Basic Rules
Venture is a game of collaborative storytelling.
In Venture, two to five players work with a Lead Storyteller to create stories.
The Lead Storyteller (Abbreviated as LS) creates a rough outline for a self contained story, called a Narrative, and the other players create Characters to interact with this Narritive.
Helpful items to have when playing Venture:
- Multiple six-sided dice. A six-sided die can be called 'd6' in this ruleset.
- Index cards. These are helpful for making characters, factions, and spaceships.
- Other stationery. Enough scratch paper and pencils for all players.
Venture was designed to be very materials light. Ideally you should be able to play with items you already own.
Storytelling
As Venture is intended to be a storytelling game, you and your fellow players should decide what story you want to create! Ultracosmos presents one such kind of story, not just a setting but a genre.
Ultracosmos presents a science-fiction playstyle, drawing from both pulp, retro sci-fi where the villains are alien conquerors; and a more recent cyberpunk take on science-fiction that shows that conquerors are frighteningly human.
The galaxy in the setting is ours. The Milky Way. Giant corporations and strange lifeforms we know frightengly little about cause grief to the average person equally.
Dice Pools
There are three main resources that Characters have when facing challenges or attempting the improbable. These are called the 'dice pools'.
- Grit, representing mental fortitude and physical toughness.
- Luck, representing fortune and quick on your feet thinking.
- Skill, representing technical know-how and planning.
These Dice Pools each start at three six-sided dice. Whenever you are told to increase a dice pool and it is not specified to be temporary, the maximum pool increases.
To impact the world, players spend their dice, rolling one or more from a single pool, and taking the highest result. This is called an action. The LS will describe the consequences of the action, based on what pool was spent and what the highest result was.
Most actions use the following table to help adjudicate the result:
| Roll | Result |
|---|---|
| 1 | Failure |
| 2-3 | Success with Complication |
| 4-5 | Success |
| 6 | Success, recoup one die spent in this action. |
Spent dice are subtracted from the available pool and not the maximum pool.
Characters regain all spent dice after a session of play (reset to maximum dice pool values).