Tomes of Power

01 · Start here

What is actually happening

Twelve things are asleep. You are trying to kill all twelve with a deck of playing cards before they kill you. Everyone at the table is on the same side: you all win or you all lose, and you will mostly lose. That is the game working correctly.

There are two decks. The Pantheon is the twelve enemies, face-down, weakest on top. One is face up at a time; that one is the enemy. The Gathering is everything else, Ace through 10, and that is what you draw from. Cards you spend go to the Grave.

A turn is: play cards, the cards do something, the enemy takes Ruin, the enemy hits you back. Repeat until the Pantheon is empty (you win) or somebody cannot pay (everybody loses).

02 · The enemy

Who you are fighting

Three tiers, four of each, always in the same order: Spawn first, Ancients last.

Dominion is how much Ruin it soaks before it dies. Strike is what it hits back for. The last column matters later: if you kill one perfectly, you get to keep it.

What you start with

03 · A turn

Four steps, always in this order

Every turn is these four steps. You cannot skip step 2 or reorder them: the order is what makes some plays work at all.

1. Invoke, or Endure

   Play cards from your hand at the enemy, or play nothing and Endure, which skips straight to step 4.

2. The suits fire

   Every suit you played does its thing, at the combined total of everything you played. This is mandatory. You do not get to decline a power because it is inconvenient.

3. Deal Ruin, and check

   Your total lands on the enemy, doubled if you played Swarm. If everyone's Ruin so far now reaches its Dominion, it is marooned, and you skip step 4 and immediately start a fresh turn on the next one.

4. Suffer the Manifestation

   The enemy hits you for its Strike, minus any Void warded against it. Commit cards from your hand worth at least that much to the Grave. Can't? Everybody loses.

Then the turn passes to your left.

04 · What you may play

Three legal shapes, and nothing else

On step 1 you have exactly three options. Anything else is not a legal play.

One card

Always legal. The simplest turn in the game.

A Symbiont bound to one other card

An Ace is a Symbiont. It is worth 1, and it can bind to exactly one other card, including another Ace. Both suits then fire, both at the combined total. This is the most efficient thing in the deck.

Two cautions. A Symbiont can never join a Ritual, and never pairs with a Heretic. And if you bind a Symbiont to a card of the same suit, that suit still only fires once.

A Ritual

Two, three or four cards of the same number, totalling 10 or less. That means: a pair of 2s, 3s, 4s or 5s; three 2s or 3s; or four 2s. Nothing else fits under ten.

05 · The four Forces

What each suit does

Every card belongs to a Force. Play the card and the Force fires, whether you wanted it to or not.

Blood always resolves before Dream. That ordering is a real tactic: cards you just pulled out of the Grave are underneath the Gathering, so a big Blood-and-Dream turn can draw the very cards it just recovered.

06 · The hard part

Domain, and the two marks

Every entity denies the Force of its own suit. That is its domain, and it is the whole strategic spine of the game: your best card is often the wrong card, because the thing you are hitting is precisely the thing that does not care.

The Spawn of Dream (J♦) denies your draw. The Herald of Blood (Q♥) lets nothing back out of the Grave. The Ruin still lands. Only the power is cancelled.

Your hand shows you this, and it shows you two different things, because the rule has two cases:

The Heretic

A Heretic deals no Ruin at all. What it does is break the entity's domain for the rest of the fight. You then skip steps 3 and 4 (so you take no Manifestation) and you choose who goes next. There are at most two in the entire deck.

07 · Killing well

Why the exact number matters

Ruin accumulates on the enemy across everybody's turns. Reach its Dominion and it dies. Reach it exactly and you get paid.

A recruited entity is an ordinary card in your hand. It has a suit, and that suit still fires when you play it: an Ancient of Blood played from hand heals twenty.

Enduring is a move

Playing nothing costs you no card. If the enemy's Strike is fully warded, Enduring is free. You cannot Endure if every other player Endured on their last turn, so alone, you can never Endure.

08 · Losing

Two ways it ends

There are exactly two, and both end the game for everybody.

• Somebody cannot commit enough from hand to cover a Manifestation.
• Somebody begins their turn with no card to play and cannot Endure either.

An empty hand is not, by itself, a loss; it is perfectly normal, and Dream or Blood may refill it before your turn comes round. It only kills you if the turn reaches you and you have nothing to Invoke and no Endure available.

09 · Alone

The solo variant

One hand of eight, and no Heretics shuffled into the Gathering. Instead you hold two Echoes.

Spending an Echo commits your entire hand to the Grave and the Gathering answers again, up to your limit. You may spend one before step 1, or before step 4 when you cannot pay. Two crucial differences from a real Heretic: an Echo does not break the entity's domain, and the refill does not count as drawing (so a Dream-denying entity cannot stop it).

A Strike you cannot pay is not the end while an Echo is unspent.

At two seats the two Echoes are a shared pool, and that is the only resource in this game you have to agree about. Whoever is playing may spend one. Note what it does not come with: no Muster, and no Beckon. A table is given something to spend rather than something that arrives because you are losing.

Channelling

You may never tell your partner what you hold. Channelling is how you earn the right to see it instead.

