OneDice Universal

Discovered a new generic universal RPG system. OneDice Universal has recently been released from Cakebread & Walton (the best publisher name ever). This one is light, simple, and kind of targets kids...

Cakebread & Walton, award-winning RPG designers of Abney Park’s Airship Pirates, Clockwork & Chivalry, Renaissance, Dark Streetsand Pirates & Dragons, are proud to announce a new product line for 2014 – the OneDice system. 

There are times when you’ve got a really cool idea for a role-playing session, but can’t quite find the system to fit the bill. You want something quick and easy, that you can put together on the back on an envelope. Or perhaps you’ve got an epic idea for a multi-genre campaign involving cyber-cowboys and a flying city inhabited by ninja dwarves and steampunk woodland animals. (Well, you might!). Or you’ve promised to run a game, only have half any hour to prepare and have no ideas 

This is where OneDice comes in. OneDice is a quick and easy role-playing game for any genre. Our first release, OneDice Universal, is a compact, art-free, rulebook designed to let you create and run characters in any setting. It comes with three ready-made “skins” – brief extra rules – for fantasy (including magic), superheroes (including powers and weaknesses) and space (including starship combat). And all this is crammed into 56 pages, for the pocket-money price of $7.99! 

We’ll be following this up with a series of “genrebooks” and “worldbooks” Genrebooks will each cover rules for a different genre; Steampunk is already in the works, withCyberpunk on its heels. Each small book will include the core rules, adapted for the genre, together with some ready-made campaign background skins and adventure seeds. Worldbooks will develop a particular setting; a OneDice version of our Pirates & Dragons RPG is in the pipeline, together with Floodland, barbarian adventures in post-apocalypse Britain. All will contain some art, and some worldbooks will be in colour. Again, they will contain the core rules, so that each book stands alone. And again, they’ll be small books at pocket-money prices. Pick one up and you’ve got enough to run a game in no time – pick up a few, and you’ll soon be mixing genres and coming up with weird and wonderful ideas which might never otherwise have occurred to you. 

How does the system work? Characters have three attributes: Strong, Clever and Quick. Some might also have Magic. They also have a bunch of skills. Add together attribute and skill, roll a D6, add that, and try and beat the target number or the opponent’s roll. The rest is just variations on the theme. Character generation takes about five minutes. 

The game books are suitable for age 10+, so there’s no better time to get your kids into role-playing!

And at the time of this posting, it isn't even $7.99. Just $5.00!

It appears this OneDice system aims to be the simple, light, entry level generic system along the likes of GURPS, Savage Worlds, True20, etc. Perhaps most like True20 as that used on single d20 and OneDice uses one single d6.

I look forward to the genre books and the world books. We'll see how it fares.

With no formal forums (at least not yet), I've set up a Google+ for a collected point for discussion if that develops.

OneDice Unversal G+