Overview
Epochrypha is a d100 tabletop roleplaying system. It is in development — the core rules are being written in the open, and the design notes track what’s decided, what was rejected, and what’s still argued about.
The shape of it
Section titled “The shape of it”Two layers stack.
The core rules cover resolution, character growth, and combat. They never change, and they’re deliberately silent about the world.
An Epoch supplies the world — what power is, what wealth means, what a blade does to a person. Epochs are swappable. The first is Zsenai: an iron-and-bronze age where magic is a bargain struck with a spirit that rides you afterwards, and wealth is standing rather than coin.
A roll, start to finish
Section titled “A roll, start to finish”Everything in the game is one procedure. Roll d100, try to land at or under an attribute score, then subtract and read both digits of the difference.
Your Melee is 62. You roll 34.
34 is under 62, so the blow lands. The difference is 28.
The 2 — how emphatically. Magnitude 2. A solid hit, enough to drive through light armor.
The 8 — what else happened. Even, so the GM takes a point of currency. Had it been odd, you would have taken one.
That’s the engine. Your score is your success chance — an attribute of 62 succeeds 62% of the time, with nothing to convert and nothing to look up. One subtraction answers everything else.
The two digits are independent. You can succeed by a mile and still hand the GM a point, as in the example above, or miss badly and walk away with something in hand. Success and complication are separate axes, and neither predicts the other.
A magnitude of 0 is a real outcome on both sides. You can pass by 0 — you did it, and that’s all you did — and you can fail by 0, which is the miss you can taste.
What’s distinctive
Section titled “What’s distinctive”Skills, abilities and flaws all live in the same tree. There’s no separate skill list and no separate flaw budget — everything bought with XP is a node somewhere, and the deep nodes can only be reached by passing through something that costs you. Specialization is a bargain, not a shopping trip.
Your sheet is a build and a record at once, on separate tracks. Attributes go up because you used them — succeed under pressure, mark it, test it later. Traits are bought deliberately with XP from semi-classless trees. What you practiced and what you planned are two different columns.
Skill buys safety, not just success. A character at 90 can only miss by a hair — their worst possible roll is a near-miss. A character at 20 fails by a chasm. Raising an attribute shortens the distance you can fall, which does more characterization than any table of flaws.
Damage is soaked, not subtracted. There are no hit points. Armor and constitution reduce what gets through, and how emphatically you hit decides whether you punch past them — so a wall of a person stops the militia and gets opened by a champion.
Money is replaced by standing. Things have a rating on the same 0–100 scale you roll against. What you can get depends on the gap between your standing and the thing’s — and reaching past your station visibly costs you.
What it asks of you
Section titled “What it asks of you”Honest costs, so you can decide before investing:
- Low rolls are good. If your table is coming from d20 games, roll-under takes a session to stop feeling backwards.
- Combat is lethal, though how lethal is set by the Epoch rather than the core rules. Zsenai tops out at mail and scale, and it shows.
- Semi-classless trees mean more decisions at character creation than a game that hands you a class. That’s the trade for building exactly the character you meant.
- It isn’t finished. Several core questions are still open and recorded as such.
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”| If you’re… | Start at |
|---|---|
| Playing | Playing the Game — begin with Making a roll |
| Running a table | Running the Game |
| Choosing a world | Epochs |