Uniworld

TL;DR: Think Ready Player One as a tabletop RPG, with the added risk of being unable to log out. 🙂

Uniworld is a tabletop role-playing game set in digital worlds. You don’t just play a character in a fantasy or sci-fi setting; you play a human who logs into virtual worlds, experiences adventures as an avatar, and—at times—finds it difficult to return to reality.

In this way, Uniworld integrates simulation, the real world, and various game worlds into a single, unified system.

A bit of background on its creation:

While there are plenty of anime (e.g., Sword Art Online or the .hack series), movies (e.g., Ready Player One), and books (e.g., LitRPG, Otherland) centered on digital worlds, there wasn't a tabletop RPG system designed for this genre.

Although a tabletop system for LitRPG does (or did) exist, it was tailored specifically to that genre. We therefore decided to develop our own system that combines these various concepts.

We wanted a vast digital world (similar to the OASIS in Ready Player One) where players inhabit avatars, yet we also wanted to include the possibility of interacting with AIs or NPCs—and the risk of a character suddenly becoming unable to log out. Furthermore, we wanted to ensure that gameplay wasn't limited to the virtual realm; events could unfold in the real world as well.

We also wanted the mechanics to be as simple as possible, so we chose to build upon the widely used Savage Worlds rule set, which is easily modified.