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# Introduction

ELDRA is a tabletop roleplaying game of dark myth, dangerous magic, and fragile reconstruction. In this game, you and your friends tell the story of characters living after the end of an age. Old powers have fallen. The heavens have changed. Nations, faiths, and peoples are still learning what survival means when the stories that once explained the world no longer hold.

This handbook provides the rules for creating characters, resolving uncertain actions, surviving dangerous scenes, and building campaigns in a world shaped by ruin, memory, blood, oath, and contested hope. In ELDRA, heroes do not arrive in a world waiting to be saved. They arrive in a world already wounded by previous attempts at salvation.

The game uses four Fate dice as its core resolution system, then adds structured rules for action scenes, advancement, equipment, magic, stress, consequences, and tactical danger. The result is a game where dramatic choices matter, but so do wounds, resources, positioning, promises, hunger, and the cost of power.

## The ELDRA Roleplaying Game

ELDRA is a game about people carrying history into danger. Characters are shaped by ancestry, training, belief, debt, appetite, and the institutions that raised or rejected them. None of these things completely defines a character. A vampire may be a priest, criminal, envoy, scholar, exile, or reluctant protector. An orc may be a warrior, archivist, wanderer, judge, or keeper of old vows. A demon may be a monster, a citizen, a mercenary, a pact-maker, or all of those things at different points in the same life.

The rules are designed to support characters who cross familiar fantasy boundaries. Warriors can study magic. Mages can wear armor. Holy characters can doubt their churches. Monsters can have laws, families, and political obligations. A character’s people gives them history and abilities, but it does not decide their morality, profession, or future.

The core experience of play is collaborative. One participant, called the Game Master, presents the world and its dangers. The other participants create player characters and decide what those characters do. The rules help the table discover what happens when the outcome is uncertain and the consequences matter.

## Adventures in ELDRA

An ELDRA campaign can take many forms.

Your group might play wandering troubleshooters hired to escort pilgrims through a region where the land still remembers an old war. You might play agents of a new religious order trying to prevent old fanatics from dragging the world backward. You might play survivors in a border settlement where trade, hunger, law, and demonic agreements collide. You might play scholars, mercenaries, clergy, fugitives, monster-hunters, diplomats, or people who were ordinary until the past found them.

Common adventures include:

- uncovering the truth behind a ruined shrine, sealed archive, or inherited curse;

- negotiating between peoples whose memories of the old age contradict each other;

- protecting a settlement from creatures displaced by broken magic;

- investigating a cult, noble house, criminal network, or forbidden school;

- crossing damaged wilderness where maps cannot be trusted;

- deciding whether an old power should be destroyed, repaired, buried, or used.

ELDRA works for heroic fantasy, political fantasy, gothic horror, expedition campaigns, religious conflict, survival stories, and character-driven drama. The tone can shift from table to table, but the setting always rewards attention to consequence.

## Adapting ELDRA to Your Table

This book presents ELDRA as a playable world, not as a script. The history, peoples, and institutions described here provide a foundation for your own campaigns. You can focus on the present age, explore earlier eras, or create a local region whose problems matter more immediately than continental politics.

Some lore in this book is written from the perspective of what ordinary people know. Deeper secrets, contradictory records, and hidden causes can be introduced gradually by the Game Master. This is intentional. A tabletop world becomes strongest when players can discover it through action rather than being asked to memorize it before play begins.

If a rule or setting detail does not serve your table, adjust it. If a theme feels too intense, change the emphasis. If your group wants a brighter adventure, let reconstruction and wonder take the lead. If your group wants horror, let the old world press harder against the new one. ELDRA is built to hold both.

## Using This Book

This book presents the information you need to create characters and play through dangerous, dramatic stories.

Introduction. This section explains the game, the setting, a short history of ELDRA, basic roleplaying concepts, the flow of play, the dice system, and the default era.

Character Creation. This section walks you through building a player character: choosing a people, choosing a class, assigning skills, selecting stunts, calculating stress, and preparing equipment.

Core Rules. These rules explain skill rolls, difficulty, advantage, disadvantage, action points, reactions, stress, consequences, recovery, and structured scenes.

