On this page: A Door That Remembers · What Is Risen Kings? · Eclura at a Glance · Adventuring in Eclura · The Altering · The Three Great Regions · The Deep Hallows · Magic and the Living World · The Powers of Eclura · Using This Book
A Door That Remembers
The torch gutters as the stone door speaks Mara’s name.
No one in the room knows how it learned it.
Game Master: The passage ends at a bronze door set into the stone. It has no handle, hinges, or visible lock. A thin seam of Gloomlight leaks around its edges, reducing your torch to a weak, dim glow.
Game Master: Behind you, Sevrin pulls against the chain around his ankle.
Sevrin: “Do not open it. That door was sealed before my people found this place.”
Mara: Does he sound frightened, or is he only trying to keep us away from something?
Game Master: He is frightened. Whether he is telling you everything is less certain.
Mara: I crouch beside Sevrin. “You said your people came here looking for a crown. Is it behind that door?”
Sevrin: “We never saw the crown.”
Mara: “That was not my question.”
The Game Master considers what Sevrin wants. He is wounded, chained, and surrounded by armed strangers. He wants to escape, but he fears what waits beyond the door more than he fears the party.
No roll is needed.
Game Master: Sevrin looks toward the bronze door. “Yes.”
Pella: I study the markings around it. Do I recognize the writing?
Game Master: It resembles early human script, but several symbols are far older.
Studying it properly will take an Exploration Turn.
The party has two turns of light remaining. Two Tension Marks have already been set aside.
Orik: I examine the stone around the frame. I want to know whether the door was built to keep us out or keep something in.
Veyra: I search the passage and listen for anyone following us.
Mara: I take out my family signet and compare it to the symbols on the door.
The Exploration Turn begins.
Mara’s signet is her Bloodline Memento. It grants no automatic bonus, but that does not mean it has no value.
Game Master: The tarnished crest does not match any symbol carved into the bronze. As you bring it closer, however, the metal grows warm.
Game Master: A voice whispers from somewhere inside the door.
Voice Beyond the Door: “Mara Venn.”
The table falls silent.
Mara: That is not my family name.
Game Master: Sevrin stops pulling at his chain.
The Game Master calls for a Hard Intelligence Ability Check from Pella. Pella’s Scholar Background grants a Boon, but the Dim Light imposes a Bane because she is studying fine details. The Boon and Bane cancel. She rolls a 13 on the d20 and adds her +2 Intelligence modifier for a total of 15, meeting the Hard DC.
Game Master: The inscription is both a warning and an oath. The door recognizes the blood of those sworn to guard what lies beyond it. The final line reads, “Let no crown pass from this chamber while one sworn hand yet lives.”
Pella: I look at Mara.
Mara: I am already looking at Sevrin.
Orik’s Artisan Background, focused on masonry, and his readied Delver’s Kit each grant a Boon. Orik rolls and succeeds.
Game Master: The stone around the frame was reinforced from this side. Whatever the builders feared, they expected it to come through the door.
At the end of the turn, the Light Clock advances. One turn remains.
Veyra returns at a run.
Veyra: “Something is coming down the passage. Heavy. More than one.”
Mara: How long do we have?
Game Master: Not long.
Orik: We could brace the passage and fight here.
Pella: With one turn of light?
Veyra: We open the door.
Sevrin: “No.”
Game Master: A new Exploration Turn begins. What do you do?
Mara: I press the signet against the bronze.
The door groans through the surrounding stone. The noise and disturbance trigger Tension.
The Game Master rolls one die from the Tension Pool. With two marks already set aside, a result of 1, 2, or 3 adds a third mark and causes a Minor Event.
The die shows 2.
Game Master: Dust falls from the ceiling. Three statues lining the passage turn their heads toward you. Stone hands close around rusted weapons.
Because Mara’s action triggered Tension, she makes a Strain Check. She rolls a 4 and does not mark Strain.
The disturbance interrupts the Exploration Turn before it is completed, so the Light Clock does not advance.
Round One
Game Master: Combat begins. Who is Taking the Initiative?
Mara: I am.
Mara acts before the enemies, but forfeits her Reaction for the round. At the start of her turn, she gains a Battle Die.
She rushes the nearest statue and makes a Weapon Attack. The attack hits, and she spends her Battle Die on Driving Strike. The blow drives the statue backward, clearing the space before the door.
The statues act next.
