This system reference document serves as a central reference for basic gameplay across modules and settings. This is not a tutorial for how to play the game, though there is one also included with Uune. Because the rules here are grouped for referencing, they will sometimes refer to concepts that have not been explained chronologically if read from start to finish.
Uune is a tabletop roleplaying base game meant to be adapted to many settings and genres. Uune is an opinionated game, and strives to meet the following goals:
You need two types of players to run an Uune game. One will be the facilitator, and the rest will be player characters.
The Facilitator is a special player who acts as the eyes and ears of the rest of the table, narrating the story and events of the world as they unfold. It is the facilitator’s job to act as referee for the group, keeping the game as grounded or as wild as is wished, and mediating the actions of the rest of the players accordingly.
If you are not the facilitator, you will be playing a singular character, known as a player character or PC. This is one of the main characters of the game’s story, the others being your fellow PCs.
Your player character will be kept track of on a form known as your character sheet. This can take many forms, such as a printed sheet of paper, notebook, or digital notes. Some examples are included with Uune.
While every player and every table are different, most Uune games will need the following supplies:
If you are inclined to visualize character placement for high-stakes situations, then you’ll need supplies for this. Some grid paper and token items can work, as can miniatures and printed maps, or a virtual tabletop program. Ultimately, Uune is not designed with exact distances in mind, so the choice for how specific you wish to be is up to preference.
Like many other RPGs, the session starts with the facilitator giving a recap of the story so far. Once everyone has been filled in and refreshed, the game can begin.
The game roughly loops over the following interaction:
Ask yourself the following questions about your character to outline their personality, appearance, and history.
You’ll need to complete the following items for your character’s first level:
To determine starting income, roll 5d6 and multiply by one of the choices on the list below.
You character may start with mundane items that they would reasonably have access to. Ask your facilitator for specifics applicable to their game.
Whenever the player characters reach a story milestone, as determined by the facilitator, they will level up. Whenever you level up, increase your characters level on their sheet and add additional items as dictated by the table below.
| Level | Shtick Points | Experiences | Proficiency Points | Bonds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | |
| 2 | 1 | |||
| 3 | 3 | |||
| 4 | 2 | |||
| 5 | 4 | |||
| 6 | 3 | |||
| 7 | 5 | |||
| 8 | 4 | |||
| 9 | 6 | 3 | 3 | |
| 10 | 5 | |||
| 11 | 7 | |||
| 12 | 6 | |||
| 13 | 8 | |||
| 14 | 7 | |||
| 15 | 9 | |||
| 16 | 8 | |||
| 17 | 10 | 4 | 4 | |
| 18 | 9 | |||
| 19 | 11 | |||
| 20 | 0 | |||
| 21 | 12 | |||
| 22 | 1 | |||
| 23 | 13 | |||
| 24 | 14 | 5 | 2 | 5 |
Experiences are past or ongoing developments in your character’s life that give them knowledge they can draw from. Each experience should each serve to flesh out a different aspect of your character. Some examples are below.
When you gain an experience, write down a rough idea of what it is in a sentence or two. Then, flesh it out as you play with additional information, people, and developments.
Your facilitator may give you additional experiences for completing story objectives.
When you take an action, you may add a resource for each experience which would help your character.
A bond is something for your character to act on, a piece of who they are that keeps them grounded.
When you gain a bond, choose one of the following options and elaborate:
Once per scene, when your character acts on a bond, they gain a point of focus.
Shticks are your character’s main abilities and training. They represent what your character is best at and most notable for.
When you gain a shtick point, you may either gain a new shtick or upgrade an existing one (level it up). Each shtick will have it’s own changes per level, so be sure to read it’s full description. You may have a maximum of 3 shticks.
Each game will have it’s own collection of shticks, but some general purpose ones are provided with Uune in a separate document.
As your character grows and learns, they will gain experience that helps them along the way. This is represented by proficiency, points which you can use to gain additional resources from existing features on your character sheet.
When you gain a proficiency point, you may place it onto any existing resource your character has. This can include things like items, experiences, features, and abilities. Then, whenever you use that resource, you gain an additional resource from it.
You may not put proficiency points into your base action die.
Your character may take time to learn to use new equipment or features, and retrain themselves to shift the focus of their efforts. If your character spends 5 scenes training something, they may reallocate proficiency points to that resource.
