Tricube Tales

What is Tricube Tales?
This product started out as a simple set of guidelines I created to run short games for my five-year-old son. However, I found the rules worked really well for adults as well, so I decided to expand them into a full game.

Versatile: Tricube Tales is a rules-light roleplaying system capable of handling a wide variety of genres and settings.
Portable: Games require little preparation or bookkeeping, and the PDF is designed for reading on a 16:9 aspect ratio smartphone screen, so you’ll always have the rules at hand.
Free: You can download the full Phone PDF for free by clicking on the Publisher Preview, and the entire text has been released under the CC BY 3.0 license, meaning you can also use it for your own commercial publications.
If you have any questions about the system or suggestions for future content, you're welcome to discuss them on the Zadmar Games Discord Server!
Character Creation
The player makes up an archetype, a perk, and a quirk. An archetype consists of a trait (agile, brawny, or crafty) followed by a concept (usually a profession or calling), a perk typically represents a special ability or item, and a quirk describes a foible or drawback. The entire character can be summarized in a single sentence, such as “an agile masked vigilante who is skilled with a rapier and loves to humiliate his foes,” or “a brawny cyborg cop who has a cybernetic exoskeleton and is programmed to uphold the law,” or even “a crafty professor with telepathic superpowers who requires a wheelchair.”

Resolution System
To overcome a challenge, players roll 1-3 six-sided dice (depending on their archetype) against a difficulty of 4-6 (depending on the situation), and need to succeed with at least one die. Perks can be used to reduce the difficulty, while quirks can increase it, but both are controlled by the player using karma tokens—they spend karma on perks, and recover it from quirks. This core mechanic is used for everything, including combat, and all rolls are made by the players.