Equipment. This section provides weapons, armor, shields, tools, alchemical items, crafting rules, and the material choices that matter in dangerous work.

Peoples. This section describes the playable peoples of ELDRA, including their bodies, cultures, social positions, and mechanical traits.

Classes. This section presents class trees, class points, tier gates, and the specialized abilities characters unlock as they advance.

Skills, Spells, and Stunts. These sections describe what characters can do, how magic functions, and how specialized techniques change the rules.

Spells. This section explains what spells are in ELDRA, where magic comes from, how spell schools fit the setting, and why magical practice carries social and historical consequences.

Bestiary. This section provides creatures and adversaries for the Game Master, from common threats to mythic dangers suitable for major campaign arcs.

## Welcome to ELDRA

ELDRA is a world living after catastrophe.

For centuries, the plane existed under a broken cosmic order. Divine powers were distant, wounded, sleeping, or misused. Mortal institutions grew around partial truths until those truths hardened into law, worship, and empire. The old order did not collapse because everyone suddenly understood the truth. It collapsed because the forces holding it together finally exceeded what the world could survive.

The war that followed changed the land, broke ancient seats of authority, altered the heavens, and forced every surviving people to ask what kind of world should come next.

The present age is not peaceful, but it is possible. A new sun rises over lands that once knew only twilight. Two moons remain where three once moved. Trade roads cross territories that were battlefields within living memory. Pilgrims walk to places where the world itself seems to remember pain. Scholars collect documents before they vanish into myth. Rural communities rebuild with practical stubbornness. Great powers negotiate because everyone remembers what happened the last time certainty became absolute.

This is the heart of ELDRA: a dark world that has discovered light without becoming simple.

## A Short History of ELDRA

The oldest stories say that ELDRA was shaped by powers too vast to understand cleanly. Some traditions call them gods. Others call them dragons, creators, conquerors, ancestors, or mistakes given names. What matters to ordinary people is that those powers altered the planes, changed mortal life, and left behind wounds that became geography, religion, law, and inheritance.

ELDRA’s public history is usually divided into five broad periods.

The age before twilight is remembered only through fragments: carved stone, old songs, ruined calendars, religious symbols, and magical techniques whose original makers are gone. During this age, ELDRA was not the only mortal world in the known cosmology. Other realms touched it through divine paths, planar wounds, dream-roads, and gates that later generations could no longer open safely.

The sundering and the refugee generations began when one of those mortal worlds was devastated in the wars of the old powers. Survivors reached ELDRA in waves, bringing languages, crafts, rites, bloodlines, and grief into a plane already under strain. Their descendants became part of ELDRA’s peoples, but they did not all remember the lost world in the same way. Some preserved its memory through clan craft. Some carried it through moon rites, archives, songs, law, or family habits. Others forgot the source and kept only the custom.

The long twilight followed the deepening of the old cosmic order. The sky dimmed, the old sun was absent, and the moons governed much of daily and religious life. Certain peoples held authority because theology said they should. Others survived under systems they did not create and could not easily escape. Demons entered through unstable boundaries. Old aristocracies, temples, and magical schools built laws around partial truths until those truths hardened into unquestioned reality.

The war of revelation began when hidden truths could no longer be buried. Sacred institutions fractured. Powers treated as eternal proved vulnerable. Forbidden histories became weapons. Armies marched, faiths split, old rulers fell, and the conflict reached beyond politics into the structure of the heavens. The war did not simply replace one ruler with another. It broke the assumptions beneath rulership itself.

The reconstruction age is the present era of this book. A new sun rises over lands that once knew only twilight. Two moons remain where three once moved. No single empire rules ELDRA, and no single religion explains it. Some old powers are dead. Some are missing. Some survive only as rituals, bloodlines, echoes, or political habits. Children born now know sunlight as normal. Their grandparents may remember when it was impossible.

This history is not cleanly agreed upon. Every people preserves different records, and every institution has reasons to emphasize some truths while burying others. For play, this means your character does not need to know the whole truth of ELDRA before the campaign begins. They only need to know what their family, teacher, temple, clan, court, archive, warband, pact, or hunger taught them.

