The world of Onyx Shards is a realm of boundless adventure. Maps remain incomplete, ancient ruins await rediscovery, and terrifying monsters ravage the land. Chaos and evil run rampant, while magic lies within reach, ready to be harnessed by those daring enough to wield it.
In Onyx Shards, you brave this perilous world, seeking fame and fortune, delivering righteous justice, exploring treacherous wilds, and uncovering the long-buried secrets of magic.
A world on the edge of chaos, Onyx Shards abounds with danger and intrigue, offering adventures limited only by your imagination.
Powered by the second iteration of the Onyx Engine, Onyx Shards lets you focus on the heart of your adventure: telling immersive collaborative stories and creating thrilling game experiences.
Onyx Shards’ attribute-and-skill system, paired with an intuitive step-die core mechanic, offers a seamless blend of simplicity and versatility, freeing you to delve fully into your world and its endless possibilities.
A World of Heroes, Magic, and Monsters
Onyx Shards, from the ENnie award-winning designer of Onyx Sky, Hero Kids, Forge Engine, and Heroes Against Darkness, is:
- All In One RPG: Everything you need to play a campaign; Player Content, Game Rules, GM Guidance, and Adversaries.
- Core Rules: Rules for character creation and development, attribute tests, skills, exploration, combat, downtime, and travel.
- Player Content: Everything to create, develop, and run characters; traits, general skills, martial skills, magic skills, and equipment.
- GM Support: Guidance and tools to run Onyx Shards campaigns and the adventure engine to generate compelling adventures.
- Adversaries: Over 120 adversaries and allies, including monsters, humanoids, animals and beasts, giants, dragons, and undead.
- Full Color: Clean layout and presentation, with over 150 full-color illustrations.
- No Wasted Words: Tightly written and jam-packed with gameable content.
Engrossing Gameplay
Onyx Shards delivers deep and satisfying gameplay:
- Three Pillars: Core mechanics and character options that support gameplay across exploration, role-playing, and combat.
- Grounded Mechanics: Fully integrated mechanics, every action and ability is tied to in-world narrative; pure immersive, cause-and-effect gameplay.
- Tactical Gameplay: Fun tactical gameplay with meaningful choices; on a grid or through descriptive combat.
- Unlimited Characters: Intrepid heroes limited only by your imagination; warriors, mages, archers, rogues, warlords, berserkers, and boundless variations.
- Lineage: Onyx Shards brings modern design, fast gameplay, and refined resolution systems to venerable precursors like Savage Worlds.
Powered by Onyx Engine v2
Onyx Shards uses an updated iteration of Hero Forge Games’ unique and versatile Onyx Engine:
- Attributes and Skills: The simple attribute and skills system allows players the freedom to create their character.
- Flexible Character Building: Flexible character building and development, with skills across general, magic, and martial domains, and skill specializations for extra customization.
- Step-Die Progression: Character attributes use step dice, starting at d6 through d8, d10, d12, d16, to d20 and beyond.
- Dice Pool Resolution: The opposed resolution system features streamlined resolution with meaningful degrees of success.
Comprehensive Player Support
Onyx Shards offers extensive support for players, including:
- Free Player PDF: The Onyx Shards Free Player Version includes everything players need across character creation and development, equipment, and game rules.
- Online Custom Dice Roller: The Onyx Shards dice roller supports all Onyx Engine games (web link included in purchase downloads).
- Form Fillable Character Sheet: Onyx Shards downloads include an interactive form-fillable character sheet (requires Adobe Reader).
- Roll20 Custom Dice Macros: For those using Roll20, the Onyx Shards downloads include dice macros for bespoke Roll20 Onyx Engine games.
Onyx Shards Deluxe Full Edition
The deluxe full version of Onyx Shards contains Setting, Campaign, and Adversary content across 69 pages not in the free edition (equivalent of 138 extra pages in the print book).
- Game Mastering: Exclusive advice for running games, encounter design, variant rules, and custom magic.
- Campaign Guide: Extensive campaign support, including campaign design guidance, adventure engine, and magic reliquary.
- Adversaries and Allies: Over 120 illustrated animals and beasts, giants, dragons, humanoids, monsters, and undead.
Campaign Guide
Onyx Shards’ Campaign Guide includes content and prompts to support game-masters to run an Onyx Shards campaign:
- Campaign Guidance: The Campaign Structure guide shares a framework for structuring and pacing compelling adventure campaigns.
- Adventure Engine: The Adventure Engine uses random tables to generate infinite campaign prompts, each with unique locations, adversaries, story twists.
- Magic Reliquary: The Magic Reliquary includes magic armor, weapons, and items tailored to Onyx Shards’ grounded fantasy realm.
Adversaries and Allies
Onyx Shards’ includes over 120 versatile animals and beasts, dragons, giants, humanoids, monsters, and undead:
- Animals and Beasts: Natural animals and onyx-mutated beasts include bats, big cats, bears, giant snakes and scorpions, wargs, wolves, hyena, and more.
- Dragons: Dragons – along with wyverns and drakes – are among the most fearsome creatures of Terathea; from pure apex predators to creatures of massive intelligence.
- Giants: These towering creatures, born of ancient lineage, range from simple-minded brutes to the ethereal titans.
- Humanoids: These sentient creatures – humans, elves, dwarves, tartareans, orcs, and more – exhibit immense diversity of shape, disposition, and intent.
- Monsters: While the power of the onyx shard empowers magic, it also corrupts creatures into malignant chaos; monsters that ravage the land and prey on the weak and tasty.
- Undead: The mystery of undeath is a terrifying curse and an ultimate power to cheat death; undeath creates ghosts, zombies, liches, vampires, wights, and more.
- Adversary Templates: In addition to the unique adversaries, Onyx Shards also includes over 40 adversary templates for minions, grunts, strikers, tanks, commanders, and casters.
Free Introductory Adventure
Onyx Shards also has a free introductory adventure, Dragoneye Island Incident:
- Introductory Adventure: In Dragoneye Island Incident, the player characters are Venture Guild agents tasked with a simple job…
- Intriguing Mystery: As the players undertake their mission, they tumble into a spiral of mysterious happenings, magical disruption, malevolent greed, petty grievances, and interfering orphans.
- Learning Through Play: Dragoneye Island Incident seamlessly teaches Onyx Shards‘ system and rules through play.
- Packed With Content: This 30-page adventure has 10-12 hours of gameplay, including fun scenes, compelling game characters, flexible encounters, and location and region maps.
Print Edition of Onyx Shards
Onyx Shards is available in print (and comes with the PDF at no extra cost):
- Digest 6×9: Onyx Shards print book is a compact 6×9 softcover book.
- Full Colour: The Onyx Shards print book is full colour.
- 410 Pages: Onyx Shards softcover is 410 pages of fantasy role-playing (this is exactly the same content as the PDF, reformatted for print).
