Hello! Welcome to the Uune roleplaying game! In this tutorial document, you will be guided through the basics of TTRPGs, character creation, and some example gameplay. This tutorial does not aim to explain every possible facet of the game, but rather to explain the overall flow and mechanisms of it.
If you’re new to the hobby, you might be wondering what a TTRPG is, and how it’s played differently from other type of games. Let’s break down what makes a TTRPG unique.
In this case, Uune provides the game, while you provide the table and the roleplay to bring it to life! Tabletop RPGs are distinct from their video game counterparts most notably because the game mechanics can be much more open to interpretation, or sidestepped entirely if need be.
Characters in TTRPGs are, in essence, your own self-insert into the game world. That isn’t to say that they need to act like you do, but rather that your own mind is what dictates how they think, speak, and act. You aren’t limited to doing things in an efficient or direct manner, and can choose not just the path they take, but how they walk it and whether they careen off into the woods beside it.
You should, in general, strive to work with your friends at the table, but bumps and disagreements along the way are all part of the game. Just remember that everyone is trying to have fun, and that you can talk to your fellow players if something stops being fun.
In a broad sense, Uune strives to fill the gap for narrative games that maintain the skillful and predictable feel of more traditional ones. Something that is flexible, but not daunting; mechanical, but not limited. This has been a difficult, slow-burn project to say the least. The TTRPG community is also always in need to more free resources, so the entire project has been made open source with the intention of being easy to base new games and modules on the core elements.
More specifically, Uune aims to help make games happen for the sort of homebrew heavy, customized, and roleplay focused groups. Facilitators (called GMs in other games) do not roll, keeping things faster to run and easier to design. PCs can mix and match character options from multiple sources, and have open ended customization options that incorporate their character’s background and personality into the gameplay.
In a phrase, Uune is the game I’ve always wanted to play, or at least that’s what I strive for.
You don’t need to understand the ins and outs of the game just to get started, but we should lay some groundwork down before we continue.
What You’ll Need
While every player and every table are different, most Uune games will need the following supplies:
- One set of 6-sided dice for each player (5+ is ideal)
- Optionally, a coin
- Somewhere for each player to take notes, such as a notebook and pen, or a digital notes file
- Somewhere for each player to keep track of their character, such as a paper or PDF character sheet
- Snacks and music are often recommended, but not required
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.
— The SRD
Gameplay Overview
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:
- The facilitator describes the situation around the PCs, including the environment, any dialog from NPCs, and anything especially of note to the characters.
- The PCs each communicate to the facilitator what their characters do in response to their situation.
- The facilitator may ask for a roll from some or all PCs to see if their actions succeed.
- The PCs will gather and roll dice, communicating with the facilitator if there are questions about the game or what to roll.
- The facilitator describes the outcome of the PCs’ actions, and the loop begins again.
— The SRD
While there are many ways to play an RPG, Uune has two distinct roles that players may take.
Player Roles
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
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.
Player Characters
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.
— The SRD
For our examples in this tutorial: Kaeja is our facilitator, while Brian, Andres, and Nancy are playing our PCs.
Kaeja sits down at the table, cracking open her notes and pulling out her dice. Brian has just finished popping some popcorn, while Nancy made a pot of coffee.
Everyone gathers around the table, pulls out their character sheets, notebooks, and picks their favorite dice to use tonight. Kaeja starts some relaxed background music, something you might expect to hear being played from the corner of a fantasy tavern, and begins regaling the group with their exploits from the previous session.
Once she has filled in everyone’s memory, she sets the scene that they currently find themselves in. Maybe it’s a dank cave with glowing mushrooms, a towering cathedral to a long forgotten deity, or even a burning library as they desperately try to save the lost arts before they are destroyed for good.
Whatever the case, the players each detail their intentions to Kaeja, and the game begins.
For most things, like talking or everyday actions, you can simply tell your facilitator what you do. They’ll stop you if something weird happens.
For things that need a little more oomph to them, we roll dice!
Actions
Mechanically, every interaction your character has is called an action. Most actions do not require anything special to complete, but different circumstances or specific types of actions can require additional mechanics.
