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Heroines of the First Age

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A tabletop roleplaying game about larger-than-life legends and the mythical monsters that lived at the dawn of time!

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Sing, Muse, of Xlu the Red, of Tyakua the Stonebound, of Elbor the Unjust. Sing of the Heroines of the First Age, of the fire at the beginning of the world.

We are the Heroines! Demi-humans, monsterfolk, beastmen, whatever you call us, this is our story. We have many forms, from kistune to arachne, from centaur to harpy. We stand against terrible, vengeful gods and unstoppable cosmic forces.

This is the First Age! It is the dawn of civilization. People are just coming out of the forests and caves to create towns and agriculture. Grand armies are being assembled for the first time in history. The world is fresh, new, and exciting, and there's so much of it that has never been explored before.

Lead Armies! Take command of military units and field them against your enemies, or make a stand against entire armies yourself.

Prepare for your Quest! Heroines of the First Age contains 10 Archetypes, dozens of special powers, and more Moves than even the gods can handle. Choose from more than 20 Tragic Flaws and select a panoply of equipment fit for royalty.

Discover and Build as You Go! Collaborative worldbuilding at its best! Work together to create your very own tale! Heroines of the First Age contains everything you need to craft a unique world with your friends!

Inspirational Media: Utawarerumono, Nibelinglied, Maoyusha, Wintersun, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Monstress, Conan the Barbarian, Beowulf, Kobayashi chi no Maid Dragon, Black God's Kiss, Everyday Life with Monstergirls, The Iliad, 12 Beast, Enuma Elish, Myth, & Legend.

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About HFARPG

Heroines of the First Age isn't about uncovering ancient secrets and defeating primordial powers. In Heroines of the First Age, you are the primordial powers. You make those ancient secrets. This is the First Age, writ large, and the world is yours to make or destroy. Your actions will shape the world for eons to come.

Features

  • Modular Character Creation!
  • Customize your monstrous traits!
  • Powered by the Apocalypse!
  • Collaborative world building!
  • Wide Variety of Archetypes!
  • War Moves & Large Scale Combat!
  • Equipment, Upgrades, and Blessings!
  • Creature Portfolios to fill out the enemy ranks!
  • Power Pools to form the basis for cosmic metaphysics!

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Playing HFARPG

HFA is designed to be a collaborative storytelling experience. The GM guides the story and provides challenges, but will often ask the players to fill in gaps in the lore or to answer questions about how the game world works. They've got a lot on their plate, so help them out by thinking up things that will make the game more interesting for everyone. Since we're all here for entertainment, all of us have to pitch in to make the game fun and exciting for all.

Most of the rules in Heroines of the First Age are character-centric meaning they revolve around the PCs rather than the many enemies, NPCs, environments, challenges, and hazards they encounter. The GM has certain rules to follow as well, but most of them revolve around providing the right amount and kind of resistance to the advance of the PCs.

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Heroines of the First Age is like a conversation. Players say what they want their PCs to do and the GM responds, usually by suggesting a particular Move or by describing the situation. The GM always finishes up their end by asking "what do you do?" to keep the game moving forward.

It's important to note that there are no "turns" in Heroines of the First Age. The enemies do not have their own actions to perform. Instead, success and failure are in the hands of the PCs. Each time a PC attempts to do something, the outcome will be one of three things: Success, Tie, or Failure. When the PCs look to the GM to see what happens next, the GM Moves. When a PC fails something, the consequences are more severe, often in the form of damage or disruption of the PCs' plans.

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PCs

PCs are mostly composed of five parts:

  • Vitals describe your character's appearance and basic traits.
  • Primary Stats describe your character's base abilities, how good they are at various kinds of tasks.
  • Secondary Stats describe things like how tough or experienced your character is, how much stuff they have, and their relationships with others.
  • Moves are the specific things your character can do. Each Move has its own mechanics. Some are offensive while others are utilitarian.
  • Equipment is the stuff you character has and uses. It encompasses everything from Weapons and Armor to Resources and even followers.

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GMing

The GM's rules are somewhat simpler because they're juggling more at a time.

  • Agenda is sort of the why of running the game and informs the reasoning for your Principles and Moves.
  • Principles are the ins and outs of how to run the game, what you should generally be trying to do.
  • GM Moves are the individual tools you use to follow your Agenda and adhere to your Principles. These are the things you do when fate intervenes in the PCs' lives.
  • Adversaries are the enemies, villains, and NPCs that the PCs will run up against. Adversaries come in two flavors and have their own GM Moves and Principles.

