In ShadowRealms, Realm Powers represent the distinct, foundational disciplines of mastery—such as Arcane and Martial—that characters harness to bend the harsh reality of their world to their will. Far beyond simple spells, these powers provide granular, tactical asonals that allow players to manipulate the battlefield and the combatants on it, modify die roll target numbers, manage complex action economies, and strategically force the rerolling of successes or failures during critical encounters. By dedicating themselves to specific Realms, characters unlock a synergistic and dynamic arsenal of abilities designed to reward precise planning and deep mechanical customization, ensuring that every invocation feels impactful, deliberate, and deeply integrated into the simulationist core of the system.
By unifying character progression under these Realm Powers, ShadowRealms strips away the arbitrary classes found in traditional systems. Instead of progressing threw a linner track, players are allowed to draw their character’s abilities from a diverse pool of powers across 4 development trees withen a realm, and are allowed to grab powers from
Here is how Realm Powers consume and replace traditional mechanics:
- Replacing Classes with Open Ability Development: In traditional systems, a class dictates your tactical role, locking you into a predetermined suite of abilities. Realm Powers flip this by letting the player assemble their own set of abilities. Because Realm Powers aren’t tied to a specific class, a character is defined instead by the specific toolkit of powers they have curated. Players build their role organically—whether focusing on frontline crowd control, battlefield manipulation, or precise single-target damage—by selecting powers that synergize with their preferred style of play.
- Replacing Feats with Integrated Customization: ShadowRealms takes the various character abilities that would traditionally come from class abilities, feats, various forms of spells, psionic powers, etc., and puts them into the unified mechanical structure of the Realm Power. While each realm has different characteristics which make them unique, they all follow a basic unifying mechanical structure. This ensures every new capability interacts seamlessly with Koth-Tari’s core mechanics, like forcing the reroll of specific dice, rather than just passively adding static numbers.
- Replacing Spells with a Unified Framework: As stated above, spells are mechanically treated as another type of Realm Power, developed just like any other. Realm Powers bring magic, Alchemy, and the Occult into the exact same simulationist framework as martial or physical abilities. Rather than using Vancian spell slots, magical ability is usually based upon set condition monitors which track the character’s ability to cast, such as an Arcane Caster’s Mana Burn or a Divine Caster’s Devotion. These powers utilize the system’s exact mechanical language, seamlessly integrating into the core combat math and utilizing the same granular rules for targeting and action economy as a physical strike.
The Taxonomy of Power: Domains and Realms
To organize this vast array of abilities, ShadowRealms categorizes the world’s forces into Domains, which are further divided into specific Realms.
- Domains are the broad, overarching sources of power or technique. There are seven total Domains in the system: Marshal, Dweomer, Arcane, Subtle, Occult, Primal, and Divine.
- Realms are the specific tactical applications of that power. Each Domain contains three distinct Realms.
You are not locked into a single Domain or Realm. You build your character by spending points on powers across any Development Trees you choose, creating completely unique mechanical synergies.
The Cost of Power: Building Your Toolkit
Because powers define everything from martial prowess to reality-bending magic, acquiring them requires strategic resource management. The system rewards both deep specialization and broad versatility, but the cost scales depending on how many different Realms you attempt to master.
When purchasing Realm Powers from your Development Trees, the costs depend on your approach:
The Specialist (Progressive Escalation) If you choose to buy powers sequentially, the point cost increases with each new Realm you tap into:
- Powers from your 1st Realm cost: 3 points each.
- Powers from your 2nd Realm cost: 6 points each.
- Powers from your 3rd Realm cost: 9 points each, continuing to scale upward.
The Dual-Focus (Two Realms) For characters who want to specialize equally in two different Realms right from the start, you can lock in a hybrid cost structure:
- Powers from your first two Realms cost a flat 4 points each.
- Penalty: If you later attempt to branch into a 3rd Realm, those powers jump to 15 points each.
