What is a Role-Playign Game?

A role-playing game is an interactive story like a novel or a movie - except the actions of the players change the course of the adventure. The players interact with their universe through imaginary extensions of themselves called characters. These characters are people living in the universe that the players control. Unlike regular games, RPGs change each time you play because the story is separate from the rules. Each time you begin a new story, the adventure is different. With role-playing games you never have the same adventure twice. That is what makes role-playing such a vivid, exciting and unique experience - you never know what to expect.

Unique features of Genesis

Two books

Genesis is separated into two books, the CAUDEX REGULUM and CAUDEX CENTIA. From Latin, and translated loosely, they mean "the book of rules" and "the book of data". Genesis was separated like this to make information retrieval easy by keeping the rules separated from the data. This works well as a Player -Game Master set also, since the players the normally read the data book only, while the GM is free to read both.

Flexibility of rules and genre

The rule systems in Genesis were created to allow for multiple levels of complexity. This is achieved with a basic system to which modifiers are added until the system simulates reality. The transition from a simple to a complex system, using modifiers, gives a continuous spectrum of complexity between the two extremes. GM you are free to use any of the modifiers, making system as complex as you want or as simple as you The Genesis universe also encompasses many gem cause it is just that - a whole universe. Although centered around Earth, the action is not confined to any one planet with any one race. This gives an almost infinite variety of adventures for you and your players to explore.

Ease of revision and addition

Genesis is bound in a three ring binder to allow for frequent revisions and additions. This eliminates the testament to wasted money that collects in every role-player's closet, game books and revisions that are worthless because they have been replace by newer editions. A three ring binder makes revision as easy as removing old pages and clipping in the new ones. You always have an updated rule book, no matter how long ago you bought it. You won't ever have to buy a whole new game to get fifteen new pages - not with Genesis.

Conventions

The Metric system

It is necessary to discuss the conventions that were used while preparing this game. Genesis uses the Metric system of measurement. The Metric system was chosen for three reasons - convenience, conversion, and consistency. The Metric system has all of these three qualities and all measurements in Genesis will be in metric. A system of measurement must be convenient, it should be easy to work with and simple in design. The metric system is both. It has only three basic units; the meter, the gram, and the litre. The other part of the system is simply a way of saving space and to simplify the writing of measurements. Each of the basic units can have a prefix added to it to tell roughly the scale of the measurement. Even if you do not know the actual measurement you can get a feeling of the size by the units it is in. For instance you would never measure a tree's height in centimeters, you would use meters. The prefixes, their abbreviations and the degree to which they are greater than the base measure is listed below.

PREFIX	        SCALE	                POWER
tera	T	1,000,000,000,000	1012	one-trillion
giga	G	1,000,000,000	        109	one-billion
mega	M	1,000,000		106	one-million
kilo	K	1,000		        103	one-thousand
hecta	H	100	          	102	one-hundred
deca	D	10		        101	ten
base	m	1	         	10	one
deci	d	.1	         	10-1	one-tenth
centi	c	.01		        10-2	one-hundredth
mili	m	.001		        10-3	one-thousandth
micro	M	.000,000,1      	10-6	one-millionth
nano	n	.000,000,000,1	        10-9	one-billionth
pico	P	.000,000,000,000,1	10-12	one-trillionth

Metric is convenient because only these three units and the twelve prefixes gives the user a working knowledge of the metric system. In the conversions between different prefixes the metric system is superior to the Imperial system. To convert you simply multiply or divide by a factor of ten or simply move the decimal to the left or to the right. No matter which unit you are converting to you always convert in the same way and use the same prefixes. This consistency in the metric system makes it easy to learn and use. There are many books and encyclopedias that give descriptions of how the metric system works and conversions to metric.

Tables

The following chapters all contain rules and rule systems, which use and refer to tables regularly. To keep the body text uninterrupted the tables that belong with each system have been placed at the end of each chapter. If you wish, you may move them to the place in the book that you find most convenient. For instance some GMs like to have the tables mixed in with the rules, while others would keep them together at the end of the book in one large 'Tables' section. The choice is yours.

Dice Rolls

Every role-playing game uses abbreviations to tell the players and the Game Master which dice to use. Another game might use the nomenclature “2d8”. This system has arisen from people saying “Use 2 dice that are 8 sided”. In Genesis however, all of the rules are designed to work with 10 sided dice, so there really is no need to say what kind of dice to use. It is necessary however, to describe how to interpret the results of the dice rolls. There are many different ways of using and interpreting the results from two ten sided dice. One way is to roll one ten sided die to find a number out of possibilities. Another would be to roll two ten and add the results to get a number out of twenty. For each of these rolls we use the format:
1:10sd and 2:10sd

There are examples in Genesis where the way the dice rolls are written could become confusing. For example you could roll two 10 sided dice but interpret the results differently than before. If you choose one die to be the “tens” die and the other to be the “ones”. When you roll, the results are 1 and 5, you could interpret the result as 15 - a number out of 100 possibilities, a percentage. In this case the abbreviation would be written 2:10sd as well. To avoid confusion dice rolls which should be interpreted as percentages will be like this:

1:100sd

(If the roll was 0,0 then the result would be 100 however a 0, 5 would only be 5 not 105).
If you wanted a number between 1 and 50 you could either roll 5,10 sided dice or roll one set of percentage dice and divide the result by 2. In either case the results would be roughly the same but they would be written like this:

5:10sd or ½:100sd

Sometimes you will see rolls abbreviated in this:

1:10sd + 5 or 1:100sd +15

For these, you would roll as normal and then add 5 or 15, as indicated, to the result. For instance, if the result of the roll in the first example was 7, you add 5 to this and the result is 12.

Finally, there is one other format of dice roll abbreviation that we have not discussed yet. In this case you would roll one die called the “hundreds”, one called “tens” and one called “ones” and you would interpret the results out of 1000. So, if you rolled a 0, a 5, and a 7 you would say that the result was 57. In this case the abbreviation used would be:
1:1000sd

The same convention as in the percentile roll applies if you were to roll 0, 0, 0, then the result would 1000.

Role-Playing Game