Audeo as a game has a small set of terms everyone at the table is expected to understand.

*coming soon*

Each player gets to play a character within the fiction of Audeo. These adventurous spirits are gifted or lucky people with the drive to dare the dangers posed by the world around them. The adventurers life is full of risk and reward, and sometimes they die trying to reach their goals. However, deaths are never random and each has meaning.

Each Adventurer is comprised of quite a few parts. Potential tells us what abilities they possess. Merits and Faults define their very nature. Means are resources they have at their disposal. Impression tells us important things about them that are apparent at first glance. Story links them into the fictional world in meaningful ways. These six things give us a solid idea of who they are and where they are going.

Learn more in: Creating the Adventurer

The Aura of each Adventurer is broken into three types: Protean, Shadow, and Brilliance. Each element of an Aura is one card of a given type, and an adventurer may have zero to five at any time. When six is reached, something dramatic will happen on their next roll, the Adventurer resolves Destiny. Truly there are only two types of aura, Shadow and Brilliance. The Protean type is possibly either, and when Destiny is resolved, they randomly align with Shadow and Brilliance.

Shadow aura is darkness, full of doubt and pain. While accumulating shadow is often bad for the adventurer immediately, it offers the most ability to develop them if they can endure the short term.

Brilliance aura is light, full of revelation and hope. While accumulating brilliance is often good for the adventurer immediately, it offers limited ability for them to develop in the long run.

Protean aura are unknown until the moment of destiny, and then all of these cards will align with Shadow or Brilliance as determined by chance. It is far more likely they will align with the type of card the adventurer has more of at a moment of Destiny.

Learn more here: Aura and Destiny.

The game uses three currencies in play. Two of them have to do with turning potential into actual ability, and the other one is a kind of meta-game currency that indicates how well your adventurer is doing.

The two that turn potential into ability are called Innate potential (Ip) and eXperience potential (Xp). They both have the same function in the game. You assign them to ability scores to give them dice ratings. For example if you had an adventurer with 3 hurry, and assigned 2 Ip to it, it counts as 2 dice. If you assigned none, it would count as 0 dice. You can assign Ip and Xp up to the limit of your potential. So with 3 Hurry you can assign a total of three Ip or Xp to it for 3 dice.

The meta-game currency is simply called Gold. The amount of Gold an adventurer has denotes how good they are doing in their current situation. The more Gold, the better things are looking for them.

Learn more in: Playing Audeo

The game uses six-sided dice exclusively. When you are asked to roll them as a player, you will always be picking up one to ten of these and rolling them all at once. The goal is to get dice to come up six, each of these is called a hit. No hits on a roll? You lose. One or more hits on a roll? You win. The Narrator has some more complex rules for various circumstances, and rarely uses this simple system.

You can learn more about dice rolling here: Rolling the Dice.

Each Fault an Adventurer has is something that haunts and hinders them, they are character flaws of a broad nature. They must be broad in scope and not specific in any way. For example, “A weakness for cute kittens” is not a valid fault, but “Compassion” is great. The board scope of these allows the Narrator and other players to invoke an Adventurer's faults in a variety of situations. When invoked by another player, the Fault interacts with the Adventurer's aura to have an effect on the current situation, this is more complex than I'll go into here, just know that it can help or hinder the adventurer depending on the situation.

Learn more in: Playing Audeo and Aura and Destiny

Every character in fiction has a general idea that defines who they are, things you could see at just a glance. Sometimes even things we just know about them because it is clearly established early on in the fiction. These details about Adventurers fall under the category Impression in Audeo. For example, in the movie Gladiator it is established early on that Maximus is a great leader. In Audeo he would have an Impression: “Warrior Leader of Men”.

At the start of play, you creates one such Impression for your Adventurer, and then pick another player to create an additional one for your Adventurer. This is in addition any you may earn during character creation.

