Player's Handbook · Chapter 1

The Three Ledgers

Heilbronn is not a world of good against evil. It is a world of claims, costs, and consequences. A crown is a promise backed by violence. A marriage is a treaty with a bedchamber attached. A monster hunt may save a village—or make a fortune for the banker who funded it.

The Three Ledgers is a fiction-first roleplaying system for playing people who must survive inside that arrangement. You may be a monarch, heir, sellsword, courtier, outlaw, priest, monster hunter, or peasant who has discovered that a secret can be worth more than a title. You are not protected by destiny. You are protected by preparation, allies, and knowing what your enemies owe you.

What you need

One GM, two or more players, two six-sided dice, and a way to record three things: your character's Debts, your Leverage, and your three ledgers — Blood, Coin, and Whisper — the accounts that hold your Wounds, your wealth, and your secrets. The GM describes Heilbronn honestly and without mercy. You decide what your character attempts. When the outcome is uncertain and important, roll.

The game moves between three kinds of scene:

The road: travel, investigation, monster hunts, danger, and hard choices.
The court: negotiations, scandals, marriages, blackmail, and shifting loyalties.
The war room: armies, resources, territory, and the human cost hidden behind markers on a map.

A good session usually touches all three. A clue found on the road becomes leverage at court. A courtly betrayal becomes a war. A war creates widows, debts, and monsters for the road.

The central question

Before a roll, ask: What are you willing to spend to get what you want?

The answer may be blood, coin, time, reputation, a secret, a promise, or another person's safety. In Heilbronn, success without a cost is rare—and often suspicious.

The three ledgers

Every important choice changes one or more ledgers.

Blood records physical harm, family ties, oaths, and lives spent. Blood is intimate and difficult to erase.

Coin records food, armies, property, contracts, and material power. Coin can buy time, but it also creates creditors.

Whisper records secrets, rumors, scandals, prophecies, and forbidden knowledge. A whisper is power until someone proves it false—or learns it first.

The ledgers are not separate currencies. A character may pay a debt in coin, blood, or whisper. The GM should always name which ledger is being damaged when a consequence lands.

You are playing to discover not whether your character is righteous, but what they become while trying to endure Heilbronn.

Manual updated Aug 19, 2026.

The Three Ledgers

Heilbronn is a light-dark fantasy world centered around epic political intrigue, mystery, scandal, monster-hunting, rising dark lords and conspiracy. Here you can be a king, queen, noble leader, bandit king or peasant. Heilbronn isn’t about good vs evil, it’s about who has the best. Rise, choose your advisors, guards, horses, companions and manage them. Brutal, cynical fantasy with flawed heroes, self-righteous villains and wars.

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UpdatedAug 20, 2026

The Premise

Heilbronn Doesn't Ask If You're Good. It Asks What You Owe.

Heilbronn is a brutal fantasy of claims, costs, and consequences, kept in three ledgers: Blood for the oaths you break and the lives you spend, Coin for the armies you buy and the creditors you collect, Whisper for the secrets that could unmake a king. Three kingdoms share one poisoned world — Regin, disciplined and covert; Eldoria, ancient and controlling; Vega, turning conquest into administration — and between them lies the Blackwound, reality damaged by the Poisoning. You can be anyone: peasant, courtier, monster hunter, sellsword, heir, or claimant to a throne. Choose your advisors, your guards, your horses, your companions, and your enemies. Make deals, call debts, cash secrets, or draw steel — but remember that the ledgers reward talking, killing is one answer and rarely the cheapest, and every throne rests on a ledger that is still open. Heilbronn isn't about good versus evil. It's about who has the best — and what it costs to keep it. Rise, rule, or be written off.

Author's note

My remake of Rathatri's 'Heilbronn: Where you are King!' I loved the original, but figured I'd update it with lore. Features 3 kings this time and one overseer (Castellan Morvran) of a lordless castle (Castle Aethelgard).

Inside the World