One strikes Veyra. Orik is standing beside her and kept his Reaction by allowing the enemies to act first.
Orik: Guardian’s Bulwark.
He catches part of the blow on his shield, reducing the damage before it can bring Veyra down.
The remaining characters act.
Pella casts a Cantrip. Her Magic Attack targets the statue’s Reflex rather than its Armor Class. The spell hits, cracking the runes across its chest.
Veyra notices that another statue is connected to a chain disappearing into the wall.
Veyra: I run up the fallen masonry, cut the chain, and swing clear before the counterweight drops.
The plan is dangerous, but possible. Moving across the rubble is part of her movement, and cutting the chain requires her Standard Action.
Because Veyra meaningfully uses the environment, Cunning Opportunist grants her 1 Opportunity Point.
The Game Master sets a DC for the chain. Veyra makes a Weapon Attack and succeeds.
The chain breaks.
A stone counterweight crashes through the floor. The statue beside it disappears into the darkness below, and the bronze door opens another foot.
Cold air spills through the gap.
Something on the other side draws a long breath.
Voice Beyond the Door: “At last.”
The players still do not know what lies beyond the door, why it spoke Mara’s name, whether Sevrin can be trusted, or what is approaching through the passage.
They know only that their light is failing and the door is open.
This is Risen Kings.
What Is Risen Kings?
Risen Kings is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game about dangerous exploration, tactical combat, and the choices made when safety begins to fail.
Players take the roles of adventurers in Eclura, a living world built over divine scars, forgotten roads, buried kingdoms, and powers that never fully left. They may bargain with enemies, break through walls, awaken relics, deceive rulers, retreat from impossible battles, and attempt plans no rule could predict.
The game uses clear procedures when structure creates meaningful choices. Combat rewards positioning, timing, and teamwork. Exploration tracks light, time, Tension, and the risks of remaining too long. Mana and Energy fuel extraordinary abilities while helping keep characters alive when they are brought down. Strain carries the cost of danger beyond a single wound.
Characters are capable, but never untouchable. Light fails. Safe places are rare. Ancient ruins remember what happened within them, and enemies grow more dangerous as Chaos gathers.
Victory may mean defeating an enemy, escaping with a relic, holding a doorway, protecting an ally, uncovering a buried truth, or knowing when to turn back. Every expedition asks what the party is willing to risk, what it can afford to spend, and how far it can press before it must find a way home.
The world waiting beyond that decision is Eclura.
Eclura At A Glance
Eclura is a living world of fortified kingdoms, crowded trade roads, ancient forests, and settlements built beside ruins older than their histories.
Farmers work beneath castle walls. Ships cross busy seas. Scholars argue in candlelit halls, merchants crowd the roads between kingdoms, and travelers gather around warm fires before continuing toward places sensible people avoid.
Most people build ordinary lives amid trade, faith, rivalry, family, labor, and change. Yet every region rests upon forgotten roads, divine scars, buried cities, and sealed places left by older ages.
Eclura is a thriving world built over dangers that were never fully buried.
Adventuring In Eclura
Most people in Eclura live beneath the shelter of walls, customs, and familiar roads. Adventurers leave those protections behind. They cross into places where maps fail, old promises still hold power, and the past has not finished with the living.
Their journeys begin with choices: whom to trust, what to carry, which warning to ignore, and how far to continue once the way home becomes uncertain. Risen Kings is about what happens after those choices begin to close doors behind them.
The Cost Of Power
Power keeps adventurers alive, but it is never separate from the life being protected.
Mana and Energy are names given to the inner reserves from which extraordinary acts are drawn. A spell tears open hidden structures in the world. A warrior forces exhausted muscles through one more decisive strike. A guardian crosses the distance between an enemy’s blade and a wounded companion. Each act spends something that cannot be given freely forever.
That same reserve becomes vital when a character falls. As consciousness fades and the body begins to fail, unspent strength may be all that holds the soul to the living world. The ability that could end a battle now may be the strength needed to survive it.
Every use of power is therefore a choice. Spend it to seize the moment, or hold something back for the danger that has not yet revealed itself.
What You Carry Matters
Every expedition begins before the first door is opened. It begins when the party decides what deserves space in its packs and what must be left behind.
In Eclura, ordinary tools can matter as much as enchanted weapons. Preparation creates possibilities. The right equipment may reveal a hidden route, preserve failing light, or turn an impossible obstacle into a dangerous but workable plan.
