Survive in a shattering world, rise through the ranks of a powerful faction, and forge your legend in this intense, character-driven RPG.

Forge of Valor is a tabletop roleplaying game that focuses on characters navigating a dangerous world ravaged by warring factions and a fracturing landscape. Characters are deeply customizable, combat is brutal, and the game revolves around characters’ goals, relationships, and duty.

The system creates a tone of “tough heroism.” Characters are strong, but not paragons of ability. People can die from poison or a dagger in the dark at any level. Heroes are often locally isolated to the area that they care most about, or sacrifice themselves for efforts much less grand than the end of the world.

Fight for powerful factions or create your own: seek justice and deliver judgment as an Iravar Arbiter, protect civilization from the horrors of the wilderness as a B’Nakar Warden, or operate as a freelance mercenary, spy, or assassin as part of the Syndicate.

Tempted by vices, steeled by virtues, and compelled by loyalty, you forge your own legend. In a fragmented civilization of tangled alliances and secret guilds, will you fight with valor?

Basics

At its core, Forge of Valor uses a 3d6 plus modifiers roll to determine an attempted task’s success.

A roll’s modifier is based off a character’s Attributes, Skills, and Specialties. The Attributes are Body, Mind, and Spirit. A character invests training into Skills, and each Skill is broken into three more detailed Specialties.

Training in a Skill applies to each of its three Specialties. For example, a character with training in the Might Skill will be good at the Melee Combat, Strength, and Speed Specialties. If a character focused on one of the Specialties, it would pull ahead of the others within that Skill. Characters are both broadly competent in their Skills and specialized in their chosen Specialties.

Characters

Characters in Forge of Valor have a core Trait, one or more Vices, and one or more Virtues to define how they view and interact with the world. Similarly, a character has Short and Long term Motivations, which operate like personal goals and connections. Characters earn benefits when pursuing their Motivations and acting on their Traits, Vices, and Virtues.  

Characters form relationships with multiple Factions which provide missions, resources, allies, and enemies. During character creation, players define a positive, negative, neutral, or complicated relationship with at least one Faction.

Additional Character Abilities

Characters further expand upon their abilities through Assets and Techniques.

Assets provide bonuses or automatic successes when attempting certain tasks, and are broken down into Combat and Noncombat Assets.

For example, if a character is particularly skilled at making multiple attacks, he might take the Combo Attack Asset, allowing him to attack twice with less penalty than normal.

And if a character is exceptionally good at following tracks, she might take the Tracker Noncombat Asset, which allows her to successfully follow Tracks up to a certain difficulty without ever having to roll.

A Technique is a set of combat maneuvers, styles, stances, or weapon proficiencies. One Technique is selected at character creation, with the opportunity of improving it over time or learning new Techniques as the character advances. Each Technique is triggered under different circumstances or when using a particular weapon.

For example, Toogan Harbeck has taken the Stealth Technique. Because of his Technique, any time that he moves with stealth or fights unaware enemies he gets to pick from a handful of benefits, such as improving his roll, making his attacks more deadly, lessening a penalty, or applying an Impact.

Technique Impacts deliver an extra effect to your friends or foes: knock your enemy prone, heal your ally, combine multiple actions together, or minimize the amount of energy spent to unleash Control. There’s plenty of sample Impacts in the book, as well as rules for how to make your own.

Read more about Techniques.

Control

With enough willpower, characters can exert their Control on the world and subtly bend reality. Controllers weave energy, sculpt matter, or manipulate the minds of others. The system limits a controller’s potency, and rewards characters for applying the Laws of Control as creatively and efficiently as possible.

There are three schools of Control that a character can focus on: Energy, Matter, and Mental. Bend light, influence gravity, alter magnetism, and even enervate an enemy by siphoning its stamina with Control Energy. Shred an enemy’s body, turn stone to mud, purify metal, or seal wounds with Control Matter. Create illusions, speak telepathically, strip memories, and block or augment the senses with Control Mental.

Character Advancement

Characters improve through failing tasks and completing goals. When a character attempts an action that isn’t trivially easy, the player has to roll. If the roll fails (is below the required difficulty), the Specialty for that roll earns an Experience Point (XP). Earn enough XP for that Specialty, and it improves. Improve enough Specialties, and your character Levels Up. When Leveling Up, characters can improve their Skills, acquire new Assets, and upgrade their Techniques.

Factions

Players can create their own Faction with goals, motivations, abilities, and resources. Factions and characters directly affect one another; characters successfully completing a mission might boost their Faction’s resources or connections, while a Faction-scale conflict might embroil the characters in an unexpected battle.

Characters often have to choose between their personal motivations, resisting their Vices, or sacrificing their Virtues in order to uphold their duty to their Faction. GMs are given hooks, seeds, and guidelines on how to create compelling and challenging Faction-character relationships.

Game Master Tools

Forge of Valor has been designed to make it easy for the GM to react to the unforeseen actions of the player characters. Obstacles, combat, game concepts, adventure seeds, improvisation advice, and a variety of other tools and rules are given in the book. The system gives GMs inspiration and easy-to-use rules, without cluttering up game time. Enemies use a quick, modular system making it easy to build battles on the fly.