— The SRD
There are more specific types of actions to help ease certain kinds of interactions, or for thematic reasons. But you don’t need to worry about that for now. You can skim them in the SRD once we’ve got you up and running with a character!
Let’s say that our PCs are exploring a deep, damp, dark cave.
Andres’ character, Pyrus, spots some bioluminescent mushrooms. He’s never seen them before, but he’d like to see if he can harvest some and keep it alive for more study later.
Kaeja tells him that he’ll need to roll for it, with a difficulty of 5 as Pyrus doesn’t know anything about these just yet.
Scouring around, Andres finds these resources:
Andres grabs his base die + 9 resource dice (for 10d6 total) and casts them into his dice tray. Counting up the 5s and 6s, he rolled 6 hits, and successfully gathers a cluster of living mushroom for later study.
Now that you understand the base elements of the game, we need to give you somebody to roleplay as before we can put the RP in RPG. Grab yourself a character sheet, and fill it out as we go along.
First, we’ll give our character some personality! These questions are on the last page, as you don’t need to reference them very often.
Backstory Questions
Ask yourself the following questions about your character to outline their personality, appearance, and history.
- What role do they play in the group?
- Leadership, support, brains, brawns, or connections.
- How do they hold themselves?
- Polite, stern, sassy, goofy, or smart.
- What is their build?
- Thin, heavy, tall, squat, buff, or lanky.
- What do they wear?
- Fancy, plain, tattered, traditional, or rebellious.
- What do they like to do?
- Career, hobby, or obsession.
- How old are they?
- Child, teenager, young adult, adult, middle aged, or elderly.
- What is their name?
- Formal, nickname, childhood name
- What was their upbringing like?
- Nurturing, reserved, wealthy, poor, dysfunctional, or absent.
- What is their extended family like?
- Close, distant, nosy, or judgemental.
- What kind of work have they done?
- Blue collar, academic, military, government, exploration, criminal, STEM, office, or religious.
- Has your character been cast out from anywhere?
- Home, guild, city, or school.
- Has your character left anyone behind?
- Family, love, rival, friend, or partner.
- How has your character gotten into their current situation?
- Hard times, wanderlust, favor, forced, or interest.
- What are some of your character’s motivations?
- Goals, obsessions, ties
- What is something that your character objects to?
- Morals, trauma, judgment
— The SRD
Nancy wants to roll up a character for the group’s urban fantasy game. Her general idea is that of the “urban ranger”, a crafty semi-survivalist with a dog companion.
Let’s start with her backstory questions!
As you can see, if we have details we can write them down, but often times we don’t know that much about the character yet! It’s ok to give a “boring” answer if it fits the character, or to go completely off the wall with something bizarre if that’s your fancy! We’re exploring this new character, and especially in a setting where people live relatively normal lives up until the oddities begin, they’re going to sound a lot like you and I.
Next, we need to fill out the mechanical bits. Doing so is relatively simple, but there’s a lot of game words you might not understand right off the bat. I’ll give a quick explanation for them now, and you can read more about them later.
Two that you will need to know right now are bonds and experiences, we’ll quote the SRD directly for those.
Bonds
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:
- Motivation
- Something that pushes your character forward.
- Objection
- Something that holds your character back.
- Flaw
- A motivation or objection that your character doesn’t like.
Once per scene, when your character acts on a bond, they gain a point of focus.
— The SRD
Experiences
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.
- Membership in a military, guild, or organization
- Background in a trade, social status, or culture
- Training for an education, skill set, or interest
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.
— The SRD
Now that you have a little understanding of what things generally are, we’ve got a small checklist for your character’s first level, i.e. their starting point within the game.
Level 1
You’ll need to complete the following items for your character’s first level:
- Choose either one shtick to put 2 points into, or two shticks to each put 1 point into (see shticks (page 1) )
- Write two experiences (see experiences (page 1) )
- Write two bonds (see bonds (page 1) )
- Determine your character’s starting income (see below)
To determine starting income, roll 5d6 and multiply by one of the choices on the list below.