You may write down up to 10 items on your character sheet. Money is always separate from your normal items. You may count each item as a resource.
Special items deviate from the normal item rules. These will sometimes refrain from acting as a resource, provide bonuses, have special actions associated with them, or take differing amounts of inventory space. The rules given with the special item should be followed under normal circumstances.
When a mechanic gives you a point of focus, mark it down on your character sheet. By default, you may have a maximum of 2 focus points.
You may always spend a point of focus to do one of the following things:
If you put a proficiency point into your focus, your focus maximum increases by 1.
Your character has 100 points of vitality, representing their health and energy. You may spend, gain, or lose vitality at various moments in the game. If your character has zero vitality, they become incapacitated and cannot take actions.
You may always spend vitality in the following ways:
When your character takes substantial injury, they will take a wound.
Wounds come in 3 varieties:
Lethal and heavy wounds will need to be stabilized by a medic or healer before they will mend. After a day and a successful downtime action, only your heaviest wound will heal, as follows:
When your character takes a substantial amount of mental or emotional strain, they will gain stress.
Stress comes in 3 varieties:
After a successful downtime action, only your heaviest stress will heal as follows:
When your character has an effect applied to them, write it down on your character sheet. This will have a mechanic and a scope. Apply the mechanic to your character as intended, and remove the effect from your character sheet after the game has moved beyond the current scope. Certain effects can stack, and their mechanics will apply multiple times if you have more than 1 level of that effect.
Default scope: Scene
You are grabbed and cannot move. You may attempt to make an attack to escape.
Default scope: Scene
You have been knocked out of your wits, and lose your next turn.
You lose consecutive actions if you have multiple levels of this effect.
Default scope: Scene
You have some kind of poison running through you, and must re-roll all 6s.
Default scope: Scene
You have an impeded sense or faculty. All actions require +1 hits.
Default scope: Scene
You take lose 10 vitality at the start of each round. If outside of a conflict, this happens every out of game minute.
You may spend an action (no roll) to staunch the wound, stopping the bleeding.
Default scope: Scene
Your maximum focus increases by 1.
When your character takes a notable action, your facilitator will ask you to roll for it. This will check to see if your character succeeds, and what they needed to do to accomplish their task.
First, your facilitator will tell you the difficulty of your action. This is how many hits (good dice rolls) are needed to complete the action.
Second, you will gather applicable resources, giving you dice to roll. You always have one resource representing your own general ability. Check your character abilities, inventory, and environment for any additional resources and run them by your facilitator.
A resource is any actionable object, structure, piece of information, or established character experience.
Third, grab 1d6 for each resource. Roll them all. Any dice which land on 5 or 6 are hits.
Finally, if you have enough hits to meet or beat the difficulty your, your character completes their action.
You can use the following table as a guide for how difficult an action should be.
| Difficulty | Description | Required Hits |
|---|---|---|
| No Roll | Doable with no conceivable failure | 0 |
| Very Easy | Doable with just your hands | 1 |
| Easy | Easy with tools or knowledge | 2 |
| Medium | Doable with tools and knowledge | 3 |
| Intermediate | Doable with training | 4 |
| Difficult | Difficult with training | 5 |
| Hard | Hard without help | 6 |
| Arduous | Difficult without preparation | 7 |
| Painful | Requiring prep or compromise | 8 |
| Inconceivable | Beyond normal ability | 9 |
| Impossible | An impossible task | 10 |
Special actions deviate from the normal rules around how actions are taken, usually to provide a thematic mechanic for the players. When you take a special action, there will be rules around how it needs to be played and what the outcome means. These rules will be given in the description of the mechanic or feature that presented it, or given by the facilitator.
Some special actions for general use are included here.
If you wish to help another PC with their action, complete the following special action.
Roll your own resources as they apply to the action. You may add your hits to the other PC’s, combining the total towards their action.
When attacking an NPC, roll roll your action as normal against their defensiveness score. You may or may not know what that score is. Ammunition does not count as a resource. Shoves and grapples are considered attacks, but do not deal damage.
If dealing damage, follow this guide:
When avoiding an NPC’s attack, complete the following special action. This does not use your turn action while in conflict.
Your facilitator will tell you the difficulty of the attack. Then, roll your action as normal against the attack’s difficulty.
The outcome is as follows:
Most movement is free, and does not require an action. However, movement which changes your narrative position does require an action (no roll).
