Hello, and welcome to the Uune Roleplaying Game! Uune is a tabletop meta-RPG designed to work with a variety of styles and genres. It is a game where you work as a team to tell a story, overcoming challenges by pooling your resources and rolling dice.
In the sections that follow, I will do my best to explain the fundamental rules and mechanics of the game, and provide guidance whenever necessary to clarify how they are intended to be used.
In this guide, special contextual hints are given via the use of italics and bold styling. Keywords which are intended to be found when skimming for specific rules are boldened, while keywords referencing mechanics that are defined in future sections are italicized.
To get started, make sure you have the following items:
The Game Master (or GM) is the player who runs the game. They guide the story and act as the eyes and ears of the player characters. The GM also acts as all of the non-player characters (NPCs) in the story, such as shopkeepers, guards, soldiers, kings, etc.
Uune is a meta-RPG, meaning that it’s designed to work with a variety of game styles and genres. Your GM will have a setting picked out, or a custom one made for your table. Some example settings are available here
Everyone other than the GM plays as their own, singular character, known as a player character (or PC).
To build a character, follow the guide below:
Levels represent your character’s overall experience, they’re an easy way of keeping track of how many features (mainly abilities) they’re supposed to have. You level up whenever you gain enough total experience (XP) to reach the next level, and you gain XP by interacting with certain game mechanics. See the following list for level XP:
When you level up, you may add a feature to your character, chosen from those available. By default, Uune gives you 3 feature types: skill levels, boons, and banes. Your setting may add additional options that you can take from as well.
Levels start at 0 (where you have no features added to your character), and can go as high as 30. Your GM may want to start you off with a level or two in order to help flesh out your character, but there is no requirement to do so.
Bonds are elements of your character’s story and personality that are specifically called out on your character sheet. Once per session, you may involve a single bond with the story and gain 10 XP. You start out with 2 bonds, and can add 1 more whenever you level up, representing the players learning more about your character as the story progresses.
Bonds can be for a variety of things (as approved by your GM), some examples are listed below:
Features are the nuts and bolts of character creation and progression. They allow you to add on new abilities, or to strengthen existing ones as your character grows and learns throughout their travels.
Skills allow you to boost your rolls for things that you have knowledge around. Whenever you use a resource, you may choose a skill that is related to that resource. You may then add a bonus to said roll equal to the levels you’ve put into that skill.
Each skill is comprised of one or two words that give a gist of what it is for, and the number of levels you’ve put into it. You can have whatever skills you can think of, so long as your GM approves it beforehand.
Many settings will have some example skills to get you started, as well as guidelines for what sort of skills would make sense for the world that the game takes place in.
Perks represent specific bits of experience, status, or ability for your character. Each one gives you an extra ability you can use to help you along your way.
You can find the core perks here, as well as additional perks from your setting and your GM.
Handicaps represent things about your character that they need to overcome to thrive in their story. This can be used to represent things like old injuries, phobias, disabilities, etc.
When you take a handicap, talk to your GM about the specifics of what it is and how you got it. Have you always had it, or was it something that developed later on in your life?
Regardless of what the handicap is, whenever you roll a resource that pertains to it, you do so with disadvantage. When you do this though, you gain a point of karma.
Banes represent another kind of negative mechanic, those which are triggered by specific circumstances. This can be used to represent things like curses, mainias, specific types of ailments, addictions, etc.
Similar to a handicap, you should talk to your GM about the specifics of it.
A bane has three parts: a trigger, a condition, and a relief.
As an example, let’s say that your character smokes. The trigger might be a stressful situation, the condition might be the strained condition, and the relief would be to smoke a cigarette.
Your character has 5 inventory slots that they can store items in, representing the number of items they can carry, pocket, etc.
Certain items will have special properties that change how they can be used. These act as quick notes for item specific mechanics. Some base properties are as follows:
Whenever your character wants to purchase an item, the GM may reference the table below to determine it’s cost based on it’s rarity and quality. The table is currency agnostic and can be adapted to your specific game if need be.
| Everyday | Common | Scarce | Expensive | Luxury | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| High Quality | 25 | 150 | 500 | 5000 | 50000 |
| Average Quality | 10 | 50 | 250 | 1000 | 10000 |
| Low Quality | 5 | 25 | 100 | 500 | 2500 |
| Cost Variance | 1 * (2d6 - 6) | 5 * (2d6 - 6) | 10 * (2d6 - 6) | 100 * (2d6 - 6) | 500 * (2d6 - 6) |
There will be times when your character will have obstacles in their path, whether physical or metaphorical. We call those challenges. Challenges are specific to a single character, though there are ways that other characters can get involved that we’ll get into later.
Every challenge has a difficulty level which is a number representing the amount of effort required to complete the challenge. For example, a difficulty of zero means that no roll is needed, while a difficulty of 30 means that your task is extremely difficult.
Your dice pool is the total amount from all the dice you’ve rolled towards beating your challenge. You add to your dice pool by making use of resources, which will be explained in their own section. You’ll need to get your dice pool to a number equal to or greater than your challenge’s difficulty level in order to complete your challenge.