What a character carries reflects what they expected to face. What they lack often becomes clear only after retreat is no longer simple.
Places That Wake
The old places of Eclura are rarely untouched by time. Grief settles into stone. Magic lingers after its makers are gone. Oaths, rituals, and acts of violence leave impressions that can survive for centuries.
When adventurers enter, the stillness begins to break. Their light, voices, and actions disturb whatever order the place has settled into. Hidden dangers move. Old defenses respond. Events already waiting in darkness draw closer.
A ruin does not need a mind to react. It needs only a history and enough time to answer those who have entered it.
Pressure Leaves Marks
Danger does not always end when the threat is defeated. Fear, exhaustion, supernatural influence, and the strain of surviving what should have killed you can remain long after weapons are lowered.
These marks accumulate. The party may win a battle and still emerge less prepared for the next one. A choice made under pressure can follow the characters deeper into the expedition, narrowing their options and making each new risk more difficult to judge.
Survival is measured by more than whether someone is still standing. It is also measured by what the journey has taken from them.
Chaos In Battle
No battle remains orderly for long.
As a fight continues, enemies adapt, wounded creatures become desperate, and hidden powers are brought to bear. A conflict that began with clear lines and simple intentions can quickly become something more dangerous.
This gathering force is Chaos. It represents the moment when the battle begins to escape its original shape and the enemy reveals what it is capable of when pressed. The longer the fight continues, the more opportunities it has to turn against those who believed they understood it.
Victory often belongs to the party that recognizes the change first.
Safety Is A Place, Not A Pause
Closing a door does not make the world beyond it disappear.
True safety exists where danger has been held back: within guarded settlements, protected sanctuaries, trusted strongholds, and other places where adventurers can finally lower their weapons without listening for what approaches.
Elsewhere, rest is only borrowed time. The party may bind wounds and recover its breath, but the surrounding place continues to move, listen, and remember.
Knowing when to press forward matters. Knowing when to turn back may matter more. In Risen Kings, reaching safety can be as important as reaching the treasure.
The Altering
In the oldest age, the gods walked openly among mortals.
Kirodin, the Sovereign Virtue, ruled over Eclura in the form of a colossal two-headed gold dragon. For a time, the gods worked together to bring order among the growing mortal peoples.
That harmony did not last.
Shalarhon, the Ash King, gathered other gods who envied Kirodin’s rule and sought to overthrow him. Alliances formed, others declared neutrality, and the conflict erupted into a divine war remembered as the Altering.
Gods fought across the earth and sky. Mountains tore upward from the land. Volcanoes opened in the southwest. Lightning storms burned forests and shattered plains. Four gods were slain, and even their names were eventually lost.
When the fighting ended, Eclura had been changed forever.
The Fractured Heights and the Copper Mountains rose from the devastation, dividing much of the known world into three great regions.
The gods withdrew from open rule, but their influence never vanished. Their temples, relics, servants, rivalries, and old wounds remain throughout Eclura.
Some wounds from the Altering became mountains, deserts, and shattered coastlines. Others remained less visible. In these places, light behaves incorrectly, the dead refuse silence, roads cross distances they should not, and the boundaries between realms grow thin. Kingdoms have built temples, fortresses, mines, and cities around these scars without always understanding what lies beneath them. Many of Eclura’s most dangerous ruins are fragments of the Altering that history learned to name but never learned to heal.
A World Of Many Peoples
Humans, dwarves, elves, halflings, gnomes, half-elves, orcs, goblins, lizardfolk, and infernals live throughout Eclura.
No Bloodline possesses a single culture, homeland, or destiny. People are shaped by family, faith, community, hardship, and choice as much as ancestry.
A human raised in the Deep Hallows may have more in common with a dwarf of Norgrin than with a noble from Navarre. An orc merchant of Nur Garum may know little of the warrior traditions outsiders expect. Elven courts, goblin warrens, halfling settlements, and infernal families differ as widely from one another as the kingdoms around them.
Old legacies still matter. A spirit may remember an ancestral promise or a lost road may open only for someone whose blood carries the memory of those who built it.
These connections create possibilities. They do not guarantee power or success.
The Three Great Regions
The Navarre Kingdom lies in the west. Its people value strength, discipline, and order, and its armies are among the most organized in Eclura. King Tythrun Emberrock rules from the capital city of Navarre, where fortress walls and military traditions shape daily life.