## The Lost World and the Refugee Generations

ELDRA was not always home to all the peoples who live there now. In the age before the long twilight, another world existed within the same broken cosmology: a brighter mortal world of sun, moon, kingdoms, craft, forests, mountains, and many peoples. That world was devastated during the wars of the old powers. Its stable reality collapsed or was severed from the known planes, and only fragments of its people escaped.

Those survivors reached ELDRA in waves. They arrived wounded, displaced, and carrying traditions that did not fit the shadowed plane that received them. Some settled in mountains, caves, borderlands, and hidden valleys. Some entered existing cities and vanished into mixed communities. Some preserved their old rites with discipline. Others adapted so thoroughly that, generations later, only names, songs, tools, and family habits remained.

When this book refers to refugee generations, it means the descendants of those first arrivals. By the reconstruction age, most people descended from the Lost World have never seen it and never could. Their inheritance is cultural rather than personal: a grandmother’s prayer, a clan technique, a half-translated archive, a festival that no longer matches the sky, or a craft tradition built around materials that no longer exist.

This history matters differently to each people. Many dwarven clans remember the Lost World through craft and stonework. Many elves remember it through lineage, grief, and sacred memory. Gnomish institutions preserve fragments of its scholarship. Some human families carry old customs without knowing where they began. Other peoples are native to ELDRA, transformed by ELDRA, or bound to planes beyond it. The reconstruction age is therefore not a single culture rebuilding itself. It is many inheritances trying to share one damaged home.

## The Present Age

The default era of this book is the reconstruction age. The great war is over, the old world has not returned, and the new one is still being argued into shape.

No single empire rules ELDRA. No single religion explains it. Several major traditions coexist under a broad settlement that limits direct divine interference and encourages mortal institutions to solve mortal problems. This settlement is imperfect. It restrains the worst forms of holy war, but it does not remove rivalry, grief, ambition, or fear.

The present age is defined by pluralism. A human village may honor local spirits, seek help from a land-priest, trade with vampire administrators, and send a child to a gnomish school without seeing those choices as contradictory. A dwarf may treat craft as worship while respecting the rites of a spouse from another people. An orc may carry covenant marks and still argue fiercely with covenant elders. A demon may live under written agreements stricter than any mortal law.

The world is safer than it was. That does not mean it is safe.

## Themes of Play

ELDRA works best when the table is interested in consequence. Characters can be powerful, but power leaves marks. Truth can liberate, but it can also destroy the innocent along with the guilty. A monster may need to be killed, but killing it may break a treaty, leave a region undefended, or prove that the monster was only a symptom.

The following themes appear often:

- Reconstruction after catastrophe. The old world is gone. The new one is being built unevenly, by people with different memories of what went wrong.

- Faith without certainty. Gods, spirits, oaths, and sacred powers exist, but their meaning is contested.

- Identity under pressure. Ancestry, class, religion, hunger, magic, and history shape a character, but none of them fully defines one.

- Dangerous inheritance. Bloodlines, ruins, contracts, weapons, and traditions carry power from previous ages, often without carrying wisdom.

- Moral complexity. ELDRA is not a world where every faction is equal or every choice is gray, but easy answers are rare and costly answers are common.

## Era of Play

The reconstruction age is the default era for new campaigns. It gives players room to explore the world without needing to already understand every secret that caused it. Characters can investigate old ruins, deal with surviving fanatics, negotiate among new powers, and decide what they believe the world should become.

Groups may also set campaigns earlier. A campaign in the twilight age is more oppressive, secretive, and theologically controlled. A campaign during the great war is more desperate and destructive. A campaign in the years immediately after the war focuses on scarcity, refugees, broken roads, religious panic, and the first attempts to build peace. A campaign generations later can explore whether the new settlement endured or whether its unresolved questions finally broke open.

No matter when your campaign begins, ELDRA is a world where the past is never entirely past. It waits in ruins, bloodlines, songs, contracts, scars, and the names people choose not to say aloud.