- Destitute
- 1 times
- Impoverished
- 2 times
- Poor
- 5 times
- Average
- 10 times
- Well off
- 20 times
- Rich
- 50 times
You character may start with mundane items that they would reasonably have access to. Ask your facilitator for specifics applicable to their game.
— The SRD
But hold on! We’ll break this down a little more.
First, you can browse the shticks in the shticks booklet. Your facilitator might have a few more they wish to add as well that you can choose from. We track how much you get from your shtick with points. One point equals one shtick level. You get two points to start, so you can choose to place those into the same shtick (for 2 levels), or a couple different ones (for 1 level in each).
Each shtick can have it’s own options, mechanics, and rules associated with it. You’ll just be getting the starting pieces for now, so don’t sweat understanding everything about it just yet. You’ll want to write down what you chose and what abilities it gives you on page 2 of your character sheet. You can mark down things you use often on the first page for easy reference.
Now that we have an idea of who Nancy’s new character is, we can start to figure out what she can do. We’ll start by giving her a “shtick”, a major aspect of the character that we choose an ability set for.
In this case, we know that Noemi has a dog, Rex. So we’ll put 1 point into The Trainer shtick. That gets us a few things.
Shtick Levels
Level Gained Feature(s) Companion Perks Proficiency Points Experiences 1 Animal Companion 2 1 2 1 3 3 2 4 2 5 4 3 6 3 7 5 4
— Core Shticks
We can see that at level 1, we get the Animal Companion feature. Let’s look at that first.
Animal Companion
You gain an axillary character sheet representing an animal companion, or something similar.
This sheet follows these rules:
- Your companion does not level like a normal character.
- Your companion does not gain shtick points.
- Your companion has a number of proficiency points and experiences as shown on the shtick leveling table.
- Your companion gains perks at certain levels, as laid out on the shtick leveling table.
- Your companion can only carry 1 item at a time unless you have saddle bags or similar items procured for them.
You must spend an action (no roll) to verbally or somatically command your companion. Your companion will then carry out that directive until otherwise given a command.
— Core Shticks
I know that looks like a lot, but we can boil it down to it the bare minimum.
Essentially, you have a second character sheet, in this case for Rex. Now Rex doesn’t gain levels or take shticks or anything like a normal character, but he does have all the core character features outside of that for his health, focus, etc. He also gains some features as Noemi gains new Trainer levels, which we’ll look at in a minute.
Now, the Shtick Levels table also shows us that Rex will get 2 Perks, and 1 Experience. Nancy perused the Companion Perks, and picked out two that she liked.
Companion Perk: Reliable Helper
Whenever your companion helps you with an action, it may re-roll any 1s, but it must use the new result.
— Core Shticks
Companion Perk: The Goodest Boy
Once per scene, you may spend an action to give your companion affection, and they gain +1 resource on all actions for the rest of the scene.
— Core Shticks
Rex’s experiences are going to be much like Neomi’s. A bit of explanation for where a bit of his wordly experience (or training) comes from. For Rex’s first experience, Nancy wrote this: “Neomi will often bring Rex exploring with her. She’s been able to teach him to retrieve things in places that she can’t get to, and to help her move things she can’t on her own.” This tells us quite a bit about what Rex can do: he’s good at retrieving, pulling, navigating obtuse environments, and possibly some less intuitive situations. These are all situations that Rex can easily apply his training, and will gain a resource for.
For her second shtick point, we’ll go much, much simpler. The Tyro, which only gives us one feature to worry about.
Beginner’s Luck
Whenever you roll an action, you may re-roll any 1s. You must use the new result.
— Core Shticks
Second, your bonds and experiences should be filled out as detailed above. Your facilitator can help you write some that will be most helpful for the game they are running.
Considering the character so far, Nancy has written out the following bonds for Noemi.
Simple enough, these serve to help remind you of your character’s cornerstones, and reward you with focus for following your own guidelines.
The experiences are similarly straightforward.
Third, roll for money, and talk with your facilitator about some tools and items that’d be commonplace in the game you’re playing. Often a good place to start is the Wikipedia List of Tools and Equipment .
