With the development of hydropower systems, more and more complex demands are encountered by hydropower scheduling. To obtain near optimal schedules of hydropower systems effectively without solving complex mathematic programming, a fast algorithm is proposed. Without an objective function, the basic scheduling concepts of saving water, servicing for power system balance, coordination of up and down stream reservoirs, together with most of the constrains of optimization models, are used to direct the scheduling of cascaded hydropower systems. The method is composed of a series of operations for whole time horizon requirements such as final reservoir level, total energy or total turbine water of a plant, total energy of several cascaded reservoirs, and reducing spill water. To achieve one target, a successive power scheduling method is proposed in which temporal order of power rise/fall based on load characters and a local scheduling algorithm that can satisfy period coupled constraints are combined. Case study of hydropower system in Hongshui River operated by China Southern Power Grid (CSG) shows that the proposed method is effective in obtaining power schedules and complex power distribution rules can be achieved.