## Religions in ELDRA

ELDRA does not have a single dominant religion. The reconstruction age is shaped by several traditions that coexist under a broad settlement limiting direct divine interference. Each tradition has its own scope, practice, and emphasis. Most communities follow one tradition closely while respecting others. Some individuals practice multiple traditions. A few survive only as underground remnants of older orders.

The major present-era traditions are summarized below. Each people’s religious life is described in more detail in the Peoples section, but a player creating a character can use this overview to choose a starting orientation.

The Mountain Faith. A dwarven tradition older than the present settlement. It venerates the geological permanence of the Mountain itself rather than any individual god. Practice is organized around three aspects: Foundation, Forge, and Ledger.

The Twin Wisdom. A gnomish tradition built on two principles. The Resonance honors the magical pressure that gnomes feel directly. The Recovered Word honors accurate memory and the patient preservation of truth.

The Lineage Faiths. Elves do not share one religion. Each elven lineage carries its own tradition: the Moon Faith for celestial memory, the Wandering Way for movement and natural presence, the Crafted Word for magic as scholarship, the Light traditions for decisive action, and the Hollow for emptiness and fracture.

The Light Tradition. A present-era movement that grew from older light faiths and absorbed surviving Sunbound and refugee practices. It emphasizes revelation, decisive action, and the willingness to build a future rather than only mourn the past.

The Renewed Covenant. The orc tradition restored during the reconstruction age. It centers on sacred body marks, oath-bearing adulthood, ancestral memory, and the slow recovery of a custodial role lost during the long twilight.

The Bloodline Faith. The religious practice that emerged among surface vampires around a present-era phenomenon: vampires can now be born rather than only turned. Surface vampire communities treat the bloodline itself as sacred, because their continued existence depends on it. The tradition has no central deity and no personal figurehead. It treats the bloodline as a present, ongoing miracle rather than a person.

Pact-Bond. The contractual theology practiced by many integrated demons. It treats binding agreement as sacred, witnessed, and final. A demon’s quality is measured by the reliability of its commitments, and broken pacts are the central religious failure.

Folk Traditions. Countless local practices survive in human and mixed communities. Some come from refugee descendants. Some are older than any present religion. Many are syncretic, blending whatever local elements work for the community without committing to a single tradition.

Underground Traditions. A few remnants of older orders persist outside the present settlement. The most notable is the Hollow Shadow, a small surviving fragment of the pre-war vampire faith that refuses to acknowledge the reconstruction. These traditions are dangerous in different ways, and most public institutions watch them carefully.

## What Is a Roleplaying Game?

A tabletop roleplaying game is a shared experience of storytelling and imagination. You and your friends work together to tell the story of a group of characters, describing their surroundings, playing out conversations, choosing actions, and discovering what happens when those actions meet danger or uncertainty.

You roll dice when the outcome matters and nobody at the table should simply decide what happens. The rules do not replace imagination. They give the table a fair and surprising way to answer questions such as: Does the blade strike home? Does the frightened witness believe you? Can you finish the ritual before the door breaks? How badly does the truth hurt when it finally arrives?

## Players

Each player other than the Game Master creates a player character, often called a PC. Your character is yours to portray. You decide their background, beliefs, fears, ambitions, relationships, and choices. You also use their rules: skills, class abilities, stunts, spells, equipment, stress, and consequences.

During play, you describe what your character attempts. Some players speak in their character’s voice. Others describe actions from the outside, like narrating a novel. Both styles are welcome. Do what helps you participate comfortably and clearly.

The player characters usually form a group with a reason to stay together. They may be hired for the same mission, bound by debt, united by a patron, travelling for survival, attached to an institution, or simply the only people present when the world asks a dangerous question.

## Game Master

One participant takes the role of Game Master, or GM. The GM does not control a single protagonist. Instead, the GM presents the world, portrays non-player characters, prepares dangers and opportunities, describes consequences, and helps the group apply the rules.

The GM is not an enemy of the players. The GM creates opposition, but the goal is not to defeat the group. The goal is to help everyone discover a compelling story. Good ELDRA play often gives characters hard choices, but hard choices should be meaningful rather than punitive.