For money, Nancy rolled 5d6, netting her a total of 19. She figures Noemi is probably about average, so she’s got 190 bucks of spending money.
Kaeja says that most modern items are commonplace, but that everyone probably has one or two esoteric items as well. Nancy picked out the following things.
And that’s it! You now have a freshly built character.
Now that you have a character, lets dive into some gameplay!
For this example, our crew of roleplayers are trying to investigate a group which has recently repaired and rededicated a cathedral to an elder god who was all but forgotten some time ago. The crew have made their way to the outskirts of the area, and need to get a look inside.
Faelyn, Andres’ elf, is heading the operation. “I signal everyone to follow behind me.” Everyone nods in agreement, and Faelyn continues. “I move in close, and peer into the window.”
Nancy says that her character, Hurada, is also looking through the window. Meanwhile Brian’s character, Aien, is keeping a look out for trouble.
Kaeja describes that they see, “Four, maybe five figures stand around in the room. They’re wearing dark clothing of some form, though you can’t tell quite what color it is through the glass. They seem to be doing something, and you see a glint of light reflect briefly off of something over one of their heads. You can tell there’s some kind of a muffled noise from inside, though you cannot tell what it is from here.”
She continues, “Then, you see one of the figures start to glance in your direction. I need both of you looking in to roll against being seen, difficulty 5.”
Meanwhile to all this, Aien has been keeping watch and found that the coast is seemingly clear, which thankfully is knowledge our PCs can use as a resource to their advantage.
Faelyn adds up his resources: his base die, the knowledge that the area around them is clear, his experience sneaking around for the mob, and two additional for the fact that the stained glass is hard to see through and it’s nighttime. He rolls all 5, and rolls 3 hits. He knows that’s not enough to get by, so he considers his options. He has 2 focus, so he spend both of those to make two more resources hit, getting him the needed 5.
Hurada does similarly, and also succeeds. From here, the group continues on with their mission through the rest of the session.
In most games, players usually know the difficulty (or DC, in d20 systems) that they need to hit to succeed. Uune is generally played this way, though facilitators may choose to hide specific difficulties where their characters would not reasonably know how much effort to put into something.
In our example above, it would have been perfectly reasonable for Kaeja to not tell the PCs how difficult their stealth rolls were, due to the obtuse nature of the situation. However, Kaeja also knows that the game has much to go and wants the players to move beyond this interaction, so she can tell them anyways to ease this interaction and keep the game moving.
Eek! Our group finds themselves amidst a burning library, attempting to fight off a fanatical group trying to destroy valuable knowledge!
“You see before you—setting the shelves ablaze—four of the Promosites! Each seems to be armed with torches and daggers. Two of them are facing you all, while the other two are behind them igniting the books. What do you do?”
Hurada starts, “I draw my sword and engage with the guy on the right.”
Following is Faelyn, “I stay back and draw my bow, notching an arrow.”
Finally is Aien, “I’m going to charge up and punch the guy on the right!”
Fights mean conflict, and for any kind of conflict we have specific rules to help slow the game down and track who does what and when.
Conflict
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 two actions. Once all the PCs have taken their turns, the facilitator will give the NPCs their turns. Then, a new round begins.
— The SRD
Uune doesn’t mess with a dedicated initiative mechanic, or action points, or hard distance tracking. Instead, the PCs go first, each getting two actions, then the NPCs go just the same. This keeps it quick and simple, and means that there’s less turn planning if things change between now and your next turn.
Starting off, everybody is moving in and/or drawing a weapon. This means that they’re taking the engage and the interact actions.. Now, the party doesn’t have to be the ones to initiate, but they want to, and this will change the flow of the fight.
Action: Engage/Disengage
You may spend an action to enter, exit, or change your engagement with a group of opponents who are hostile to you. This includes things like stepping into melee range, or dipping behind cover.
— The SRD
Action: Interact
You may spend an action (no roll) to interact with something on your person or in the environment, such as opening a door, pulling a lever, or picking up an item. Drawing, shiething, or changing a weapon is considered an interact action.
