Runespire Academy (Tricube Tales one-page RPG and mini-campaign guide)

I've sometimes heard people say the Tricube Tales one-page RPGs aren't suitable for campaigns, so I decided to show how I'd do exactly that. As well as the "one-page RPG" itself (i.e., the first page) and the adventure examples (which I always include on a second page), my latest product also comes with a 2-page campaign guide, and a 2-page adventure guide: Runespire Academy!

This one changes the traits and replaces the concepts with classes (each player picks three classes to study at the academy). Quirks were replaced with aspects (each player picks two), and perks were replaced with affinities (each player has an affinity for each aspect, and a specialty for each affinity). Karma was replaced with mana, and each aspect has its own separate mana pool. This is less fiddly than it sounds, and I think it makes the magic system feel a bit more interesting.

The campaign guide provides various downtime activities (like exams, building a coven, and memorable events during the semester), with the actual adventures taking place outside the academy, between semesters. Each trait is tied to a form of advancement (athletic characters are better at sports, brainy characters are better at academics, and charming characters are better at recruiting witches and warlocks into their coven). There are various tables and guidelines for generating random NPC students, as other students play a major role in the campaign, with friends and enemies pulled into the ongoing story.

The adventure guide was something I added a little bit later, after I realized the campaign guide only dedicated a couple of short sentences to the adventure. I considered creating a six-scene scenario, as I've done for some of my other one-pagers, but I felt it would be more useful as a generic template that references the adventure generator, rather than as a one-off adventure.

I also created an online Runespire Academy Student Generator for creating random NPCs, but I thought it would be nice to offer people a curated list as well, so I ended up designing a separate 13-page PDF with 216 students (i.e., a d666 table). I went through and manually adjusted the students to balance their traits, family names, aspects, affinities, hobbies, etc, and I also gave each student a unique first name to avoid potential confusion during play.