Tricube Tales Quickref

A Player Guide

2022-08-25

1. About
2. Character Creation
3. Doing Stuff
4. Karma
5. Effort
6. Advancement

About

I started a play-by-post game of Tricube Tales by Zadmar. It is very lightweight and has a novel metacurrency, and I’m enjoying it.

I made a little quickref cheatsheet for the core rules, and thought I would post it here.

You should of course read the full rules for a more complete understanding of the game, and also support the artist by purchasing their work.

• https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/294202/Tricube-Tales
• https://zadmar.itch.io/guardians-of-the-shadow-frontier

Character Creation

1. Choose a trait—agile, brawny, or crafty—and create a concept.

   Examples:

   • An agile thief
   • A brawny warrior
   • A crafty sorcerer

2. Create a perk—a special item, talent, or ability—and a quirk, a flaw or hinderance.

   Examples:

   • An agile thief with shadow magic who is greedy
   • A brawny warrior with a magical sword who succombs to blood lust
   • A crafty sorcerer with fire magic who is arrogant

3. Start with 3 karma tokens and 3 resolve tokens. Resolve are like hit points from other games. Karma will be elaborated on below.

Doing Stuff

1. GM determines the type of roll—agile, brawny, or crafty—and its difficulty

2. Roll 2d6 and read your single highest roll. If the type of roll matches your character trait, roll 3d6. If the roll is far outside your character concept and perks, roll 1d6.

Failure usually means losing resolve, or accepting a condition or a complication.

If you succeed on 2 or more dice, that is a critical success.

If you roll all 1s, that is a critical failure.

Karma

Karma is the metacurrency of the game.

• After rolling, you can spend 1 karma to invoke your perk—if appropriate—and reduce the difficulty of the challenge by 1.

• Before rolling, you can invoke your quirk to regain 1 karma and increase the difficulty of the challenge by 1. If you succeed on this special roll, you can choose to regain 1 resolve instead of regaining 1 karma.

To make things interesting, the GM can offer a player karma at any time in exchange for a complication.

Effort

Some tasks cannot be accomplished in a single roll.

In this case the GM will specify a number of effort tokens, each of which must be defeated by a successful roll.

Example: A hoarde of goblins. Their large number is respresented by 3 effort tokens. That is, you must roll 3 successes to defeat them all.

Advancement

• Every 1 - 3 sessions, gain a new perk or quirk. Or convert an affliction or condition into a new quirk.

• Every other advancement, you may choose instead to gain 1 max karma or resolve.