# Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth tags: #game/rpg/aria ![[Aria - Canticle of the Monomyth (cover).jpg|600]] **Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth** (also sold as *Aria Roleplaying*) is the 1994 last gasp of the hobby's most grandiose ambition from **Last Unicorn Games**: a roleplaying game so committed to world-building that it would rather you spend a weekend discussing the socioeconomic impact of a dragon's hoard on the village below than ever actually roll dice at the dragon. Designed by Christian Scott Moore and Owen Seyler across a 500-page softcover, it's the RPG as an anthropology seminar with a d10 bolted on — brilliant, laborious, and very, very certain of itself. ## Setting Aria comes with **no setting at all**, and takes considerable pride in that fact. It's a "cap system" — a rules chassis meant to sit over or outright replace the mechanics of any fantasy game you like — built around the *monomyth*: the idea that one fundamental story underlies most myths, legends, and fairy tales, and that your table's job is to build and then inhabit a whole mythological history around it. The players, as a group, create the **myth**: a world, its nations and cultures, and their histories and politics, all worked out with a methodical thoroughness that would make a sociologist blush. Then they play *through* that history — and not as one character. You run a **Persona** bound to a **Heritage** (your family, culture, or nation), and over the game you'll play a *series* of personas across generations, effectively roleplaying a guild, city, or culture telling a longer, grander story than any single adventurer could. The GM is the **Mythguide**; the world is the point; the individual character is, frankly, a vehicle for it. ## Mechanics The engine is minimal where it bothers to show up, because so much of the book's weight sits in creation tables and social mathematics rather than combat. ### Resolution For any uncertain outcome, roll a **single d10**. The contested action becomes a **Trial** with a **Base** of 3 — or, if the Trial leans on an Expertise (the game's word for a skill), a Base derived by totaling the governing Attributes. Roll equal to or over the Base and the Trial lands; under it, and the fiction decides what your failure costs you. The dice are deliberately spare — the system's real "roll" is the social and cultural scaffolding that decides *which* Trial is worth risking in the first place. ### Persona Creation Character generation is a life history, not a stat block. Personas are "children of their environment," defined first by a **Heritage Template** — which fixes your race, homeland, physical traits, and the cultural baggage of where you're from — then by a **Vocation** (profession), with **Expertises** (skills) attached. Your Attributes are called **Determinants** — Agility, Communication, Hardiness, Intelligence, Presence, and Willpower — each with sub-Determinants beneath them. And age is wealth: you get creation points *per year of life*, so a 40-year-old persona starts with twice the budget of a 20-year-old. Generation is famously long, meticulous, and badly indexed, but it produces a character whose every number is accountable to a life lived inside the world — which is rather the point. ### Windows of Opportunity To keep a new persona from being a pure carbon copy of their parents' lives, the system hands out **Windows of Opportunity**: bonus points you spend on a single defining unique experience of the character's youth. It's the small rebellion inside an otherwise destiny-shaped creation process — the one place the game lets an individual poke a hole in their inheritance, and the bit players reportedly like enough to port into other systems. ## Editions - **Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth** (Last Unicorn Games, 1994) — the core, printed as two separately-paginated halves: the *Persona Creation Book* and the *Myth Creation Book*. - **Aria: Worlds** (Last Unicorn Games, 1994) — the companion volume, drilled down into creating civilizations, cultures, and societies (with attribute scales and formulas for everything from dominant materials to technological level). A "Worlds," "Chronicle," or "Military/Religion/Magic" series was promised beyond it; only *Worlds* materialized. ## References - [Wikipedia — Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aria:_Canticle_of_the_Monomyth) - [Pyramid Pick: Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth](https://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=1705) - [RPGnet — Review of Aria Roleplaying (extensive play)](https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/classic/rev_2882.phtml) - [RPGnet — Review of Aria Roleplaying (Grose)](https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/classic/rev_75.phtml) - [RPGnet — Review of Aria Worlds](https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/classic/rev_3447.phtml) - [RPG Nostalgia — Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth Preview Guide](https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/rpg-nostalgia-aria-canticle-of-the-monomyth-preview-guide.184130/) - [Thoughts on Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth and Collaborative World-Building](https://wildmusings.wildmusegames.com/2013/02/07/thoughts-on-aria-canticle-of-the-monomyth-and-collaborative-world-building/) - [The Unofficial Aria Homepage](https://www.sfko.com/aria/)