Game Rules

Going for a mix between Cypher System and Nights Black Agents here.

Grade and Experience

Your grade is your level in Academie Heroica and shows how much Effort you can use to make a challenge easier. It starts at 1. You improve your grade through experience. You’ll normally get between 2 and 4 experience for each session you play depending on how much fun you have, how much cool stuff you do and how much you learn.

You can spend 4xp to gain an Improvement for your character. When you improve, you can choose one thing from the following list. You can only choose each improvement once per grade. When you’ve taken all four improvements for your grade, your grade increases by one and then you start again. You can mark your current experience at the bottom of your character sheet.

The improvements are:

• Increase one of your Pools by one
• Increase your Effort by one
• Learn a new Skill at Trained or increase an already existing skill to Specialized
• Gain a new piece of Gear, upgrade an existing piece of gear or learn a new Knack or use of your Powers

When you’ve taken each of these options once, your Grade improves by one!

Handing out Experience

Heroes get experience for learning, challenging themselves and for being heroes. Each hero gets 1xp for:

• Having fun
• Learning something new or trying something totally new
• Helping or saving someone
• Failing and learning from it

Pools and Edge

Pools are the way your character will interact with the world. Starting characters will have between 1 and 4 in each of their pools.

Starting characters have 11 points distributed between their pools. If you’re playing with some older and younger kids at the table, you can give the older kids a slightly higher courage to help the younger ones succeed more often.

• Might -> Your strength, toughness and physical prowess
• Speed -> Your agility, speed and dexterity
• Smarts -> You intelligence, charisma, education and knowledge
• Courage -> Help others succeed

Heroes can use effort to reduce the difficulty by your Grade.

At Grade 3 and Grade 6, you can choose an Edge for one of your pools. Having an Edge means you can reduce the cost of using the pool by one. This can ease the difficulty of a challenge or activate one of your powers. If this reduces the cost to zero, it doesn’t cost any points from your pool!

Skills

Choose one thing that your hero is very good at. Reduce the difficulty by the skills level when you’re doing these things. You can have up to two ranks in a skill. With your first rank in a skill you are considered Trained and reduce the difficulty by 1. Your second rank in the skill means you are Specalized and reduce the difficulty by 2.

Knacks and Powers

Heroes start with one Knack based on their career or noun descriptor and one Power based on their abilities or verb descriptor.

These knacks and powers make your character unique. You should associate each one with one of your Pools. When you use a Knack, you can spend 1 point from the associated Pool to automatically succeed in a task.

You can use a Power narratively at any time or spend up to your Effort from your Pool for minor to major or rules based impacts.

Equipment

Choose three things that your hero carries most of the time that will help them be heroic. You can use your equipment to make a challenge easier by one level. If you have Armour of some sort, it will reduce damage you take by 1. If you have a weapon, it will inflict 2 damage.

When you improve a piece of gear you can:

• Add one Armour or damage to the gear
• Add a special trait like Fiery, Long Range or Explosive that might change how the gear works
• Add a new ability to the gear, like adding telescopic sight to a hat or jet-pack to armour