is a critical failure, worse than an ordinary failure. A 20 is a critical success, and can overcome things that should have been impossible.

How hard is the roll? Every roll has a Target Number — the number you need to meet or beat on the d20 to succeed. The GM sets it by how hard the task is compared to how skilled your character is, and the situation can push it up or down. In a fight, the Target Number is how hard the other side is to hit well enough to hurt.

The usual scale: Mundane — anything but a 1 · Easy 5 · Moderate 10 · Hard 15 · Almost impossible 20.

If the GM has not told you the number, ask before you roll. When a roll really matters, the GM may keep it hidden — but you can usually tell how well you are doing from how your efforts land.

Most everyday things are not rolled at all. Your character is assumed to have every skill and piece of knowledge their daily life and job require.

Tropes can grow. If your character lives through enough to justify a new one — months of training, a life-changing event — that is evidence, and it can earn a new trope.

Characters can earn additional Minor tropes this way — as many as they can justify.

Hero Points are earned by playing well from the outside: guessing a piece of foreshadowing correctly, catching something the GM left out, solving a problem in a way the GM did not prepare for, or beating the GM at their own logic.

Spend one to overturn a rolled 1, to get another try, or to ask for something at the meta level — steering something you really want. Bigger asks cost more.

Two more ways to get one, at the start of every session:

• If you have zero Hero Points, you get one.
• Whoever gives the recap of last session gets one.

This is the game's health system. When an attack meets its Target Number, the target takes a bruise.

Damage is tracked as bruises. Two bruises make an injury.

• A character starts with room for two injuries. More can be added when needed.
• Everyone at the table can see a character's bruises and injuries. The GM may keep some of their own characters' hidden.
• The player who owns the character, and the GM, mark bruises on and off.
• If every injury slot is full, the character is knocked out of combat and can't act.

On the map, each pair of dots is one injury: one dot lit (yellow) is a bruise, both lit (red, marked ✕) is an injury.