How to Play Opera Eterna

Get a Job

Opera Eterna (OE) is a game of operatic science fantasy set in the World of Saints: a post-catholic imagination that echoes my family’s stories of post-war Italy. It’s a life sim RPG heavily inspired by JRPG systems and MMORPG play culture. You play as either characters or the world itself and witness / set into motion the mundane and mystical events that shape your life story.

Unlike many RPGs, OE is played with a “limited vocabulary”. When you want to do something, you look at what actions you can perform in this context (AKA commands) and decide how and where you want to use them. While the applications and outcomes of the commands you perform are flexible, the actions themselves frame how you approach the challenges you face.

Commands are often contextual and are used in specific modes of play. For example, USE allows you to interact with your equipment or objects in your environment. Jobs, however, can give you access to new commands.

Jobs are the core of OE. As you play, you will acquire new jobs, learning their skills which will provide you with new tools to confront challenges. In addition to unique commands, job abilities can also modify (aka augment) other commands, allow you to start special projects, or even give you access to new mechanics entirely.

Each job also defines your score for each attribute tied to an action ranging from 1-9. Higher scores mean you are more likely to succeed when performing commands using that attribute. Because attributes are defined by your job, changing jobs mean you change your attributes. By matching your job to the task at hand, you will be more likely to accomplish your goals.

When you begin play, you either arrive as a visitor or, for a quickstart, choose one of the jobs directly connected to the visitor on the job grid and answer the question: who taught you?

Commands in Play

Let’s use an example to show how a player might use commands in play.

Our party consists of a mafioso and a pilgrim. These two are hunting down the relic of a saint. Just as they locate the relic, a rival nabs it and attempts to flee.

The players consider their options. To address the situation, The mafioso is going to activate the USE command. In this case, the mafioso selects to USE her CLUB, which allows her to STRIKE something. She chooses to STRIKE the rival. Her CLUB has a condition of 3/3 and is associated with the FORCE attribute. That means she will roll 3 10-sided dice and attempt to roll under her FORCE score. Let’s say her FORCE is 8.

So the mafioso got 2 successes and 1 failure. On a STRIKE, this means she deals 2 out of 3 possible damage to her target’s HEART. Let’s explore two other possibilities here:

• What if she had rolled 3 successes? The mafioso would have had a perfect check. Certain augment abilities, like the mafioso’s SIEZE augment, will add additional effects on perfect: SIEZE: on a perfect STRIKE, take something that was not yours. In this alternate reality, the mafioso would have been able to instantly recover the relic from her rival and save herself the headache of any further conflict.
• What if she had rolled 3 failures? In the unlikely event that the mafioso had rolled 3 failures, the command is compromised, dealing no damage. Some commands will backfire when compromised, opening the opportunity for circumstances to change — usually for the worse.

The mafioso can, after rolling, spend the club’s condition to flip failed rolls to successful rolls 1:1. In the above example, the mafioso could convert her check to a perfect result by spending 1 condition from her club, reducing it to 2/3. This would means that on all future USEs, the club will automatically fail one of its three rolls. As a result, the mafioso would not be able to perform a perfect STRIKE until her club is repaired (unless she is willing to spend more of her club’s condition to counteract this effect).

At this point I was then going to have the rival attack and the pilgrim could follow up with a heal but I think we’ve illustrated the point well enough. The flow is as follows:

1. The situation emerges from play
2. The players respond to the situation by performing a command
3. Performing a command usually requires you to roll a set number of 10-sided dice and compare the result to a specific attribute. The command and its results may be altered by augments.
4. A roll result equal or under the attribute is considered a success, whereas a result above the attribute is considered a failure.
5. The results of the successes are described by the command or may be whatever is appropriate to the situation. If all rolls succeed, the command is considered perfect. If all rolls fail, the command is compromised.
6. The results apply, the situation is altered in some way, and play continues.

At the Heart of it All

In the instance above, the mafioso used her club to strike and deal damage to her rival’s heart. As I mentioned, the heart attribute functions a little differently than other attributes.

Instead of a score, your HEART is a progress bar. Encounters, projects, and other objectives that can not be resolved with a single command or specific actions are instead measured in progress.

A progress bar is a gage divided up into segments equal to an associated die size. For instance, when your HEART is set to d10, you have a 10 segment progress bar. Performing commands can move a marker up or down a progress bar towards a desired outcome. While the mafioso may have wanted to decrease her rival’s heart to incapacitate her, the pilgrim instead would have wanted to keep the mafioso’s heart high through prayer.

Outside of an encounter, progress can also be use to track progress towards crafting a new club for the mafioso, repairing a wayshrine for the pilgrim, or locating the rival somewhere in the city. When you perform a command, successes will often make progress toward an objective by either decreasing or increasing a progress bar.

Assigning projects a die size allows the player to quickly approximate how long something is going to take, ranging from d4 which will usually resolve in about 2 actions, to d12 which will usually resolve in about 6. For projects, this allows you to quickly scale the time and effort needed to work on something up to about a week of steady work.

The passage of time is a resource that needs to be carefully managed. If you need to finish off an opponent, complete a project before a deadline, or see if a plan you have been working on comes to fruition, you can attempt a FINALE to resolve a project before the bar is full. When you do so, roll the corresponding die and comparing it to your current progress. If you are trying to fill the bar, you want to roll under. If you are trying to deplete the bar, you want to roll over. If you succeed, things will likely go as planned, but failure to do so will likely come with steep consequences or put you at an even greater risk than before.

Complicated projects and powerful entities like Saints will have multiple stacked progress bars (expressed as, for example, 3d10) which will make a finale much more difficult. Depleting or filling a progress bar will reset the bar and remove one die from the pool. This can also be used to create phased encounters.

In Summary

When you play a character, you will define objectives and track progress towards those objectives using progress bars. You will perform commands to fill or deplete those bars to complete your objectives.

Performing a command requires you to roll a number of 10-sided dice and compare them to a specific attribute. Some commands will be available depending on context (especially through the USE command), but new abilities (commands, augments, passives, and other mechanics) are acquired by learning new jobs.

Because your active attributes are determined by your active job, it is important to dress for the task at hand. As a result, character growth is covered through a combination of acquiring new equipment and jobs.

In the future, some topics I would like to cover include:

• the calendar system (phases, forces, the world deck)
• the encounter system (tempo, Saints, combat jobs)
• the travel system (modes of travel, travel as conflict, travel jobs)
• equipment and crafting (resources, projects, equipment types, gathering and crafting jobs)