To the east lies Avrynth, a region of scholarship, old wealth, sacred mystery, and political tradition. The Conclave of the Entombed King governs from the Rose Citadel, known throughout the region as the City of the Sapphire Flame.
Between them stretch the Veiled Lands, a varied and sometimes unpredictable region of forests, mountains, trade roads, hidden settlements, and lingering magic. Five powerful mages known as the Council of Mists rule from the city of Ohm Serin.
Trade, diplomacy, old resentments, and competing ambitions bind the three regions together. Each winter, representatives of the Council of Mists and the Conclave of the Entombed King meet at Nur Garum for the Festival of the Yielding Dawn, renewing the peace between their peoples.
Peace, however, is not the same as trust.
The Veiled Lands
The Veiled Lands contain some of the most traveled and least understood places in Eclura.
The Cinderwood Forest covers much of the southwest. Its ancient trees surround secluded settlements, druidic circles, forgotten roads, and places where the boundary between the mortal world and older realms grows thin.
Bhurn Farum, a fortress of black stone, stands upon a steep mountain west of the forest. Deep within it lies one of the few protected entrances to the Deep Hallows.
Farther south, the Charred Grove twists across rocky ground beneath nearly leafless trees. The forest appears burned, though no history agrees on when the fire occurred or why the land never recovered.
Nur Garum stands near the base of the Copper Mountains and serves as one of the region’s greatest trading centers. Merchants, pilgrims, mercenaries, diplomats, and travelers from Avrynth and the Veiled Lands pass through its markets.
The Greywall Mountains divide much of the region. Ohm Serin rests among their southern foothills, while Palmor lies to the north, known for its fighting pits and harsh warrior traditions.
Beyond these better-known places lie villages, old roads, isolated towers, hidden shrines, and ruins absent from every modern map.
The Navarre Kingdom
The Navarre Kingdom stretches across the western reaches of Eclura, where open plains, dry riverlands, red-rock mesas, desert roads, fortified farms, and border forts shape the land.
Pockets of forest survive along sheltered rivers and old estates, but much of Navarre is built around endurance. Villages gather near wells, granaries, and caravan roads. Towns rise where trade routes, military roads, and ancient ruins meet.
The capital city of Navarre stands upon an old holy site long older than the kingdom itself. Its fortress walls surround crowded markets, shrines, barracks, caravan yards, noble compounds, and the halls of the Order of the Revealing Flame.
The Order holds deep influence in the capital. Some honor its priests and agents as guardians against darkness and corruption. Others fear how easily truth becomes judgment once the Revealing Flame turns toward them.
King Tythrun Emberrock rules a realm known for discipline and military strength. Navarre’s armies are widely considered the strongest of the three great realms, supported by drilled infantry, hardened cavalry, desert scouts, engineers, and signal forts.
Beyond the capital, Emberwatch Bastion crowns a red mesa along the eastern approaches. Redglass Ford marks a vanished river where caravans still cross. Farther south, the Sunken Reliquary waits beneath wind-stripped desert stone.
Avrynth
Avrynth stretches across the eastern reaches of Eclura, a land of fertile river valleys, old estates, wooded hills, coastal roads, and ruins preserved beneath layers of scholarship and ceremony. Its settlements are often built around monasteries, observatories, ancestral holdings, and fragments of older civilizations.
The region’s wealth flows through vineyards, glassworks, manuscript houses, enchanted crafts, and ports facing the eastern sea. Beyond its cultivated heartlands lie drowned foundations, abandoned noble estates, sacred groves, and sealed tombs whose ownership remains the subject of legal disputes centuries after their builders died.
The Rose Citadel rises in Avrynth as a city of scholarship, old wealth, sacred mystery, and careful rule. Its pale spires, rose-colored walls, gardens, archives, courts, and sanctuaries are known throughout eastern Eclura.
At the city’s heart burns the Sapphire Flame, a sacred fire kept alive for more than a thousand years. Priests, wardens, mages, and oathkeepers guard it through rites whose oldest meanings are known only to a few.
The Conclave of the Entombed King governs from the Citadel. Its members are priests, scholars, and mages chosen for intelligence, discipline, and neutrality. They rule in the name of a dead king whose legacy still shapes Avrynth’s laws and ceremonies.
