AxiomRPG System Reference Document
AxiomRPG is a passion project created and tested by a group of old gamers that want to leave a legacy in the hobby-life that has been part of their lives for so long.
AxiomRPG is designed as a universal core rule system based on a fairly standard D6 dice-pool concept.
- The Core Rules define how.
- The Genre Catalogs define where.
Every Catalog relies on the same core dice mechanics, attribute and talent structure and the same advancement framework. Characters built in two different settings operate using the same mechanical foundation. What differs is everything else: the world, the lineages, the factions, the threats and the texture of ordinary life.
Core Rules
Reference Code: AX.C
AxiomRPG resolves actions with pools of six-sided dice. A pool is built by combining an Attribute rating with a Talent rating - roll the combined pool and count dice showing 5 or 6 as successes. Meet or exceed the task's Threshold to succeed.
Character's are built using three Attributes (Body, Speed, Wit). Each branches into groups of Talents. A character with Speed 3D and Stealth 2D rolls 5D when sneaking. A relevant Talent Focus can add additional dice. No roll is typically required unless failure has a consequence.
The Core Rules cover the full arc of play: character generation, lineage and profession selection, perks and extra-normal powers, equipment, combat, health and conditions, advancement, GM tools, and threat construction. Every Genre Catalog relies on these essential rules without modification unless a Catalog entry specifies an override.
The core rules do include about 250 converted generic Fantasy Threats based on OGL SRD sources. This allows game masters to create test encounters and full adventures with 100% compatible stat blocks using familiar monsters.
Some of the 250 are variations on a single Threat type, like chromatic and metallic dragons. We also included Dungeon and Wilderness Encounter tables for random fun.
Genre Catalogs
Each Catalog is a complete setting expansion. It uses, supplements or overrides the Core Rules. Pick up the Catalog for your setting, read it alongside the Core Rules, and build.
The World of Andrus
Reference Code: AX.GAN
An epic fantasy setting. A world three generations past a catastrophe that it still doesn't fully understand.
The World Gate opened three generations ago, four human cultures emerged into a world already inhabited by the aboriginal Anima and the elemental attuned Kin. What followed was not openly hostile - it was the long, difficult, productive negotiation of a world learning to share itself. Trade routes now traverse territories that had no contact a century ago. The Compact mediates disputes between cultures whose concept of authority do not agree. Children in mixed communities learn the traditions of neighbors their grandparents had never met.
Beneath all of it: the Blasted Reach, the scar that the Gate's opening left in the world's geology and in whatever boundary separates this world from what lies outside it. The damage was not clean. Something dark and hungry reached through it. Most cultures of Andrus do not know this yet. A very few are beginning to understand that something is not right, what the window for response looks like and how narrow it is becoming.
Andrus rewards players who build relationships, accumulate knowledge and treat the world's problems as worth solving. It is a setting of real cultures with genuine tensions and hard-won institutions - and some unnamed power, patient and unnamed, working against all of them.
Setting highlights:
- Sixteen distinct lineages across three cultures (Anima, Kin, and Human)
- Elemental power traditions tied to the Kin's Second Era breach
- True Dragons and their Ustara partners
- The Kyne Daas Scar Readers and what they know about the Reach
- A world-threatening incursion with no agreed name
The Astraeus Terminal
Reference Code: AX.GAT
A complete space opera setting. Frontier survival. Far from help, close to something vast.
The Astraeus Terminal was built as a corporate asset - a navigational hub at the edge of charted space, positioned to service the extraction economy the Ki Nebula's near-side solar systems promised. What decades of operation produced instead is a community: messy, contested and permanent in ways for which the original specification never planned.
The Ki Nebula cannot be entered by FTL drive. The gravitational and electromagnetic complexity of a stellar nursery prevents it. To go inside, crews commit to sub-light travel and what the distance and the duration require. Expeditions that return have found resources, navigational hazards that experienced pilots read by instinct, entities that appear in no catalog and the occasional ruins. Old structures. Materials that predate any civilization currently capable of reaching this sector. The research community argues about what this means. The factions argue about who owns what the expeditions find.
