Heavens Shadow

Chapter 1: Introduction
And we did according to all His words: all the malignant evil ones we bound
in the place of condemnation, and a tenth part of them we left that they might be
subject before Satan on the earth. - Book of Jubilees, 10:11

Heavens Shadow is a tabletop roleplaying game in which the players take on the role
of Shadows, trained assassins in service to a secret Agency tasked with finding and
eliminating ancient demonic beings called Nephilim, who hide amongst mankind in the guise
of normal human beings in order to sow discord, sin, and destruction.

Shadows
Shadows are skilled operatives, hand-picked from any number of backgrounds, and
while the particulars of any given Agency for recruitment may vary, they all share one thing:
they understand the importance of having something to believe in, especially when the means
to the end start walking into the darker side. Shadows are killers, spies, and often criminals,
but they never lose sight of their faith, and it is that faith that keeps them on the right path
when the road gets muddy.
Every Shadow is chosen for their faith in the Supreme Director, and in the principles
He has taught His servants throughout the millennia. No matter what the needs of the mission
at hand and what dirty deeds they must commit, they ultimately believe in a code of conduct,
and in protecting the innocent from threats to mind, body, and soul.
It is this faith that drives them, gives them something to fall back on in their
decisions, and imbues their Icon of Faith with the power to reveal and fight the dark Nephilim
who hide among us. It also makes for an excellent operational security measure: you cant fake
true faith, so getting Nephilim double agents into the halls of an Agency is almost impossible.
The name Shadow is taken from the original Agency, the Order of Shadows
founded by Shem, son of Noah, after the Great Flood. The title is still in common use in most
modern agencies out of a sense of tradition, used to describe the main operators within the
organization.

Nephilim
The Nephilim are mans most insidious and secret foe on Earth. They are the only
surviving descendants of the Watchers and their mortal wives. Most of their kind were
banished straight to Hell after the Flood, but some of their number were spared so that the
Adversary might have agents on Earth to practice his dark work of testing the mettle of man.
Twisted and evil to the core, Nephilim worship sin itself, selecting a chosen sin as
their path in life, and seeking to spread it by whatever means they can, whether directly or
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through luring mortal sinners into their corruption. The Adversary rewards them with arcane
power in accordance with their success in their path, making the most successful Nephilim
incredibly dangerous prey.
In appearance, they appear much like any mortal man or woman, though they often
appear to be at the peak of human ability and appearance. In the pre-Flood times the Nephilim
were warriors and heroes, and that bearing still lives in the line of those who have survived.
However, exposure to the sight and presence of a holy Icon in the hands of a Shadow of Faith
will reveal their true demonic visage, twisted and ugly like the souls within.

Icons
Every Shadow carries with him an Icon of Faith. Each Icon is a personally selected
or crafted object that the Shadow wears as a reminder of his faith and the mission he strives
for, and as the focus for that faith when he calls on the Supreme Director for aid in that
mission. Icons are specially constructed or modified to include at least some small portion of
a holy relic or physical connection to a holy site, event, or miracle. It is said that the original
Icon carried by Shem was carved from a piece of the wood of the Ark, a simple roughly hewn
dove, to remind Shem and his followers of the mercy the Supreme Director gives to those
who are truly dedicated to good and just living.
A Shadows Icon is his most basic and vital tool. If his faith is strong enough, then
by holding the Icon within his hand and intoning one of the ancient prayers recorded by Noah
after the Flood, the Supreme Director will grant him momentary blessings or assistance in
accordance with that prayer. The most basic prayer and the first any Shadow learns is the
Wordless Sight, which enables the Shadow holding his Icon within his hand to reveal
Nephilim in their true form, making them easily identified for their true natures.

Religion
Shadows come from many faiths, but generally all come from some belief in the God
of Noah and Shem and their descendant Abraham, often referred to as the Supreme
Director in many modern Agencies. Individual Shadows may be everything from Jewish to
Anglican to Sufi, and the varying agencies may stem from some specific religious group, or
take a more multi-faith approach. To the modern Agencies, the specific trappings of modern
belief have often been seen as less important than the mission itself and the traditions of Shem
and his followers in the generations to come, and there are even some who lay claim to a faith
that dates back that far. Agencies of various faiths may even work side by side from time to
time, and some organizations, such as ICON, were founded expressly to bring together the
best of many faiths and denominations into a single modern Agency fit to fight the Nephilim
in all their forms.
It is not always all brotherhood and pluralism between the Agencies, of course. While
the uniting mission of the Watch (as the hunt for the Nephilim is often called) and the use of
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Icons and the Prayers of Shem have generally been enough to convince most that they all
indeed serve the same Supreme Director; Agencies and their Shadows have often been drawn
into the holy wars of their parent religions, or brought into conflict among themselves based
on national boundaries, conflicting operations, or even bad blood between members.
In the field, the discovery of another Agencys involvement with a Nephilim target
can be a tense situation. Most modern agencies are generally on friendly terms, but planning
an operation is a delicate matter, and finding that someone elses assets and agents are already
in the field can complicate things substantially. Shadows may be cagey about joining forces on
the fly, even if they might otherwise have been happy to work together if theyd been planning
in concert beforehand, as it is difficult to have full awareness of an operations security when
bringing in a strange team and its assets blind. It is often up to the chain of command or the
gut instincts of the Shadows involved as to whether their shared Watch is enough to put
differences aside and work together.

