# Aria: Worlds *Created:* 2026-11-10, *Modified:* 2026-11-10 ![[Aria - Worlds (cover).jpg]] **Aria: Worlds** is the companion volume that makes the core's promise usable. The core says the myth is the point; this is the book that tells you how a society is built, scored and changed, and it does it with the same appetite for tables that made **[[Aria - Canticle of the Monomyth|Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth]]** both admired and feared. ## Setting *Worlds* has no setting of its own — it is a sourcebook for building them. A **Narrative Environment** can be any region from a village to a continent, so long as it is one contiguous society, and it is described by five **Environ Parameters**: **Scope**, the **Environmental Profile**, the **General Profile**, the **Historical Profile**, and the **Hierarchy of Social Estates**. The book is explicit that it works outside its own game: it can be used as a standalone worldbuilding reference for another system, and the design guidelines read that way. It is also the only companion volume the line produced. ## Mechanics ### The Environ Parameters - **Scope** — the environment's size, population, population density and location. - **Environmental Profile** — the **Social Determinants**, quantifying the society's specific aspects. - **General Profile** — the rationale behind that profile, the cultural and racial diversity present, and the current political situation. - **Historical Profile** — the society's history, and the progression of events that put it where it is now. - **Hierarchy of Social Estates** — the breakdown of classes and individual status. ### The Societal Foundation The first four Social Determinants are the **Societal Foundation**, and they are meant to be settled in order because the book treats the profile as a hierarchy: **Society Age** is first and is modified by nothing, and every Determinant modifies the ones below it — its **Greater Determinants** above, its **Lesser Determinants** beneath. - **Society Age** — how old the society is, and therefore how much it has already survived. - **Philosophical Orientation** — its underlying disposition: **Survival**, **War**, **Conquest**, **Equilibrium**, **Peace** or **Knowledge**. - **Isolation** — how physically removed it is from its neighbours. - **Interaction** — how much contact it seeks with them, and what kind. Those four are the creative springboard for everything else: they turn numbers into a society with a posture and a history. ### Social Determinants The Social Determinants come in three groups — **Environment**, **Economic** and **Political** — each a value on a scale (1–10 for most, with some on twenty-point scales), and they describe everything from the society's resources and trade to its technology, tolerance and political infrastructure. ### Society Trials The Determinants are the target numbers for a **Society Trial**: the society's **Age** serves as the Base and the relevant **Determinant** as the Rank, with a twenty-point scale halved and a five-point scale doubled to fit the Trial's 1–10 Rank band. That is how a century of development, a war or a reform gets resolved at Aria Time without dropping back to persona scale. ### Creating a Society The procedure starts with a **Society Concept** in a sentence, then picks a **Social Foundation** — **Progressive**, **Original**, **Interactive**, **Fictional** or **Historical** — and a method: **Narrow**, which builds the whole society around one or two elements, or **Broad**, which takes several parameters into account at once. ### Subsistence and Mobility **Subsistence Classification** asks the basic question — how does the society feed itself? — in three stages: **pure hunting and gathering**, **incipient agriculture** (primary hunters or fishers, primary herders, primary agriculturists, secondary herders, secondary agriculturists) and **fully agricultural**. **Mobility** follows from it — nomadic, semi-nomadic or sedentary — and the pair shape settlement, custom and the rest of the profile. ### Technology and Innovation A society's **Technology Value** is the average of seven **Innovation Scales**, with **Dominant Materials** as the principal driver; the scales let a Mythguide give a society its own innovation path instead of a generic tech level. Innovation travels by **diffusion** — itinerant artisans and trade carrying techniques between societies — or appears independently where need, resources and receptivity coincide, and Interaction, Trade, Isolation and Philosophical Orientation all change how fast it moves. ## Editions - **Aria: Worlds** (Last Unicorn Games, 1994) — the society sourcebook, and the only companion volume to appear. *Held*, as the 320-page book. ## References - [RPGnet — Review of Aria Worlds](https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/classic/rev_3447.phtml) - [Wikipedia — Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aria:_Canticle_of_the_Monomyth) - [The Unofficial Aria Homepage](https://www.sfko.com/aria/)