Player's Handbook · Chapter 1

Your First Session

Aevum begins with a place, a person, and a problem that will not wait. You do not need to build a character from a blank page or memorize every rule before play. Choose a realm, take one of its starting characters, and tell the Game Master what you do.

Choose where you begin

Each start places you at the bottom of a different social order. Your realm determines the law around you, the people entitled to command you, and the lawful paths by which you might rise.

The Kingdom of Al'thoria begins in the Greenfields. The King's Road is failing, carts have stopped, and a serf has almost no lawful room to refuse a superior.
The Njordheim Clans begin on the Froskald Coast. Grain is short, winter is closing, and the clans must choose trade, hunting, or raiding.
The Shogunate of Sakura begins in Akayama Province. Ronin demand tribute while honor and caste decide who may speak, command, or draw steel.
The Sultanate of Al-Jamil begins at Zahar. The wells are failing, contracts carry the force of law, and water is worth more than courtesy.
The Shattered Republic begins in Elysia. A non-citizen has no name in the rolls, while relics, guilds, and political service offer dangerous ways upward.

The opening tells you what is happening now. It is not a command to accept one quest. You may investigate, bargain, prepare, leave, or pursue another opportunity—but time and other people continue moving.

Choose a character

Every start offers two characters tied to its place and social order. Read the character's description, standing, legal status, attributes, skills, equipment, and personal motives. Choose the person whose constraints interest you, not merely the person with the highest numbers.

Standing is law, not wealth. Coin does not make a serf free, a plebeian a citizen, or a peasant a samurai. If you want freedom, office, land, or rank, you must find the lawful instrument that grants it—or accept the consequences of trying to break the order.

Your inventory matters only when you actually carry it and can use it. Your contacts remember what you do. Wounds, exhaustion, money, travel, and obligations persist after the scene ends.

Declare an action

Say what you want, how you attempt it, and what you are willing to risk. Concrete declarations give the Scale something to weigh.

Instead of "I investigate," say: "I examine the cistern ledger against the water marks before the keeper returns."

Instead of "I persuade the guard," say: "I present the sealed contract, address him by rank, and ask passage before the caravan gate closes."

Instead of "I attack," say: "I keep the table between us, draw the knife, and drive him away from the door rather than chase him into the street."

The Game Master weighs every relevant fact: training, strength, tools, position, preparation, numbers, morale, time, law, and what the opposition wants. There are no dice. If the situation does not yet decide the outcome, one more real factor will.

Read the verdict through the fiction

The Game Master does not announce hidden clocks or reduce the world to arithmetic. You hear what your character can perceive: the guard hesitates, the ice groans, the merchant looks toward the guild witness, or the wounded man can no longer keep his shield high.

Success may cost time, coin, supplies, reputation, or blood. Failure leaves a door open: a different route, a harsher bargain, a debt, a retreat, or knowledge bought too late. You may always change the situation before trying again.

Time is a choice

Ask how long an action takes when it matters. Crossing a district may cost minutes; gathering labor may cost a day; recovery, travel, construction, and training may cost weeks. When midnight passes, food is eaten, wages are owed, income is posted, wounds recover or worsen, and distant factions continue their work.

Do not say "I wait" without saying what you do while time passes. Name the work: keep watch, recover, earn wages, train, gather rumors, repair equipment, or supervise a project. The world will answer that choice too.

The first turn

When the opening ends, do three things:

Read the immediate problem and decide what your character actually wants.
Check the character's standing, equipment, money, and relevant skills.
Declare one concrete action with an approach and an intended result.

That is enough to begin. The Game Master keeps the books, but the consequences belong to you.

Manual updated Aug 17, 2026.

The Scale (No Dice)

Aevum Realm Builder

No dice, no luck. A serf-to-sovereign RPG where crafting, wages, estates, armies and politics all settle on one ledger — and five realms move whether you show up or not. Start at the bottom. The world remembers.

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@Rukka

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CreatedAug 12, 2026

UpdatedAug 17, 2026

A No-Dice RPG of Craft, Coin & Conquest

Serf to king. Ruin to empire.

No dice. No luck. No mercy.

