Abeir Toril › Coming from 5e
Then you already know how to play this. Almost everything here is a word swap — there is exactly one rule you have not seen before.
You roll a d20 and add your modifiers. Advantage and disadvantage work the same. Your AC, your saving throws, your proficiency bonus, your hit dice, your spell slots, your action / bonus action / reaction economy, concentration, conditions, death saves — all identical.
This is D&D 2024. It is wearing a coat.
Read this as a dictionary, not a rules change. The right-hand column is what your character sheet says; the left is what the Player's Handbook calls the same thing.
| In the PHB | Here | What actually changed |
|---|---|---|
| Class | Role | Nothing. A Solo is a Fighter, rule for rule. Look Solo abilities up under Fighter. |
| Level | Mark | Nothing. Mark 7 grants exactly what level 7 grants. |
| Background | Lifepath | Nothing. Three abilities, +2/+1 or +1/+1/+1, two skills, a tool, an origin feat — that is the 2024 background rule verbatim. |
| Spell | Program | The rules, nothing. Same levels, same slots, same text. Every one now wears this world's name — Fire Bolt is Thermal Lance, Haste is Sandevistan, Counterspell is I.C.E. — and every program cites the spell it is, so you can still look it up. |
| Learning a spell | Picking a program | Every Mark that would teach you a spell offers a choice of programs from your Role's menu. Cantrips are Routines. The counts are the PHB's. |
| School of magic | Family | What a program is for rather than what tradition it came from: Attacker, Defender, Anti-Program, Booster, Trauma, Drone, Utility. It is the same field, so it sorts and filters everywhere the school used to. |
| Skill proficiency | Skill Shard | Same bonus. It is now an item on your sheet, so it can be found, bought and lost. |
| Gold | Eddies €$ | It spends the same, and it is the only currency. No silver, no copper, no platinum — prices that were in coins are in eddies. |
| Species | Species | Reflavoured only. A Dwarf is an industrial line. Traits are unchanged, and — as in the 2024 PHB — species grants no ability bonuses. |
| Subclass | Firmware | Same features at the same Marks, but you do not choose it. See below. |
| Magic item | Cyberware | Same idea, but it goes in a body location with limited slots, and it has a weight called Load. |
| Attunement | — | Not used here. Cyberware is either installed or it isn't. Nothing to attune, no three-item cap. |
| Ammunition | Rounds | Guns take a type of round, and the type decides what the shot does. Load Incendiary and a hit sets them Burning; Biotoxin poisons; EMP stuns the chromed. Your weapon stays loaded with whatever you picked last. |
| Weapon Mastery | Weapon Mastery | Unchanged from the 2024 rules. Your sheet now names the mastery on the weapon row and lists what you have mastery with in the header. Mastery is per weapon kind — mantis blades are mantis blades, not a left one and a right one. |
Under the hood every Role keeps its D&D identifier, because that is what makes the automation work — the dice roller, the animations, the macros all key off it. If you spot the old word somewhere, nothing is broken. Look the rules up under the chassis name and they will be correct.
Everything above is vocabulary. This is the actual change, and it is the only subsystem you have to learn.
Your body has a budget for how much hardware it will accept. Go over it and you make a CON save at the start of each combat — DC 8 + your Overload — and a failure is a scene event, not damage.
In PHB terms, the closest thing is attunement slots: a cap on how much gear can be doing something for you at once. The difference is that you are allowed to exceed it, and the game gets interesting when you do. Full detail ›
An attack that hits a Surprised target is an automatic critical hit. 2024 dropped Surprised as a condition — surprise is now disadvantage on initiative — so this world put it back and gave it teeth.
It is why scouting is worth a turn, and it cuts both ways: walk into an ambush and the first shot doubles its dice on you.
The PHB has four grades of cover. This table plays two, because a firefight where everyone is behind something needs one question answered fast: can I be shot, or not?
Leaning out costs you. Attacking while you are in total cover is made at disadvantage, and you lose the cover until your next turn. You do not get to shoot from inside a wall for free.
Half cover does not work that way — you can fire from behind a low wall all day. That is what half cover is.
Then your weapon class decides what it does about all that, and this is the reason the class on your gun is not decoration:
| Class | Against cover | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Power | Cover works on you, in full. | It is a gun. It fires a bullet in a straight line like a gun does. |
| Smart | Ignores half cover entirely. | The rounds home. They go around the console, which is the whole point of paying for a Smart Link. |
| Tech | Ignores half cover, and shoots through the wall at a target in total cover — at disadvantage, and only if that target is Marked. | Tech weapons charge and penetrate. The wall is not the problem; knowing what is behind it is. |
Marked means somebody has eyes on the target and is sharing them — an ally's optics, a drone, a hijacked camera. Somebody has to spend an action doing it. That is deliberate: shooting a person through a solid wall is the strongest thing in this game, and it should take two of you.
It also means a netrunner has something to do in a firefight besides wait for the shooting to stop. Camera Hijack, Remote Eye, Watchdog Drone and Perimeter Watch all put a Mark on somebody, and every pair of cyberoptics in the catalogue can do it the old-fashioned way: by looking.
At the table, cover is a condition the GM clicks onto a token. The AC, the refusals and the disadvantage are all applied for you — nobody is adding +2 to anything.
| You never level up | There is no moment where you gain a level. You go to a clinic and buy the next Mark, for Mark × 1,000 €$. Mechanically it is levelling; narratively somebody installs it, and they can decline to. |
| Your subclass picks you | Firmware is specced at Mk3 by whoever owns your implant. One per Role, unswappable. If you want something else you commission it between sessions — that is a story, not a menu. |
| Multiclassing costs Load | A second Role is legal and adds its full Mark to your Load while giving nothing back. Depth is free; breadth is paid for out of your chrome. |
Every Role implant has a lienholder — the company that made it and can take it back. No mechanic enforces this. It is there so that “where did you get that arm” has an answer, and so the GM has something to lean on that isn't a monster.
| Rules question? | Look it up in the 2024 PHB under the chassis name. It will be right. |
| Spell question? | Look up the Program by its own name. It's the same spell. |
| “Can I do X?” | If you could do it in 5e, you can do it here. |
| Overload? | The only thing on this page worth memorising: CON save, DC 8 + Overload, start of combat. |