Life in the city moves through ceremony, study, faith, and politics. Noble families keep estates behind flowering walls. Scribes copy histories in vaulted libraries. Mages debate beneath observatory domes, while markets carry books, glasswork, pigments, relic fragments, fine weapons, and rumors.
Beneath the courts and terraces lie cisterns, sealed passages, forgotten prison halls, and foundations older than the present city. Some secrets are preserved by law. Others survive because no one powerful has dared expose them.
Adventures in the Rose Citadel often begin with a forbidden text, a disputed inheritance, a missing scholar, a relic smuggled beneath the city, or a strange change in the Sapphire Flame.
The Deep Hallows
Beneath Eclura lies another world.
The Deep Hallows are a vast network of caverns, underground roads, buried fortresses, black rivers, and forgotten kingdoms. Entire civilizations have risen and fallen without ever seeing the sun.
Light travels strangely beneath the world. Blackwater reflects shapes that do not stand above it, distant bridges vanish into cavern mist, and entire roads descend beyond the reach of surface maps. Settlements survive around guarded fires, luminous stone, ancient machinery, and routes protected across generations.
Three major cities still endure.
Ama Ennore is an elven outpost built within the ruined stronghold of long-dead frost giants.
Norgrin is a dwarven city of towers and bridges suspended above the dark waters of Raven Lake.
Zirbran Aghol is an orcish city ruled by Bazzuk, the Orc Lord.
These cities represent only a fraction of the Deep Hallows.
Most entrances to the Deep Hallows are hidden, unstable, or controlled by those who have good reason to fear what might emerge from below.
Planes Of Existence
| Plane | Description |
|---|---|
| Eclura (The Living World) | A rich, diverse world, where the forces of nature, magic, and civilization collide. It is divided into three major realms: the Navarre Kingdom to the west, Avrynth to the east, and the Veiled Lands in the center, a mysterious, mist-shrouded region full of dangers and secrets. Beneath Eclura lies the Deep Hallows, a vast and treacherous network of caverns and subterranean civilizations, home to dark forces. |
| Primal Void | A chaotic, ever-shifting plane with five distinct layers of malevolent energy, ruled over by the demon lords. Each layer is dominated by a different type of dark force or entity, vying for power over the others. The deeper one descends, the more twisted and nightmarish the reality becomes. |
| The Divine Realm | A radiant and serene domain of celestial beings, where the divine powers of the good gods hold sway. It is a realm of peace and order, where gods and their servants reside in towering cities of light. Mortals who ascend here are rare, often chosen by divine beings for their extraordinary deeds. |
| The Hells | A single, vast, infernal landscape of brimstone and fire, ruled by the arch-devils. It’s a land of torment and punishment where the damned souls of mortals reside for eternity and fight their way into power. |
| Verdant Grove | A vibrant, mystical forest teeming with wild magic, nature spirits, and ancient beings. It is a plane of growth and life, where the magic is less mischievous and more in tune with nurturing the balance of nature. Mortals visiting here often find themselves in awe of the beauty, but can easily be overwhelmed by the raw power of untamed nature. |
| The Mirthwood | A shadowy mirror of the material world, where everything is dim and echoes of lost souls linger. It is a place of melancholic beauty, often used by mortals to traverse between life and death. While not as malevolent as the Primal Void, the Mirthwood has a haunting, unsettling quality, where time and memory distort. |
| Arcane Nexus | A boundless, star-filled expanse where the weave of magic is laid bare. Here, powerful mages and beings traverse between planes, meditating on the nature of existence and unlocking forbidden arcane knowledge. The Nexus is both a highway for planar travelers and a sanctuary for those who master the magical arts. |
| Echoing Expanse | A mysterious plane connected to time, where the past, present, and future blur together. Time is fluid here, and those who enter may witness glimpses of what has been or what could be. Chronomancers study this realm to manipulate time’s flow, but too long spent here can lead to temporal disorientation or being lost in infinite loops. |
| Ethereal Linking | The ethereal web that connects all planes, acting as a transitory space between realms. It’s a formless, ever-shifting expanse of mist and shadow, allowing travelers to pass unnoticed between planes. While neutral in nature, it’s often used by spirits, planar travelers, and beings wishing to move without interference from the powers that rule the planes. |
Magic And The Living World
Magic is known throughout Eclura, but it is never entirely ordinary.
Mages study its hidden structures. Clerics channel divine power. Druids and shamans listen to the living world. Elementalists seize fire, storm, stone, and cold. Occultists bargain with spirits, shadows, curses, and the dead.