This includes:
You may spend an action to attempt to increase your stealth level or maintain it through a difficult area. The difficulty of this action is equal to: the highest perceptiveness score in the room; and +0 for one person, +1 for a few, +2 for a group, or +3 for a crowd.
| Stealth Level | Description | Resources |
|---|---|---|
| Observed | Actively perceived | 0 |
| Hidden | Your presence is known but not your position | +1 |
| Undetected | Nobody knows you’re here | +2 |
Your character may center themselves, focusing themselves and preparing for their next action. You may do this once per scene, or once per turn while in a conflict. To do so, complete the following special action.
Spend your action preparing to do something (no roll). When you do this, you gain your maximum focus.
Your character can recover vitality during downtime. To take downtime, complete the following special action.
First, your facilitator will tell you how many hits you need to restore your vitality.
| Living Conditions | Hits |
|---|---|
| Luxurious | 2 |
| Comfortable | 3 |
| Sparse | 4 |
| Dire | 5 |
Then, roll your resources as normal. On a success you restore 50 vitality.
While interacting with someone, or while observing an interaction, you may complete the following special action to attempt to observe someone’s true emotions.
Roll resources as normal. If the number of hits you get meet or exceed an NPC’s social score, you catch their body language, such as a micro expression, and the facilitator will give you a rough emotion that they appear to be feeling in response to something: anger, contempt, disgust, enjoyment, fear, sadness, or surprise.
On a failure, you do not observe anything in particular.
When looking, or passively noticing something, you can complete this special action to help guide that interaction.
Roll resources as normal. Depending on how many hits over the difficulty you get, you will notice something odd with one or more of your senses, as per the list below.
Luck determines when something is entirely decided by chance. Any 50/50 outcome is appropriate for a luck check, such as a coin flip or dice roll.
Luck does not use up an action to complete.
If you have advantage, try twice and take the better outcome. Similarly, if you disadvantage, try twice and take the worse outcome. If you have both, make the check as normal.
Passive actions are a tool for facilitator’s to determine whether a character can automatically (passively) do or observe something. Passive action’s success is determined by the facilitator looking at a PC’s generally available resources, and counting 1/3 of them as hits.
Mechanics and effects in the game have scopes, meaning that they are applied within a certain portion of the game. Once that portion is over, that mechanic or effect is no longer applied.
The following scopes are used:
| Scope | Description |
|---|---|
| Campaign | The entire rest of the story. |
| Arc | The rest of the current chapter of the story. |
| Quest | The rest of the PCs’ current task. |
| Day | The rest of the in-game day, or until the following dawn, whichever is clearer. |
| Scene | The rest of the current environmental setup. |
| Round | After all players have taken an action. |
| Action | The active action currently being, or about to be performed. |
It is often a useful tool for facilitator’s to write thematic rules for their campaigns at the start, helping to frame the game more appropriately and provide additional rules for players to have fun with. These will often be provided with game modules as well.
When there’s a lot going on, the facilitator can slow down the game to give everyone a chance to get in on the action. We call this conflict.
Conflicts are broken up into rounds and turns. At the beginning of the round, each PC gets a turn, on which they can take one action. Once all the PCs have taken their turns, the facilitator will give the NPCs their turns. Then, a new round begins.
Included with Uune are sheets that your facilitator can fill out for shops. This includes the items they’d have in stock, their price, and the specialty of the shop.
Opponents, enemies, and monster mechanics work differently than those for PCs. Opponents will almost never roll, instead they have scores which determine what the PCs need to roll for or against an ability.
Monster and NPC stat blocks should have roughly the following stats:
Sometimes, as the facilitator, you will want to keep track of something throughout the game in a mechanical way that doesn’t otherwise have a rule. While you can workshop an entire new ruleset for it (or find someone else’s), this should only be done if it going to be a major element of the game you’ll be playing. For everything else, consider using a story stat.
Story stats are simple, centrally tracked notes that serve a purpose for the game. These are generally numerical, but can be whatever you need. Make note of what it’s for, what prompts a change, and what happens when it changes or reaches a certain level.
And that’s it! For many things (such as a reputation, a rival’s pettiness, a city’s corruption, etc) you can avoid over complicating or over generalizing your game rules by jumping straight to the point and only making what you actually need. If you wind up needing more complex rules for something, you can always adapt and expand upon something later because you’ve already started keeping track of it.