The Polymath (Three Realms) For characters weaving together powers from three distinct tactical arenas from the very beginning:
- Powers across all three of your chosen Realms cost a flat 6 points each.
- Penalty: If you attempt to expand into a 4th Realm, those powers jump to 21 points each.
The Domains and Realms
Below are the established Domains and their corresponding Realms, broken down by their tactical focus and how they translate to the grid.
Domain: Marshal
- Focus: Physical combat mastery, weapon proficiency, and battlefield command.
Realm 1: Tactics
- Focus: Battlefield command, strategic positioning, and coordinating allies.
- Powers Useful For: Granting action-economy advantages to the team. Excels at granting free movement or attacks to allies, manipulating enemy positioning (forced pushes, pulls, or slides), and creating highly coordinated group strikes.
Realm 2: Arms
- Focus: Complete mastery over melee and ranged weaponry, from heavy polearms to precision bows.
- Powers Useful For: Direct physical damage and weapon-based crowd control. Mechanics revolve around exploiting weapon properties (like reach or piercing), sundering enemy armor, applying physical conditions like bleeding or staggered, and delivering devastating area-of-effect weapon sweeps.
Realm 3: Fist
- Focus: Unarmed combat, grappling, throws, and peak physical conditioning.
- Powers Useful For: Close-quarters lockdown and bypassing weapon dependencies. Crucial for grabbing, pinning, and restricting enemy mobility on the grid, while maintaining high personal evasion and utilizing forced movement through throws and trips.
Domain: Divine
- Focus: The channeling of power from a higher entity to heal, protect, or destroy.
Realm 1: Faith
- Focus: Communion with and empowerment by a deity, covering the spectrum from restorative miracles to holy retribution.
- Powers Useful For: Highly flexible support and burst-damage. Crucial for action-economy preservation through healing and buffing allies, while also capable of delivering high-impact “divine wrath” attacks to eliminate priority targets.
Realm 2: Retribution
- Focus: Divine punishment, defensive auras, and holy retaliation.
- Powers Useful For: Frontline defense and punishment. Excels at marking targets, controlling enemy behavior through threat, and triggering immediate counter-attacks or radiant damage when enemies harm allies or violate tactical zones.
Realm 3: Judgement
- Focus: Inquisitorial tracking, vows of enmity, and relentless pursuit.
- Powers Useful For: Highly mobile, single-target elimination. Mechanics revolve around isolating a specific priority threat, gaining massive offensive bonuses against that single target, and utilizing pursuit abilities to ensure they cannot escape or break line of sight.
Domain: Subtle
- Focus: The manipulation of the mind, senses, and the environment through unseen forces.
Realm 1: Glamour
- Focus: The supernatural manipulation of emotion, perception, and morale through performance or sheer presence.
- Powers Useful For: Sensory and psychological support. Focuses on imposing status conditions (fascinating, distracting, or taunting enemies to burn their action economy) and granting psychological buffs (like temporary hit points or triggering Advantage/Disadvantage rerolls through inspiration).
Realm 2: Shadow
- Focus: Stealth, subterfuge, and espionage, blending mundane infiltration with the supernatural manipulation of darkness.
- Powers Useful For: Controlling line of sight and grid mobility. Encompasses avoiding detection, striking from hidden positions, and physically bending shadows to create cover, obscure vision, or bypass obstacles.
Realm 3: Mind
- Focus: Psionics, telepathy, and raw mental force.
- Powers Useful For: Bypassing physical defenses to deal direct psychic damage. Utilizes telekinesis for pure grid control (moving enemies, allies, or objects without physical contact) and telepathy for silent tactical coordination.
Domain: Occult
- Focus: Knowledge of the forbidden, pacts with extraplanar forces, and mastery over death.
Realm 1: Necromancy
- Focus: Mastery over death, necrotic energy, and the animating forces of the undead.
- Powers Useful For: Dominating the action economy by summoning and commanding undead minions on the grid. Also utilizes life-draining attacks (leeching health) and decay-based debuffs to weaken enemy defenses.