Expunge an entity exactly and a channel opens, both ways. One card still in their Redoubt turns over to you; one of yours turns over to them, at the same moment. Cards turn over oldest first, so a channel moves on as they play rather than piling up.

Cumulative, not a run. A spill fails to advance you; it never takes back what you earned.

That is the one thing Channelling does differently from the solo Beckon, and it is deliberate. Alone, breaking your own run is your own fault and the sting is the rule working. At a table it would be your partner breaking your reward, which is how a game teaches two people to resent each other.

Sight, and the Reach

A channel can be used twice over, but only once. Look through it and the card stays where it is and the channel stays open. Reach through it and you take the card into your own Redoubt, and the channel closes. Any open channel, not only the oldest card.

Reaching across closes the sight that permitted it.

That is the entire price and it needs no second one. Only another perfect marooning opens another channel, so a table that leans on the reach stops being able to see, and a table that never reaches accumulates channels it is not using. Sight lasts until you spend it; a card is gone the moment you take it. So sight is the long game and the reach is the emergency.

It can starve your partner. Take their last small card and a Manifestation they cannot cover ends the descent for both of you. There is no guard against this, deliberately: it is a boon and a curse in one action, and knowing that is what stops anybody being cavalier with it. The board says what it will cost before you take it.

Alone you can also switch on Inoculation in the lobby, a coach that speaks after each move and shows what three different priorities would have done.

10 · Going further

The campaign

A Cycle is one descent. A campaign is several, played as one run, and what you carry out of one decides how the next begins.

Terror is the first, and it is three descents. Beneath the twelve of each sits an Empyrean of 50 Dominion and 25 Strike, wearing a different Force every time, so the power it denies you is never the one you spent the descent learning to rely on. Two players at least; the Heretics matter too much below that.

The Empyrean is the reason a campaign is not three games in a row. You can see all four of its faces, and the twelve above them, on the Pantheon.

11 · Descending alone

The Dream Rite edition

Alone, your hand only ever drains: there is no second seat to draw for you, and the descent is decided long before the Ancients. Three rules answer that, and the third is the one that changes what you are playing for.

The four readings

Every descent hands you one translation of the ancient materials, and it decides what a pair becomes in your hands. Descending alone you choose it in the Gathering. At a table you are dealt one each, and no two of you read alike, which is shown beside every name because it is a role rather than a preference.

One card’s Ruin, never the pair’s.

That is the brake, and it is what keeps the four on one scale. The Swarm reading looks like the strongest and is not: those two eights would have dealt sixteen anyway across two turns. What the Rite buys is the manifestation you did not have to stand through, and it costs you the second card’s own Force to buy it.

The Bloodstone

Put an entity down at full Dominion, exactly, in a single play, and you take a Bloodstone: worth ten for a Spawn, fifteen for a Herald, twenty for an Ancient.

Not a clean kill. A clean kill with no blow struck first.

You hold it until you break it. Breaking one calls that many cards back out of the Grave and into the bottom of the Gathering, and choosing when is the whole of it. Break it early and they lie under a full deck where nothing reaches them; break it when the Gathering is thin and they are exactly what you draw next.

Nothing stops you wasting one. Break a twenty over a Grave holding three and you get three. The Grave’s count sits beside the stones and the call is yours.

It is Swarm that makes it reachable, and the arithmetic is exact: a Club doubles, so the Swarm of a rank is precisely that rank’s Dominion. The Rite does it with a pair, which is the harder and better line.

A Club can never double against the entity of Swarm, which is why three of those rows have an exception and why the Rite has none.

Expunged, and Subdued

Put an entity down on exactly its remaining Dominion and it is Expunged: face down on the Gathering, to be drawn again. Spill Ruin over it and it is only subdued. It is beaten and it is not gone.

The Marooned are the Expunged plus the Subdued.

That is the whole arithmetic, and it is why the count of twelve never grows. Settling a debt moves an entity from one half to the other.

What a Beckon buys

The debt comes due

Nothing you subdued is forgotten, and with a rung set, a descent is won by Expunging all twelve. Reaching the end of the Pantheon with anything still owed is not a lesser victory; it is the end of the descent. And once nothing remains to reveal, the fight in front of you must be Expunged: subdue one then and the Unbound are consumed.

Two roads lead there. In a single Cycle the debt is dragged back: when the Pantheon is spent, anything still owed breaches on its own, at full strength, against whatever you have left. In a campaign nothing drags it back, so a Beckon is the only thing that can, and one must be spent on every entity you failed to put down properly.

Battles can be won and the war still lost.

How hard you want it

One dial, chosen in the Gathering, and every name describes the Pantheon rather than you. It sets how much clean play one Beckon costs, and how far the Unbound will go before more of them come forward. At the hardest rung none do: it is the Cycle with nothing but the cards you draw.

Winning alone is graded on blemishes: an Echo spent counts as one, and so does an entity left subdued. None is Gold, one is Silver, two or more is Bronze. At every rung but Quietus a win means nothing was left owed, so the grade is the Echoes you did not need.

12 · Talking

What you may and may not say

You may never reveal or hint at what is in your hand. Everything public is fair game.

After a Heretic the restriction relaxes for one turn: players may say whether they want to go next (“I have a good play” or “I would rather not”) without saying why.

That is the whole game. Survival is the part the rules do not teach.