Three facts define life on the Terminal: help is not coming in time, what you need is here but you will pay for it and the Ki Nebula is not background - it is present. Visible through every outer hull viewport, affecting electronics, biology and the people who spend too long near it in ways that are documented but still not fully understood.
Setting highlights:
- Six faction organizations (Oryx Logistics, The Vigilants, The Span, Survey Corps, the Oblis Consortium and the Solis League)
- Ten playable lineages including the ancient Synthari and the Drift-Touched
- Four power systems: Psionics, Void Attunement, Cybernetic Integration, Arc Theory
- Complete Starship construction and combat rules
- Three campaign frameworks: Station Intrigue, Void Exploration, Corporate War
Astraeus Terminal Setting Overview →
The Hidden World
Reference Code: AX.GHW
A modern urban horror & fantasy setting. The monsters are real. Most people don't know. The few who do know have to decide what to do about it.
The Veil is not a magical concealment. It is a social fact: an ongoing collective effort - by organizations that know, by supernatural communities that prefer to stay hidden and by human psychology that resists evidence contradicting its model of the world - to ensure that supernatural activity is not exposed to public awareness. It works. Mostly.
Beneath ordinary society, a parallel world operates. Dhampir bloodline courts govern centuries of lineage politics. Skinchanger families maintain territory by long-standing agreement. Faeborn navigate the space between the two worlds to which they partially belong. Haunts exist in the gap between death and whatever comes after. Against them and alongside them: hunters, agents, scholars, and priests work for organizations that range from protective to dangerous, with mandates that overlap, conflict and conceal.
Characters in this setting are people who know the truth. What they do with it - what they protect, what they investigate, what they fight and what they choose not to destroy - is the game.
Setting highlights:
- Six supernatural lineages including Dhampir bloodlines and Skinchanger forms
- Eleven organizations from the Bureau of Unusual Affairs to the Hollow Market
- Six power traditions: Mediums, Glamour, Blood Sense, Pact Flame, Sacred Fire, Pact Shifting
- A Veil that can and does fail locally, with consequences
- Three campaign structures: Monster of the Week, Conspiracy Arc, Apocalypse Now
The Hidden World Setting Overview →
Iron Lattice
Reference Code: AX.GIL
A contemporary urban fantasy setting. Five powers. One city that none of them own.
The Spire is the closest thing the Iron Lattice world has to a neutral city - which means it is a city where all five groups are present and they are working to ensure the no one gains a decisive advantage. Five factions, five lineages, and a live territorial competition conducted in contract negotiations, infrastructure access rights, information economies and the occasional moment when the political process breaks down and someone has to do something directly.
The Linden-Green Trust holds foundational legal authority through property documentation and Covenant contracts. Brak-Varr Heavy Industries controls the deep transit infrastructure everything else runs on. The Nexus Technology Consortium holds the city's digital and hardware systems and the certification keys that govern them. The Hearth-net Intelligence Agency operates in the background of everything, maintaining a Shadow-Census that the other organizations would prefer not to acknowledge. The New Venture Syndicate moves fast, builds fast, and occupies the commercial space the other four generate by competing with each other.
The Spire is organized on a vertical axis from the arcology towers of the Canopy through the professional Lattice to the street-level Fold and the deep BVHI infrastructure of the Bedrock below. Power maps upward. Survival happens everywhere else.
Setting highlights:
- Five playable lineages (Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Halfling, Human)
- Five faction organizations with full profession trees
- Harmonic power traditions built into the world's physical infrastructure
- A city designed as a living political problem, vertical and dense
- Starter adventure and GM tools for faction-contested play
Using This Document
This site is a complete system reference for AxiomRPG and its four current Genre Catalogs. Use the search or navigation to move between Core Rules sections and Catalog-specific content.
The content is cross-referenced throughout the documents using the following format.
AX.[section].[chapter].[entry]
For example, AX.C.02.01 refers to the Core Dice Mechanics section.
Begin with Dice Mechanics and Character Creation if you're new to the system. If you know where you're going, use the navigation or the cross-references to get there.