## GMs, Players, and You

This book uses player to mean a participant who controls a player character. It uses GM to mean the participant guiding the world and adjudicating rules. When the rules say you, they usually address the player using a character ability. Sections written for the GM say so directly.

Everyone at the table is still playing the game together. The distinction exists only so the rules can be clear.

## What You Need to Play

To play ELDRA, your group needs the following:

- This rulebook. At least one person should have access to the core rules during play.

- Character sheets. Each player needs a place to record skills, stress, consequences, equipment, spells, stunts, and notes.

- Fate dice. ELDRA uses four Fate dice, also called 4dF. If you do not have Fate dice, ordinary six-sided dice can be adapted by treating 1–2 as minus, 3–4 as blank, and 5–6 as plus.

- Scratch paper or digital notes. Notes help track clues, NPCs, resources, maps, conditions, and unfinished promises.

- Safety tools. ELDRA can involve horror, violence, grief, hunger, religious pressure, bodily transformation, and moral tension. Before play, discuss boundaries and tools that help everyone participate safely.

## Flow of Play

The game unfolds in sessions. Many groups play for two to four hours at a time, but sessions can be shorter or longer. During a session, play usually follows this rhythm:

- The GM sets the scene. The GM describes where the characters are, what they notice, who is present, and what seems immediately important.

- The players decide what they do. Players describe their characters’ actions, questions, movements, plans, and reactions.

- The rules resolve uncertainty. If an action is difficult and failure matters, the GM calls for a roll or uses the relevant subsystem.

- The GM describes the result. Success, failure, cost, injury, discovery, and consequence change the situation.

This cycle repeats during quiet conversations, tense negotiations, long journeys, chases, rituals, investigations, and battles. Structured scenes use more formal timing and action rules. Outside structured scenes, play remains conversational.

## Using Fate Dice

ELDRA uses four Fate dice, written as 4dF. Each Fate die has two plus faces, two minus faces, and two blank faces. When you roll 4dF, add the symbols together:

- Each plus counts as +1.

- Each minus counts as -1.

- Each blank counts as 0.

The total usually ranges from -4 to +4. Add the relevant skill level to find your result.

Result = 4dF + Skill Level

If you meet or exceed the difficulty, you succeed. If you are rolling against another character, both sides roll and compare results.

## Skill Rolls

The GM calls for a skill roll when all three of the following are true:

- the outcome is uncertain;

- success and failure would change the story;

- something meaningful is at stake, such as time, safety, trust, resources, position, or information.

If an action is easy, impossible, or unimportant, the GM should not ask for a roll. The story simply moves forward.

## Difficulty and Margin

When no opponent is rolling, the GM sets a Difficulty Rating. The following scale is a guide:

Difficulty | Rating | Examples
--- | --- | ---
Trivial | 0 | Recall common knowledge, light a torch in calm conditions.
Simple | 1 | Pick a basic lock, follow clear tracks.
Moderate | 2 | Climb a rough wall, persuade a suspicious merchant.
Hard | 3 | Sneak past an alert guard, decipher an obscure dialect.
Formidable | 4 | Forge a noble seal, track prey through a storm.
Extreme | 5 | Disable a master trap without proper tools.
Near-impossible | 6+ | Attempt something at the edge of mortal capability.

The difference between the roll result and the target is the Margin. A higher Margin means a cleaner, stronger, or more useful success. A low or negative Margin means failure, delay, cost, or consequence.

Margin | Outcome
--- | ---
-3 or lower | Failure with consequence.
-1 to -2 | Failure.
0 | Failure, unless a rule says ties succeed.
+1 to +2 | Success.
+3 or higher | Strong success with an additional benefit at the GM’s discretion.

## Advantage and Disadvantage

Advantage and Disadvantage represent situational help or difficulty. When you have Advantage, roll one additional Fate die and discard the lowest die. When you have Disadvantage, roll one additional Fate die and discard the highest die.

Multiple sources cancel one for one. If you have two sources of Advantage and one source of Disadvantage, roll with one Advantage.