Realm 2: Summoning
- Focus: Calling, binding, and commanding extraplanar entities.
- Powers Useful For: Deploying specialized, high-impact outsider units with unique abilities and resistances. Shifts the focus from quantity (undead hordes) to quality (a single powerful ally), often introducing risk/reward mechanics to maintain control of the bound entity.
Realm 3: Witchcraft
- Focus: Pact magic derived from a bargain with an extremely powerful extraplanar entity.
- Powers Useful For: Channeling the patron’s power directly through the character. Encompasses highly customizable magical abilities, sustained single-target debuffs (like hexes or curses), and consistent, specialized magical attacks.
Domain: Primal
- Focus: The raw, untamed forces of the physical world and the beasts within it.
Realm 1: Wild
- Focus: Command over the untamed natural world, plants, weather phenomena, and wildshaping.
- Powers Useful For: High adaptability. Uses wildshaping to dynamically alter physical stats and movement on the grid. Employs plant and weather manipulation for extreme area denial, creating difficult terrain, and imposing environmental hazards.
Realm 2: Fury
- Focus: Channeling primal rage into superhuman physical prowess and specialized combat abilities.
- Powers Useful For: Stance-based offense. Entering a rage state unlocks massive melee damage output, physical damage mitigation, and specific primal powers (burst mobility, roars, ignoring debuffs) that are only accessible while enraged.
Realm 3: Hunt
- Focus: Tracking, wilderness survival, and the coordination of an animal companion.
- Powers Useful For: Target elimination and tactical mobility. The animal companion functions as an independent unit on the grid, providing a massive advantage in action economy, securing flanking positions, and enabling coordinated strikes, while tracking abilities ensure priority targets cannot easily escape.
Domain: Dweomer
- Focus: The infusion of magic into physical objects, crafting, and mechanical mastery.
Realm 1: Alchemy
- Focus: The manipulation of volatile substances, chemical processes, and synthesis.
- Powers Useful For: Crafting and applying consumable battlefield advantages. Allows for the rapid synthesis of compounds like explosives for area-of-effect damage, antidotes to clear conditions, or specialized vulnerabilities applied to enemy armor mid-combat.
Realm 2: Artifice
- Focus: Mechanical engineering, magical constructs, and gear enhancement.
- Powers Useful For: Upgrading equipment and deploying tactical hardware. Excels at granting permanent or semi-permanent buffs to armor and weapons, as well as deploying automated constructs, traps, or turrets to control space on the grid.
Realm 3: Runecraft
- Focus: The etching of magical language to create wards, sigils, and persistent effects.
- Powers Useful For: Area denial and environmental control. Allows characters to place stationary magical traps, create defensive thresholds that punish approaching enemies, or brand targets with runic tags that trigger specific magical effects when hit.
Domain: Arcane
- Focus: The scholarly, innate, and fundamental manipulation of raw magical energy.
Realm 1: Wizardry
- Focus: The highly structured, formulaic, and scholarly study of magic.
- Powers Useful For: Unmatched versatility and prepared spellcasting. Excels at dropping massive area-of-effect damage, exploiting specific elemental vulnerabilities, and accessing a wide array of utility magic (like teleportation or force barriers) through careful preparation.
Realm 2: Sorcery
- Focus: Innate, raw, and highly adaptable magical power channeled from within.
- Powers Useful For: Overwhelming burst damage and flexible casting. Allows players to dynamically alter the properties of their spells on the fly (changing ranges, energy types, or areas of effect) and deliver focused, high-intensity magical strikes.
Realm 3: Thaumaturgy
- Focus: Altering the fundamental laws of reality, sympathetic magic, and miracles of physics.
- Powers Useful For: Bending the battlefield itself. Excels at manipulating probability, reversing gravity, altering terrain, and utilizing pure magical force to disrupt both enemy tactics and the environment around them.