— The SRD
As you can see, everybody is now engaged in some way with everybody else. This gives the enemy an advantage though, because they have time to react to our party members going in “guns blazing”. The one exception to this is Aien: because they’re unarmed, they don’t need to draw a weapon and can attack immediately.
Action: Attack
If you are engaged with an opponent, you may spend your action to attack them. Roll your action as normal against their most applicable action 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:
- If you meet the difficulty
- the NPC takes a heavy wound.
- If you get double the required hits
- the NPC takes a lethal wound.
- If you miss by 1 hit
- the NPC takes a light wound.
- If you miss by more than 1 hit
- you fail.
— The SRD
Aien’s opponent—we’ll call him Righty—has a defensive action score (which Kaeja knows) that we’ll use as the difficulty for the attack. Aien doesn’t know if Righty is sporting any armor under his garments, nor do they know his training, so their guessing at where and how to hit and as a result they don’t know the difficulty.
Kaeja describes what happens next, “Alright, the guys in the back spend their action to disengage and flee deeper into the library. The two facing you all attack twice.”
“Haruda and Aien, both of you make me two defense rolls, difficulty 4.”
Now on the back-half of the round, we see the NPCs scrambling to react to the situation. Two flee to attempt to complete their mission, while the other two launch an attack. Let’s see what Haruda and Aien need to do to defend against this attack.
Action: Defend
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:
- If you meet the difficulty
- you dodge or parry the attack.
- If you fail by 1 hit
- you take a light wound.
- If you fail by more than 1 hit
- you take a heavy wound.
- If you roll no hits
- you catastrophically fail and take a lethal wound.
— The SRD
Haruda gathers her resources: her base die, shield, armor, mercenary experience, plus 3 resources from her shtick and other abilities. She rolls all seven…and fails with only 2 hits.
“You attempt to shield yourself against the Promosite, but you were more worried about the torch than the dagger, and he manages to slip it under your breastplate and into your gut. You feel the warm blood wetting your undershirt, and you start to feel woozy. You take a heavy wound.”
Aien, fairing slightly better, rolls 5 hits. He’s in the clear and takes no damage. Rinse and repeat for the second attacks, and both of them manage to stave off further blows.
Now what’s this wound business? Haruda is not out of the fight, but how much fight does she have left in her? To answer that, we need to look at two things: wounds and vitality.
Vitality
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:
- You may spend 5 vitality to re-roll a die in your pool, using the new result.
- You may spend 10 vitality to bump a die, increasing it’s roll by 1.
— The SRD
Wounds
When your character takes substantial injury, they will take a wound. You may heal as a downtime activity.
Wounds come in 3 varieties:
- Lethal
- reduce your max vitality by 100.
- Heavy
- reduce your max vitality by 50.
- Light
- reduce your max vitality by 10.
— The SRD
So Haruda is about halfway to death’s door, not a great place to be in a burning building! While we haven’t used it in our examples here, this also means that she has less vitality to spend should she need it later to help boost her rolls, which is a detriment in it’s own right.
Faelyn starts off the new round, “I fire an arrow at the guy on the left, then notch another.”
Aien continues, “And I throw two punches at the one on the right!.”
And Haruda finishes, “I’ll stab the one on the left, and then disengage.”
Kaeja smirks, “I’m going to need everybody to roll some attacks then.”
Faelyn counts up his resources: base die, bow, mob experience, bow hunting experience, plus 3 more from ability bonuses. He rolls all six resources and gets 4 hits! He wants to finish this guy off though, so he spends two focus to push his attack all the way to 6 hits. Little does he know, that’s double Lefty’s defensiveness, killing him in one go.
“You fire your shot out, aimed straight for the head. As the Promosite looks you dead in the eyes, you see a moment of regret cross his face, as the arrow buries itself between his eyes and he falls limply to the ground.”
The fight continues like this for some time, with success against the Promosites nearby but not so much against those that fled. Ultimately, they wind up having to scramble to save whatever they can before escaping the burning building. They survive, but to a mixed success. They find their way to a healer to get their wounds treated, and rest up for a few days afterwards to plan the next step of their quest.