You can use the the list below to help narrow in on an appropriate difficulty level.
| Difficulty | Level |
|---|---|
| Effortless | 0 |
| Easy | 5 |
| Medium | 10 |
| Difficult | 15 |
| Hard | 20 |
| Merciless | 25 |
| Impossible | 30 |
Having too many rolls can bog the game down, but having too few leaves players wondering what their abilities are good for. To help determine what necessitates a roll, ask yourself the following questions and increase the difficulty of the challenge in proportion to how many obstacles and intricacies are present:
Additionally, you can adjust the difficulty of a challenge if your player changes their goal slightly. For example, your player might decide that in addition to scoping out a spot for them to hide, they also want to plant some tools for them to use later now that they’ve found somewhere to put them.
Resources are dice which represent your ability to use things at your disposal. You use resources to help you complete a challenge, and using a resource allows you to roll a six-sided die and add it to your current dice pool towards said challenge.
Every time you roll a resource, you gain 1 point of experience.
There are 6 main types of resources, as outlined below. Features might also grant you additional ways to gain or use resources.
The most basic of resources are those inherent to you, your mental and physical fortitude. Your character starts with 5 points of stamina. They may expend a point of stamina to use it as a resource. You regain 1 stamina for every hour that your character sleeps, up to 5.
Another type of resource that you can have is karma. You can only ever have 1 karma at any given time, and you can gain karma from banes, risk, or other mechanics.
You may spend your karma at any time to give yourself a resource for free. Gaining a resource in this way allows you to very slightly alter your circumstances in your favor in order to give you a one-time resource.
We can’t forget some of the most fundamental resources: your senses! Sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch; you can use each of these once per challenge if you can think of a way that they help you.
Make sure to describe your action! Where do you look? What are you listening for? What are you feeling for, and what conclusion do you hope to draw?
Next up are the things you have on you. That can be things in your inventory, or things in your environment that you readily have access to. If something is a little out of reach or stowed away in a bag, you’ll need to roll the resource with disadvantage.
Pieces of information or past experience can also count as resources for you. You might know about about the guard rotation for a heist, or have overheard the duke planning to start a war, or have been trained in bomb diffusal, etc, etc, etc. If it’s been established and your GM approves, you can use these sorts of know-how to help you.
Finally, you can always try to just make it up as your go along! A little creative thinking and ingenuity can fill a lot of gaps where you might not otherwise be able to progress easily.
Your GM will need to be convinced first that it’d make sense, second that it’s doable (luck checks help a lot here), and finally they might impose a risk roll if it’s iffy.
At times your GM may apply one of the following modifier mechanics to a resource roll, depending on the nature of the resource and how it’s being used.
Resources aren’t always easy to use, nor are they all equally helpful. Sometimes, your GM will impose advantage or disadvantage on the roll.
Advantage means that you will need to roll twice, and take the higher roll.
Disadvantage means that you will need to roll twice, but take the higher roll.
Having both advantage and disadvantage on a roll means that they cancel out, and the roll is normal.
Sometimes, rolling for a resource once just isn’t enough. If it makes sense, your GM can grant advantage on it if your character takes double the time it normally would to use it
When the actions you take can lead to unintended side effects, your GM may ask you to roll for risk. Often, this is due to using a resource that you "made up" (such as a lie), but can also be a consequence for using a tool in the wrong way or other particular circumstance (such as using a walkie-talkie while trying to be quiet).
Roll your risk die, and add a relevant skill bonus to your roll.
Another facet of challenges is how well they are completed. There are 3 levels of Quality for every challenge, based on how large your Dice Pool is relative to the difficulty you needed to beat:
| Dice Pool is equal to or slightly past the difficulty | Adequate Success |
| Dice Pool is 2 times the difficulty | Flawless Success |
| Dice Pool is 3 times the difficulty | Fantastical Success |
In any level of success, your character completes what they set off to do. However, in the case of a flawless or fantastical success, your GM may give an additional perk or bonus depending on the challenge. For example, if your character is crafting a weapon and they get a flawless success, your GM might give it the high quality property to reflect the craftsmanship put into it.
Luck checks are used for whenever something needs to be answered purely by chance. For example, your GM might call for a luck check to see if something exists in the environment around you that they hadn’t explicitly planned for. As another example, they might also use it to see if your character remembered to do something in retrospect that seems plausible but isn’t a given.
When your GM asks you to make a luck check, flip a coin. On heads, the situation is in your favor. On tails, it is not in your favor. If you don’t have a coin handy, you can instead roll a d6, treating a 4 or higher as a success.
At times, your GM will need to slow the game down to allow everyone to get in on the action. We call that crunch time.
Starting off, crunch time is always initiated with the actions of a character. Then, the other characters involved can each take their turn, completing 1 challenge on their turn. Once everyone has taken their turn, a new round begins and everyone can take take their turns again.
If a character wishes to take another turn within the same round, they may do so, but the difficulty of their challenge will be increased by +5 for each additional turn they take.
Conditions are active effects which affect your character. These are given out by your GM as a result of an environmental threat, another character’s action, a risk roll, etc. The base conditions are outlined below:
| Name | Cause | Effect | Stacking | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strained | Sustaining a light injury, overexertion, or other debilitating effect | All of your challenges have +1 to their difficulty level | Yes | You heal 1 level of this for every hour that you rest |
| Gashed | Sustaining a significant injury | All of your resource rolls are reduced by 1 | Yes | You heal 1 level of this whenever you sleep at least 6 hours |
| Helpless | Being incapacitated | You cannot use resources | No | Determined by your GM based on context |
| Held | Being tied up, grappled, etc | You cannot move | No | You may attempt to break out with an attack against your holder |
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