Agencies
While there are a few Shadows who operate as lone wolves or in independent teams,
the vast majority of them operate within an Agency. Most Agencies are in some way connected
to, or at least descended from, one of the Abrahamic religions, and all claim to share some
spiritual lineage to the original Order of Shadows founded by Shem.
In practice, however, the level to which this affects operations and the structure of
the organization varies. Since many Agencies are founded and run by former members of
secular organizations, the day to day operation of many modern Agencies more closely
resembles that of a modern day intelligence agency than a religious organization; though
obviously doctrine varies heavily from Agency to Agency, this secularized structure is
common among Western agencies.
In other territories where the rule of law is shakier, or a dominant political force
makes operation more difficult, an Agency may take on a structure more resembling an
insurgent cell or even a criminal network. The important thing is having the operational
flexibility to ensure the security of the organization and the completion of its mission.
Nephilim often have allies very high on the food chain in the local government or power
structure, and so the ability to operate without that power structure being able to hinder or
even destroy an Agencys operations is paramount.
A given Agencys resources will vary from outfit to outfit, though at the most basic
they will generally have manpower, assets and contacts in the field, equipment, discretionary
funding, safe houses for evading heat from authorities or enemy factions, and may even have
legal connections for making those sorts of problems go away. It all depends on the Agencys
standing in their area of operations, level of funding, legal status, and manpower as to what
sort of aid they may be able to offer to Shadows on a mission, and the amount of those
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resources is liable to vary based on the importance of the mission and the standing of the
operatives involved within the organization.

Operations
The primary mission of any Shadow is the elimination of Nephilim. In practice,
getting to that point is no small feat. Nephilim must first be located and identified; intelligence
must be gathered about their operations in order to ensure they come to a close once the
Nephilim itself is eliminated; reconnaissance must record their daily routine, security
measures, and details about their location, so that the best time to strike can be planned; and
of course, the operation itself needs to have all its cards put in place, with both plans for the
strike itself, as well as how to clean up afterwards once the target is eliminated.
How much of this legwork is left up to a particular Shadow or team of Shadows is
dependent on the needs of the operation, the size and resources of the Agency, and the
Agencys standard operational procedures. Some missions may call for a team to do much of
the work themselves with only a name of a possible enemy to go on, while others may already
have all the reconnaissance in place, and the team need only layout and execute a plan to
eliminate the target. Some agencies protect the security of their operations by segmenting the
steps of it and providing a team only the information and instructions needed for a specific
section of an operation, while others may allow a team to operate largely autonomously,
handling the full breadth of an operation themselves and providing agency resources when
needed, to allow for maximum deniability and minimizing connections to home base.
Identifying Nephilim targets is itself a significant challenge for agencies. A Shadows
Icon allows him to sense and even see a Nephilim for what it truly is, but only within the
beings presence, and many Nephilim can in turn spot a dedicated Shadow, or at least his Icon,
risking a blown cover. In order to better identify candidates, Agencies maintain intelligence
presences in criminal, governmental, military, and even secular intelligence circles, keeping an
eye out for individuals with a modus operandi that fits that of a demonic presence. This side of
operations is often performed by a separate wing of the organization, and tends to be the most
likely to employ outside individuals as long-term information assets. For this reason, such
individuals may not even be kept privy to actual elimination activities, for their own safety as
well as the security of future operations.

Playing the Game

Heavens Shadow is a roleplaying game. In a roleplaying game, a single overseeing
player called the Gamemaster or GM, creates a world and a scenario, and the remaining
players create characters or PCs, who will encounter that scenario and play out how their
characters would act under the circumstances, while the GM narrates the result of their actions
and how any non-player characters or NPCs act in response to the new events.

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The game rules will provide a framework for resolving these situations, defining how
skilled or inept the PCs and the NPCs are at different types of actions, how to resolve those
actions, and what some of the consequences might be for failure, especially when that failure
takes place in a combat or life-and-death situation. Most often, this will involve rolling dice
related to the characters skill, and comparing the result to some number.
It is important to remember, however, that unlike a traditional board game or a video
game, the rules of a roleplaying game are not intended to be set in stone, but only to provide
guidelines and frameworks for handling the situations of the game. If a given rule doesnt
work for your group, or something isnt covered by the existing rules, feel free to change them
to suit your needs.

Rolling the Dice

Heavens Shadow uses six-sided dice exclusively, just the sort you can find in bricks at
everything from department stores to the local bodega, or swipe out of your favorite popular
board game. Your characters statistics will generally be measured in some amount of dice,
and it is these dice you will roll, total, and compare to a target number when you need to know
if youve succeeded at a task.
Dice in Heavens Shadow, are notated in the form of (number of dice) D+ (pips). You
roll the number of dice shown, total them, and then add any pip amount to that total. So for
instance, if you have 4D+2 in a skill, you would roll 4 dice, total them, and then add 2 to the
result to find your final total.
Pips especially come into play during character creation and advancement. When
distributing dice for attributes and skills, each die can be broken down into 3 pips of +1
each, and those pips can then be distributed as desired, with the exception that no group of
dice can ever have more than +2 in pips. If an attribute or skill would be raised to +3, instead
the total number of dice increases by 1 and the pips are dropped (1D, 1D+1, 1D+2, 2D,
2D+1, and so on).

Rule Number One

Roleplaying games are a creative and collaborative hobby, unlike most games you
may have played. Enjoyable play involves working together with your group to create the most
fun possible for everyone, and it is this rule of fun that should be paramount above any
detail or rule described in this book. If something isnt fun for your group, change it: you paid
for it, it is yours to do with as you wish.

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