Many spells are known and taught. Others vanished into ruins, forbidden grimoires, sealed temples, and the memories of beings older than mortal kingdoms.
These Discoverable Spells cannot be learned through ordinary advancement. They must be found, earned, taught, or taken from places where magic was never meant to survive.
Beyond the mortal world lie other realms: the untamed Verdant Grove, the haunted Mirthwood, the infernal Hells, the radiant Divine Realm, the chaotic Primal Void, and stranger realms of magic, time, and planar passage.
Their influence reaches Eclura through ancient gates, supernatural creatures, relics, dreams, divine intervention, and magic that should have remained forgotten.
The Dark Between Lights
Not every darkness in Eclura is the absence of flame.
Gloomlight weakens ordinary illumination and diminishes healing. Shadowlight shortens sight and turns distance into danger. Voidlight consumes mundane light and disrupts magic itself.
These forces gather in cursed lands, buried places, ancient battlefields, and wounds in the world that have never closed.
Those who enter such places carry light because they fear what they cannot see.
They also carry it because some things can see them perfectly.
Ruins And Frontiers
Beyond Eclura’s guarded roads, the world becomes less certain. Borders fade, maps grow unreliable, and the remains of older ages rise through forest, marsh, mountain, and stone.
These places are rarely empty. Some shelter creatures, exiles, cults, or powers that have outlived the kingdoms that named them. Others hold relics, lost histories, and truths dangerous enough to threaten rulers, faiths, or entire peoples.
Adventurers go where armies would draw too much attention, where scholars cannot travel safely, and where ordinary people cannot afford to risk what little they have. They enter because someone must recover what was lost, learn what survived, or stop what has begun to stir.
Eclura is filled with questions buried beneath stone, blood, and memory. Adventurers are the ones willing to cross the frontier and hear the answers.
The Powers Of Eclura
The people of Eclura pray to gods, honor angels, fear demons and devils, and remember mortals who rose beyond death into divine legend.
Faith differs between regions and cultures. A sailor may offer tribute to Kizordus before a voyage, ask Kronos for clear stars, and still keep a charm bearing the light of Daella. A judge may serve Adriel while invoking Gahlmiir before passing sentence.
The gods do not always answer directly. Their temples, servants, relics, rivalries, and ancient acts still shape the mortal world.
These powers rarely act alone. Their influence moves through temples, military orders, covens, pacts, pilgrimages, relics, bloodlines, and rival interpretations of ancient commands. Two people may call upon the same god and become enemies over what that god requires. A kingdom may outlaw one cult while quietly depending upon another.
The Gods
The gods are not divided cleanly between those who act and those who remain distant. Some intervene through visions, miracles, chosen servants, and relics. Others move through institutions, traditions, and consequences set in motion centuries ago.
Even the gods worshipped as good may demand sacrifice. Even a feared god may govern something mortals cannot escape.
Pantheon Of Eclura
| Deity | Form | Known As | Domain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kirodin | Two-Headed Gold Dragon | The Sovereign Virtue | Honor |
| Adriel | Cloud Giant | The Watchful Judge | Law |
| Daella | Gnome | The Blinding Light | Light Magic |
| Keris | Divine Being | The Everpresent | Creation and Life |
| Udon | Planetar | The All-Knowing | Knowledge |
| Greknar | Storm Giant | Prince of Storms | Storms |
| Kronos | Griffin | The Enduring Guide | Moon, Stars, and Sky |
| Borion | Centaur | The Guardian King | Courage and Protection |
| Gahlmiir | Dwarf | The Life Forger | Justice |
| Elaran | Elf | The Sealer | Fate |
| Kizordus | Hydra | The Salt Queen | The Sea |
| Shalarhon | Three-Headed Red Dragon | The Ash King | Evil |
| Khalgaladh | Lich | The Undying | Undeath |
| Gnakuorog | Gnoll | The Ravager | Savagery |
| Ghorbash | Orc | The Ruin Maker | War |
| Eknare | Grey Elf | The Shadow Lord | Knowledge and Darkness |
Demon Lords
Demon Lords embody destruction without order or restraint.
Sinnoroth, the Infinite Chaos, rules the hunt and the breaking of boundaries. Tarkath, the Anarchic Nightmare, twists minds through dark magic. Xugmurak, the Plagued Destruction, spreads disease, poison, and anguish. Soz’gurith, the Executioner, claims death through terror and violence. Istamo, the Timeless, commands the restless dead.