Photos

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Character Sheets are included, but can also be found here.

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Warning: This game is very pink.


Check out our Heroines of the First Age products!

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Reviews (2)
Discussions (9)
Customer avatar
Unnar T January 07, 2021 2:07 pm UTC
PURCHASER
The Super Ability Move seems a bit ill-defined. Do we use it every time we roll the associated stat? If so, why are there two Awareness ones? If not, what exactly does, say, Omniscience do? I assume you don't actually know everything, as that would be hard to figure out and work with in a game.
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Customer avatar
Joe B January 07, 2021 10:01 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
Super Ability directly accomplishes the thing you try to do with it. There's no other roll you need to make in order to succeed with it. The risk is that really bad things can come down on you as collateral damage from using your Super Ability: this is sort of using your raw power to brute force the problem, whatever it is. And you're correct, Super Ability: Omniscience doesn't make you know everything, per se, but allows you to use Super Ability to solve intelligence / knowledge related problems.

Since Super Ability is separate from other moves, you don't HAVE to use your Super Ability to do something you also have another move to handle, but you can if you want.
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Customer avatar
Unnar T January 08, 2021 7:59 am UTC
PURCHASER
Ah, thanks! I guess it's probably too late for the errata, but this does seem like it should be specified.
Customer avatar
Irven M September 16, 2019 6:42 pm UTC
PURCHASER
What are the rules on dual-wielding? Do I add up the harm of both weapons or give the player the option to hit twice?
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Customer avatar
Joe B September 16, 2019 6:54 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
There are no rules for dual-wielding. Generally, if the payer attacks some other being, that'd be the Melee move regardless of what they're using to do that. Since there are no "turns" attacking twice doesn't make a lot of sense. If you want, you could rationalize using two weapons as a kind of Upgrade, possibly either as "Many" or just by tacking on some extra harm. Beware though, the cost of weapons is discounted by 2 from the total of harm + positive tags - negative tags, so doubling a Dagger, for example, at a cost of 2 Gold would be giving that player a 2 harm advantage. A doubled dagger should cost more like 4 total to preserve balance. A simple "dual wield" upgrade could simply boost the harm by 2 and cost 2 gold.
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Customer avatar
Irven M September 17, 2019 2:29 am UTC
PURCHASER
Thanks for the quick response, this information would help me a lot with my upcoming game.
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Customer avatar
Joe B September 17, 2019 2:11 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
You're welcome! Glad I could help!
Customer avatar
August 04, 2018 11:46 am UTC
PURCHASER
On page 28, your character creation list says to being play with 3 connected willpower stars, but on page 73 it says to begin play with 2 connected. Which one is the correct number?
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Customer avatar
Joe B August 06, 2018 2:25 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
Good catch. Page 28 is right, 3 willpower, not 2 as it says on 73. Added to the errata.
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Customer avatar
Joe B July 31, 2020 4:46 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
I was incorrect about this. The proper initial Willpower is 2, as on 73 and on the character sheet. I've updated the errata.
Customer avatar
joao J July 10, 2018 11:20 am UTC
PURCHASER
hi, first , the book is great i love it. i just one thing to ask , probably will appear strange but i have ocd (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder ) and i cant get satisfaction with the pdf without the last page, so you can att the pdf with the lastest page ? thanks for your attention
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Customer avatar
Joe B July 16, 2018 2:05 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
The last page of the book is 143. Is that page missing from your PDF?
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Customer avatar
joao J July 19, 2018 8:53 pm UTC
PURCHASER
i'm so sorry, i confused the name what i ask its the back cover , i have curiosity to see it , but i say last page my pdf go until 144 bit dont have the back cover
Customer avatar
Heather R June 26, 2018 1:18 pm UTC
PURCHASER
Beautiful book and an interesting take on Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics. Can't wait to run my first game.

I am confused about how +# Forward/Ongoing work with the new dice mechanic, however. Initially I thought that this translated to bonus dice that could be rolled, but I thought the book specifically said that's NOT what happens. I'm not sure what the alternative is, though.

Is it: "add +# to the value of each rolled die"? So that +1 forward makes a roll of 2,3,5 (1 success) turns into 3,4,6 (2 successes)?

Or is it: "Gain # successes without rolling? So that +2 forward means that a roll of 2,3,5 would = 3 successes?

Or something else entirely that I'm not thinking of?