When a detail from Impression acts in a positive way, reinforcing the action of the Adventurer, they may draw Aura and re-roll the dice, saying: “but, <detail>,”. For example, if your Adventurer had the detail, “Legendary Warrior of Cimmeria” and was attacking a snarling troll but rolled bad, you could say, “but, Legendary Warrior of Cimmeria” and draw Aura to roll again.

Means are the important, broad resources of an Adventurer. Each Means is one of: an agency, instrument, or method used to attain an end. They are never specific, but broad ideas from which specific instances can be created in play. A sorcerer's means to slay her foes may be a fireball spell, but that would not be her means. That spell would be just a single instance of a much broader means, “Calling of Fire and Brimstone” for example. Regardless, the end result is that Means give more dice for you to roll for your Adventurer, making them more powerful and effective in whatever actions they support.

Learn more in: Means and Instances

Each Merit is something firmly defined (hard to change or lose) about an Adventurer that gives them power or advantage in specific situations. A Merit is generally a short phrase which describes some virtue of the Adventurer, but it does not always have to be what we think of classically as a virtue. It does however have to be something that motivates the Adventurer in their actions. “Rampant, Unchecked Greed” is a great example of a merit that doesn't fit the classic definition but works for Audeo.

A Merit always gives the player an extra die to roll when they apply, and they can be exploited for additional dice.

Learn more in: Playing Audeo.

The Narrator is a player without an Adventurer in the game of Audeo. Instead, they run the world around the adventures and are responsible for the Pursuit itself. The Pursuit is really what they bring to the game, and try and tie everything going on to that meaningfully. There is more workload on the Narrator, make no mistake, but the rewards are greater too.

Learn more in: Narrating Audeo.

There are five abilities for Adventurers in Audeo. Each is a very broad definition of their level of prowess in some facet of adventuring. Three of these are action abilities, and two strength abilities. They are scored with a number, higher meaning your Adventurer has more potential in that area. Note this is potential and not pure ability, you will assign ability from time to time as you wish but never exceeding the potential of said ability. This means if you have a potential of 3 in an ability, it will never be higher than that. Here are the action abilities with a brief definition:

• Hurry: Physical speed and prowess all rolled into one. You use Hurry whenever your adventurer runs, jumps, swings, or otherwise does physical actions with haste.
• Sharp: Mental speed and perception all rolled into one. You use Sharp whenever your adventurer thinks, looks, listens, or otherwise does mental actions with haste.
• Trick: Not just the ability yo deceive, but to out-think and apply refined technique. You use Trick whenever your adventurer plans, talks, performs a trick, or otherwise applies genius to problems before them.

Here are the two force abilities with brief introduction:

• Push: This is physical strength and hardiness. Push applies when your adventurer is faced with physical challenges.
• Drive: This is mental strength and toughness. Drive applies when your adventurer is faced with mental challenges.

Currency interacts with potentials to give your adventure actual ability scores.

Learn more in: Playing Audeo, and Understanding Potential and Ability

The Pursuit is the overarching ambition of play. The Narrator creates a generally defined Pursuit, and then the players spend the course of the game connecting that to their Adventurers. For example, “To Attain The Fabled Black Diamond of Amarath” would be a great Pursuit introduced by the Narrator. Then the players decide on how their Adventurers connect to the Pursuit broadly at first, and eventually giving more substance to this as play resolves. For instance, a player might elect to attach their Adventurer to the Pursuit like so at first “For Personal Wealth” and later expand on that during play.

Learn more in: Pursuits of Audeo.

Every Adventurer has their story, and the current Pursuit is only the latest part of it. However, not all the parts of this story are important enough to make it on the Adventurer sheet. Instead, only the most sweeping and meaningful moments are placed there. These moments tie the Adventurer to the larger stories of the world in a meaningful way.

There are many ways to earn Aura in Audeo, but few ways to remove it. One of these ways to spend it is on creating a Story point, which is then recorded into this part of an Adventurer's sheet.

Once on the sheet, a Story point gives the player narrative control when it can logically be connected to the unfolding story. At that point, the player can spend Aura to add or edit narration.

Learn more in: Aura and Destiny