Their followers do not always build temples. Some create wounds in the world and wait for something to answer.
Arch Devils
Devils offer order at a price.
Mirseth, the Seductress, rules through trickery and forbidden knowledge. Tolguth, the Fallen One, turns war into obligation and conquest. Genrach, the Infernal Prince, binds death through oath and bargain. Zorzaran, King of the Hells, commands law, darkness, and the hierarchies of the infernal realms.
A demon destroys the agreement, but a devil asks you to sign it.
Archangels
Archangels serve as divine warriors, messengers, judges, and guardians.
Tabris embodies protection and light. Zarall carries war and knowledge. Mihr preserves life and sacred understanding. Uzziel, the Celestial Light, bears the powers of light and life.
Archangels may serve individual gods, divine causes, or purposes older than modern temples understand.
The Risen Kings
The Risen Kings were mortals who passed beyond ordinary death and became powers in their own right.
They were warriors, rulers, protectors, assassins, and seekers of forbidden truths. No single path carried them beyond mortality. Some rose through sacrifice, some through conquest, some through powers claimed from the ruins of older ages, and some through deeds whose full histories have been deliberately concealed.
Ullurk Glosk, the Warlord of Light, represents war bound to order. Karrim Stormhorn, the Horned Prince, guards life through protection. Kelqen Stonelight, the Tranquil Assassin, watches over stealth and trickery. Ianstar, the Concealed, governs hidden knowledge and cunning paths.
Their shrines stand beside those of the gods in some lands and are condemned as mortal arrogance in others. Orders preserve their teachings. Families claim their blood. Rulers search for their weapons, crowns, tombs, and unfinished oaths. Cults seek to repeat the acts that carried them beyond death.
They are remembered as heroes, rulers, saints, tyrants, and warnings. Their existence proves that mortality is not an unbreakable boundary and that the gods are not the only powers capable of changing the world.
Every adventurer begins as someone small before the weight of history. Yet Eclura remembers those who enter the sealed places, confront powers older than kingdoms, and survive long enough to change what comes after them. Will your deeds fade with the road behind you, or will you write your name into the legends of Eclura and rise among its kings?
Using This Book
Risen Kings is organized so you can learn the game, create a character, and then explore the rules connected to that character’s abilities. The following chapters build from the world and core rules into character options, combat, and exploration.
- Introduction: Discover Eclura, its history, regions, divine powers, ancient dangers, and the kind of adventures Risen Kings is built to tell.
- Chapter 1: Playing Risen Kings: Learn how the game works, what players and the Game Master do, the Three Modes of Play, and the Core Rules used to resolve uncertain actions.
- Chapter 2: Character Creation: Build an adventurer, assign Ability Scores, choose defining options, calculate character values, select equipment, and learn how characters advance.
- Chapter 3: Bloodlines and Backgrounds: Choose the ancestry, culture, experiences, and inherited connections that shape your character’s identity and history.
- Chapter 4: Classes and Specializations: Choose your character’s primary role, central abilities, resource type, and the path they develop as their power grows.
- Chapter 5: Perks: Select additional talents that expand your character’s martial skill, magic, survival, leadership, and other capabilities.
- Chapter 6: Magic and Casting: Learn how spellcasting works and explore the Cantrips, Core Spells, and Discoverable Spells available through the traditions of magic.
- Chapter 7: Equipment: Find weapons, armor, shields, adventuring supplies, Kits, services, and the rules governing what characters carry into danger.
- Chapter 8: Combat: Learn how to run tactical battles using rounds, actions, movement, attacks, defenses, Reactions, Chaos, damage, conditions, and recovery.
- Chapter 9: Exploration: Learn how to investigate Points of Interest using Exploration Turns, light, Tension, Strain, equipment, hazards, rest, and the pressure of passing time.
- Appendix A: Sample Characters and Character Sheets: Use ready-made characters as examples or begin play quickly with a completed adventurer.
- Appendix B: Creature Stat Blocks: Find creatures that support different classes during adventures.
- Appendix C: Glossary: Look up important rules terms, conditions, and recurring language used throughout the book.
You do not need to memorize every rule before beginning. Read Playing Risen Kings, create a character, and become familiar with the sections connected to that character’s abilities. The remaining rules can be learned as they arise during play.
The door is open.
Decide who enters first.