Thanks for the clarification!
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Customer avatar
Joe B June 27, 2018 3:34 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
Page 96 talks about this, specifically that bonuses are to the outcome of the roll, the successes, rather than the number of dice.
Customer avatar
Irven M March 27, 2018 5:20 pm UTC
PURCHASER
Players can choose 3 extra moves at creation and buy new moves later on. How many moves from other Archetypes can players choose to have? It seems to me that players could just take any number of moves from other Archetypes and it's making it feel like Archetypes won't matter because players could just continuously take moves from other Archetypes.
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Customer avatar
Joe B March 28, 2018 12:37 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
That's correct, there's no limit on the number of moves from any particular category you can have. That way, if you want to build a Fighter Mage Thief, or a specialist, very human-like socialite, or a creature that has almost no civilized traits, you can do that. The archetypes are more like guidelines or starting points than classes in other games.
Customer avatar
joao J February 25, 2018 11:36 pm UTC
PURCHASER
can you add the last cover for the pdf archive please
Customer avatar
Kim F November 13, 2017 3:51 pm UTC
Is there a chance that any of the pages will be available for preview? I'd like to see a little bit of the mechanics too. :)
Reply
Customer avatar
Joe B November 20, 2017 5:38 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
I've updated the listing here with a preview of some of the mechanics and the front part of the book. You can also get a pretty good idea of the entire game by downloading the character sheets, it's a pretty character-sheet-focused game, as the moves are listed right there for you. Those can be found here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/216214/Heroines-of-the-First-Age-Character--GM-Sheets
Reply
Customer avatar
Kim F November 21, 2017 6:27 am UTC
Thank you very much, Joe, I'll be sure to check it out. :)
Customer avatar
Luke W November 09, 2017 2:51 am UTC
PURCHASER
Any chance of a hardcover POD with premium quality paper?
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Customer avatar
Joe B November 09, 2017 3:24 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
I'll look into it. It might make the book too expensive though.
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Customer avatar
Luke W November 09, 2017 6:48 pm UTC
PURCHASER
Understood. However, I would much prefer to pay more for a higher quality physical product, especially higher quality paper for the colour art :)

How many pages is the book?
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Customer avatar
Joe B November 09, 2017 7:15 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
143 pages. Once we've got the other parts of the product line in a better situation, I'll probably come back to this. In fact, I've added a task to our trello board; you can see it here: https://trello.com/c/leXjh8F5/610-premium-color-core-book
Reply
Customer avatar
John B November 16, 2017 9:11 am UTC
PURCHASER
Count me as someone who would be interested in a HC premium option to buy as a "CE" version of this (I already have the SC print from KS).
Reply
Customer avatar
Joe B November 20, 2017 5:39 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
Noted! I'll start looking into the size and cost stuff. Hopefully we can keep it.... reasonable.
Reply
Customer avatar
Joe B November 20, 2017 6:04 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
FYI, I've made a task on our task tracker for this; it'll be updated as we go but it's pretty deep in the backlog at the moment.

https://trello.com/c/leXjh8F5/610-premium-color-core-book
Reply
Customer avatar
Luke W June 12, 2018 8:32 pm UTC
PURCHASER
Any progress with a hardcover option?
Reply
Customer avatar
Joe B June 12, 2018 8:53 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
we're still working on finishing out the other parts of the project first. You may be interested in Holdfast (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/242461/Heroines-of-the-First-Age-Holdfast) and America: Land of Monsters (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/243401/America-Land-of-Monsters)
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Customer avatar
Luke W June 12, 2018 9:23 pm UTC
PURCHASER
Thanks. I am interested in the line but trying to hold off until its released in POD. Any chance you would credit PDF purchases against later POD purchases?
Reply
Customer avatar
Joe B June 14, 2018 3:22 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
We're looking at whether you'd be automatically credited the right amount as part of the Print + PDF package deal after the fact, but even if that doesn't happen automatically, I can make a special discount for it.

As our projects keep moving forward, I'm not sure when the hardcover version will happen anymore, FYI. You can still buy the soft-cover print version, however.
Reply
Customer avatar
Luke W June 15, 2018 4:57 am UTC
PURCHASER
Thanks. I will look at grabbing the PDFs when I have the cash.

TBH the hardcover is less of an issue than the standard weight paper. The difference in quality for a full colour book with vibrant colours like HotFA is notable.
Reply
Customer avatar
Luke W July 08, 2020 12:20 am UTC
PURCHASER
No news of this?
Reply
Customer avatar
Joe B July 08, 2020 3:32 pm UTC
PUBLISHER
We're working on a special, fancy version that's both hardcover and premium color. Possibly a few more weeks.
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Product Information
Electrum seller
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HFA-cs
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This title was added to our catalog on November 07, 2017.