## Actions and Reactions

Structured scenes use Action Points, or AP. At the start of your turn, you normally have 3 AP. You spend AP to move, attack, cast spells, defend, use items, perform quick tasks, or attempt complex actions under pressure.

Reactions are special responses triggered by events outside your turn. A reaction does not cost AP unless a rule says otherwise, but a character normally has only one reaction between the start of their turn and the start of their next turn.

Outside structured scenes, characters act through conversation and narration. The AP system appears when timing, danger, and turn order matter.

## Stress, Consequences, and Recovery

ELDRA measures harm through Stress and Consequences. Physical Stress represents injury, fatigue, and bodily punishment. Mental Stress represents fear, strain, confusion, and pressure on the will.

Stress can recover quickly with rest. Consequences are more serious. A Consequence is a lasting wound, trauma, curse, fear, broken limb, public disgrace, or other problem that remains part of the character until treated and healed.

When a character has no stress left and cannot absorb further harm, they may be Taken Out. Depending on the situation, this may mean unconsciousness, capture, surrender, death, spiritual collapse, or another serious removal from the scene.

## Game Conventions

The following conventions apply throughout the rules:

The GM has the final say. If a rule is unclear at the table, the GM makes a ruling and play continues.

Specific beats general. If a class feature, spell, stunt, item, or creature ability contradicts a general rule, the specific rule wins.

Declare before rolling. Bonuses, AP expenditures, and similar choices must be declared before the dice are rolled unless a rule says otherwise.

Round normally unless told otherwise. If a rule requires rounding, use the instruction in that rule. If no instruction is given, the GM decides the cleanest interpretation.

Minimum zero. A value cannot be reduced below zero unless a rule explicitly says it can.

## Adventuring and Advancement

ELDRA can be played as a one-shot, a short adventure, or a long campaign. In longer games, characters grow through Experience Points, new stunts, improved skills, spells, class features, equipment, relationships, and changes to their place in the world.

Experience Points are usually awarded at the end of a session. A typical session grants 1–2 EP. A climactic session may grant more. EP can improve skills, unlock stunts, learn spells, and increase weapon mastery according to the advancement rules.

Advancement should reflect what happens in play. A character who survives court politics may improve Influence. A character who studies forbidden inscriptions may improve Lore. A character who repeatedly faces terror and keeps standing may improve Resolve. Growth is not only numerical. It is also the story of what the character has become.

## Example of Play

The following example shows how a scene might unfold at the table.

GM: The road ends at a collapsed watchtower. The upper floors have fallen across the pass, and the stones are marked with old heat scars. A cold wind moves through the gaps. You can hear something shifting underneath the rubble.

The orc scholar’s player: I want to study the marks before anyone gets close. Are they battle damage, spell damage, or something stranger?

GM: That sounds like Lore. The damage is old, but the danger may not be. Difficulty 3.

The player rolls 4dF and gets +1 total, then adds Lore +3 for a result of 4.

GM: Success. The scars were made by radiant heat, but not ordinary fire. Something discharged power here repeatedly, probably during a siege. You also notice the stones were moved recently from underneath. Whatever is below has been clearing space.

The vampire envoy’s player: I step back into shade and tell the others, "We are not alone under this road." Can I listen for movement with Perception?

GM: Yes, but the wind makes it difficult. Roll with Disadvantage.

The player rolls 5 Fate dice for Disadvantage and discards the highest die. The result is poor.

GM: You hear the movement too late. A hand of blackened stone pushes through the rubble. Everyone sees the tower shift. We are entering a structured scene. Who is closest to the collapse?

The gnome spellblade’s player: I am. I want to spend my first action getting civilians back and my second action drawing my blade.

GM: Good. You have 3 AP when your turn begins. Moving the civilians is a Complex Utility action, so 2 AP. Drawing the blade is a Quick Utility action, 1 AP. That uses your turn, but it means the bystanders are clear before the thing pulls itself free.

The scene continues into combat, with the players making tactical choices while the earlier Lore success gives them useful information about the creature’s origin.