Player's Handbook · Chapter 1

How to Play

You sit down at the table knowing three things about your character: who they are, what they can do, and what they want. The dice decide what happens when the wanting gets complicated.

The core roll

Whenever a student attempts something risky, you roll 2d6 and add the most fitting attribute (see Attributes). Sometimes an aptitude (see Aptitudes) also applies — they stack.

Roll	What happens
10+	Full success, clean and complete
7–9	Success with a cost, complication, or hard choice
6–	Things get worse — the GM makes the world respond, and the story twists

That's the whole engine. Everything else in this book is guidance on reading that table.

When to roll

Every roll should be for something that matters. The table is also a timer: a genuinely dangerous task is about to happen, or a dangerous task is not, and the GM needs input to narrate.

Do roll when:

The outcome is uncertain — a trained dueller casting Protego is certain.
The outcome carries real stakes — failure would change the scene.
The student is acting under pressure — rushing a potion, hiding from a professor, casting mid-fall.

Don't roll when:

The task is routine and no one is in a hurry — you just did warming Charms for three years.
The student is properly prepared and nothing opposes them.
Failure would be boring — the door has no lock, the room is quiet.

If you aren't rolling, you aren't free to mute the stakes. The GM narrates what happens straight off the fiction, and you pick up your quill again.

How to frame a roll

Describe the fiction — what you do, how, and what you want.
The GM names the stakes — what a 6– means, in the fiction, before dice fall. If stakes are unclear, ask.
Choose the attribute (sometimes aptitude).
Roll 2d6 + attribute (+ aptitude if it applies).
Resolve from the table. — 7–9 means you get what you want, and you decide the cost with the GM: a dropped spell, a softer hold, a noise that caught someone's ear, a choice between your goal and something you care about.

You roll for/its character, not for the world to stop them for rules' sake. The numbers serve the fiction: they tell you how much the school pushed back.

The first thing to know about this game

Students are not crawling with statistics. Your sheet is a person: a year, a house, four attributes, three aptitudes, and three things the world must never find out. Everything is designed so that a single die roll can change the evening's plans.

Manual updated Aug 19, 2026.

2d6 + Attribute

Hogwarts

Seven years. Four houses. One name worth making. Create a student, sit for the Sorting, and live a Hogwarts year of friendship, rivalry, and the secrets the castle keeps.

Crafted by

@mouldyyy

447

Messages

Plays

Likes

369

Files

Versionv23

CreatedAug 18, 2026

UpdatedAug 20, 2026

A SCHOOL OF MAGIC

The castle remembers every name.

Hogwarts is a narrative roleplaying game set in the corridors, towers, and grounds of a school of witchcraft and wizardry. You begin where every witch and wizard does — a stool, a mouldy hat, and the eyes of four hundred students — and from there you write your own years: the friends who cover for you, the rivals who make you sharper, the classes you ace or sleep through, and the secrets the castle keeps far better than it keeps its ghosts.

The game runs on 2d6 plus one of four attributes — Courage, Cunning, Empathy, or Will — so every roll reveals who your student is as much as what happens. Aptitudes say what you've studied; spells say what you can do; and the person sheet — ambition, trouble, fear, bond, secret — is what the dice get their hooks into. Every story starts as a first-year and ends somewhere no one predicted.

Glimpses

Author's note

Unofficial fan project; not affiliated with or endorsed by J.K. Rowling, Warner Bros., or Scholastic.

Start: After character creation, you will be with the Sorting Hat. You can choose any year to begin with. Pick your house, then tell the narrator which year the campaign will start in. Ask them to fill in previous years. For example, I tested playing a 7th year; asked for achievements/failures per previous years, friends/rivals etc and it worked quite well. Enjoy! Note: Not fully lore friendly, I'm not an expert in Harry Potter!

Inside the World