Most AI RPGs roll for you. Aevum weighs. Name what you want, and the Scale counts every factor for and against it — your skill, your tools, the ground, the weather, the ten men at your back, the debt you owe the guild — and the outcome follows from the count, Certain to Hopeless. Success costs something. Failure leaves a door open. There is no random table between you and your fate, and no chosen one either. You start at the bottom, like everyone else.

SIX SYSTEMS, EACH DEEP ENOUGH TO BE ITS OWN GAME

CRAFT — Ten trade families and dozens of skills: gathering, food, textiles, woodworking, metalworking, construction, alchemy, arcana, monster-harvesting, knowledge. Gatherers feed processors, processors feed makers, makers feed the market. Skills gate what you can make; markets decide what it is worth.

COIN — A household ledger down to the copper. Every soul eats 2 copper a day. Farmland sells only the surplus your own people do not eat. Animals are investments, buildings are capacity, land is the productive asset. Ten acres and a cottage is a real financial position — and it can go under.

ESTATES — Build acre by acre and roof by roof: cottage, barn, coop, palisade, mill, workshop. Construction costs time and workforce and offers four spend levers with honest ROI. Stockpile against winter and siege, or find out what an unfed winter does to a holding.

WAR — Regiments with Power and Defense, roles that choose their ground, heroes who carry war ratings, and a levy you raise from your own people and disband when the harvest calls. Pay and supply decide loyalty: unpaid troops go home, drift, or mutiny. This is not a combat minigame — it is a standing army with a wage bill your estate has to actually cover. What a regiment is worth is the sum of what its men actually carry, down to the shield — reprice mail and every company wearing it moves with it.

SCHEME — Three economies running at once: the open market, guilds that are economic armies, and a black market often richer than both. Buy debt, corner a market, blacklist a rival, or fund a rebellion with coin instead of swords. Fifty-three guilds, underworlds and secret orders are already playing without you.

RISE — Five realms, five law codes, and one social wall that is law rather than flavour. A serf does not meet a lord's eye. A samurai may cut down an insult on the spot. A Republic non-citizen buys citizenship at a deliberately impossible price. Climb by the realm's own rules or fall to its punishments: serf, freeman, lord, king. And in the shattered west a throne waits for whoever digs the dead empire out of its ruins and crowns himself emperor.

ADVENTURE — The part every other world has, built to the same standard. Combat on a wound ladder from Unharmed to Dead. Conditions bend every weighing, morale ends fights before the last sword falls, and wounds heal in days and weeks rather than overnight. Ground, weather and the long march are edges that belong to whoever earned them. What you wear is priced the same way. Five worn slots and two hands — a two-handed axe leaves no hand for a shield or a torch, and something gets dropped. Armor does not subtract damage; it moves a killing blow down the ladder. Every realm fields its own light, medium and heavy kit at its own price: a full harness runs 33 gold in Njordheim, where the ore is shallow and the timber endless, and 62 in Sakura, where every ingot crosses a mountain range.

THE WORLD DOES NOT WAIT

Five faction clocks tick every week whether you play or not: Al'thoria's succession paralysis, Njordheim's grain-and-war confrontation, Sakura's daimyo stability, Al-Jamil's failing oasis, and Valerius's drive to reunite the Republic. Five hundred named NPCs want something specific enough to act on. Debts, insults, oaths and favours are written down and held against you across sessions — the world remembers because the record remembers.

1,450 entries across 28 file types. Every acre, animal, wage, wound and rank is a real record with real numbers behind it, not a line of improvised prose.

Pick a realm. Take a name. Start at the bottom. The Scale is waiting.

Glimpses

Author's note

I design games. The thing that has always bothered me about AI RPGs is that the numbers are decoration — a 500 gold reward means nothing in a world where nobody ever priced bread.

Aevum is built the other way round. The economy came first: 2 copper a day to feed one person, and every price, wage, acre and building cost derived from that. Then the crafting chains had to balance against those prices, the estates had to pay for themselves, the regiments had to be payable out of an estate's real income, and the factions had to want things they could actually afford. If a system here cannot be paid for, it is not in here.

That is also why there are no dice. Randomness lets a GM launder a bad verdict as luck. The Scale forces it to name every factor out loud — so you can argue with the verdict, and so a serf and a lord get weighed by the same rules.

It is a large world, but you do not have to read any of it. Pick a realm, start at the bottom, and let it come to you.

— Rukka, ArcanumRPGs.com

Inside the World